RECENT AND WORTHY
This month’s Alternate View was supposed to be the second part of the column I started in the February issue. However, "LENR Part 2" will just have to wait until the web-site, a new "clearinghouse" for information about Low Energy Nuclear Reactions, to which I plan to introduce my readers in that column, recovers from a few circumstances-beyond-their-control. (The problems aren’t serious–just some major pain-in-the-butt difficulties–and soon to be solved. But I felt it prudent to wait until I could actually access the fully up-and-running site before I wrote a column directing any of you there.)
Fortunately, I am never at a loss for topics, the reason being that I, like most of you, read a lot. For instance, I just finished a book called Conquest by Man by Paul Herrmann. It is a marvelous tome from 1954 dealing with voyages to new lands made by explorers long before Columbus. Any one of the fascinating and well-researched chapters in this book would make for an interesting column (and subsequently, pay back many times the price of the book, which I found purely by luck at the local library used book sale for only two bucks!). However, it’s out of print.
Having finished Conquest by Man, I’m now working my way through the 1950 Dover hardcover edition of Oliver Heaviside’s Electromagnetic Theory. (This special edition is three volumes in one book, with–ack!–very small print.) Every page of this book is packed with brilliance but, once again, ’tis out of print.
Now, far be it from me to let a little thing like current unavailability prevent me from calling your attention to a worthy book. Didn’t I do that very thing with Thrust Into Space (July/August, 2002)?
But I have read a great many more recent and yet worthy books, still easily available. Any one of them would be worth a column (as was The Versatile Soliton, presented in my October 2002 column, "The Wave of the Future"). But I can’t, and furthermore, don’t want to, write a column about all of them. So this time around I’ll introduce you to a few of these "recent and worthy" books that I think you owe it to yourselves to check out. Some of them may yet find their way into future columns, but in case they don’t. . . .
First up are two books by Richard Rudgley, Secrets of the Stone Age (ISBN 0-7126-84522, 2000) and The Lost Civilizations of the Stone Age (ISBN 0-684-85580-1, 1999). Both books deal with the evidence for significant technological abilities and advanced social structures (that is, civilization) of our ancestors during the last ice age. No, these books are not of the Chariots of the Gods strain–far from it. Indeed, one might best describe them as the antidote to the viewpoint of such books. As Rudgley says in the introduction to The Lost Civilizations of the Stone Age, "Such views are extremely popular and influential, and this is partly due to public dissatisfaction with the standard academic view that does not explain the origins of civilisation in a convincing way." (p. 12) The author’s remedy is to (also p. 12) "show that the cultural elements that constitute civilisation did exist in the Stone Age and that the civilisations of ancient Egypt and other ancient societies had their prehistoric precedents." Rudgley takes the reader on a trip through time that starts in ancient Egypt and heads backward into the mist of prehistory. He assembles the puzzle of prehistoric civilization from a tool or article of clothing here, and a cave painting or a small sculpture there. It’s a trip anyone who reads SF is sure to enjoy.
Both books deal with essentially the same subject matter. The latter book is the more scholarly of the two–richer in material, more thorough in its treatment, heavily referenced with a sizable bibliography–and so for me, the more satisfying. But the former book is the "dumbed-down, coffee table edition," and what it lacks in content it makes up for in beautiful color photographs (the photos of cave paintings are breathtaking!).
Next up is A Different Approach to Cosmology by Fred Hoyle, Geoffrey Burbidge, and Jayant V. Narlikar (ISBN 0-521-66223-0, 2000). Different from what? Different from the Big Bang, of course. It was Fred Hoyle who first referred to earlier versions of the current standard view of cosmology as the "big bang model." Hoyle remained skeptical of the Big Bang until his death in August of 2001, and this book serves as his final say on the matter.
And what a thorough "say" it is.
I have been skeptical of the Big Bang model since the early 80s, when Cosmic Inflation was coming to be accepted. The notion that problems with the Big Bang could somehow be fixed by having the (really) early Universe briefly inflate at many times the speed of light left me cold. The idea did not strike me as brilliant, but rather, as desperate. It still does.
But who is going to listen to me complain about the Big Bang? No one, and that’s why it’s a pleasure for me to recommend a book like A Different Approach to Cosmology, written by men who have been active in the field. And in Hoyle’s case, by a man who has worked in the field from its very beginning.
The authors wisely chose to use a historical account of how cosmology has progressed from its "true beginning" in 1914, to the present. This way, one sees clearly how the current Big Bang model grew out of earlier ideas and the need to make sense out of the accumulation of astronomical observations made possible by the explosion of new technologies in the post-war era. But one also sees how the authors’ own quasi-steady-state model organizes and interprets this same body of observations. The Big Bang is then properly seen as one of several competing models and not, as it is usually portrayed, as the only possible answer.
So what is their alternative to the Big Bang? Little bangs that go on all the time, creating matter continuously out of "space-time," rather than in only one huge explosion at the very beginning. In this model, active galactic nuclei are the very engines of creation, rather than huge black holes sucking up matter and torturing it into titanic explosions.
Whether you agree with them or not, A Different Approach to Cosmology is a valuable resource written by a trio of the learned and loyal opposition to the standard view.
Finally, we come to a pair of exceptionally important books by Oleg D. Jefimenko1, Causality, Electromagnetic Induction, and Gravitation, 2nd Edition (ISBN 0-917406-22-2, 2000) and Retardation and Relativity, (ISBN 0-917406-21-4, 1997). I must warn you that, while the Rudgley books and the Hoyle et. al. book are, for the most part, readily accessible to the typical educated layman, these Jefimenko books are not. They are heavily mathematical. However, even if you are a hopeless math-incompetent, you can still understand the gist of the books just by reading the words and skipping the equations.
I expect that most of you readers have never heard of Oleg Jefimenko, but in Classical Electromagnetism circles he is well regarded, even having a couple of equations named after him. For the past few decades, Jefimenko has devoted himself to the study of electromagnetic retardation. As the author admits, this is an obscure concept. His own description of what it is can be found in the preface to Retardation and Relativity: "Electric and magnetic fields propagate with finite velocity. Therefore there always is a time delay before a change in electromagnetic conditions initiated at a point in space can produce an effect at any other point in space. This time delay is called electromagnetic retardation." (p. v)
Some of you are no doubt thinking that this is common knowledge to any typical educated layman, and you’re right. But, for the most part, the equations of Classical Electromagnetism are not usually expressed in a form that explicitly takes this fact into account. When you do cast the equations in their retarded forms, which is precisely what Jefimenko does in these two volumes, some interesting results appear.
As Jefimenko says (this from p. vi of the same preface–see above): "Perhaps the most important recently discovered aspect of the now evolving theory of electromagnetic retardation is that this theory leads to, and duplicates, many electromagnetic relations that are customarily considered to constitute consequences of relativistic electrodynamics." In other words, the equations Einstein showed could be derived via the postulates of special relativity (the equal validity of all physical laws in all inertial frames and the constancy of the speed of light in all inertial frames) can also be derived simply by incorporating the empirical fact of electromagnetic retardation into all analyses, without recourse to any postulates at all.
One thing that everyone knows about from special relativity theory is time dilation: that time slows down for fast-moving objects. This conclusion is so easy to derive from Einstein’s postulates via a bit of geometry and algebra that I once showed my tenth-grade geometry students how to do it (one of them was genuinely interested). In Chapter 10 of Retardation and Relativity, Jefimenko shows how applying the theory of electromagnetic retardation also yields time dilation.
Jefimenko’s approach is to "construct" an electromechanical system that could function as a simple clock, and then show how the retarded equations predict that the clock slows down when put in motion. As an example of a primitive clock, picture a positively and uniformly charged ring with a small (much smaller than the ring radius) negatively charged sphere constrained to move on the ring axis. When displaced just a bit from the ring center, the sphere will oscillate along the axis in simple harmonic motion, and this periodic motion allows us to use the system for a clock. When this clock moves, say in the direction of the ring axis, the electromagnetic retardation equations show how the forces on the sphere change with increasing velocity, increasing the period of oscillation. Increasing it, in fact, by exactly the amount predicted by special relativity.2
However, electromagnetic retardation shows that it is also possible to construct some simple clocks that slow down at a different rate than that predicted by special relativity. Indeed, the same clock can behave in accordance with, or not in accordance with, special relativity, depending only upon its orientation to the direction of motion.
This is a huge contradiction with special relativity, which says that the magnitude of time dilation depends only upon the relative velocity between two observers.
So which theory is right? Special relativity has served us very well. But the techniques of electromagnetic retardation are so fundamental that to question them is to question the very foundation of physics and its mathematical methods.
Alas, I must stop at this point–I’m out of column space. But fear not, I will in the future be discussing more of Jefimenko’s work. I’m just trying to figure out if I should do it in the Alternate View or if I should instead write it up as an Analog fact article.
While you wait, I’ve suggested some books you can read. And I still have to write "LENR Part 2."
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1 http://www.as.wvu.edu/coll03/ phys/www/jefimenk.htm
2 If you want the details but don’t want to buy the books, see Oleg D. Jefimenko, "Direct Calculation of Time Dilation," American Journal of Physics, 64, 812-814 (June 1996).
