The Pioneer anomaly

[Viv Pope]

Could This be the ‘New Physics’?
One of the most disturbing developments in modern experimental physics is the discovery that, virtually, the ‘gravitational constant’, G, long regarded as sacrosanct in its dependability, is not a constant but a variable. This means that some of the planets, satellites, space-probes, etc., are not where they should be according to the standard Newtonian equations. This has prompted physicists, particularly those connected with space-probes, such as Pioneers 10 and 11 and others, seriously to contemplate the necessity for a ‘new physics’. As NASA scientist, John Anderson puts it:

In the unlikely event that there is new physics, one does not want to miss it because one had the wrong mind set.

Unfortunately, to flip from one ‘mindset’ to another, as radically as may be necessary, is not easy. Indeed, as history attests (witness Galileo, et al.) it may even be socially traumatic. In any case, if there is such a new physics in the offing, it is obviously not something that can be just ‘plucked out of the air’ or manufactured, ad hoc on the spot. Fortunately, over the last half-century there has been developed a radically new paradigm of physics, based on the ideas of relativity’s originator, Ernst Mach, who was Einstein’s Philosophy mentor. This Machian relativism differs from Einstein’s in that instead of opposing quantum theory in the way Einstein’s theory so notoriously does, it actually incorporates it as part and parcel of its physics. Also, in its predictions of varying G, not only does it propose a natural solution of the Pioneer anomaly, but also of the anomalous ‘missing mass’ in current astrophysics, that is, without having to postulate the completely undetectable ‘dark matter’ that mystifies modern physics.

Spam removed...

[Viv Pope]

Originally Posted by Viv Pope

Could This be the ‘New Physics’?
One of the most disturbing developments in modern experimental physics is the discovery that, virtually, the ‘gravitational constant’, G, long regarded as sacrosanct in its dependability, is not a constant but a variable. This means that some of the planets, satellites, space-probes, etc., are not where they should be according to the standard Newtonian equations. This has prompted physicists, particularly those connected with space-probes, such as Pioneers 10 and 11 and others, seriously to contemplate the necessity for a ‘new physics’. As NASA scientist, John Anderson puts it:

In the unlikely event that there is new physics, one does not want to miss it because one had the wrong mind set.

Unfortunately, to flip from one ‘mindset’ to another, as radically as may be necessary, is not easy. Indeed, as history attests (witness Galileo, et al.) it may even be socially traumatic. In any case, if there is such a new physics in the offing, it is obviously not something that can be just ‘plucked out of the air’ or manufactured, ad hoc on the spot. Fortunately, over the last half-century there has been developed a radically new paradigm of physics, based on the ideas of relativity’s originator, Ernst Mach, who was Einstein’s Philosophy mentor. This Machian relativism differs from Einstein’s in that instead of opposing quantum theory in the way Einstein’s theory so notoriously does, it actually incorporates it as part and parcel of its physics. Also, in its predictions of varying G, not only does it propose a natural solution of the Pioneer anomaly, but also of the anomalous ‘missing mass’ in current astrophysics, that is, without having to postulate the completely undetectable ‘dark matter’ that mystifies modern physics.

The full account of this radically new approach to modern physics is presented in a recent (2008) book entitled Light-Speed, Gravitation and Quantum Instantaneity, by A. D. Osborne and N. V. Pope. This book describes the neo-Machian philosophy of Normal Realism and its Physics spin-off, POAMS (the Pope-Osborne Angular Momentum Synthesis). The book is available from some bookshops, such as Borders, as well as in some libraries and from the distributors listed on the website spam link deleted

The Pioneer Anomaly as a POAMS-Effect

The POAMS Effect is described in the new book mentioned above was written mainly for post-graduate students of mathematics (see website spam removed - Recall, here, that ‘POAMS’ stands for the Pope-Osborne Angular Momentum Synthesis). Some readers of the book regard it as too 'highly mathematical' for their unserstanding, especially in relation to the Pioneer anomaly. The following is attempt to make that point about the Pioneer anomaly more accessible to non-mathematicians.

To reiterate, Briefly, the POAMS effect is the effect of varying G due to spin angular momentum of freely orbiting bodies. Despite its 'highly mathematical' treatment in the book, the POAMS Effect is susceptible of a simple commonsense paraphrase. Briefly, it is that if the total kinetic energy of an orbiting body consists of the kinetic energy of the orbit plus that of the spin, then, logically, changing the spin energy must change the orbital energy, hence the radius of orbit in the way NASA has discovered.

Such changes in orbital parameters due to spin are, of course, counter to Newtonian mechanics, according to which the ‘gravitational’ effect on bodies is the same whether or not they are spinning, so that for Newton, G is G , no matter what. However, to incorporate the spin angular momentum into the equation for the total angular momentum of an orbiting body in the way POAMS does, necessarily alters the value of G. And that, in a nutshell, is the POAMS effect.

So the Pioneer experiment has discovered varying G, and POAMS predicts varying G. If this is not the explanation of the Pioneer anomaly, then what is?

Listening out,
Viv Pope

[Viv Pope]

Dear 080528jk

I have received the following =e-mail message:

080528jk has just replied to a thread you have subscribed to entitled - The Pioneer anomaly - in the Alternative theories forum of Science Forums.

Unfortunately, I cannot locate your reply. All I get in the e-mail is a string oif strange hieroglyphics. Sorry,
Viv Pope

[Moontanman]

Robert Foot suggests the Pioneer anomaly can be explained by Mirror Matter. Mirror matter - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[Boerseun]

Hi Viv,

Interesting stuff in the original post, until I saw this at the end of it:

Originally Posted by Viv Pope

The full account of this radically new approach to modern physics is presented in a recent (2008) book entitled Light-Speed, Gravitation and Quantum Instantaneity, by A. D. Osborne and N. V. Pope.

So here you are promoting your own book that supposedly topples Einstein.

It's called spam, and we don't take very kindly to it.

We can't participate in discussing matters pertaining to your original post if it requires we first buy a book you wrote. We had a guy here who wrote "The Final Theory", something he sucked out of his thumb, and he simply refused to disclose anything unless you pay the $30 fee for his book.

That is not Science.

If you're serious about your alternative theory, please:

1) Refer us to a peer-reviewed publication in which it appeared
2) Give us some info of what its about (...and no, we're not going to buy the book, nor are you allowed to use our readership as a free billboard for your book).
3) The strategy of "yes, I know it's technical, but page seventeen of the book (available at whatever.com) explains it beautifully) doesn't hold sway here. If that's your approach, this thread will most likely be deleted and your account be removed.

...and I'm not nasty, I'm interested in any new scientific developments. But not the charlatans who continuously keep cashing in on ignorance.
At post number three we don't know you well enough to know in which category you fit, you see.

[C1ay]

Originally Posted by Boerseun

So here you are promoting your own book that supposedly topples Einstein.

It's called spam, and we don't take very kindly to it.

****Hocus Pocus **** POOF

Spam gone

[Viv Pope]

Boerseun says:
So here you are promoting your own book that supposedly topples Einstein.
It's called spam, and we don't take very kindly to it. We can't participate in discussing matters pertaining to your original post if it requires we first buy a book you wrote.

Viv replies
I'm sorry, Boerseun, if it looked that way. However, that was far from being the true purpose of the website. Unfortunately, the pictures of the books were plonked in by our webmaster with, yes, sales in mind. But in his zeal he almost obliterated the list of Sections dealing with the true purpose of the site. If you look again at the front page, ignore the books and examine the strip on the left-hand side, you will see the list of Sections that not only explain the various aspects of the project but also offer, in the Relevant Pulications section, conference papers, lectures, Proceedings, etc., which can be downloaded for free.

Thanks, anyway, for alerting us to this problem of the website looking, at first glance, like nothing but a sales pitch for the books when, in fact, it is nothing of the kind. What it really is, is a conscientious attempt to advance science in the true, traditional way by an analysis of concepts at its cutting edge.

As for your assumption that I am trying to 'topple Einstein', that is definitely not true. At the risk of being accused of 'name-dropping', I am very grateful to Einstein for a short correspondence with him, in 1954, which set me on the course I am now on. This is definitely to build on Einstein, not 'topple' him.

By the way, I hope there are some subscribers in this group who are serious thinkers. I will not respond to mere Clever-Dick one-liners.I'm sure you agree that Science is a serious subject, not something to serve the egos of ignoramuses. With this firmly in mind, I intend to subscribe some bits of my long philosophical odyssey for serious and intelligent consideration. I trust that these pieces will be examined studiously before responses are posted.

By the way, my philosophical mantras are:
'It isn't who is right but what is right that counts'; and
'I don't know what The Truth is, but I sure as hell know what isn't!'

Viv Pope

[Viv Pope]

In his previous posts, Viv says
'I intend to subscribe some bits of my half-century long philosophical odyssey for serious and intelligent consideration. I trust that these pieces will be examined studiously before responses are posted.'
Here is one such post reiterating, in different words, the proposed solution to the Pioneer anomaly.

Pioneer and Commonsense
The answer to the Pioneer anomaly is, surely, just plain commonsense. All the NASA space-probes have to spin so as to maintain their orientation with regard to Earth.

Now angular momentum is a conserved quantity, so the total angular momentum of a space-probe is that of both its orbit and spin. This means that for a given amount of angular momentum imparted to a space-probe at the start, barring any externally applied force, the probe will maintain that amount of angular momentum throughout its journey through space. (Note: we are talking about magnitudes here, not vectors. It is these magnitudes that are conserved, not vectors.)

It follows, then, that insofar as that total amount of angular momentum is conserved, the larger the spin angular momentum of the probe the smaller its orbital angular momentum, and, by standard dynamics, the smaller the orbital angular momentum the smaller the orbital radius hence the faster the orbital speed.

However, standard orbital dynamics, in its classical Newtonian mould is based on the notion of ‘gravitational attraction’ between masses, which takes no account of any spin those masses might have. Now the velocities of NASA’s probes, fast as they are, are too small seriously to involve Relativity, so NASA’s calculations of the orbital trajectories of their probes are virtually Newtonian, which means that they take no account of spin. And if the spin angular momentum of the probe is ignored, then the shortening of the orbit radius and increase in orbital velocity, with regard to its centre of orbit (the earth, Saturn, the sun or whatever) presents an anomaly.

But, of course, this ‘anomalous acceleration’ of the probes towards its centre of orbit, be it the earth, the sun or whatever, is precisely what NASA have discovered. So, where’s the ‘anomaly’? Not in nature, surely, but in Newton.

Viv Pope
The Website of Science-Philosopher Viv Pope

[Viv Pope]

Reiteration: In his previous posts, Viv says
'I intend to subscribe some bits of my half-century long philosophical odyssey for serious and intelligent consideration.' I trust that these pieces will be respected for what they are and examined studiously before responding'
Here is another such post dealing, this time, with Relativity.

Relativity from Pythagoras
Modern Physics has become unnecessarily complicated and esoteric. Its central ideas are getting old and well in need of a good service and overhaul. Take Special Relativity for instance. That theory has not been seriously checked over for more than a century. It has done a lot of mileage but now it is clear some bits of it are in urgent need of repair. Take, for instance, Einstein’s Second Axiom. This is clearly nonsensical. It states, in effect, that the ‘speed of light’ in vacuo is c, which is constant, not only for all observers, regardless of how they move relatively to one another but also to space (the vacuum) itself, which is logically incoherent.

However, there is no need of that assumption, for the true fact is that c is no more than a constant ratio of observational distance-units to time-units. This is obviously the same for all observers, regardless of their motions relative to one another in the same way that for those same observers there is a constant ratio of 39.37 inches to the metre and 2.2 pounds to the kilogram. The fact that c has the dimensions of a velocity doesn’t make it a velocity, any more than the fact that all women are human makes all humans women.

Besides, there can be no knowing what light ‘does’, when conceived as ‘travelling all alone and unseen in the void’. This generates theoretical fantasies. The simplest and safest interpretation of c, then, is that it is simply the ratio of 3.3 nanoseconds to the metre. This makes no difference whatsoever to the mathematical consequence of any equation in which c appears, so the notion that c is a ‘velocity’ is altogether redundant hence a source of unnecessary metaphysical speculation.

There is also the fact that Einstein’s time equation, which is perplexingly written as tR = 1/√[1 – (v^2/c^2)], can be derived from the much simpler Pythagorean equation tR = √(s^2 + t^2 ), where s is the observed distance travelled by a body in units of metres/c per second, t is the time in seconds of that motion as registered on the body itself (as viewed by the home observer), and tR is, by Pythagoras, the resultant in seconds (the hypotenuse) of the two dimensionally rectangular time-measures s and t.[*] Note that all these measures are now expressed uniformly in units of seconds. This makes it more logical to think of Einstein’s equations as deriving from Pythagoras than to think of Pythagoras deriving from Einstein. Or else, of course, one may dispense with the Einsteinian equation, together with all this conversional rigmarole, and deal in terms purely of Pythagorean time-measures. This is similar to the way in which it is now customary to measure journeys in the time they take (e.g., ‘It is no more than about five minutes down the road’ or ‘It’s three hours from here to Birmingham’.)

In this way, a whole new way of thinking (or paradigm) of relativity, based on purely observational, or phenomenalist [***] space-time dimensions, has been developed in the name of POAMS, the Pope-Osborne Angular Momentum Synthesis. This can be accessed on the website POAMS - The Neo-Machian, Digital Physics Website .You don’t have to buy the books advertised on that site. Just trawl through the Sections list on the left of the front page and download, for free, some of the most relevant conference papers and Proceedings on this subject.)

Viv Pope The Website of Science-Philosopher Viv Pope

NOTES [*] The relative velocity, v, is s/tR. From this we have s = vtR . Substituting this equivalent expression vtR for s in the Pythagorean equation and simplifying the result produces the Einsteinian equation.
[**] metres/c = metres/ (3 x 10^8 metres/second) = 3.3 x 10^-9 seconds.= 3,3 nanoseconds.
[***] The most well-known exponent of phenomenalism (radical relativism) was Ernst Mach, significantly, the relativistic predecessor and mentor of Einstein.

[CraigD]

Originally Posted by Viv Pope

Here is another such post dealing, this time, with Relativity.
…
Take, for instance, Einstein’s Second Axiom. This is clearly nonsensical. It states, in effect, that the ‘speed of light’ in vacuo is c, which is constant, not only for all observers, regardless of how they move relatively to one another but also to space (the vacuum) itself, which is logically incoherent.
…
Besides, there can be no knowing what light ‘does’, when conceived as ‘travelling all alone and unseen in the void’.

In order to confirm that I understand the point Viv intended to make with these statements, let me restate my read of it:
“The concept of the speed of light in vacuum (c) is logically incoherent, because the speed of light cannot be measured in a system consisting only of light in vacuum.”

However, I’ve not previously encountered a definition of the c as “the speed of light measured with only vacuum”, and am practically certain this is not the definition intended to be used in the Second Postulate of Special Relativity:

The Principle of Invariant Light Speed - Light in vacuum propagates with the speed c (a fixed constant) in terms of any system of inertial coordinates, regardless of the state of motion of the light source.

(source: wikipedia article “special relativity”)

The usual definition of the speed of light in any medium is the same as that of the average speed of anything: , where and are changes in distance and time. Although direct measurement of for practical values of were experimentally impractical 100 years ago, they are no longer (eg: see “A small tabletop experiment for a direct measurement of the speed of light”, Aoki and Mitsui, 2008).

Although, to a person subscribing to a corpuscular theory of light (eg: Isaac Newton and many other 18th century natural philosophers), the idea that a direct measurement of the speed of light results in a constant value regardless of the motion of the emitter or receiver of the light is counterintuitive and unexpected, such results are reproduced literally many times a second worldwide, in particular by the GPS. The precision of the clocks and signal shapes of the GPS and other systems performing long-distance speed of light measurements is sufficient that a violations of the second postulate would be easily detected. No such violations are detected.

Therefore, rather than being nonsensical, as Viv claims, the second postulate seems to me superbly supported by experiments.

Viv, do I appear to understand your claims? If not, how have I erred?

If so, what is your experimental evidence for violations of the second postulate, or explanation for why violations are not experimentally detectable?