Posted on 01/27/2005 1:24:21 PM PST by yankeedame
HAWKING WRONG AGAIN, RESEARCHER TELLS MARS CONFERENCE
Added : (Wed Aug 25 2004)
For Immediate Release:
HAWKING WRONG AGAIN, RESEARCHER TELLS MARS CONFERENCE
by Belinda Drizdale
(cleared for redistribution with World.Net.News credit )
Dateline August 21, 2004 Chicago, Illinois, USA: Research and development engineer Marshall Barnes stood before a packed audience in PDR 9 in the luxurious Palmer House Hilton in Chicago and explained to members of the International Mars Conference (see http://www.marssociety.org/docs/sched_04.pdf bottom of Saturday's schedule, 4:30 ) how Stephen Hawking and others have made as yet undetected errors in their published works.
These mistakes form a pattern of hidden assumptions which may extend elsewhere in the science and technology community, resulting in holding back progress which NASA now recognizes needs more imaginative solutions.
Before it was over no one disagreed with Marshall.
Debate did rage for a while over the ways in which Hawking's betting partner, Kip Thorne was wrong about a wormhole time machine model.
The Mars Society is a non-profit U.S. organization which promotes the expansion of the space program and efforts to send human beings to establish bases on Mars. This year's 7th convention was held August 18th to 22nd in Chicago, Illinois ( http://www.suntimes.com/output/news/cst-nws-mars19.html ).
Marshall submitted his paper's abstract, which asserts that "if Man is to go vigorously beyond his immediate cosmic neighborhood, the shackles that constrict the ability and the willingness, of free form thought, must be broken once and for all; while simultaneously not ignoring the need for rigorous analysis and application of the scientific method to insure that those ideas that appear to be revolutionary breakthroughs do indeed become revolutionary realities".
The presentation "Avoiding Hidden Assumptions While Thinking Outside The Box" drew considerable attention because of the inclusion of Hawking's comments on Thorne's wormhole time machine suggestion, due to the fact that Hawking, who is seen by many as the successor to Einstein, recently admitted to being wrong about the nature of black holes ( http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/3897989.stm ).
This mistake has cost Hawking a bet with a fellow physicist at Cal Tech. According to Marshall, before that admission, he attempted to bet Hawking through his collegue Kip Thorne, whose time travel model Hawking said wouldn't work.
Thorne has yet to respond, perhaps because Marshall does agree that Thorne's wormhole time travel idea wouldn't work either, but for an entirely different reason.
"I found mistakes in it that were more than significant," Barnes said before the talk as he waited outside PDR 9 to go on....
Barnes and his audience were kept waiting more than 20 minutes before he could take the podium and face the expectant crowd of engineers, scientists, teachers and space enthusiasts.
"I just want to hear what he has to say," one school teacher from Cleveland commented. "It seems like it should be interesting at least."
...Marshall began his talk with a bit of levity, reading the bet he had sent to Kip Thorne, offering to take Thorne's place in betting against Hawking and his chronology protection conjecture theory.
Though Thorne hasn't responded yet, Marshall chose to read the bet anyway since its subject would be covered in the presentation.
After delivering the opening statement from the abstract he quickly and effectively revealed errors in interpreting dimensional relationships in geometry made by Rudy Rucker and Michio Kaku, then scored again with an attempt by Kaku to illustrate a closed timelike loop from an example from the sci-fi story "All You Zombies", before plunging headlong into what he's described as the Thorne/Geroch/Wald/Hawking train wreck.
Based on Thorne's idea that two mutually connected wormhole mouth's could become a time machine once one was placed aboard a spaceship traveling near the speed of light, Marshall pointed out numerous miscalculations made by Thorne which kept the audience on its toes.
Laughter broke out though when Marshall introduced the Geroch/Wald factor, where the two professor at the University of Chicago ( see Robert P. Geroch http://physics.uchicago.edu/t_rel.html#Geroch and Robert Wald http://physics.uchicago.edu/t_rel.html#Wald ) had told Thorne that his wormhole idea wouldn't work because when the ship was within 10 light years of Earth that electromagnetic radiation traveling through the wormhole could make it collapse.
Marshall pointed out that this would be impossible because the ship is supposed to fly out and back to Earth within a total elapsed time of 10 years, flying at a sub-light speed.
The ship could never reach a 10 light year distance from Earth because it would never make it back in time. The audience broke out in laughter. Things got a little rowdy when the Hawking part of the equation was introduced.
Marshall described Hawking's chronology protection conjecture, a theoretical physical feature in spacetime physics that Hawking believes would prevent time travel from ever occuring.
He then pointed out how Hawking made the same mistake as Geroch and Wald, pointing to a 10 light year distance from Earth as the point where the wormhole connection would collapse.
The crowd was at first surprised that it was such simple mistake that Hawking made, but then one audience member pointed out that it wasn't the first time, remarking about the admission of the black hole theory error in Ireland. That's when another man suggested that the wormhole still might provide travel to the past because wormholes are from general relativity.
Marshall was not moved.
"The wormhole isn't providing the time travel aspect, only the connection between two different positions in spacetime. Outside those wormhole mouths, it's still the same story as the twin's paradox, even Thorne says so, but then goes on to get things completely confused. He didn't even catch that Geroch and Wald were wrong and it's his own thought model. "
Another audience member sided with Marshall and within moments the full audience was either calculating the problem outloud to their neighbors or arguing with the man in the back.
"It appears that Thorne's train wreck has caused a train wreck here", Marshall smiled wryly from the podium as a woman appealed for quiet near the back.
Marshall continued once the audience settled down. He deconstructed Hawking's chronology protection conjecture, relating how Hawking fails to explain why quantum gravity fluctuations or electromagnetic radiation would build up through any arbitrary opening to the past without doppler effects, further emphasing that connections to the past are not direct connections via linear pathways.
"Deutsch and Wolf use the Everett/Wheeler many-worlds theory to argue for time travel without paradox, but I'll go one further", he commented. "I'll use the Copenhagen interpretation which shows that you only get one outcome from a superposition, whether you want to surmise that the alternate outcome exists in a parallel universe or not. So if you go back in time, or open a door to the past, it's a parallel past, not a direct linear one with a casual relationship to the future you came from. So nothing is going through and then coming back before it left anymore than it does when you open a door to the next room."
Marshall mentioned how Hawking had also been wrong about time reversing, if the universe were to begin to contract instead of expand, something that Hawking admitted to in his movie, "A Brief History of Time".
Stephen Hawking’s Universe Implodes
Only the God of the Bible tells the future with accuracy and specificity.
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