The First Test That Proves General Theory of Relativity Wrong

Softpedia.com ^ | March 24th, 2006, 12:39 GMT · | By Vlad Tarko

[varmintman]

The largest dinosaurs, sauropods, had zero adaptation for any sort of an aquatic life and nobody believes they lived in water any more. For starters, they would have needed snow shoes; the feet they actually had would have gone straight into muddy river bottoms and they would have spent their entire lives standing in one place. Likewise their teeth show the wear and tear of eating branches and leaves, you don’t get that from soft aquatic vegetation.

[mdmathis6]

You were arguing that gravitation in the Earth has some how increased in recent eons making it impossible for creatures much larger that elephants to have survived...I don’t know how much I agree with the plausibility of your opinion but I was just trying to reason it out. We have water creatures much larger than elephants, so I was just playing around with your opinions. I was trying to give you the benefit of the doubt.

[varmintman]

Water buoyancy does in fact allow whales to attain sizes greater than land animals could survive at today but that had nothing to do with how sauropods lived. Sauropods required an outright reduction in gravity itself. That means that gravity itself is not a basic force in nature or any sort of a four dimensional differential geometry thing as Einstein claimed; it is basically some sort of an electrostatic dipole effect.

[betty boop]

...Shannon's definition much more closely aligns to the original late 14th century meaning of the word which was the "act of informing." Modern common usage reduces it to the message itself rather than the successful communication of the message.

Outstanding observation, dearest sister in Christ!

Thank you so much for this excellent essay/post!

[Alamo-Girl]

I owe you an apology, dear Kevmo. I've been very impatient with you all week, taking out my visceral disappointment with another on you. I apologize.

I am disappointed with a person, very dear to me, who has decided he is an atheist. He is intelligent and should know better - but I suspect he has been beguiled.

In that regard, the words of the serpent to Eve in the Garden of Eden are clear in my mind. The serpent said "did God really say..." (Gen 3:1 NIV).

So, as you might see, communication is front and center to me - especially this week. And this thread and our sidebar has focused on that very subject.

One of the truisms in Shannon's model is that if the sender encodes the message in say, French, the receiver must also be decoding in French and not say, German, or else the communication fails.

And here we have a problem.

You are certainly free to use whatever word meanings you desire. And if you choose colloquialisms, you are welcome to them.

I reject colloquialisms. This is also because of Scripture. For instance, in today's colloquialisms, bad and good are interchangeable - a reflection of what has actually happened in society:

Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter! - Isaiah 5:20

I will continue to be hard as nails on language as I am after all, Christian and Texan and a math geek. Add all that up to my encoding/decoding demands clarity and precision.

So we have an irreconcilable language difference that makes continuing this dialogue pointless but thank you for your time, Kevmo, it has helped me deal with the disappointment mentioned earlier.

[Alamo-Girl]

Thank you for your encouragements, dearest sister in Christ!

[Kevmo]

I was once an atheist, so I feel like I know where your friend is coming from. I had a desire to know truth and pursued it even if it hurt me. And boy, did it hurt me.

The 2 books that pulled me off the atheism path were

“Late Great Planet Earth” by Hal Lindsey. Largest selling nonfiction title of the entire decade of the 1970’s. It’s a bit dated now. It’s about bible prophecies coming true in these end times.

“Jesus: God, Ghost or Guru” by Buell and Hyder. It is about the historical evidence that Jesus claimed to be God Himself. A similar book for this timeframe is “The case for Christ” by Lee Stroebel.

The atheists I encounter are not honest with themselves. They refuse to acknowledge the historical evidence that Jesus claimed equality with God (and paid for that statement with His own life) because their bigotry forces them to view christians as irrational followers of a superstition. If they honestly value truth, they would encounter the evidence. I will pray for your friend.

[Alamo-Girl]

Thank you for your prayers, dear Kevmo, and for sharing your testimony!

[BroJoeK]

Sorry for the hiatus, so let's pick up where we left off...

Swordmaker: "You just continue to fail to grasp the cube-square law. . . Notice it is a 'law.' "

A little googling turns up some sources for all this laughable nonsense:

The Paradox of Large Dinosaurs (The New Science) -- 2010, 17 pages, Kindle: $3.

Galileo's Square-Cube Law (The New Science) -- 2010, 22 pages Kindle: $3.

The Science of Flight and the Paradox of Flying Pterosaurs (The New Science) -- 2010, 36 pages, Kindle: $3.

An appropriate & detailed response to Esker's sauropod arguments is this:
Biology of the Sauropod Dinosaurs: Understanding the Life of Giants (Life of the Past) -- 2011, 348 pages, Kindle: $38

For Esker's Pterosaur arguments, we can begin here:
Pterosaurs: Natural History, Evolution, Anatomy -- 2013, 304 pages, Kindle $19

Alamo-Girl, in post #113 above, Swordmaker implies that the largest flying birds today -- "Albatross with an up to 11 foot wingspan and weigh only 30 lbs" -- are the largest birds which can fly.
In response I noted that the Kori Bustard's nine-foot wing span can lift its 44 pounds off the ground.
But even more important to flight is not the wing-span alone versus bird-weight.
Rather, it's the wing-load -- pounds per square foot of wing, and the rule of thumb for birds is: 5 lbs per square foot of wing.
So, if we take the largest bird which ever lived, Argentavis, with max 26 foot wings lifting 176 lbs.
Those wings needed to be less than 1.5 feet wide to produce the 5 lbs/sq foot required for flight:

There is more to be responded to here, and I will return to it later, but let's end now with this idea:
Nobody seriously objects to what you decide is "real" or "not-real" in your own life.
For example, if you decide that Tolkien's Hobbits are "real" creatures that live in Hobbit-holes, or if you believe in a "galaxy long ago and far away" where young Skywalker could "feeeel the force" -- I say all well and good, especially since those are generally moral, uplifting stories.

But, but, but... if you pretend such beliefs have something to do with "science", now you are trespassing onto posted land, and there you must respect the rights of the owners: real scientists.

Swordmaker: "They had to drop the neck to parallel to the ground, again because of the issues brought up by the people YOU ARE DENIGRATING, trying any way possible to limit the damage and find answers"

All three of Esker's short books were published in 2010, and all of the responses I've listed here came subsequently.
But, exactly how much "credit" Esker deserves for stimulating real science is impossible to say.
What's the term for that logical fallacy?
"Post hoc ergo propter hoc".

[varmintman]

http://www.krugerpark.co.za/africa_kori_bustard.html

"They are ground dwellers, hence the name bustard, meaning birds that walk. They fly only when necessary because of their weight. It is even appearing that the Kori Bustards may become categorized as the few large flightless birds like ostriches and emus, which means they may be returning to an ancient ancestral form, since they, and the other cranes, are descendants of large flightless predators."

Basically, Bustards fly about as well as chickens do and are evidence that Adrian Desmond's note ("Hot blooded dinosaurs") about calculations as to flying maximums was correct:

"It would be a grave understatement to say that, as a flying creature, Pteranodon was large. Indeed, there were sound reasons for believing that it was the largest animal that ever could become airborne. With each increase in size, and therefore also weight, a flying animal needs a concomitant increase in power (to beat the wings in a flapper and to hold and maneuver them in a glider), but power is supplied by muscles which themselves add still more weight to the structure.-- The larger a flyer becomes the disproportionately weightier it grows by the addition of its own power supply. There comes a point when the weight is just too great to permit the machine to remain airborne. Calculations bearing on size and power suggested that the maximum weight that a flying vertebrate can attain is about 50 lb.: Pteranodon and its slightly larger but lesser known Jordanian ally Titanopteryx were therefore thought to be the largest flying animals."

In the case of the chicken, you have a member of the same family as pheasants which started off as a 1.5 lb. jungle fowl and was then bred into a 6 lb. meat animal but still has only the 1.5 lb bird's wings. The square/cube problem has done the same thing for the bustard, which can fly with difficulty for short distances, but that's it, i.e. it would be a mistake to call a bustard a flying bird.

The argument that bustards prove that a teratorn or a Texas pterosaur could fly in our world is idiotic.

The calculations Desmond mentions were perfectly good. Large pterosaurs could not possibly fly in our present world but they did in fact fly (you can't live by dragging 50' wings around). The only reasonable and rational analysis is that they did not experience gravity as we do.

[MHGinTN]

He didn't 'create' anti-gravity and never claimed to. That you would so grossly mischaracterize exposes an agenda on your part.

And you further smear the man by asserting he is a kook and by extension those who paid his salary for decades are kooks too. Such asinine assertions are what we would expect from a steven jones nano-thermate willy.

As to your 'schooling me': I know an electrostatic field is and what ion wind is, Friend. I also know that what Boyd was illustrating is the analogy to the zero point providing 'resistence' to mass, otherwise known as inertial mass. But I do so appreciate you're trying to make sure I'm not being taken in by charlatans ...

[FredZarguna]

I cannot accept the use of term "information" in an application where all these elements do not exist, e.g. when it means no more than determinism or physical causation.

We must agree to disagree. A definition of "information" as content-less [or content free] and nothing more than what "communication" delivers puts the epistemological cart before the horse, and is really unworthy of any serious consideration.

Counterexamples abound, including the transmission of random noise or counterfactual content, which your definition requires us to call "information" [neither of these things is, outside of an extraordinarily narrow context.]

The reductio ad absurdum of your belief is that neither mathematical proof nor scientific discovery actually produces information, and that indeed, there is no source of any original information except for a supernatural [and unscientific] cause; which is where the real misappropriation occurs in this discussion. But I am not going to get into this in detail because I'm not interested in such a silly definition. My tagline applies to what you consider to be "information."

[BroJoeK]

varmintman: "Calculations bearing on size and power suggested that the maximum weight that a flying vertebrate can attain is about 50 lb."

I'll say it again: the limit on flying bird-weight is simply the size of its wings, and that is roughly the calculation of 5 pounds per square foot of wing.
So, if a large Kori Bustard weighed 45 pounds and has a nine-foot wing-span, how wide do those wings have to be?
Answer: to lift 45 pounds you need nine square feet of wing (45 divided by 5 pounds per square foot).
Since Kori Bustard's wings are nine feet long, they need be only one foot wide -- as clearly they are:

varmintman: "The square/cube problem has done the same thing for the bustard, which can fly with difficulty for short distances, but that's it, i.e. it would be a mistake to call a bustard a flying bird."

But the fact that bustards don't fly much is a reflection of their life-styles, not some physical "law" which prevents them from it.
If these birds seriously needed to fly more, then somewhat longer, wider wings would accomplish that, as we can see in the case of ancient Argentavis, with max 26 foot wings lifting it's 176 lbs.
Those 26 foot wings needed to be less than 1.5 feet wide to provide the necessary 35 square feet of wing-lift.

The same calculation works for Quetzalcoatlus' 52 foot wing-span lifting perhaps 550 pounds -- for flight, those wings needed to be only two feet wide, which clearly they were far more.

varmintman: "The argument that bustards prove that a teratorn or a Texas pterosaur could fly in our world is idiotic."

Kori bustards, Albatross and Condors all prove that wing-loads less than 5 lbs. per square foot will get a large bird air-born.
All of the estimates for large extinct birds & pterosaurs also fall within that range.

varmintman: "The calculations Desmond mentions were perfectly good."

Such calculations are laughable, and the resulting conclusions ludicrous.

[varmintman]

I'll say it again: the limit on flying bird-weight is simply the size of its wings...

The fact that you're saying this stupid *** again indicates that you are basically ineducable.

[Alamo-Girl]

I reject everything following your first sentence in order to accept your first sentence.

[Swordmaker]

I'll say it again: the limit on flying bird-weight is simply the size of its wings, and that is roughly the calculation of 5 pounds per square foot of wing.

No, that is UNTRUE. The muscular structure required to support and MOVE those wings is also a requirement you repeatedly ignore. That is what the cube/square law is about. Yes, you can increase the size of the wing, but then it WON'T BE THE SAME STRUCTURE AS A MODERN EAGLE! The shape of the bird would be different. As one increases the sail area, the muscle size must increase by the cube of the square area of the wing. The teratorn fossil structure was essentially a scaled up eagle without oversized wings. You can theorize oversized wings all you want but they weren't there and neither were the muscles. Nor were the muscles in the dinosaurs capable of swinging or lifting a cantilevered neck using bone and sinew as the structural materials. . . the engineering math simply doesn't work. The weight go the a teratorn keeps getting lighter and lighter as the need to make it lighter gets more and more, just as the paleontologist keep putting their dinosaurs on diets, trying to get them lighter too. Why? Because of the problems of bio-engineering.

[Swordmaker]

BroJoeK,
David Esker had NOTHING to do with this. He’s a late comer to this issue. Just because you found A source does not mean it’s THE source. These problems have been discussed for years, even on FreeRepublic far before 2010. All of your objections and points have been made before.

[Swordmaker]

David Esker proposes that dinosaurs were able to grow so large because the atmosphere was many times more dense—not that gravity was in someway attenuated—dense enough that it was the equivalent of "swimming through water" which supported their bodies.

[varmintman]

Should be obvious... Make the atmosphere dense enough for anything to float on it, and a creature trying to breath such an atmosphere would burn up like one of those stupid experiments where some redneck throws liquid oxygen on a fire.

[BroJoeK]

varmintman: "The fact that you're saying this stupid *** again indicates that you are basically ineducable."

The fact that you assert blithering nonsense as if it were highly educated scientific "law" indicates that you are basically dishonest, and/or corrupted by your alleged "education".