In article ,
Tom Van Flandern wrote:

This replies to Paul Schlyter, Joseph Lazio, and Dave Tholen.

"Paul Schlyter" writes:

[Schlyter]: So you considered that possibility [of satellites on the
surface with roll marks] very early after all. Well, why didn't you
add that to your original challenge?

To keep the challenge as simple as possible until specific terms were
negotiated with any takers,

That is not honest! It implies that the challenge you're actually
prepared to take is a bit different than the challence you're making
public.

and because I mistakenly thought that Eros had stable orbits near its
synchronous orbit, which would probably have made the special condition
moot. As I've already said, that latter reason was my mistake. Of course,
that was not the fault of the hypothesis.

Actually, if you want to renegotiate the terms when someone is
prepared to take your challenge, you've implictly admitted having
lost the original challenge.

[tvf]: The other person ... apparently already knew the gravity field
was unstable... So he was apparently only willing to place a
"sucker's bet" with conditions where he could not lose.

[Schlyter]: What do you mean "he could not lose"? If there had been a
swarm of satellites around Eros, then he would have lost, wouldn't he?
He didn't believe there was such a swarm of course -- but nobody knew
for sure before NEAR was able to observe Eros at close distance.

Scheeres showed that the gravity field of Eros was unstable. So it was
not physically possible for decent-sized satellites to have remained
in orbit, even if Eros (as the EPH asserts) originally had lots of them.
The other party apparently knew that, so he knew he could not lose the
challenge.

....if Sheeres was right, that is. He probably was right, but
remember that models are models, not the reality itself. We won't
know for sure until we've observed it.


[Schlyter]: As you perhaps start to realize, I'm not discussing the
validity of the EPH here -- I'm discussing your earlier public promise
to declare it invalid if some conditions would be fulfilled.

Yes, as you say, I'm starting to get that picture. You are probably
frustrated by finding so few people willing to admit their grand idea
is wrong when a prediction or challenge fails.

I'm actually more irritated when people try to make some kind of
"circus show" by making those challenges. Science isn't gambling.
Yes I know you disagree about that.

And who can blame them? The mainstream sets a terrible example by
continually adding ad hoc accommodating hypotheses when their favored
model's expectations fail.

Such models are of course immature - but what are you supposed to do
when the best models available fail? Should you discard them and
replace them with something worse?

By contrast, since I've been involved in USENET discussions, I have
three times had to admit error and concede a position (counting
this as one of them) because of new information or evidence brought to
my attention. In this case, my original challenge wording was wrong. I
later corrected it. (Isn't that the appropriate response to being shown
an error?) And as you say, that does not reflect on the hypothesis.

In science that's of course the proper procedure. But in gambling it
isn't - there you're supposed to stick with the initial conditions.
If you play e.g. roulette, and bet a lot of money (or your
reputation, or whatever) on "red", and when the ball slows down you
realize "red" probably won't win - then you cannot change your mind
and bet on "black" instead.... doing so would not be accepted.

Issuing a challenge is similar: you hope to win by getting your opponent
to publicly declare they're lost. But you also risk having to declare
you've lost yourself.

However, at no time was the condition of my challenge met -- that
an acceptor of the challenge agreed to its terms.

If you wanted to play roulette, or poker, on similar terms, no-one
would want to play with you either.....


But you missed my point. Forget the other guy. The scientific issue was
as I stated. The challenge was merely a means to get the issue onto the
scientific table for wider consideration because the prior history of
successful EPH predictions had gone largely ignored.

Did your challenge succeed, or fail, as a gimmic to get more attention
to your EPH?

BTW what's wrong with the regular procedu publish your theory, make
predictions about observable events not yet observed, and await the
results of future observations. What's wrong with that?


[Schlyter]: Perhaps your greatest problem is that you're trying to
challenge too much at a time? Besides your EPH hypothesis you claim
that the force of gravity travels faster than light, and you make some
quite non-standard interpretations of GR, without good enough evidence
for your ideas.

Your familiarity with the GR issue is obviously minimal. I've now
published three papers in leading journals, the most recent jointly with
Vigier to which there has been no further rebuttal. According to the
peer review processes and editors involved, and judging by feedback from
many readers worldwide, my evidence was good enough and the two major
points of this last paper were made:
** 1) The proof that nothing can travel faster than light in forward
time is unconditionally invalidated because Lorentzian relativity (LR),
which allows it, has never been experimentally falsified.

Does relativity really say nothing can travel faster than light?
Then why do people talk about tachyons? I.e. those hypothetical FTL
particles with imaginary rest mass which have never been observed,
but, if I've understood it all correctly, is not completely ruled out
by relativity.

** 2) All six experiments bearing on the speed of gravitational or
electrodynamic force agree that it must be much faster than light, which
falsifies SR in favor of LR.

Does SR say anything about gravity? I thought GR did that.....

Anyway, in GR, the gravitational force is a pseudo-force which really
does not exist - quite similar to the centrifugal force or the coriolis
force. At what speed does the centrifugal force propagate? :-)

If you haven't assimilated these published, unchallenged findings yet,
then your gravitational physics is still stuck in the 20th century.

I've seen nobody but you argue that gravity travels faster than
light. More than a decade ago, you used the aberration of light and
the absence of aberration of gravity in the solar system as a "proof"
that gravity travels much faster than light. Your arguments were
simple and down-to-earth and I believed you for awhile. And from a
Newtonian perspectice you are right of course: in Newtonan physics
gravity is assumed to propagate instantly. Later I saw Steve Carlips
arguments why your aberration argument for gravity travelling FTL is
wrong, and he convinced me. Carlip's position is that since we've
never directly observed the propagation speed of gravity, we don't
know whether it travels FTL or not. But according to GR, gravity
does not propagate FTL. So says Carlip, and since, as you correctly
pointed out, I'm no expert in GR, I cannot argue against that. But I
do trust his expertise in GR more than yours.


As for my "greatest problem", in 1990 I founded Meta Research to look
into all ideas in astronomy that meet the criteria of scientific
method but are ignored solely because they conflict with a mainstream
paradigm.

If your EPH should become an accepted mainstream model, how would Meta
Research deal with it then? Would Meta Research stop promoting it then?
After all, it would then no longer be in conflict with the mainstream
paradigm, and would thus be outside of what Meta Research is supposed
to deal with.

[Schlyter]: the presence of those asteroid occultations was a clear
indicator that existence of asteroid satellites was an interesting
subject to study.

You couldn't tell that from the mainstream reaction. Binzel,
Tedesco and I had a chapter on asteroid satellites in "Asteroids I"
(1979). The subject did not even come up in "Asteroids II" (1989), four
years before the discovery of the first official asteroid satellite in
1993.

OTOH e.g. the Galileo space probe was sent past two asteroids, and
found a satellite orbiting one of them. So some attention was paid
to this problem, or else Galileo would have been targeted for only
Jupiter.

[Schlyter]: with such outstanding achievements lately, you and your
hundreds of supporters of course have a lot of papers published in
professional journals like Astrophysical Journal, Astronomy and
Astrophysics, Icarus, and others. And they are frequently referred to
by other papers. Is that so?

See the citations at the end of "The exploded planet hypothesis -
2000", available on the web at
http://metaresearch.org/solar%20system/eph/eph2000.asp. A coming
publication has an even longer bibliography. The EPH model has a
200-year history dating back to Olbers and Lagrange, its first
advocates; so the literature has many such articles. For highlights of
the history before I came on the scene, see the lengthy reference list
in my first paper: "A former asteroidal planet as the origin of comets",
Icarus 36:51-74 (1978).

Interestingly, a lot of models in conflict with mainstream models are
revived old hypotheses which once were rejected. I guess the major
weakness with the EPH hypothesis is that we know of no feasible
mechanism by which a planet could spontaneously explode. So your EPH
requires some "magic" as far as we know today - and that's probably
why it is met with such resistance. Yes I know your counterargument
he "...but how can a whole universe explode?" - at least the
primeval universe had physical conditions very different from today.
In particular an extremely high density, where quantum physical
effects became important even on a larger scale. Therefore it is
much easier to accept an exploding primeval universe than to accept
an exploding planet under more normal physical conditions.

So that's probably what's required to get EPH accepted as a mainstream
model: find a feasible physical mechanism by which a planet can
spontaneously explode. After all, ad hoc adjustments and additions
to models not requiring magic is easier to accept than a model which
does require some magic.


and writes:
.............
[Tholen]: Non sequitur, given that the EPH is not a viable model.

Pointlessly argumentative and uninformative.
............
Pointlessly argumentative, or shows ignorance of the EPH/SM model
you are addressing. See preceding description.
............
Ad hominem, argumentative, unscientific.
............
Unexplained, but apparently shows ignorance of the model it
addresses.
............
Pointlessly argumentative.
............
Argumentative and uninformative.
............
Argumentative and insulting.

Uh-oh! Watch out so you don't yourself become a "Tholen-bot" Tom!
Tholen belongs in the kill file - discussing with him on Usenet is
like trying to talk with a robot. Perhaps it's feasible to argument
with him through some science journal - these journals have editors,
and therefore Tholen is then forced to behave, or else his letters
will be rejected.

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