Dissident Scientists

Dissident Science Links Peter Myers, August 8, 2001; update November 25, 2003.

You are at http://mailstar.net/science.html.

(1) James Lovelock calls "peer review" a "self-imposed inquisition"
(2) Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe challenge the dogma that life spontaneously arose on earth from non-life; Paul Davies responds
(3) Paul Marmet challenges the Big Bang
(4) Evidence for trans-oceanic contact between ancient civilisations; and the case for Diffusion
(5) Redating the Sphinx
(6) Freud "discovered" that religion is a "mental illness"; yet he exempted the Jewish religion
(7) Peter Duesberg, AIDS dissident, says "peer review" is anonymous, does not allow the applicant representation, nor a say in the selection of the "jury"
(8) Relations between Indoeuropean and Afroasiatic (Semitic) Languages
(9) Lamarck Rehabilitated: Ted Steele claims to show that adaptive changes in the immune system can find their way into the reproductive cells
(10) Bringing Einstein down to earth

(1) James Lovelock writes about the way Science is done now...

"Science, unlike other intellectual activities, is almost never done at home. Modern science has become as professional as the advertising industry. And, like that industry, it relies on an expensive and exquisitely refined technique. There is no place for the amateur in modern science, yet, as is often the way with professions, science more often applies its expertise to the trivial than to the numinous. Where science differs from the media is in its lack of a partnership with independent individuals. . . . You may think of the academic scientist as the analogue of the independent artist. In fact, nearly all scientists are employed by some large organization, such as a governmental department, a university, or a multinational company. Only rarely are they free to express their science as a personal view. They may think that they are free, but in reality they are, nearly all of them, employees; they have traded freedom of thought for good working conditions, a steady income, tenure, and a pension. They are also constrained by an army of bureaucratic forces, from funding agencies to the health and safety organizations. Scientists are also constrained by the tribal rules of the discipline to which they belong. A physicist would find it hard to do chemistry and a biologist would find physics well-nigh impossible to do. To cap it all, in recent years the 'purity' of science is ever more closely guarded by a self-imposed inquisition called the peer review. This well-meaning but narrow-minded nanny of an institution ensures that scientists work according to conventional wisdom and not as curiosity or inspiration moves them. Lacking freedom they are in danger of succumbing to a finicky gentility or of becoming, like medieval theologians, the creatures of dogma...."

His site is http://www.kheper.auz.com/gaia/Lovelock/Lovelock.htm.

(2) In school textbooks, Evolution Theory is usually presented in terms of life arising on Earth, without any connection to life elsewhere in the cosmos, by a process of Spontaneous Generation. The Big Bang is usually taken as gospel.

Astrophysicists Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe challenge both of the above. They claim that the universe is eternal, without beginning or end, and that life on any planet is seeded from elsewhere in the cosmos, by bacteria etc. present in comets, meteorites, and even in interstellar dust or dark matter.

They claim that Life comes only from Life, not from Non-Life, i.e. they uphold the old Ontological distinction between Living and Non-Living Matter. They have written many books presenting their evidence for this cosmic lifeforce, which they call Panspermia. Here is some of it: http://www.panspermia.org/.

They write, in their book Our Place in the Cosmos,

"The popular belief is that the Copernican Revolution and the inquisition of Galileo are things of the past. Human societies, it is claimed, have progressed beyond the stage when such outrages could happen again. In this book we show that the Copernican Revolution is far from over, and that society has not improved since the sixteenth century in any important respect. If anything the situation may have got worse, with the successes of the Industrial Revolution conferring upon human beings a degree of arrogance not seen before. The dogma has shifted from an Earth-centred Universe to the equally unlikely idea that life, which is the most complex and amazingly intricate phenomenon in the entire cosmos, must be centred on the earth. The new dogma has Judeo-Christian roots, but today its custodians are scientists rather than the high priests of the church" (p.1).

Religious worldviews depict a world where Mind and Life are pre-eminent: the gods or ancestral spirits fashion Living beings as a potter makes vessels out of clay.

Today's children are taught a very different worldview. Standard textbooks depict Life as coming about by accident, not only without a creator but without an intrinsic place for Life or Mind in the universe.

Did Life evolve on earth, from non-life, or is Life (and Mind) a fundamental principle of the universe?

If so, does this restore God? Or, if not a theism, then Deism of a sort? Taoism perhaps?

In the following article, Paul Davies addresses these questions. He does not mention Hoyle, but his name appears in the bibliography.

Davies writes:

"The most obvious way to establish a link between life and cosmos is to postulate a 'life principle' (or, extending this to encompass observers, a 'mind principle'). Indeed, many scientists have suggested just such a thing. It is often claimed by astrobiologists that life is 'written into the laws of physics' or 'built into the nature of the universe.' ...

"Life is incredibly complex but the laws of physics are, in the algorithmic sense, simple. So life cannot be 'contained' in the laws of physics. Contrast this with another state of matter: crystals. The structures of crystals are determined by the symmetries of the electromagnetic force, and so they are built into the laws of physics. Basic geometry underlies them. Given the laws of physics, the structure of, say, common salt crystals may be deduced from purely geometrical considerations. Crystals are simple and have low information content, concordant with the low information content of the laws of physics. But one could not predict the structure of, say, a bacterium, nor even its genome sequence, from the laws of physics, because the genome has very high information content.

"... Assuming a link between laws and product states such as life amounts to slipping an element of teleology into physics. This is very unfashionable, but I believe it is unavoidable if we are to take life and mind seriously as fundamental rather than incidental features of the universe. And the bio-friendliness of the universe suggests they are fundamental."

These quotes are from

Multiverse or Design? Reflections on a 'Third Way'

Paul Davies

Paper delivered at the Stanford University workshop

'One Universe or Many?', March 28-29, 2003

http://aca.mq.edu.au/PaulDavies/Multiverse_StanfordUniv_March2003.pdf

"Most scientists concede that there are features of our observed universe which appear 'contrived' or 'ingeniously arranged' in their relationship to the existence of biological organisms in general, and intelligent observers in particular. I term this 'bio-friendliness, 'or 'biophilicity.' A popular explanation among non-scientists (and some scientists) for this 'contrived' nature of the universe is to invoke some sort of design principle, or more explicitly a 'Cosmic Architect' who selects a judicious set of laws in order that the universe might host intelligent life. A fashionable response among scientists to this re-vivified design argument is the many universes hypothesis combined with 'anthropic' selection. According to this explanation, what we call 'the universe' is but a small component in a vastly larger assemblage of 'universes,' or cosmic regions, among which all manner of different physical laws and conditions are somewhere instantiated. Only in those 'Goldilocks' regions where, by accident, the numbers come out just right, will observers like ourselves arise and marvel at the ingenious arrangement of things. Thus the reason why we observe a universe so suspiciously contrived for life is because we obviously cannot observe one that is inimical to life.

"In this essay, I shall argue that both the Cosmic Designer and multiverse explanations suffer from serious shortcomings. I shall then sketch some ideas that have been germinating in my mind for some time of a 'Third Way' to explain the bio-friendliness of the universe. ... "

(3) Professor Paul Marmet, Order of Canada, Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, President of the Canadian Association of Physicists (1981-82):

Paul Marmet: Big Bang Cosmology Meets an Astronomical Death: http://www.NewtonPhysics.on.ca/BIGBANG/Bigbang.html.

Paul Marmet on The Absurdities in Modern Physics: http://www.NewtonPhysics.on.ca/.

Discovery of H2 in Space Explains Dark Matter and Redshift: http://home.pacbell.net/skeptica/pc.html.

21st Century Science and Technology Home Page http://21stcenturysciencetech.com/

Eric J. Lerner, The Big Bang Never Happened: http://www.users.fast.net/~aparise/bigbang.html.

Lerner writes, "But determinism, which implies, at least in theory, that events can be exactly determined, has been thoroughly confused with a quite different notion, causality - the idea that all events occur as a result of some other events ... When determinism was rejected, causality was rejected along with it" (p. 368).

"To many in the Judeo-Christian tradition, the idea of a universe infinite in space and time is not allowed for the same reason Agustine argued two millenia ago: infinity is exclusive to the deity, and thus prohibited for the material universe" (p. 386).

Shortcomings of Standard Cosmology: http://www.damtp.cam.ac.uk/user/gr/public/bb_problems.html.

Was the big bang necessary? Is it time for a new paradigm for how the Universe began? http://www.no-big-bang.com/.

(4) Evidence for trans-oceanic contact between ancient civilisations; and the Case for Diffusion

Thor Heyerdahl, Diodorus of Sicily, Cyrus H. Gordon, G. Elliot Smith, Martin Bernal, Joseph Needham: before-columbus.html.

(5) Redating the Sphinx http://members.aol.com/davidpb4/sphinx2.html.

(6) The Thomas S. Szasz Cybercenter for Liberty and Responsibility: http://www.szasz.com/. Szasz is a Jewish intellectual who promotes libertarianism, and has a link to Hayek, a leading advocate of privatization. Nevertheless Szasz has important contributions on "Mental Illness", and he is a major critic of Freud for anti-Gentilism. In his book The Myth of Psychotherapy, he brands Freud "the Jewish Avenger". Freud "discovered" that religion is a "mental illness"; yet he exempted the Jewish religion: freud.html.

(7) AIDS/HIV Dissidents: Peter Duesberg is Duesberg is a Nobel Prize winner who says that AIDS is a Gay disease caused in part by drug cocktails Gays take; that HIV does not cause AIDS; that deaths put down to AIDS in Africa are actually caused by other diseases.

In America his funding was cut, but South African President Thomas Mbecki takes him seriously, and invited him to the AIDS conference: http://www.duesberg.com/.

Here is the new 2003 paper by Duesberg, Koehnlein and Rasnick, in pdf form: http://www.virusmyth.net/aids/data/pddrchemical.pdf.

A surgeon who worked in Zimbabwe in 1982-3 and 1990-1 told me that he noticed a different pattern of diseases in the latter period - due, he believed, to HIV/Aids, contrary to Duesberg's argument that Aids is merely a new label for old diseases. The surgeon has read a number of Duesberg's books, and says his case is well-argued but wrong.

Edward Hooper is a journalist who wrote a book called The River, claiming that AIDS is real, and that it was caused by contaminated polio vaccines developed for United Nations vaccination programs in Africa, vaccines using chimpanzee kidneys etc, from which AIDS entered the human population: http://www.uow.edu.au/arts/sts/bmartin/dissent/documents/AIDS/River/Observer.html.

The Prostitute Paradox, by Robert Root-Bernstein: "the almost complete absence of HIV among non-drug using prostitutes is not due to safer sex practices" ... Rethinking AIDS March 1993: http://www.duesberg.com/subject/rrbprostitute.html.

Some quotes from the above article:

{quote} ... In sharp contrast to its US/European namesakes, the African AIDS epidemic is randomly distributed between the sexes and not restricted to behavioural risk groups ... Hence sub-Saharan African AIDS is compatible with a random, either microbial or chemical cause.

The African epidemic is also a collection of long-established, indigenous diseases, such as chronic fevers, weight loss, alias "slim disease", diarrhea and tuberculosis ... However, the distribution of AIDS-defining diseases in Africa differs strongly from those in the US and Europe (table 2). For example, the predominant and most distinctive AIDS diseases in the US and Europe, Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia and Kaposi's sarcoma, are almost never diagnosed in Africa ...

(i) During the African AIDS epidemic, the sub-Saharan African population has grown, at an annual rate of about 2.6% per year ? from 378 million in 1980 to 652 million in 2000 (US Bureau of the Census International Data Base 2001). Thus Africa had gained since 1980 274 million people, the equivalent of the whole population of the US! Therefore, a possible, above-normal loss of 1 million Africans over a period in which over 200 millions were gained is statistically hard, if not impossible to verify ? unless the African AIDS diseases were highly distinctive.

(ii) However, the African AIDS-defining diseases are clinically indistinguishable from conventional African morbidity and mortality (see above).

(iii) Further the HIV-based definition of AIDS (see § 3) can not be used in Africa to distinguish AIDS-defining from otherwise indistinguishable diseases, because as of 1985 the WHO decided at a conference in Bangui, Africa, to accept African AIDS diagnoses without HIV-tests (see § 3). This was done because these tests are unaffordable in most African countries (World Health Organization 1986; Fiala 1998; Fiala et al 2002). Thus without the CDC's HIV standard (§ 3), the diagnosis of African AIDS is arbitrary. ...

2. 1981?1984: The "lifestyle"-AIDS hypothesis

Hardly anybody remembers now, that shortly after the origins of the AIDS epidemics in the US and Europe scientists had already discovered that illicit psychoactive and aphrodisiac drugs, consumed at massive doses, were the common denominators and probable causes of the new AIDS patients. Drugs such as cocaine, heroin, nitrite inhalants, amphetamines, steroids and lysergic acid had become widely available and popular in the US and Europe during and after the Vietnam war and the coincident era of "gay liberation" (legal indemnity of homosexuality) ...

5. Epilogue

5.1 Why is AIDS research not free to investigate non-HIV hypotheses?

The probable answer to the question, why HIV-AIDS researchers do not study or fund non-HIV-AIDS theories, lays in the structure of the large, government-sponsored research programs that dominate academic research since World War II (Duesberg 1996b). Such programs favour individual investigators who contribute to the establishment a maximum of data and a minimum of controversy. However, if individual researchers move into new directions, that threaten the scientific and commercial investments of the establishment, the establishment can impose various sanctions via the "peer review system". The most powerful of these are denial of funding and of publication. The peer review system derives its power from the little known practice of governments to deputize their authority to distribute funds for research to committees of "experts". These experts are academic researchers distinguished by outstanding contributions to the current establishment. They alone review the merits of research applications from their peers, and they have the right to elect each other to review committees. Outwardly, this "peer review system" appears to the unsuspecting government and taxpayer as the equivalent of a jury system ? free of all conflicts of interest. But, in view of the many professional and commercial investments in and benefits from their expertise, and even of the rewards from their universities and institutions for the corresponding overheads and partnerships ? all legal in the US since president Reagan ? 'peer reviewers" do not fund applications that challenge their own interests (Duesberg 1996b; Lang 1998; Zuger 2001). Since "peer review" is protected by anonymity, does not allow the applicant personal representation or an independent representative, nor a say or even a veto in the selection of the "jury", and does not allow an appeal, its powers to defend the orthodoxy are unlimited. The corporate equivalent of academia's peer review system" would be to give General Motors and Ford the authority to review and veto all innovations by less established carmakers competing for the consumer. Even the professional journals and the science writers of the public media comply with the interests of government-funded majorities because they depend on their monthly "scientific breakthroughs", the lucrative advertisements from their companies, and the opinion of their subscribers. For example, an early precursor of this article was written in response to an open invitation from a pharmacology-journal over 3 years ago. But, after considerable pressure on the journal from anonymous "AIDS experts", the editor requested a reduced article, which was neither accepted nor rejected. Instead, the editor simply dropped all further correspondence. Subsequently, the editor of a prestigious German-based science journal invited another precursor of this article 2 years ago, which received two favourable reviews in short order. But before the manuscript could be revised, the editor informed us that the publisher was concerned about losing subscribers if our paper were published and ceased all further correspondence. It is this passive resistance that can grind down even the most determined truth seeker.

{end of quotes}

"AIDS in Asia ? killer epidemic in sex paradise" - or just hype? http://www.virusmyth.net/aids/data/chrfthai.htm.

Myths and Lies about Aids ... Myth: AIDS is a disease of the immune system; Truth: AIDS is a disease of toxicity: http://www.healsd.org/lies.htm.

AIDS activists in South Africa march to try to force the Government to provide "life-extending" drugs to those with HIV (see the report below).

Some interesting questions arise.

1. Why quarantine SARS patients but not HIV patients? The official story is that HIV causes AIDS, and that it affects millions of people, yet HIV or AIDS patients have never been quarantined; nor is there any call for this to be done. If the early patients had been quarantined, many lives could have been saved. Why treat SARS differently? Is it because AIDS in the West was a Gay disease, and the Left Establishment wanted to promote the Gay lobby as part of its Minorities policy (and Feminist policy)?

2. Note the last sentence in the report, which says "it still drags its feet because President Thabo Mbeki remains in thrall to scientists who question the link between HIV and AIDS."

Specifically, Mbeki believes that Peter Duesberg is right. Notice that the sentence quoted above omits to mention the NAME of Duesberg. Instead, "scientists who question the link". I have noticed this repeatedly in reports involving Mbeki and Duesberg: Duesberg's name is omitted, as if he's been made a "non-person" ... something out of 1984.

Why the collusion by editors to blot him out? Whether he's right or wrong isn't the point; the implication is that the editors don't want the public to know that there are credible experts who deny the standard story. Mbeki is either a traitor to his people, or a man of great nous and courage in standing up to the Industry. Notice that the leader of the protesters is NOT a black, but Mark Heywood ... who is HE?

AIDS activists march to change state policy

The Age, Melbourne

Date: March 22 2003

By Rory Carroll Sharpeville http://www.theage.com.au/text/articles/2003/03/21/1047749935034.htm.

Hundreds of AIDS activists gathered illegally and marched into South African police stations yesterday to begin a campaign of civil disobedience against the Government for its refusal to provide life-extending drugs to those with HIV.

Chanting and waving banners, they laid accusations of manslaughter against two cabinet ministers they say are letting 600 people die every day by denying the medicine to South Africa's 4.7 million infected people, more than any other country.

They blame Health Minister Manto Tshabalala Msimang for denying anti-retrovirals to state hospitals and clinics, and Trade and Industry Minister Alec Erwin for blocking production of the drugs in South Africa. The accusations relate to 16 specific deaths. The Government continued to recommend people infected with the virus boost their immune systems with garlic, onions, olive oil and "African potato", an African corm, Hypoxis hemerocallidea, used in traditional healing which has attracted medical attention in recent years as a protection against the onset of AIDS.

The activists vowed to revive the African National Congress's tactic against apartheid of committing peaceful but illegal acts that prompt mass arrests and result in police detention cells overflowing. Police officers in Sharpeville, the township where their predecessors killed 69 apartheid protesters in 1960, were dumbstruck when 200 people in red T-shirts emerged from a nearby church and marched to the station door.

The campaign, expected to intensify in coming weeks, steps up the four-year effort by a coalition of civil groups to force the Government to abandon its view that AIDS drugs are too expensive and too toxic. "This is just the first shot in the campaign. Later on we will have sit-ins and occupy Government buildings," said Mark Heywood, who led the march in Sharpeville, chosen for its symbolism of struggle against oppression. At least 200,000 South Africans are expected to die from AIDS-related illnesses this year.

An international outcry against the South African Government for doing less than poorer neighbours such as Botswana and Namibia prompted the cabinet to change direction last April and promise to provide the drugs, but its critics say it still drags its feet because President Thabo Mbeki remains in thrall to scientists who question the link between HIV and AIDS. - Guardian {end}

(8) Relations between Indoeuropean and Afroasiatic (Semitic) Languages http://www.dabis.at/Anwender.htm/Alscher/afroasia.htm.

(9) Lamarck Rehabilitated: Ted Steele claims to show that adaptive changes in the immune system can find their way into the reproductive cells.

Evolution's barrier breaker

Whistle-blowing maverick researcher Ted Steele is the subject of an award-winning documentary, reports Bernard Lane

The Australian, June 12, 2003

TED Steele, evolutionist outsider, is at a curious point in his turbulent career. His long association with Bob Blanden, immunology group leader at the John Curtin School of Medical Research in Canberra, is about to come to an end. "Bob's got six months to retirement, then we lose his lab," Steele, 54, says. "We are, if you like, in the death throes of our collaboration." Yet there seems to be renewed vigour in their campaign to rehabilitate Jean Baptiste Lamarck (1744-1829), the evolutionist victim of Charles Darwin's revolution. Lamarck had seemed to reward effort: the fruit of this life's struggle could be inherited by the next generation. Darwin interposed a genetic lottery: those lucky enough to end up with adaptive genes would be more likely to survive.

Steele and his Canberra collaborators feel their efforts are about to be rewarded. Their PhD student Andrew Franklin has reportedly made an important breakthrough. They hope to publish it within six months. They promise to show precisely how an adaptive mutation - Lamarck's signature, as it were - is written in the white blood cells. The timing is good. Tonight, the ABC screens a sympathetic documentary - Ted 's Evolution, produced by Film Australia - which this week won an award at Canada's Banff Television Festival. Steele's appears to be an evolution of ever-greater self-confidence. "I know of no scientist who's actually sat down and confronted [our neo-Lamarckian] data ... without coming away saying: ÔYeah, you're right,' " he insists, speaking from the research office that he runs from his Wollongong home. Perhaps the classic Lamarckian image is the giraffe, its elegant neck stretching up to feed, its effort not wasted for the next generation. But Darwin would have the giraffe species wait until a random, neck-stretching mutation occurs in the reproductive cells. Steele's work is more abstract. It proves, he says, that adaptive changes in the human immune system - in response to a virus, for example - can find their way into the reproductive cells. If so, the barrier said to stand between body cells and reproductive cells - the Weismann barrier, an edifice of Darwinian evolution - is far from intact. Steele was first attracted to Lamarck by literature: Arthur Kostler's advocacy. Darwinian evolution can seem unpalatable, lacking a human scale or purpose. For Steele, a Lamarckian correction is good science but he acknowledges its pyschological appeal: "It certainly allows you to think of evolution having velocity - that is, speed and direction." Steele believes there is more than science in the anti-Lamarckianism of diehard Darwinians such as Oxford University's Richard Dawkins, as if they fear anything that "open the gates to religious creationism". Dawkins proved camera-shy as soon as Steele's name was mentioned, according to director Lou Petho.

Steele certainly seems to live in an institutional exile. He left England's Medawar lab - Peter Medawar won a Nobel prize - after a convoluted dispute about data he invoked in support of Lamarck. And he left Wollongong University after denouncing soft marking. This was a formidable distraction from Lamarck. Sacked, Steele won an unfair dismissal case but nonetheless left the campus. "That was the toughest battle of my life," he says. "Much tougher than penetrating Weismann's barrier." {end}

(10) Bringing Einstein down to earth

Caroline Thompson's Physics http://www.aber.ac.uk/~cat

Started August 27, 2000

Forgotten History

http://users.aber.ac.uk/cat/History/forgotten.htm

{start} Whether or not there is conscious effort by "the establishment" to support the reigning paradigms by presenting distorted versions of history, the fact is that the text books and popular literature abound with misleading statements and occasional outright falsehoods. If established scientists believe in something, why should they tell historians and science writers the whole truth? After all, it will only confuse them!

In my opinion, the false reporting of the Michelson-Morley result was the worst error in scientific history! ...

Did the Michelson-Morley experiments prove there was no "aether wind"?

Probably not! They have been accepted by almost everyone as giving a "null" result, but in point of fact they showed a very interesting periodic variation indicating something. If it was the presence of an aether wind, then it was not behaving in the way they expected, but it was definitely something that needed further investigation, and Dayton Miller, working at first with Morley, undertook the task. The variations proved to be reproducible and to show systematic changes with time of year and some other factors. He also showed, incidentally, that the effect disappeared if you put the apparatus in a thick-walled enclosure, which nullifies several of the more recent tests. He summarised his work in great detail in a review paper in 1933 (Miller, Dayton C, "The Ether-Drift Experiments and the Determination of the Absolute Motion of the Earth", Reviews of Modern Physics 5, 203-242 (1933)). For a much shorter version written in 1940 (the year before he died) see his article for the Cleveland Plain Dealer.

He interpreted his results as showing relative motion of the aether. It could either be that the solar system was moving pretty fast (about 200 km/sec, faster than the earth moves around the sun) in a direction roughly perpendicular to the plane of the ecliptic, or the aether was moving in the opposite direction at that speed. The aether seemed to be moving like a fluid, going with much slower relative velocity near solid bodies, thus accounting for the apparently modest speed (about 10 km/sec) indicated by Miller's experiments.

These facts about Miller were drawn to my attention by James DeMeo, who continues to research the subject. It appears that there was a major difference of opinion between Miller and Einstein. Einstein's Special Relativity theory demanded that the Michelson-Morley experiments must have been null! The aether was not acceptable. DeMeo reports (January 2001) that he has now found evidence that Einstein was more directly involved than he had thought. Much new material has been added to his original paper, which concentrated on Shankland's 1955 report, written in consultation with Einstein. (Shankland had been an assistant to Miller in 1932-3. )

As Miller said, in an article in a local paper:

The trouble with Professor Einstein is that he knows nothing about my results. . . . He ought to give me credit for knowing that temperature differences would affect the results. He wrote to me in November suggesting this. I am not so simple as to make no allowance for temperature. (Cleveland Plain Dealer January 27, 1926. )

It was evidently a power struggle between the two, the odds tipped in favour of Einstein by the media-enhanced "victory" of his General Relativity theory after the 1919 eclipse. By 1955 the aether had become a dirty word. Even in 1940 or so, I can find no reference to Miller's existence in Herbert Ives' papers (see The Einstein Myth in my book list). The 1979 Brillet and Hall experiment*, currently accepted as an accurate confirmation of Michelson and Morley's "null" result, appears to have been conducted in ignorance of Miller's work. They seem to have been unaware of Miller's conclusion that the aether wind can only be detected in the open. Their temperature-controlled Fabry-Perot interferometer would have had little chance!

DeMeo is not the only person to have spotted Shankland and Einstein's error! See notes by Prof Allais to the French Academy of Sciences, 1997, 1999 and 2000 at http://allais. maurice. free. fr/English/Science. htm .

However, let us not jump to conclusions! Could Miller in fact have been seeing the same thing as Gershteyn et al. , who reported in February 2002** that there was an apparent periodic variation in the value of G? The data was not quite conclusive but appeared to show that its main variations followed a sidereal cycle, not a solar one. Could it be that a gravitational effect caused the arms of Miller's apparatus to bend and vary slightly in effective length?Or could it be that what he saw was merely an ordinary wind effect?Whatever it was, it should not have been ignored. Even if there was no sign of drift, this should not have been used to dismiss the idea of an aether, since all it means is that some wrong assumptions have been made about its properties.

*A. Brillet and J. L. Hall, Physical Review Letters 42, 549 (1979)

**Mikhail Gershteyn et al, "Experimental Evidence That the Gravitational Constant Varies with Orientation", http://www.arxiv.org/pdf/physics/0202058

Have Einstein's relativity theories ever been "generally accepted"?

Many prominent scientist have expressed their doubts, but one in particular should have been listened to. Louis Essen, professional metrologist,inventor of the atomic clock and co-author of a book on the experimental estimation of the speed of light thought Einstein's ideas ridiculous. He may well have forfeited a Nobel Prize for saying this rather too publicly. As he said, EinsteinÕs theories arbitrarily made "space and time intermixed by definition and not as the result of some peculiar property of nature É If the theory of relativity is regarded simply as a new system of units it can be made consistent but it serves no useful purpose".

See his essay, http://www.btinternet.com/~time.lord/Relativity.html

Whilst on the subject, see also:

New Scientist book review, May 13, 2002, page 48: Margaret Wertheim reviews Robert Marc Friedman's "The Politics of Excellence" (Time Books):

"Seen as a purveyor of metaphysical nonsense that would corrupt the vigorous strain of experimental physics admired by conservative Nobel committee members, EinsteinÕs nomination provoked an extraordinary depth of hostility. "

[Though his nomination for the Nobel prize was not for his relativity ideas, these would have contributed to the impression of "metaphysical nonsense". ]

Dingle, H, "The Case Against Special Relativity", Nature 216, 119-22 (1967)

McCrea, W H, "Why the Special Theory of Relativity is Correct", Nature 216, 122-4 (1967)

and later correspondence: Nature, vol 217, Jan 6 1968, p19

Did Einstein discover E=mc2?

Well, no! I received the following from Theo Theocharis, August 23, 2000, and relayed it to APS News on his request:

In the APS News, Vol. 9, No. 8, August/September 2000, p. 2, the "This Month in Physics History" column was entitled "September 1905: Einstein's Most Famous Formula", and it stated:

"But it was later that year [1905], in a paper received by the Annalen der Physik on September 27, applying his equations to study the motion of a body, that Einstein showed that mass and energy were equivalent, a startling new insight he expressed in a simple formula that became synonymous with his name: E=mc2. However, full confirmation of his theory was slow in coming. It was not until 1933, in Paris, when Irène and Frédéric Joliot-Curie took a photograph showing the conversion of energy into mass. "

The "100 YEARS AGO" item in the 6 April 2000 issue of Nature (Vol. 404, p. 553) is taken from the 5 April 1900 issue of Nature (note the dates), and it states:

"The calculations of M. Henri Becquerel show that this energy is of the order of one ten-millionth of a watt per second. Hence a loss of weight of about a milligram in a thousand million years would suffice to account for the observed effects, assuming the energy of the radiation to be derived from the actual loss of material. "

The assumption that accounts for the stated (in the 5 April 1900 issue of Nature) figures is E=mc2. But according to APS News, this is "Einstein's most famous formula" which in September 1905 was "a startling new insight".

I think that there is a problem that ought to be resolved.

Did quantum theory "predict" that "back body radiation curve"?

Well, not exactly! This is what Planck -- the reluctant co-inventor of the "photon" -- had to say:

From his 1919 Nobel Prize address, "The Origin and Development of the Quantum Theory":

But even if the radiation formula should prove to be absolutely accurate it would after all be only an interpolation formula found by happy guesswork, and would thus leave one rather unsatisfied. I was, therefore, from the day of its origination, occupied with the task of giving it a real physical meaning É

It is down to you to judge whether or not he succeeded.

Does the photoelectric effect prove the existence of photons?

No! Listen to Millikan on the subject -- and he should know! He is probably best known for his "oil drop" experiment, but he also made a vital contribution to photoelectric theory. His experiments confirming that Nature really does seem to obey the law that Einstein had predicted in 1905 are still taken as definitive. In his main paper on the subject, (Millikan, R A, "A Direct Photoelectric Determination of PlanckÕs ÔhÕ", Physical Review 7, 355-388, 1916) he says in the introduction:

It was in 1905 that Einstein made the first coupling of photo effects and with any form of quantum theory by bringing forward the bold, not to say reckless, hypothesis of an electro-magnetic light corpuscle of energy h?, which energy was transferred upon absorption to an electron. This hypothesis may well be called reckless, first because an electromagnetic disturbance which remains localised in space seems a violation of the very conception of an electromagnetic disturbance, and second because it flies in the face of the thoroughly established facts of interference. [My emphasis]

Millikan's concluding discussion includes fascinating ideas about what really happens, some sounding remarkably similar to my own [see my faq file]! He repeats several times his vehement objection to the idea of localised packets of light. For example:

... if the equation be of general validity, then it must certainly be regarded as one of the most fundamental and far reaching of the equations of physics; for it must govern the transformation of all short-wave-length electromagnetic energy into heat energy. Yet the semi-corpuscular theory by which Einstein arrived at his equation seems at present to be wholly untenable . . .

Finally, he says that a modification of Planck's latest idea [in which light is not in packets of h? but of nh?, where n is any integer]

"... seems to me able to account for all the relations thus far known between corpuscular and ethereal radiations É If any particular frequency is incident upon [a substance containing oscillators of every conceivable frequency] the oscillators in it which are in tune with the impressed waves may be assumed to absorb the incident waves until the energy content as reached a critical value when an explosion occurs and a corpuscle is shot out with an energy h? É

It is to be hoped that such a theory will soon be shown to be also reconcilable with the facts of black body radiation. "...

Has it ever been proved that gravity is proportional to mass?

No! This was an assumption that Newton made and others followed, but since nobody pretends to have actually weighed the Sun or the planets it has never been checked. ...

Did Hubble think the cosmological red shift was a Doppler shift?

No! In fact he thought some of his data proved it could not be. He had little use for Einstein's cosmological ideas. Hubble right from the start kept an open mind about the cause of the red shift. ...

Did Quantum Theory help in the discovery of the laser?

Well, certainly the discovery owed nothing to Niels Bohr!

See http://www.spectator.org/AmericanSpectatorArticles/carver.htm, where Carver Mead makes some outspoken criticisms of the status quo. ...
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