Tales From The Travels

For my trip to South Dakota a couple weeks ago, I booked my return on a 6 AM flight out of Omaha because the airline bribed me to take such an early flight. Since Omaha is about two hours from Vermillion, and I needed time to return my rental car, I needed to leave Vermillion about 2:30 in the morning in order to get to the airport on time. So, when I went to bed the night before I set my alarm clock to get me up, but it was only a safety step. I knew I would wake up at the right time without any alarm and I did. I was actually awake a couple minutes before the alarm went off.

I was confident about this because I do this on a regular basis. Somehow, I know what time it is and will wake up at the time I want to. I use an alarm clock at home in the morning, but it is only a prudent failsafe and I am almost always awake when it goes off. When I’m lecturing, I know when the class time is almost up without looking at a clock. Routinely, I set the alarm in my head and it goes off at the pre-selected time. What is strangest about all of this is that I’m not all that strange. I routinely hear other people tell very similar stories.

I’ve always wondered about this ability. This is pretty cool. So, what am I doing, counting seconds in the back of my head? How can I know what time it is, even while I’m asleep? I’ve tried different experiments to see if I can figure out how this works, but with no success. I simply don’t know what is going on that allows me to tell the time. The best I can guess is that people that have this ability can just judge the passage of time, even when not thinking about it. Kind of like watching the flow of a river. If you watch it enough, you learn just how it behaves.

I would write more, but my internal clock is telling me I need to stop.

A few of us were having dinner with lunar astronaut Jack Schmitt and his wife the other night when the topic of the lunar hoax nonsense came up. I noted that the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter was scheduled for launch later this year and it has a camera with high enough resolution that it should be able to image the landers. I commented that there’s going to be a lot of embarrassed people when that happens. Someone else disagreed, saying they will figure out another way to believe in the hoax.

As Jack Schmitt said, ‘Stupidity is voluntary.’

I think that just about says it all.

I was at the Lunar and Planetary Sciences Conference a few years ago at the Johnson Space Center. I had just listened to this talk and the speaker was taking questions from the audience when this guy steps up the microphone and starts talking about the flying saucers on the Moon that the government is keeping secret. It was very surreal because everyone in the room (a large auditorium with maybe 200 people in it) suddenly went silent and stopped right in the middle of what ever they were doing. It was kind of like everyone was thinking, ‘If I don’t make any sudden moves maybe he won’t do anything violent.’ Then, as soon as he was done, everything returned to normal. It was as if I had stepped into the Twilight Zone.

Being in science automatically makes you a target for everyone with a weird idea. When I was in grad school we had a file with all of the strange letters the department would get. I remember this one where this lady was telling us that when she stripped naked, wrapped herself up in aluminum foil and laid in the middle of her kitchen, she could here radio stations and she wanted to know how this worked. All I could think was, ‘How in the world did she discover that in the first place?’

So, we’ve been getting some interesting emails lately. We’re hosting the regional meeting of the American Physics Society/American Association of Physics Teachers (APS/AAPT) this coming Friday and Saturday. Events like these are open to anyone that wants to register, so you get some ‘colorful’ people signing up for them.

One story one of our faculty members has is of a conference where this guy opened a talk session by telling everyone there that he was the messiah and all of the attendees were now his followers. When the moderator realized what was going on, she pulled the plug on the guy and ended his ‘talk.’ Then, when she called the next speaker, it was the same guy! He had registered under a different name and submitted a different paper title designed to get into the same session. So, she pulled him a second time. Then, the third speaker was the same guy again! It turned out that all of the registered speakers were the same guy, under different names. So, they ended up canceling the whole session. Later on, a legitimate speaker showed up to give his talk and was wondering where everyone was.

Another story I heard was about this guy that would always show up at these meetings and start ranting to the point they were afraid he would need to be restrained. They finally started holding their meetings without any advertising, but somehow he still found out about the meetings and would show up and try to take them over.

So, when we got a series of phone calls and emails from a local fringe element everyone else was all upset, but not me. I love these guys. I think they’re a blast. If nothing else, they’re out there and people are listening to them. We, as scientists, need to be able to discuss why they are wrong. We can’t just dismiss them with a comment that they’re kooks, because there are people that are listening and believing them. If someone starts claiming the Moon landings were faked, or the 9/11 attacks were a government conspiracy, or there’s a giant face on Mars, we need to be able to count off on our fingers and say, ‘You’re wrong for this reason, and this one, and this one, and excuse me while I take off my shoes because there’s a lot more reasons why you’re wrong and I can prove it!’ We can’t be prepared for these guys unless we pay attention to what they’re saying.

Also, just because they reach an invalid conclusion doesn’t mean that everything they have to say isn’t interesting, and they may even have some valid points. So, one local kook sent up his self-published book and asked us to hand it out at the conference because he was too sick to attend. After seeing his emails, I’m wondering just what kind of hospital he’s in and if they allow him out on weekends. Anyway, I was the only one to sit down and actually read it and it was a lulu. Essentially, he is yet another guy claiming to have discovered that Einstein was wrong, the United Nations is taking over, and the angels of the lord are being sent down to show all of us that he’s right. But, this guy’s starting point was pretty interesting.

He began his argument by looking at a spaceship flying at relativistic velocities. If this spaceship were to fly at 86.6% of the speed of light (.866c), then observers on Earth would see the spaceship double in mass. This is correct and is a consequence of the theory of relativity. He goes on to correctly state the extra mass was a result of the energy put into the spaceship to accelerate it. Now, this is where it gets tricky. He goes on to claim, correctly, that the occupants of the spaceship would see themselves as being stationary and the universe as moving at .866c. Then, he makes his mistake. He claims because of this, the mass of the universe has doubled from the perspective of the spaceship occupants and this increase in mass cannot be accounted for anywhere. Therefore, relativity is a violation of conservation of energy and is wrong.

Well, I thought this was pretty interesting. I knew his argument was wrong somewhere, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. I also knew that the occupants of the spaceship should see the same increase in mass as is witnessed by the observers on Earth because of the conservation of mass-energy. I thought about it for awhile over the weekend and finally contacted my relativity professor and asked him to point me in the right direction.

My professor was Dr. Wolfgang Rindler, who is one of the top relativity experts in the world, and is one the finest gentlemen I’ve ever met. We exchanged some emails and we got it all straightened out. The problem is that the writer didn’t take into account that the spaceship is accelerating. This results in a force that can be measured and accounted for and that changes everything. The argument the writer makes would require the spaceship to suddenly be at .866c without any acceleration involved. So, the occupants know they are in an accelerating reference frame and what they see is a change in mass in the exhaust used to accelerate them. The change in mass of this exhaust would be exactly equal to the change in mass the observers on Earth would see in the spaceship.

A little science is a dangerous thing.

So, because I was willing to read this guy’s book, even though I was fully aware it was invalid, I increased my understanding of relativity and am now more able to counter his claims.

As he said in his opening argument:

In addition, if you say my logic is faulty (in any place), then it is your responsibility to physics to tell me where and how it is faulty (which it isn’t), or else find yourselves another occupation.

Gary Mike Colasuono
Warp Speed A Plus

Well, I’m not ready to find another occupation, so there you have it, Mike. By the way, the rest of your arguments are even worse.