Response to "A Geocentrist vs. Relativity" by Martymer81

Response to Youtube video “A Geocentrist vs. Relativity” by Martymer81

1:22 Have you actually read the original Michelson-Morley paper? I would say no, because your 5-point outline is a complete misrepresentation of it.
According to your bullet points, the hypothesis of Michelson-Morley is (1) “Light is a wave in a medium, the aether (or ether).” The alleged consequence of this hypothesis (2) is that “The Earth moves through the aether at at least 30 km/s, the Earth’s orbital velocity.”
(2) is actually NOT a consequence of (1). It is an assumption independent of (1), and was explicitly labeled as an assumption in Michelson’s 1881 paper, and implicitly labeled as such in Michelson-Morley’s 1887 paper. Both your prediction (3) and your conclusion (5) are dependent upon the truth of that assumption. Anyway, (1) was NOT the hypothesis of the Michelson-Morley experiment. The title of the 1887 paper was “On the Relative Motion of the Earth and the Luminferous Ether,” which gives a pretty good idea of exactly what the experiment WAS about. Is the paper titled, “On the Question of the Ether’s Existence” or “On the Question of Whether Light is a Wave in a Medium”? No. The actual hypothesis of the 1887 experiment was one of Fresnel’s, that “the ether is supposed to be at rest except in the interior of transparent media.” It had to do with the question of whether the ether is entrained in objects moving through it, NOT with whether the ether actually existed. The existence of the ether was another assumption of the experiment. It’s even clearer in Michelson’s 1881 experiment: “The result of the hypothesis of a stationary ether is thus shown to be incorrect, and the necessary conclusion follows that the hypothesis is erroneous.” The conclusion of the 1887 paper: “It appears, from all that precedes, reasonably certain that if there be any relative motion between the earth and the luminiferous ether, it must be small; quite small enough entirely to refute Fresnel's explanation of aberration.” Part of Fresnel’s explanation being that the ether is stationary except in the interior of transparent media. Where exactly in the paper does it state that the conclusion of the experiment is that there is no ether? It isn’t even implied. Einstein, decades later, was the one who said there was no ether. The point: your 5-point outline of MM is riddled with errors and a conclusion based upon a biased misstatement of the true experimental hypothesis.
Here is a summary of the experiment inferred from your 5-point outline of it:
Light is a wave in a medium, the aether (or ether). Therefore the Earth moves through the aether at at least 30 km/s, the Earth’s orbital velocity. The experiment failed to detect Earth’s motion through the aether. Therefore the aether does not exist.
Completely illogical. Neither of the “therefores” follows from the assertion in their respective preceding sentences. A more accurate summary of the experiment, NOT a summary of the experiment as re-interpreted in hindsight by relativists to support their theory (which is what your 5-point summary is), is:
The aether is supposed to be at rest except in the interior of transparent media (according to Fresnel’s theory). Assuming the Earth moves against the aether at at least 30 km/s, the experiment will detect such motion. The experiment failed to detect such motion. Therefore, Fresnel's explanation of aberration (stationary ether -- NOTE: NOT NO ether) is entirely refuted.
You have misrepresented/misstated/mischaracterized the entire experiment to fit your biased interpretation of the results. Use it as evidence in favor of relativity if you’d like, but at least give an honest summary of the experiment. Is your position so weak that it can’t withstand an honest summary? 1:36 “And you do realize that the experiment has been repeated with more sensitive equipment, right?”

So they just have more accurate data that there is no relative motion between the Earth and the ether. Or that Fresnel’s hypothesis of a STATIONARY ether is incorrect. So what? Repetition of the same experiment with more sensitive equipment does not change the hypothesis of the original experiment or its conclusion. An increase in the accuracy does not change the fact that the experiment is only designed to detect the relative motion of the Earth and the ether, NOT to detect whether the ether actually exists. You DO realize this, right? As I said to some other commenter, the failure of a car’s speedometer to detect relative motion between the car and the road is not evidence that there is no road. It is evidence that there is no relative motion. Anything more is your own explanation of WHY there is no relative motion.

But let’s pretend you’re right. The ether has been disproven. Why then do they keep repeating the experiment? Educational purposes? To make sure there’s still no ether 130 years later? You’ve got to watch out for that ether stuff, because some of it might have condensed out of the void after the original experiment? Whatever the reason, assume for the sake of argument that it’s no longer about the ether. Even so, as you say, they’re still testing for the effect of motion on the measured speed of light, still testing for evidence of c –v, v being the velocity of Earth through space. And have they detected any evidence of c-v? No. Hypothesis of a motionless Earth: supported, regardless of the existence or non-existence of the ether.

2:05 “Uh, no, it [relativity] has its limits, indicating that it’s incomplete, but it works perfectly fine within those limits…” Perfectly fine? No. Dark matter is evidence that it doesn’t work perfectly fine. 2:33 “Nope. The Twin Paradox is a misunderstanding within special relativity.”
Nope, it’s not. It’s a thought experiment within special relativity. The thought experiment itself is not a misunderstanding; rather, people who think it can’t be resolved have a misunderstanding of the supposed paradox.
Bowden calling it a paradox isn’t an indication of his misunderstanding; it’s an indication that he’s choosing to call it by the common name for that thought experiment. So simply referring to it as “The Twins Paradox” doesn’t mean someone doesn’t understand that it isn’t actually a paradox, any more than calling a cheese product “cheese” doesn’t mean it isn’t understood that it isn’t really cheese; it simply means that you’re referring to it by one of its accepted names. You have to look for other evidence that Bowden doesn’t understand The Twins Paradox.
7:03 “And what would that material be, and what other effects would it have that we could look for and confirm its existence?”
You’re dismissing Poor’s idea of a small amount of material around the sun simply because we don’t know what the material would be and need some other effects to confirm its existence, yet you’re willing to accept the existence of an invisible, unknown, mysterious and purely hypothetical type of matter to explain the galaxy rotation problem. Double standard. Seems like there might be some dark matter around the sun causing Mercury's precession. Dark matter. Wonderful stuff. We can use it to explain any discrepancy between theory and observation.
8:19 “When you’re standing in a field and looking up at the stars… The point of general relativity is that there is no correct way of looking at it. Are you spinning or are the stars orbiting you?” Thank you for acknowledging the equality of a geocentric reference frame, be it absolute or relative. Getting some relativists to even acknowledge the existence of a geocentric reference frame is a monumental task.

9:36 “You do know that relativity is a classical theory, right? Classical physics includes everything except quantum mechanics.” Only according to people who hold to a such a definition of classical physics. Many people (not just us alleged crackpots) consider classical physics to be physics pre-1900, excluding relativity. For example: http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/classical-physics http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/classical https://www.lhup.edu/~dsimanek/ideas/allabout.htm http://www.thefreedictionary.com/classical+physics 10:26 “I’ve looked for a peer-reviewed paper by Setterfield and Barnes and I can’t even find a reference to it.”

You DO know how to competently do an Internet search, don’t you? It’s a valid question, because I didn’t know who Bowden was referring to either, but half a minute’s work on Google reveals that the two people referred to are creationists, who separately have written several articles, some of which Bowden has apparently read, since he cites them. I doubt that your own apparently feeble research skills revealed as much, because if they had, I’m sure you wouldn’t have wasted the opportunity to mock the fact that Bowden is citing non-peer-reviewed, creationist sources (no disrespect to creationists intended). Simply Google “Setterfield and Barnes muons” and boom! You have plenty of stuff to work with. One of the guys cited even has his own entry on Wikipedia, so it’s not difficult to find out who they are. How did your search fail to uncover this? They’re clearly creationists. You have done a disservice to your audience by not revealing this and mocking Bowden for citing creationists. I DOUBT you failed to mention this merely to grant Bowden a sole merciful moment of reprieve from your scorn, so the only conclusion is that your research skills are ineffective, OR that you didn’t actually look, despite your claim that you did. “If you’re going to cite sources, why don’t you provide proper references so that I can check for myself.” I’ll second that, because you apparently can’t dig information up on your own without having someone take you by the hand and lead you directly to it. Bowden gave you two names and a few other keywords to work with, and you came up with NOTHING?! I came up with plenty of stuff in about thirty seconds. There doesn't seem to be any peer-reviewed papers, of course, but geez, I can’t actually believe you wouldn’t have jumped at the chance to expose Bowden’s use of creationist sources. Or maybe you only searched the websites of a few peer-reviewed journals, deigning to forsake the common Internet search. Come on! You should have known better. 11:09 “Also, every time we use a GPS device, we use technology that wouldn’t work if the speed of light were different in different directions.” Incorrect. GPS is based upon the average speed of light on a round trip, which doesn’t preclude the possibility of an anisotropic speed of light on each leg of the journey. THE ONE WAY VELOCITY OF LIGHT HAS NEVER BEEN MEASURED, so it’s only by convention that the speed of light is not different in different directions, not by any empirical evidence. What we know as the speed of light is the average speed over a two-way path. We could give light any speed we wanted on each leg of the journey, as long as round-trip it came out to 186,000 miles per second. Also, absolute Geocentrism predicts exactly the same necessary corrections to the GPS system that relativity does. So let’s go set up a GPS system on some other planet and see if it works identically to the way it does on Earth. Earth: the only place in the universe where GPS will work as it does. Lo and behold, where is the only place in the universe where a GPS system has been set up? You guessed it: Earth. GPS cannot yet be validly claimed as conclusive support for relativity that excludes all contending theories, since it supports absolute Geocentrism equally well. 11:57 “And these [Sagnac’s fringe shifts] are always the same regardless of how fast you’re moving or in what direction.” Not true. The magnitude of the fringe shifts depends upon the relative rotational speed of the table. The faster the table or the universe around it rotates, the greater the fringe shift. 12:14 “You’re citing an example of how the non-existence of the ether is used for practical purposes.” No, he’s citing an example of how the unequal lengths of the two light paths around the table (unequal due to rotation from the viewpoint of an observer external to the frame of the device) are used for practical purposes by an observer. Assume you are correct and there is no ether. In the Sagnac experiment, from the viewpoint of an observer on the table, the table is not rotating and he is stationary relative to his interferometer, and the light paths are equal, yet he still measures a fringe shift. However, in the Michelson-Morley experiment, the observer is likewise stationary relative to the device and the light paths are likewise equal, yet he measures NO fringe shift (except that he does, but we’ll put it down to the experiment’s margin of error). How do YOU explain this inconsistent result? 12:37 “How people reacted to the theory before the overwhelming evidence that we have today was available has no impact on its validity.” You’re right. It doesn’t. But you also don’t know how they would have reacted if they DID have all the “overwhelming” evidence. You seem to be implying that they would have reacted differently, but you can’t know what might have been. As for the “overwhelming” evidence gathered by observers from within a geocentric reference frame -- Michelson-Morley, GPS, particle accelerators, et al. Go out into the rest of the universe, set up these things, and replicate the results you obtained on Earth. THEN you can claim them as support for relativity. For now, they only support a geocentric reference frame. 12:55 “Right. Because you can’t ignore one of the cornerstones of physics and still be taken seriously as a physicist.” Right. Just as a self-proclaimed Satan-worshipper wouldn’t be taken seriously as a Catholic priest. You’ve got to drink the Kool-Aid of whichever group you want to join. Which was Bowden’s point. But just because someone with contrary views is barred from a certain group doesn’t mean that the views of that group are correct. 13:30 "Except that it’s not [false]. It’s perfectly valid at macroscopic scales, and that’s where it’s applied.” Which is exactly what you would expect someone who advocates a pseudoscience to say. Relativity is NOT “perfectly valid at macroscopic scales.” If it were, you wouldn’t need to fabricate dark matter and dark energy in order to reconcile theoretical prediction with empirical observation, two substances for which the only “evidence” is exactly the prediction/observation problem you’re attempting to solve. 14:21 “The Earth is only the center of the observable universe, and that’s only for the trivial reason that we must observe the universe from where we happen to be. Far from land, your boat is always the center of the observable ocean.” You’re implying that there is a larger universe beyond the observable universe. What empirical evidence do you have (1) that this hypothetical larger, unobservable universe actually exists, and (2) that we are not at the actual center of that larger universe? Prove your implicit claim that our observable universe is bounded by a horizon rather than an edge. Also, what physical law says that the Earth, or any other planet in the universe for that matter, MUST be the metaphorical equivalent of a boat FAR FROM LAND at the center of its own observable ocean, utterly precluding the possibility of any boat being closer to one shore or another and observably NOT at the center of its observable ocean? [insert Martymer81-style video clip of me making condescending faces at the camera, playing with my iPhone as I patiently wait with crickets chirping in the background] 16:12 “…so you have made the decision not to care about reality.” Says Martymer81 as he studies a CGI animation of gravitational lensing. That’s classic.