Monday, April 8, 2013

The Speed of Light May Not Be Constant

The series of posts indexed below was, in part, motivated by Jerry Coyne's  TED-scare over Rupert Sheldrake's heresy against the materialist orthodox view of science.   Proving that he didn't listen to Sheldrake's TEDtalk or that he didn't listen to it carefully enough to know what Sheldrake said, what Coyne told his mob of fans:

Rupert Sheldrake speaks, argues that speed of  light is dropping!

Actually, he didn't say that, he said there were fluctuations in the reported speed of light in the period before metrologists decided to make the "speed of light" a mere conventional definition instead of an actual phenomenon.   Sheldrake noted that the reported speed of light, in the period when it was a report on an observed, natural phenomenon had dipped significantly during a couple of decades.  So, it's pretty apparent that, in the way of enforcers of orthodoxy, Coyne misrepresented what Sheldrake said.   He continued:

Well, TED has come down a long ways since it once presented a forum for quirky, advanced, and entertaining thinkers. In an effort to keep ahead of the intellectual tide, they’ve started incorporating substandard speakers, including woomeisters, and have spawned “TEDx,” local versions of TED talks.

For this post I will resist the temptation to go into Rupert Sheldrake's long and distinguished career in entirely conventional science, resisting making a comparison between his published record and that of Coyne or his good buddy and fellow Inquisitor,  PZ Myers.

Coyne's condemnation of Sheldrake was posted on his blog on March 6.  He posted a comment from another figure in "Skepticism"/atheism and protector of materialist orthodoxy, Sean Carroll

What the crackpots don’t understand is that (1) scientists would love to find that the speed of light has been changing, they’d be giving out Nobel prizes like Halloween candy; and (2) in some sense, the speed of light can‘t change. It’s a dimensionful quantity — it can only change relative to something else, and there aren’t any other absolute velocities in physics. (Indeed, today the speed of light is fixed by definition, not by measurement.) What people really mean when they talk about measuring changes in the speed of light is measuring changes in other related quantities, like the fine-structure constant or the mass of the electron. And there are better ways of constraining those than by measuring light propagation

Oh dear, it would seem that the defenders of the Coyne-Myers-Carroll model of the orthodox universe would have a few more problems than Sheldrake's research into the matter.  I haven't looked hard to see if Coyne has addressed this story from Science Daily on the 25th of March. He didn't that I could see on his blog, but, well:

Speed of Light May Not Be Fixed, Scientists Suggest; Ephemeral Vacuum Particles Induce Speed-Of-Light Fluctuations

Mar. 25, 2013 — Two forthcoming European Physical Journal D papers challenge established wisdom about the nature of vacuum. In one paper, Marcel Urban from the University of Paris-Sud, located in Orsay, France and his colleagues identified a quantum level mechanism for interpreting vacuum as being filled with pairs of virtual particles with fluctuating energy values. As a result, the inherent characteristics of vacuum, like the speed of light, may not be a constant after all, but fluctuate.


... As a result, there is a theoretical possibility that the speed of light is not fixed, as conventional physics has assumed. But it could fluctuate at a level independent of the energy of each light quantum, or photon, and greater than fluctuations induced by quantum level gravity. The speed of light would be dependent on variations in the vacuum properties of space or time. The fluctuations of the photon propagation time are estimated to be on the order of 50 attoseconds per square meter of crossed vacuum, which might be testable with the help of new ultra-fast lasers.Leuchs and Sanchez-Soto, on the other hand, modelled virtual charged particle pairs as electric dipoles responsible for the polarisation of the vacuum.

They found that a specific property of vacuum called the impedance, which is crucial to determining the speed of light, depends only on the sum of the square of the electric charges of particles but not on their masses. If their idea is correct, the value of the speed of light combined with the value of vacuum impedance gives an indication of the total number of charged elementary particles existing in nature. Experimental results support this hypothesis.

I can't claim to understand the issue from the story in Science Daily, but it would seem that Coyne should be on the back of these researchers and the author of the report, pressuring Science Daily to have it removed.

I will point out the last sentence, "Experimental results support this hypothesis".   That would be some of that empirical evidence that the "Skeptic"/atheist ortodoxy is always demanding, ignoring it with all their might when it doesn't support their preferred model of reality.  That would be as opposed to the mere definition setting that Carroll's uninformed snark against Rupert Sheldrake would be based in.  If Coyne, Myers and Carroll had read what Sheldrake said in his book, Science Set Free,  and his TEDtalk they'd have seen that what he called for was RESEARCH into the question to clear it up.

Why doesn't something like what Coyne and Carroll did ever come back onto them?  That would be as opposed to the real damage that someone can have done to them when the "Skeptics" misrepresent what they've said.   I'm not expecting a retraction from them.

Declaring yourself a "Skeptic" means never having to correct yourself, even when you've made an ass of yourself.

UPDATE:  Here is an example of the great champions of empirical evidence and scientific methods that the "Skeptics" claim to be, but so seldom are, in action:


Dr. Daryl Bem: Well, I think the flurry of activity in the popular media will just sort of die down. When I look at Google News on it there are still four or five articles that pop up in which it just shows how successful Wiseman is at getting his point of view out. I have been replying to people who’ve asked me to reply to blogs and things of that sort.

Without accusing him of actually being dishonest, he has now published the three studies that he and French and Ritchie tried to get published in several journals that rejected it. I replied with a comment on that. If there’s anything dishonest there, it’s when you publish an article, even if it’s of your own three experiments—they did three experiments that failed trying to replicate one of my experiments—you always have a literature review section where you talk about all the previous research and known research on the topic before you present your own data.

What Wiseman never tells people is in Ritchie, Wiseman and French, the thing they published, their three failures, is that his online registry where he asked everyone to register, first of all he provided a deadline date. To be included in that you had to have completed it by December 1st. Well, that’s six months after my article appeared. I don’t know of any serious researcher working on their own stuff who is going to drop everything and immediately do a replication.

Alex Tsakiris: And why would there need to be that kind of deadline to begin with? I mean, it’s completely contrived to work only in support of his effort.

Dr. Daryl Bem: Unless he just underestimated or overestimated how many people were going to drop everything and try to replicate it. Anyway, he and Ritchie and French published these three studies. Well, they knew that there were three other studies that had been submitted and completed and two of the three showed statistically significant results replicating my results. But you don’t know that from reading his article. That borders on dishonesty.

If there is one habit of the scientists who do actual research into these questions that really annoys me, it is how generous they are to people who don't merely border on dishonesty but who are actively dishonest.  Daryl Bem gets closer to the point when he says:


Dr. Daryl Bem: Well, that’s a funny way to put it. I think they have established their reputations and he’s made a total career out of being a debunker and an extraordinarily successful person at getting public attention to his pronouncements. I take a much more sort of benign psychological view of it. He has a great career going by being a debunker. It wouldn’t match what he had done if he had been one of the regular parapsychologists.

So rather than look for deep hidden motives, I tend to look at the more simple one. He’s [Weisman]extraordinarily successful at being a debunker and he’s more knowledgeable and in some ways more honest than someone like Randi, the magician who offers $1 million to anyone who can demonstrate ESP.

Also interesting is Bem's account of how, after years of success as a researcher in conventional social psychology, he read the research and was surprised at how strong it was.


Dr. Daryl Bem: I myself am a magician who—in my past. That’s how I got into this field. I had done stage magic, namely mentalism—that is fake ESP—ever since I was in high school. The way I got into this field was the Parapsychological Association asked me to come give my stage performance to their convention because they wanted to be able to protect themselves against people who might enter their labs claiming and knowing how to fake ESP and subvert their research.

So I went and did my performance and I was a skeptic at the time. I didn’t know the literature. Someone there, namely Chuck Honorton, who is now deceased, was setting up a new laboratory at the time. He asked me to come to his laboratory and to examine his experimental methods, both from the point of view of a magician and the point of view of a social psychologist who does live experiments and see if they were air-tight.

I looked at it and in preparation for the visit to his laboratory I started reading the literature. I was struck by how strong it was. I had never seen that. So I have some sympathy for people who aren’t familiar with all the research that’s already gone on.

You can compare that to how the "Skeptics" operate.


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