Setterfield Revisited and Refocused

Phillip, I think you missed Peter's point. His point was not that Setterfield *couldn't* have been qualified without a PhD, his point was that he *wasn't*.

 

UTEDTW wrote:

Yes. Speed of rotation is probably proportional to c in Setterfield's theory. I say "probably" because he hasn't developed the theory sufficiently to be sure, but the most logical development does have speed of rotation proportional to c.

The reason is that in Setterfield's world it is obvious that the familiar conservation laws of angular momentum and linear momentum (and also energy, although we need not discuss that here) work differently from what we are used to. Consider angular momentum: It's quantized in units of h/(2Ipi); but according to Setterfield h is time-varying, so angular momentum cannot possibly be conserved. However, since hc is constant, the product of angular momentum times c can indeed be constant.

Is it? Well, Setterfield has said that he wants energy to be conserved. For a free particle this means that its kinetic energy must be conserved; but at least between his "quantum jumps" the mass of a particle is inversely proportional to c^2. This suggests that Setterfield's first law of motion (replacing the old-fashioned Newton's first law of motion) should be that v/c is constant for a free particle. This implies that pc is constant, where p is linear momentum, as well as angular momentum times c.

For Setterfield's second law of motion we are practically required to say that d(pc)/dt = cF. The corresponding rule for angular momentum will be d(Lc)/dt = cT, where L is the angular momentum and T is the net torque applied. (Please forgive my not bolding vector quantities. I hope the notation doesn't confuse anyone.)

There doesn't seem to be much flexibility in choosing Setterfield's equations of motion. Setterfield has never touched the subject, so I guess it falls to me as the world's foremost expert on Setterfield theory to promulgate them!

Anyway, if cL is constant for a pulsar experiencing no torque (good to a zeroth-order approximation) then L = I*omega is proportionaal to 1/c. But I ~ mr^2, and the radius of the pulsar doesn't change while m is inversely proportional to c^2. Therefore omega has to be proportional to c.

Of course this has to apply to the earth's rotation rate as well. When measured in dynamical time it has to be proportional to c in dynamical time. Therefore according to Setterfield theory there were very many many many more days in a year in the past! That's a part of his model that he never talks about. (Remember that the frequency of the earth's revolution about the sun is gravitationally controlled, and is not proportional to c!)

 

It cracks me up that people who have never listened to Barry or met him pass judgments like this. On the other extreme is Dr. Robert Brown at GRI who, although he disagrees with Barry, has attended every lecture Barry has given down there, plus two dinners given for Barry (I think it was two there...), and recently emailed a mutual friend that he was amazed that anyone with any amount of education could have the grasp of the number of fields that Barry had.

I would rather Barry impressed Dr. Brown than Meatros or Peter101 ANY day!

It is not that Barry does not have a degree, it is that those who do have Ph.D.'s in fields related to Barry's work are taking him very seriously now, and the number of emails and other communications we are receiving is increasing daily.

So while Peter and Meatros and Mark can all chop away here, where it is quite safe as the audience hasn't the vaguest what is being talked about for the most part, the people who do know what is going on are attending Barry's lectures, writing us, asking for more.

As it is, we are so far behind in responding after our recent vacation that there is much too much work to do to pay much attention to the sniping going on here.

By the way, Phillip, many thanks for your response. I have often wondered if Barry had been able to continue in university and get whatever degrees, if he would not have been so indoctrinated in the current way of thinking that he would not have been able to take a fresh look at the data and start chasing down more of it.

 

Phillip, you responded to the wrong question with your description of your experiences with degreed and non-degreed engineers working on your military black boxes. Nowhere in this forum were we discussing how to judge the competence of an engineer. Rather, the question here concerned judging the competence of a (possibly would-be) scientist. Criteria for judging engineers may be, and in fact are very different from those for judging scientists. Hence it is unsurprising and irrelevant that you would find different criteria to judge the value of workers on your military black boxes than scientists employ to judge their peers' competence.

Now it is not literally true that scientists are judged by the number of their publications. One does not say that Smith is better than Jones because Smith has 47 refereed publications while Jones has only 43 (or even 33). It is, however, virtually certain that a would-be scientist who has been working, charitably say, more than a few years having NO refereed scientific publications in ordinary scientific Journals is very likely not competent.

Scientists are indeed expected to complete experiments or to develop theories; but they are additionally expected routinely to communicate their discoveries to their peers. An uncommunicated discovery might as well never have been made! It is for this reason that scientific publication is considered essential. Someone who does not publish at all has not communicated at all, while someone like Setterfield who has published only in the popular or creationist literature, or who has only self-published his work has most certainly not communicated his work among his peers. Such a person cannot be regarded highly as a scientist.

So far I have assumed for the sake of argument Phillip's valuations of degreed personel and their contributions to the engineering he has managed. However, as it stands, Phillip's remarks applied even to engineering make no sense. Despite Phillip's claim it is not the task of engineers to make a working product, but rather to make a well-cocumented working product. That is so in every engineering concern. It is not enough to creat a working product that one or two people on an engineering team understand, or even a product understood by the entire team of its development engineers. In the engineering world, as in the scientific, it is essential to communicate in a form suitable for one's peers' reading, the nature of the work that one has done.

While there is room in most engineering organizations for individual engineers who cannot or do not effectively write what they have designed (leaving that task to better writers, perhaps), that is not possible in any engineering organization as a whole. (To a more limited extent an individual scientist in a large group might avoid some of the writing of scientific papers; but that is hardly relevant here since Setterfield writes with few or no collaboarators, and in any event the issue is the entire Setterfield collaboration's failure to publish in the legitimate scientific Journals.)

Of course it is quite possible in the engineering environment to get wrapped around the axle over documenting everything to the point where documentation actually slows down or stymies a project. . It is possible even that in Phillip's projects some holders of advanced degrees contributed disproportionately to the problem of overdocumentation. That in no way, however, suggests even in engineering the unimportance of documenting and communicating about one's project.
While it may be true at some level that you as an engineer are expected to deliver your product

 

Helen, if you read my post again, please notice that I wasn't passing judgment on Setterfield's work. *I* don't know enough about the speed of light and what have you, to feel comfortable making a comment about your husbands work.

What I was saying is that I felt Phillip missed what Peter was saying, which was that your Husband didn't know what he was talking about enough to be considered by experts (Peter's claim, not mine). As I'm not an expert in the field (I'm not even very familar with it), I didn't feel as though I should just agree with Peter (even though I do doubt that your Husband has a revolutionary new theory, but again, that's my speculation). what I did was point out to Phillip that the point wasn't the acquiring of a PhD.

I feel as though I'm not being clear.

 

Helen wrote:

What has listening to Barry Setterfield or having met him hav to do with anything? He's left a paper trail. Not in the places where scientists custimarily leave their paper trails, but a paper trail nevertheless. It is upon this that he is judgedx and found wanting. Whatever fine lecture or personal qualities Setterfield might have is of no concern here.

So how has Dr. Brown used Setterfield's work in his own research?

No they don't. Absolutely none of them have cited anything written by Barry Setterfield in any of their own papers in the scientifi literature. You can check the Citation Index yourself.

I am not saying for a moment that people do not take Setterfield's work seriously. It's just that the only ones who do so are apparently his critics. We take his work seriously to point out a few of its flaws. It is my judgment (shared by Setterfield's other critics) that Setterfield's work cannot likely be fixed. People like Dr. Brown, on the other nand, have not only failed to use
Setterfield's work in their own, but have not published (in any permanent medium to any audience) their objections to Setterfield's theory, or suggestions on how it may be fixed. Although I do not regard Setterfield's work as serious science, I have obviously taken it more scientifically seriously than has Dr. Brown. (That is not a criticism of Dr. Brown.)

In what Journal or what forum is this material being discussed by those competent scientists? In any case I am not concerned with that part of our audience here that doesn't understand this matter. Although mistakes have been made it is a fact that I do well understand Setterfield's writings, and have intelligently criticized the same. Paul, Peter, Meatros, and UTEDTW have also done so here. Tim Thompson has intelligently done so elsewhere (back on CARM). I cannot speak for those others, but I have geared my criticisms of Setterfield to the sophisticated lay audience. (There is no sophisticate physics audience to talk to. The question isn't whether or not Setterfield's work is any good. It isn't. No physicist who has looked at it has approved. Its failings are obvious. The problem is to convince a lay audience. Of course I am always open to elucidating at any depth. However, experience shows that few or no physicists need deep explanation to find Settterfield's work wanting.

No need to wonder. It would have been perfectly reasonable for someone with a degree to have started out as Setterfield did and look at old measurements of the speed of light for evidence of change over recent historical time. Although it's somewhat strained, it's possible that someone with a degree might convince himself that there was more than the slightest statistical suggestion that historical measurements of the speed of light indicated a secular trend. I suspect that a reasonably sophisticated scientist could even get that much published. (He'd need at least the statistical sophistication of his friend Alan Montgomery, together with more flexible personality and willingness to pull some of the punches. A degreed writer might have learned to be sufficiently cautious with inferences from scattered data to have written a paper suggesting that measurements of c from about 1880 to 1950 might suggest, and are not inconsistent with, a slow dow of atomic time with respect to gravitational time. With degrees one tends to learn to abandon that boldness which is rashness! Anyway, in my judgment Setterfield might have gotten something published on the experimental side of things.

The rest would have gone nowhere. Had Setterfield gotten his degree he would have understood that Tifft's "quantization" is vastly different in meaning from atomic "quantization." He would have learned that peaks in a power spectrum are not the same as the discrete peaks found in atomic or molecular spectra. He would not have had that motivation for his work.

Setterfield would also have learned quantum mechanics beyond the Bohr theory. He would have found it strange that all atoms respond to his "quantum jumps" at the same time rather than probabalistically as is required by any version of quantum mechanics. He would have certainly used something other than the Bohr theory!

He would have figured out that Equation (13) in his magnum opus at http://www.setterfield.org/quantumredshift.htm is wrong, and that Delta(1/lambda) is not the same thing as 1/(Delta lambda). Not every equation involving his new quantum integer would be wrong.)

He would have seen that motivation for his new quantum integer is entirely lacking.

He would have seen that his theory uses a relationship between astronomical distance and red shift which makes perfect sense in an expanding universe, but not in his own model where the equation has to be introduced by fiat.

He would have easily seen that his classical and quantum theories are inconsistent. His classical electrodynamics would have have the energy of light in a perfectly-reflecting box vary as 1/c. However, if he treated this quantum mechanically (even at the Bohr level with which he is now comfortable) he'd find that the energies of each photon were fixed and there was no mechanism for changing photon number. In other words his theory both requires energy conservatiopn and endrgy nonconservation under the same circumstances. While a degree isn't necessary to realize this, it would help.

There's. more. But Helen is probably right. Setterfield probably wouldn't have produced the physics that he has procuded if he'd earned his degree

 

UTEDTW wrote:

Absolutely right!

Also frequencies in "mixed" systems would not scale with c, although it's perhaps nontrivial to calculate their scaling. I have in mind systems like Cepheid variables (or any other type of variable star) where the pulsation is partly gravitationally driven and partly governed by gas properties dependent on the nongravitational atomic constants. Or even the rate of burning of nuclear fuel in stars. There is a delicate balance between supporting pressure (from thermal motion in a star's center) and pressure due to the weight (depending explicitly on G as well as c) of the mass above the stellar core. The two pressures change differently with time, so there are going to be features of stellar evolution sensitive to changes in the speed of light if the speed of light changes significantly over stellar lifetimes.

I'm still trying to figure out why we live our three score and ten years in dynamical time (and why our ancestors lived their thirty-score and one hundred) in dynamical time rather than atomic time. Our life spans are controlled by c hemical, rather than gravitational processes. The ratios of those processes typical time scales to those of, say, radioactive decay, should be constant in Setterfield's model. Adam and Eve should have been able to live only on the order of 70 atomic years, which would have been many fewer, not many more, when computed according to the then current dynamical time.

 

Helen wrote:

The above paragraph from Helen has been bothering me for these past hours. Of course it doesn't bother me that Helen would prefer the counsel of Brown to my own. What bothers me is the e-mail she says Brown sent her in which Brown wonders "that anyone with any amount of education could have the grasp of the number of fields that Barry [Setterfield]had".

From this we may, I think, infer that Dr. Brown does not believe himself to have grasp of those necessary fields. Why would Helen (or anyone) care what wonderful things someone without grasp of the necessary fields would bestow upon Barry Setterfield and his work? I should think that as an intellectually active person Helen should be interested in the things (good or bad) said about Barry Setterfield's work by those having (unlike Brown) grasp of at least a significant number of the fields necessary.

The problem is especially acute because Helen compares her preference for Brown'responses to Setterfield with her distdain for those of us who have read Setterfield and posted our responses here.

Perhaps I should here speak only for myself. You see, unlike Brown, I do not marvel at the number of fields needed to write what Setterfield has written. Apart from a few references off the beaten path (those to Puthof on Bohr Quantization using SED or to Tifft's astronomical observations) there is little beyond what anyone with a physics Ph.D. would not know, and nothing that could not be quickly picked up by a typical physics Ph.D. Now although obtaining a physics Ph.D. is by no means trivial, and many (probably the vast majority) of people would be incapable of earning one even if they tried, earning such a degree is now cause for wonderment. It's a hard thing to do, deserving congratulation, but not wonderment.

I have now doubt that I have learned quite enough of whatever fields of knowledge are necessary to understand most of what Setterfield has written. (The only exceptions would be geology in the sciences and some areas of Biblical studies; but I treat this as a scientific discussion where the Bible and Biblical interpretation are at best secondary issues. Setterfield's c-decay, although perhaps having some peripheral extensions in geology, is primarily about physics, astronomy and cosmology..

So unlike Brown I claim to have grasp of substantially all subjects needed to critique Barry Setterfield's work. Yet Helen prefers Brown's responses to mine. Why?

I suppose that Helen could disbelieve my claim that I have grasp of the necessary subjects; but that would only mean that she doesn't think either Brown or I has grasp of the necessary subject matter. In that case why would she care about the remarks of either of us? Indeed, why care anything at all about the remarks of one who wonders how someone could grasp everything necessary to understand or do Setterfield's work? It makes no sense. Brown tells us (or rather tells Helen) that he doesn't see how anyuone (including himself) could understand what Setterfield has to understand to do Setterfield's work. Nothing dishonorable about that. No one can know everything and I admire Brown for freely admitting his ignorance of fields he does not understand. But after Brown has implicitly admitted his ignorance of relevant fields, why does Helen continue to value Brown's aprobation of Setterfield's writings which writings' evaluation requires grasp of those fields that Brown lacks?

Could it be that Helen prefers Brown's responses to Setterfield to those posted on this board simply because Brown's responses are fuzzy approval (him not having grasp of some subjects needed to understand Setterfield's work) while ours, although often or mostly based upon knowledge and grasp of the necessary subjects, are harshly critical of Setterfield's work?

I can't see any other reason. Even if Helen believed that I and every other critic was ignorant of the subjects needed to understand Setterfield's work, that would put us only at the same level as Brown, not below Brown. It would afford Helen no reason to prefer Brown to us. Putting us in the most unfavorable, but arguably reasonable, light it would be possible for Helen only to reject us and Brown equally.

 

Go for it, Mark.

 

Here's a Setterfield blunder that I hadn't seen before. It concerns the relationship he gives between atomic time and Dynamic time in his Equation 118) of ATOMIC QUANTUM STATES, LIGHT, AND THE REDSHIFT. Setterfield writes:

t = K[arcsin(T) - (1 - T^2)^(1/2) - T + 1].

Here t is atomic time before present, T is the fraction of the dynamical time over a critical time before present. The K is a constant to be determined later. The final "1" on the right hand side is an integration constant so that the origins of both t and T coincide.

Now I'm not worrying about how this equation connecting t and T was derived. All I'm asking now is "Does it make sense?" As I shall show below, it does not.

As I said (from Setterfield himself) T is a fractional time s/Tc before present, where s is now the dyna mical time before present. This introduces no new physics. It will appear to complicate our equation, but ultimately simplifies it. The units of both s and Tc are dynamical seconds. (They have to have the same units since T is dimensionless.)

So now we have

t = K]arcsin(s/Tc) - (1 - s^2/(Tc^2)^(1/2) - s/Tc + 1).

So far this doesn't look unreasonable...except

Remember that s and t were defined (as close as could be) in about 1950 to run as close as could be. That is, the atomic second was defined to be as close as possible to the dynamical second. In 1950 the two times were supposed to pass at the same rate. That is, in 1950 dt/ds = 1. The derivative of atomic time with respect to dynamic time was 1. Since even Setterfield agrees that the divergence between atomic time and dynamic time has been small since 1950, we must still have, approximately, that dt/ds = 1.

But look at Setterfield's formula and you will see that at s = 0 dt/ds = 0./

That cannot be. Setterfield has already used the equality of the two times at s = t = 0 to get the integration constant. But in order to do that his expression for t(s) has to be valid in a region about s 0. Plainly it is not. His expression is wrong and unphysical

 

from Barry:

Mark Kluge correctly states equation 118 in Atomic Quantum States, Light and the Redshift (see the section of the paper here:
http://www.setterfield.org/quantumredshift.htm#periodicitiesandgeo )
reads
t = K[arcsin(T) - (1 - T^2)^(1/2) - T + 1]

This equation gives the atomic time elapsed, t, for a dynamical time elapsed, T, after a starting point T=0. At T=0, no atomic time has elapsed, so t=0 as well. If T=0 is substituted in my equation above, then it can be seen that t also equals 0. In other words this is the beginning point for both time scales. On that basis, the integration constant of +1 at the end of the equation is correct. Furthermore, this means that the equation is correct in itself.

Kluge goes on to say that "As I said (from Setterfield himself) T is a fractional time s/Tc before present, where s is now the dyna mical time before present. " Setterfield has said no such thing. Kluge is trying to put words into my mouth. Kluge then takes his conversion of T into s/Tc, plugs it into the equation, and then gets a result which he understandably claims is incorrect!

 

Below Barry Setterfield responds to my previous post in this thread. He does not respond to, and even fails to acknowledge, the physics of my post. It is clear from his response that at least one of us has misunderstood something the other has said. Let us then go to what appears to me the first point of departure.

Hellen wrote:

OK, here is a place where I might have misunderstood Setterfield. I have understood T to be a measure of dynamical time before present. That is, as a function of red shift. That is, I understand T = 0 to correspond to zero red shift and positive T to be in the past.

I thought positive to be in the past because of Setterfield's Equation (108) and following:

z = [(1 + x) /(1 – x^2)^(1/2)] – 1 (108)

relating cosmological distance x to red shift z. (Now as an aside I regard Equation (108) in Setterfield's theory as ill-motivated, although it follows very naturally and inevitably from certain plausible assumptions in standard cosmology. However, that is for another day. For the present I take Equation (108) as axiomatic and continue.)

Now I don't here want to do a full derivation since there is at least a reasonable chance that Setterfield meant something else here and I am discussing Setterfield's model. However, I did understand Setterfield's x to be cosmological distance outward and T to be a measure of dynamica time in the past.

Am I mistaken in what T is? If I am mistaken I would appreciate correction.

But anyway, I do not think the time direction matters here. Nor does it matter whether or not I have correctly stated the scaling of dynamical time. (Setterfield seems to think I have not.) The physics of my previous post can be perfectly discussed in the form of Equation (113) that Setterfield gives.

Recall that both t and T are times having the same origin. They both flow in the same direction. If one is flowing then both must flow. IT IS THEREFORE UNPHYSICAL FOR THE DERIVATIVE OF ONE WITH RESPECT TO THE OTHER TO BE EITHER ZERR INFINITE. If, for example, dt/dT 0 for some dynamical time T it would mean that atomic time is not flowing at the corresponding dynamical time. Or, in other words, if dt/DT = 0 for some value of T then dT/dt is infinite at the corresponding point.

Am I incorrect that I can assign the common origin to the present? But both dynamical and atomic time are flowing now, so the derivative of one with respect to the other cannot be zero at an ordinary point like now.

As for the scalingrelating s and T, I did so because quite obviously from Equation (113) T is a scaled time. That is, it is not dynamical time measured in seconds, years, or any other unit. From Equation (113) we see that the relationship between t and T is singular at T = +/-1. 1 What? I did the scaling so that I could have a dynamical time s measured in conventional units like seconds or years. Then atomic time t could be similarly measured (with a different prefactor K in Equation (113)). The point is that now both times are flowing at the same rate (in units of seconds or hours, etc.) Therefore if I am correct that we can set the origin at the present, at t = - dt/ds has to be 1! In any case dt/dT cannot be zero.

 

>>>>>>>>With all of the management I have done, I found out that many of the best employees I had were ones who actually had no schooling (formal) whatsoever, but had years and years of experience. The lowest individuals I had were those who had Phd's in Electronic Engineering. They were essentially worthless. The reason? Their whole concept of "work" and "career" was to write theoretical white-papers and produce tons and tons of this material. In 90% of the cases, people with this level of education were completely worthless when it came to producing a piece of hard-ware that would get a missile from a ship to Saddam's Palace. NOW, DON'T GET ME WRONG! Many of the Phd's I worked with did help with problems which required a level of expertise to fix, but it was often like pulling teeth to get them focused away from analysing the transistors that went into the circuit, rather than designing the circuit itself. They were completely incapable of using rule-of-thumb settings to get something working. After twenty pages of advanced math, they often announced they could not accomplish the job. A highly experienced technician would sit down at the bench and breadboard a circuit and maybe with the help of a little more experienced engineer to get the circuit parameters to work across the environmental range, the job was finished in one tenth the time and wow, was the cost better.<<<<<<


Phillip,

My main purpose in posting about Setterfield's education was to correct your understanding about it, which apparently was incorrect. If you want to consider Setterfield as an expert in the field, even though he has very little education and proven experience in it, then that is your choice to make. However, I believe that someone without a good education is likely to make major blunders when trying to attempt what Setterfield is attempting. His situation is considerably different from your company, and in my judgment advanced graduate level education is essential in trying to do what Setterfield is attempting. I suspect that even in your organization the Ph.D. types were paid considerably more than the technicians. Why is that so, do you think? If that is true, as it would be in most organizations, then someone in your organization has a different opinion from yours about the value of a Ph.D.

But I think the main difference is nature of the task to be accomplished. If I have a problem with my plumbing, I don't want a Ph.D. physicist working on it. I want an experienced plumber. But if a new theory is to be advanced in astrophysics, I would not assign a plumber to that task, for sure. I think you understand my point. Just to be sure, let me say that the work that Setterfield is trying to do is ordinarily tackled by those with a Ph.D. in one of several closely related fields. It is not impossible that someone with Setterfield's background could make a useful contribution, but the odds are very much against it. I do not buy the argument that Helen makes that those in the know are awed by Setterfield's knowledge. I know a little about the field he is working in, although not nearly as much as Mark. But from what little I know, I am not at all persuaded that Setterfield's work is of acceptable quality.

I suspect that many of those who encourage Setterfield do not really have a good background in the very specialized field that he is attempting to enter, even though they may have an advanced degree in something.

My impression of some of Setterfield's writings on the Internet, those that discuss geology and geochronology, is that the papers are extremely superficial and shallow and not up to the standards expected of a scientific publication, doubly so since many of them blend biblical interpretation with his scientific theories.

It is a little misleading for anyone to refer to Setterfield as Dr. Setterfield, and for Helen to maintain that he is a scientist. He simply has not done the things that normally fit a person for that description. However much weight you give to his opinion, I think you would have to agree with that. My information is that he does have a couple of years of college education with some science courses. In my opinion his writing reflects that level of education plus a fairly high degree of interest as an amateur. That apparently is enough to convince those with a religious agenda that he knows what he is talking about. There is nothing particularly surprising about this, many educated people accept such nonsense as chiropractors, astrology, faith healing, homeopathy, magnetic healing, etc. There is a lot of nonsense accepted by many educated people.

 

Thanks, Peter. Please don't miss the sarcasm in that thank you.

That Barry is a true scientist is beyong argument. His work is full-time, he is funded, his research is original, he has now been invited to submit papers to two peer reviewed journals, and has been invited to speak literally all over the world.

He just doesn't meet your qualifications. That, of course, breaks our hearts.

 

Helen wrote:

Because science is a learned profession it defines and maintains standards for its members, just as do lawyers, physicians, and the like. Unlike many other learned professions, or even skilled crafts,, standards for being a scientist are not enforced by law, but by convention.

Ordinarily a Ph.D. is regarded as a scientist's union card. It gets him or her in the door. Put in terms of skilled labor, a Ph. D. makes one a Journeyman scientist. It enables one to do post doctoral research leading, hopefully, to a permanent job, indicating roughly master craftsman status.

Below journeyman status comes graduate school, and prior to that undergraduate school. These may be regarded respectively as scientific senior and junior apprenticeship.

Since Barry Setterfield has started his undergraduate studies he may fairly be called a Junior Apprentice Scientist.

Should one call a Junior Apprentice Scientist a scientist? It dpends on context. Would you call an apprentice plumber a plumber? Maybe if you were his mother; but if you called the plumbing company for a plumber and you got a junior apprentice plumber instead you'd be thinking fraud.

.............................................

One might object that there are, or ought to be experience alternatives to education. That is true, but the essence of experiential alternatives in most fields (including science) is to have a MENTORING experience. That is, the inexperienced apprentice is closely supervised by a master. Freelance experience is regarded as less valuagle because the apprentice does not learn to be accountable to anyone besides himself. It appears that Setterfield has not permitted himself to be mentored. He has not collaborated in research of his seniors. Rather he has taken on junior partners in his own research. It is not that that is a bad thing in itself, but it is not experience corresponding well to education.
Finally, let me say a few words on Helen's list of things Setterfield has done that are supposed to make us regard him as a scientist. It is true that his research is original, but it has not been published in the scientific literature. If he is funded, then that is either a very new development or else he neglected to mention his sourse(s) of funding in the Acknowledgments section of his paper, as is customarily done by scientists. The reason is that we believe scientists' research despite, and never because of, their institutioal affilliations and sources of funding. This is probably harmless error on Setterfield's part (if he was receiving funding for his paper) since it is unlikely that any source of funding influenced his research. A mark of most scientific funding is its peer-review. Funding isn't given at the whim of philanthropists to scientists of their choice, but rather recipients are chosen by a peer-review process of grant proposals. This helps to ensure distribution of funds where they are deemed most necessary and promising. I do not mean that it's unethical to be funded by non peer-reviewed processes, but such funding cannot be taken as evidence that science is being done.

I congratulate Setterfield on his invitation to publish articles in two unnamed peer-reviewed journals. Given his lack of publication in regular peer-review journals, however, one has to wonder what quality of peer-reviewed journals would ask an unpublished author like Setterfield to publish in them. It's just a bit flaky to be mentioned as a scientific qualification.

 

>>>>>>>>That Barry is a true scientist is beyong argument. His work is full-time, he is funded, his research is original, he has now been invited to submit papers to two peer reviewed journals, and has been invited to speak literally all over the world.<<<<<<

What is beyond doubt is that he cannot properly be called a scientist and you ought not to mislead people so.


I bet you are not willing to tell us who is funding him, or what journals have invited him to submit papers or where the speaking invitations are coming from. I certainly believe you on these points, but I doubt that these invitations are coming from anything other than creationist sources. What is wrong with creationist journals and institutions? They have bad scientific reputations, that is what is wrong. They are not recognized as being legitimate in the larger world.

 

JM: As I recall Barry is having a very difficult time getting his work published in mainstream scientific journals. If these invitations are from true mainstream science journals, then bravo for Barry. Most of the time, invitations to publish articles are given to established and respected scientists. I can't think of an instance where an unpublished scientist is offered not one, but two chances to publish their first work. So, once again bravo for Barry. I assume his invitations to speak are not merely churches and creation organizations, but mainstream scientific venues? I would guess that the invitations are not from creationist organizations since Barry's views are not particularly embraced by most ye-creationists. I had a conversation with Kurt Wise at GSA last year and when I brought up Setterfield's model, Kurt dismissed it as 'fringe' creationism and not accepted as valid. Anyway, be sure to let us know the journals when the articles are published. UF has subscriptions to nearly all of the top-flight mainstream physics journals so it should be easy to obtain.

Cheers

Joe Meert

 

More on Setterfield’s folly with time.I am talking about his magnum opus at http://www.setterfield.org/quantumredshift.htm. In my previous two posts here I pointed out that Setterfield’s Equation (118) relating dynamical time and atomic time would imply that at the origin of either time scale (they have a common origin) the derivative of atomic time with respect to dynamic time is zero. This implies that at the origin atomic time is not flowing with respect to dynamic time. Put another way, at the origin dynamic time is flowing infinitely faster than atomic time. Since the origin is now, this is obviously unphysical.

That was, perhaps, too arcane. Here I show you the origin of Setterfield’s unphysical atomic time/dynamical time relationship. It turns out that the immediate problem consists both in a physical blunder of Setterfield’s followed by an in3explicable calculational blunder. (Perhaps it can be explained by pressure to publish.)

We start with Setterfield’s Equation (108) relating cosmological distance x and red shift z:

z = [(1 + x) /(1 – x^2)^(1/2)] – 1 (108)

Now Setterfield does not derive his Equation (108) from more fundamental principles. He merely notes that it is in accordance with experiment. Actually the situation is different. Equation (118) was not plucked out of thin air. Rather it follows quite simply from a (Special) Relativistic model of cosmology in which the full relativistic Doppler Shift formula is used and it is assumed that the recessional velocities of distand objects are proportional to their distance from us.

In Setterfield’s model, however, red shifts are not due to recessional velocity, but to changes in emitted wavelengths over time due to changing atomic constants. In Setterfield’s model, then, his Equation (108) has no motivation, unlike in standard cosmology.

Nevertheless, let us allow Setterfield to use his Equation (108) as a postulate of his model. Let us then follow him as he blunderously derives the speed of light as a function of atomic time. I promise you that this isn’t hard. (It won’t hurt much more than a root canal.)

We shall also take Setterfield’s Equation (109), relating the speed of light at the time of emission of light from a distance x at the dynamic time ago T it was emitted as given:

c = kz (109)

Setterfield could then have very easily related speed of light at time of emission as a function of distance. By combining Equations (108) and (109) it obviously follows that

c = {[(1 + x) /(1 – x2)^(1/2)] – 1}/k (MK1)

But Setterfield fails to derive the trivial Equation (MK1). Instead Setterfield writes:

So far so good…

Bzzzzzz! Wrong!!! As the sequel makes clear Setterfield means by “a direct relationship between astronomical distance…and dynamical time” as “a direct proportionality between astronomical distance and dynamical time”

But that is totally wrong. Because x is the distance from us of an object that emitted its light a dynamical time T before present, it follows that the speed of light c is equal to the derivative of x with respect to T). (That is,

c= dx/dT (MK2).

Note that because both x and T have been scaled so that each has a maximum value of 1 that the units of c will not be the familiar meters/second. The units will be (maximum distance visible from us until redshift becomes infinite)/(maximum time before present accessible to observation before red hift becomes infinite). According to Setterfield, indeed much of the point of his model is that the speed of light c is NOT constant in dynamical time. (Indeed, one can combine Equations (MK1 and MK2) to obtain

dx/dt = c = {[(1 + x) /(1 – x^2)^(1/2)] – 1}/k (MK3)

This may be easily integrated to yield:

Integral(dx/ {[(1 + x) /(1 – x^2)^(1/2)] – 1}) = integral(k dt)
= kt + integration constand (MK4)
(The left hand side integral of Equation (MK4) may be done in terms of elementary functions. A Maple (Waterloo’s symbolic processor) session gives:
</font><blockquote>code:</font><hr /><pre style="font-size:x-small; font-family: monospace;">&gt; z := (1 + x) /(1 - x^2)^(1/2) - 1;




1 + x
z := ----------- - 1
2 1/2
(1 - x )
&gt; integrate(1/z,x);
2 1/2 1
1/2 (1 - x ) - 1/2 arctanh(-----------) + 1/2 ln(x) - 1/2 x
2 1/2
(1 - x )
&gt;</pre>[/QUOTE]This gives T as a function of x. I do not know how to invert this to give x as a function of T. However, it is obvious that Setterfield’s Equation (108), contrary to Setterfield’s assertion, does not permit a direct relationsbip between x and T.

Indeed, ironically, the only way there could be a direct (proportionality) relationship between x and t would be if the speed of light, dx/dT were constant! That is, in conventional cosmology Setterfield’s equation (110) would hold, but not in his own model!

Of course after this blunder everything else that follows from Setterfield’s Equation (110), including his Equation (118) relating dynamical and atomic time, is wrong.

Of course since the speed of light with respect to atomic time is constant, then the relationship between distance and atomic time is x = cn*t. This may be easily substituted into Equation (MK4) to obtain the relationship between atomic time t and dynamic time T, the result being quite different from Setterfield’s result!

One might ask why no one of Setterfield’s readers has before pointed out this blunder of Setterfield’s. Calculation mistakes are not uncommon, but are usually readily uncovered by readers or reviewers. Why was Setterfield’s error here not discovered previously? Why have none of his supporters even gotten that far in his manuscript?

 

Once again, please feel free to email Barry with your observed 'blunders' and he will be happy to answer you publicly on his website.

If you do not want to be responded to publicly, please forget the whole thing. But the fact is that extremely few people here understand or care about this kind of technical argument. This Baptist Board is a board for lay people who want lay-type answers. This is not the place for what you want to do, Mark.

Thank you.