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Newton's Second Law, Revisited
eldavojohn writes "Dust off your fundamental physics books, an aspiring astrophysicist by the name of Alex Ignatiev has published a paper that proposes testing special cases of Newton's Second Law on earth's surface. His goal is sort of ambitious. The time he has to test his theory is only 1/1000th of a second, twice each year, in either Greenland or Antarctica. What would he look for? Spontaneous motion. From his interview with PhysOrg: 'If these experiments were to take place, Ignatiev says that scientists would look for what he calls the SHLEM effect. This acronym stands for static high latitude equinox modified inertia and would be noticed in a condition where the forces of the earth's rotation on its axis, and of the orbital force of the earth as it moves around the sun, would be canceled out ... In the end, if Newton's Second Law could be violated, he would be forcing physicists to reevaluate much of what we understand derived from that law — which is quite a bit.'"
Or is it?
Reminds me of what Patrick Moore did:
Stolen from
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrick_Moore
Eccentric personality
Due to his long-running television and xylophone playing career, eccentric manner, distinctively rapid speech delivery and in later years his ever-present monocle, Moore is widely-recognised and well-respected in the United Kingdom, even by those with no interest in astronomy. This was used to great advantage for a 1976 April Fool's joke on BBC Radio 2, when Moore announced that at 9.47 am a once-in-a-lifetime astronomical event was going to occur: Pluto would pass behind Jupiter, temporarily causing a gravitational alignment that would reduce the Earth's own gravity. Moore informed listeners that if they could jump at the exact moment that this event occurred, they would experience a temporary floating sensation. The BBC later received hundreds of phone calls from listeners claiming to have felt the sensation.
Moore joined the Flat Earth Society as an ironic joke though many have taken this seriously.
It could be worse, it could be Monday.
Law breakers should be punished to the fullest extent of the physical law.
Spending $1000 on these plans for the Dean drive weren't a waste of my money! Take that science!
who formulated Cole's Law, especially when eating ribs.
So, what law is this person using to calculate the cancellation of the forces?
Yes, it only takes one demonstration to a render invalid a scientific theory. But that does not validate any other theories by doing so, unless they can accurately carry the same predictive weight as the previous theory, plus comply with the improved observations.
A hole in Newtons second theory in any case doesn't mean scientists throw out their physics books, it generally means they add and exception to the theory and work on finding a more unified algorithm to describe the newly revised observations. Here's hoping this somewhat exotic set of observations leads eventually to a stronger set of theories, rather than just more false controversy about 'mavericks' and 'closed minded skeptics' - everyone's a skeptic AND a maverick, closed minded and radical - focusing only on the extremes of that, especially in terms of science sort of ignores the whole point of science, to use biased viewpoints to paint a larger picture.
Ryan Fenton
i always had a sneaking suspicion that my physics textbook was wrong... and now the funny thought is what if this somehow magically is correct... then can i light my textbook on fire because it will all be wrong and we'll have to start over from scratch?
I think it's odd that MOND's enthusiasts are so eager to push it as an alternative to dark matter, now that we've entered the era of high-precision cosmology. We know a hell of a lot about cosmology that we didn't know ten years ago. We know the age of the universe to two significant figures. We know that the universe is expanding at an increasing rate. We know the spectrum and angular distribution of the cosmic microwave background to high precision. We've found out that neutrinos have mass. I can see how MOND would have some appeal back in 1981, when it was first proposed, but so much has changed in the last 26 years. The evidence has accumulated that we live in a universe that's much stranger than we'd believed. I think that's cool.
Find free books.
"Fall heavy towards the moon, and the moon falls also towards you." -- Nietzsche
Hammer and feather are dropped simultaneously from equal heights (as measured by distance from the center of the moon), separated laterally by a distance substantially less than the moon's diameter. Both hammer and feather experience force from the moon's gravity proportional to their mass, and hence both accelerate at the same rate. Meanwhile, the moon is also accelerating towards the other two objects, but unevenly so: the hammer exerts a greater gravitational pull due to its greater mass. The moon is therefore subject to a torque, causing it to accelerate more rapidly towards the hammer.
The hammer is first to hit the ground.
Anyone who denies this truth is a spatially absolutist lunocentric whose refusal to recognize the validity of hammer/feather mechanics places him wholly beyond the help of Galilean metaphysics. Such hammer/feather rejectionists ought to be banished from planetary space, for their own good and for the good of not only hammers and feathers but all subjugated smaller objects, everywhere, who find themselves victims of this scientifically perpetrated emassculation.
--
a756f345ec354225c08ff1a10a43162a
Maybe he's wrong, maybe he's not right. But damned if I don't admire a scientist who is willing to destroy a potentially promising career over a tiny hunch. Maybe god will take pity and alter gravity for just such an instance. I think he's getting bored with Iraq.
http://ww2010.atmos.uiuc.edu/(Gh)/guides/mtr/fw/cr ls.rxml
The link above explains the Coriolis force. Among other things, this is the force that causes water to spiral down the drain in different directions on different sides of the equator. It also manifests itself such that if you fly at sufficient speed travelling past 63 deg. North Latitude, you will feel a slight bump. This is easily measured and confirmed by placing an accelerometer on the aircraft. There is almost always a slight acceleration. Of course, the accelerometer is subject to the vibration of the aircraft and to rapid changes in altitude due to air currents so the bump is often lost in the noise floor but it's there nevertheless.
The phenomenon cited above is not limited to any particular time and is somewhat south of 80 deg. North Latitude but I suspect that Ignatiev is probably talking about the same thing. He should check his math.
"In the end, if Newton's Second Law could be violated, he would be forcing physicists to reevaluate much of what we understand derived from that law -- which is quite a bit.'"
In the end, if the second law of thermodynamics [or any other law of physics] could be violated, it would force physicists to reevaluate much of what we understand derived from that law - which is quite a bit. However, given that what we have derived from our laws generally fits with experimental observation (which is why we call them laws), the odds of him disproving Newton's second law with this experiment are about as good as me disproving the second law of thermodynamics by accidentally building a perpetual motion device.
Experiments disproving longstanding laws have happened before. People don't have reason to care about them until afterwards, though.
that Newton's Laws are actually just flawed theories? In that case, sign me up for the new "Intelligent Force" theory. Everything accelerates because something smarter than me decided it would, and there's no point asking questions. No more physics equations for me!
I mean, NSL only applies in the case of slow moving/low acceleration objects because it assumes infinite propagation speed of the force carrier.
If he finds this it will be interesting not because of NSL concerns but because it would be an observation of the finite propagation speed of gravity. A fact that would serve as indirect (or perhaps direct) evidence of gravitational waves.
Perhaps there's a force that hasn't been taken into account in his calculations...
Category: Instant karma
For: new scientific theory proposed
Suppose the hammer and the feather were dropped in superposition along the same axis. They would both hit the moon at the same time.
Think it'd be cool to visit Greenland?
1. be a prof
2. propose theory that must be tested in Greenland
3. profit
Am I missing something, or would this be a hell of a lot easier to do in space? From TFA I gather that he's looking for an instance of no outside force, and, since orbit is essentially free-fall, this would be easily accomplished on the ISS. Granted, I might be missing the point entirely, or I don't get his strange "I've got to do this on the surface of the Earth!" fetish.
Mass Equals Force Times Acceleration!
That's a cute little paper. If other physicists think it makes sense, that little experiment is worth doing, even though some people will have to go up to the northern tip of Greenland to do it.
Newton's law underwent some serious revisiting in 1905 when a chap called Einstein realised that masses are not constant/absolute but in fact relative, and this is why the modern relativistic notation differs quite a bit from the original F=ma. Now if this new guy is not joking (Russian timezones, April 1st, bit early..etc) then not only is our understanding of momentum going to be radically different, but in fact E=mc2 might have to be revisited as well (must read part 10 of this historical paper by Einstein to understand). That happens to be a very ground breaking idea if it were true, and would change lots of things we supposedly know about fundamental physics.
Ever hear of Force Vectors?
The moon would be pulled towards both objects at the same rate.
Don't be apathetic. Procrastinate!
Done.
The force pulling the moon towards the hammer is greater than the force pulling the moon towards the feather, as each one's gravitational force is proportional to the height of the object. Therefore (unless F=ma is no longer an accurate law, couldn't figure out TFA) the acceleration towards each will be that force divided by the moon's mass, and obviously the acceleration towards the hammer will be much higher, meaning the mon and hammer will collide sooner than the moon and feather.
So for this thousandth of a second in a remote location at 80 degrees of latitude, is he proposing that we build an entire testing facility to see if an uncharged particle wiggles a little bit for some reason by some mechanism that no one has really figured out?
Are we also to believe that because the mathematical calculations work out such that all first- and second-order gravitational forces are cancelled, if we observe some motion, that motion is a clear violation of Newton's Second Law by assuming that there is zero force on the particle?
Wouldn't it be just as reasonable to claim that there were another force involved rather than saying that the Law has been debunked?
One thing about this is at least it can be tested for, and right here on Earth. But even if it's observed, that doesn't automatically prove his theory true. It would only add evidence to it.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
You can take my gun from me...oh, wait, wrong 2nd law...
An example to illustrate the breakdown of theories: the Special theory of Relativity modified Newtonian mechanics on a fundamental level. However, for speeds much less than the speed of light (which is what most of us experience in daily life), it is STILL Newtonian mechanics that we use, even in several cutting edge research fields. The rule of thumb in research is: never use a full model when an approximate one is just as accurate in the domain of interest. In much the same way, even if MOND were true, any deviations from Newton would kick in at EXTREMELY LOW accelerations (of the order of 10^-20 m/s^2 which is about 10^-21 g, something next to impossible to duplicate in a lab because of ambient vibrational noise which is usually MUCH higher (say, about 10^-9 g is a VERY quiet environment)). This is the reason why the paper (which attracted our group's attention a few weeks ago) proposes an experiment at such well-defined times and locations. To put it bluntly, this is an ad-hoc modification in the sense that there is just no justification for the modification. Of course, I don't even think MOND would replace the Dark Matter hypothesis. One might even argue that this modification is simply a way of expressing the effect of Dark Matter (just a thought).
idea for ya.
The universe blows up, expands, shit forms, eventually everything comes back, collapses, and another big bang happens. Repeat countless cycles, yet it keeps happening.
If you want to get into it, I'd argue that the universe, as open as it is, is a closed system without energy loss. But, this only works with the Big Bang theory.
As it stands, we'll NEVER know in our lifetimes. So, I just present something for you to think of - the perpetual motion machine could exist, but it's on such a scale that even galaxies of competent and intelligent life coudn't figure it out before the universe collapses upon itself from it's own gravity and wipes us all out.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
It's worth pointing out that this paper is only publihed on a preprint server - that means it has not been through peer review, so needs to be treated with a lot of caution. There's an awful lot of totally crazy stuff on preprint servers. Not that I'm saying it's totally crazy - whilst I'm a physicist, I do condensed matter not astro - amd wouldn't describe myself as qualified to have a definitve opinion. But I would be both cautious and skeptical until proven oherwise.
These theoretical astrophysicists are getting good at what they do.
The submitter of this article (and the populace of Slashdot as a whole) doesn't get the point of this article. Ignatiev isn't suggesting this experiment out of thin air, he's suggested a novel earth-based experiment to help explain the anomaly in galactic rotation (ie. Dark Matter). To explain this anomaly some theoretical astrophysicists modify Newtonian dynamics in a small way so that the galactic rotation calculations come out correct. Others introduce Dark Matter, or alter gravitation itself.
He basically wants to observe an object smaller than 7 cm x 40 cm x 40 cm at the precise moment and the precise location on the earth such that it would experience an acceleration that is much smaller than the extra acceleration it would experience as proposed by the modified Newtonian dynamics. So any extraneous acceleration observed at this moment had to have come from modified Newtonian dynamics.
The interesting thing about this article is that it isn't just a wild claim by a crackpot scientist, it's the proposition of an extremely accurate measurement using the most advanced technologies we have available. Of particular interest to me was that the proposed effect was two orders of magnitude larger than that observable by LIGO, a gravitational wave detector, suggesting that such an experiment is actually possible.
PhysOrg doesn't tend to have very high standards when it comes to the articles they post. Similarly, their forum is overrun with nutjobs and crackpots.
Though I haven't fully read the article, based on what I know of physics, this sounds like just another physics loony. I'd take this article with a grain of salt.
- Dave
You could do this as a 3-body problem, and then you'd be correct that they fall at different rates, but you'd have quite a difficulty measuring the difference, since the feather and the hammer are orders of magnitude of orders of magnitude less than the mass of the moon.
The other point you've mentioned is actually quite the physical puzzle. There's no reason why gravitational mass and inertial mass need to be the same, yet to our ability to measure so far, they are.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
You're right that you can still use an equation that looks like F = dp/dt in GR, but I still think the original second law is wrong with all the quantities defined as they were. Writing it your way, it is then the definition of momentum which is wrong (or going on, the definition of velocity as dx/dt not dx/dTau). (Also in GR F= dp/dTau, not dp/dt if t is the time coordinate). The symbols in GR just happen to look and act quite like the newtonian symbols, but are interpreted differently.
Anyway, it is the error in predicted motion that is interesting here, where 'F=ma' gives the newtonian motion,
but this becomes like 'F = ma + m Gamma Vi Vj' in GR. You can't clearly see the different motions each theory gives in F = dp/dt.
Day early, dollar short.
Faith: n. -- That human impulse that drives them to steal appliances when the power goes out
...by the rocks that move in the desert...
http://mmmgroup.altervista.org/e-rocks.html
Erm,
Could this minute fluctuation in forces over a 1ms time-period be drowned out by any other fluctuation? Physical vibration? Magnetic flux? Gravitational flux? Noise in the measuring devices?
At least either way both sides will be able to deny that the result proved them wrong.
SHLEM stands for `helmet' in the Russian language.
We know the spectrum and angular distribution of the cosmic microwave background to high precision.
This is the only statement that is correct since it is the only conclusion derived directly from observation. A lot depends on how accurate our models of the universe and physics are. I think MOND is unlikely to last, but the theory is yet viable. Your claims about the age of the universe, mass of neutrino, etc are likely to be correct, but it would be embarrassing if these observations turn out to be dependent on assumptions that are incorrect. Eg, perhaps Type IA supernovas are different in the early universe than they are now (even though physical law is the same, there are substantial differences like elemental composition), perhaps we're incorrect about our local gravity environment (eg, we're deeper in a gravity well) and this effects our perception of the temperature of the cosmic background, or perhaps a more accurate model of the universe involves oscillating yet massless neutrinos.This article (and the whole MOND thing) would make some sense if the systems described in them were not accelerating because of gravity. Sun is subjected to the gravity forces toward the center of our galaxy, so its path relative to the center of the galaxy is not a straight line but a circle -- though a very large one. I find it to be an extremely weird oversight considering that the whole hypothesis exists to describe parameters of the very same motion of stars in galaxies. So even when a point on the Earth surface is not accelerating in the Sun's coordinate system, it still does in the galaxy's coordinate system.
Worse yet, MOND does not explain anything about galaxies because galaxies themselves accelerate. They are not distributed evenly and uniformly in space but form clusters. Each cluster just like a galaxy itself, is pulled together by gravity, so galaxies experience some acceleration in the cluster's coordinate system because of the gravity of other galaxies.
Obviously this acceleration is not detectable locally because it is caused by gravity -- for the same reason objects in orbit are "weightless". To find out that you are in freefall (or in orbit, what is the same thing) without looking at other celestial objects you have to throw something and observe its movement -- since gravity is not parallel and uniform everywhere, after the object will get far enough from you, it will be noticeable that its trajectory is not a straight line relative to you, as it would be if you weren't accelerating at all. However locally gravity and acceleration are indistinguishable, and at the scale of Solar system or galaxy the size of such "local" area is huge.
MOND is talking about absolute acceleration that should be clearly distinguishable from gravity. However if we will try to find something in the universe that is really "unaccelerated" by this definition, there will be very few objects in this category, if any. Certainly it would not be massive centers of galaxies, Sun or two spots on the Earth surface the author of the article proposes as locations for his experiments.
This is the theoretical part of the problem. Now, the practical one. In two proposed spots the conditions that article author expects to happen last for a very short time and happen once a year. The extent of effect is similar to the influence of gravity from many existing celestial bodies. Tidal waves caused by Moon and affected by the shape of oceans, condition in the atmosphere, movement of Earth crust, etc. are likely to produce more noticeable influence on any test body that may be used in the experiment. Though I didn't do any calculations, it's hard to believe that variations of tidal waves caused by changes in weather will be less than supposed effect of "modified" 2nd Newton's Law even if it worked the way that the article author's proposed. And since conditions are supposed to be so rare, there is no way to collect enough samples for any statistical analysis.
In the end, I can add that if your experiment is to look for a black cat in a dark room, it shouldn't be a surprise if the result is negative regardless of the actual presence of a cat. However this makes no excuse for proposing that the cat is in the room when there is no reason for it to be there in the first place. Both theory and proposed experiment look extremely stupid, and if MOND can be modified to explain why it should include movement of stars within galaxies but not movement of galaxies in clusters, maybe it would be worth a second look. For now it's just that -- stupid idea with no foundation and no viable method of verification.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
I think the point here isn't that there's some weird hiccup that only occurs during this brief time, but rather that standard theory predicts that a certain observation over this brief period should be zero while MOND predicts a nonzero value. Testing whether something is zero or not is one of the more sensitive types of tests out there. As an example, it's a lot easier to figure out whether there is a person or not in a room than to figure out whether there are 1,000 or 1,001 people in a room. By measuring during this brief time, certain normal effects, which would drown out the data that this guy is looking for, are absent. It eliminates a source of error in the experiment assuming his calculations are correct.
now, please everybody repeat after me: A link to thre preprint archive is not a link to a published paper, because a preprint is a preprint and a paper is a paper (even if it is pdf nowadays....).
People teach their religion as fact. Sometimes even to young children who don't know any better.
Blar.
"No. Coriolis force exists."
3 /gallagher3.html
More accurately: No coriolis force exists
The coriolis force is a fiction which describes the deflection of objects relative to the surface of the earth. In that regard, it's much like centrifical force.
http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-cen1.htm
In any event, I'm reasonably certain that you haven't flown north of the tree line with a pilot sufficiently experienced to point out the bump. When it is pointed out to them, most people do notice it. The next thing will be that you try to tell us that you can't hear the aurora borealis.
http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/biology/b103/f00/web
Anyway, the grandfather post is just as accurate as the article to which it was posted.
First of all, Newton's laws of motion are not Universal, we know it. More than one hundred years ago, Einstein proposed his "extended version": relativistic dynamics, which works fine in the case of high speeds, twenty years later Schrödinger and Heisemberg along with other geniouses formulated Quantum Mechanics(our most powerful theory). Years later, more theories have appeared, very beautiful and fine theories which describe physical phenomena correctly where you "can" apply them, I mean, a physical theory, as Newton's laws of motion, are just a mathematical model(cool differential equations, or more abstract stuff) and which describes nature whitin it's limits... every model has a domain of application and whenever you apply it out of it you can get weird things(the problem is that actually the limits of this domain are not well defined).
:) ).
:). But we can still go to Antartida and use Newton's law and they will be fine :).
Newton's laws of motion and all which can be derived from them work extremely fine in our macroscopic dayly world... But whenever you look to something very little(one atom), you need to apply Quantum Mechanics, and whenever it moves fast(near the speed of light) you need relativity, or if both happens Relativistic Quantum Mechanics... and so on, you just say:"ok, here I will found a couple of non-classical effects, so I need a non-classical theory, let's forget about Newton and use another theory", but Newton's law of motion are still valid!, they've been used for describing the macroscopic world extremely well since they were formulated more than two hundred years ago, and today, we have no experimental evidence of a change in the way nature works and so we can be confident about the usefulness of Newton's law of motion... for every-day life(if you work in a particle accelerator forget about the last
This russian guy may have just devised a method for measuring some weird effects...
My post was just as accurate as the story.
The confluence of circumstances (velocity, acceleration), that occur at 80 deg. N twice a year for 1/1000 of a second, could be reproduced anywhere on the surface of the earth.
Which postulates that the amount of time for a research assistant to get back from Quiznos is directly proportional to the gastric sounds of everyone else in the lab, and inversely proportional (to the second power) of the immediacy of the stuff left to do in the afternoon.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
For a thousand years an entire religion has been based on this exact premise. (So how has it been working out for them?)
You can't handle the truth.
That assumes that the difference in position and momentum is greater than the uncertainty principle allows, which isn't immediately obvious. If you do the calculations, you may just find that the difference is smaller than QM allows, and thus there is no difference.
I read about a fascinating experiment recently which attempts to test whether the laws of physics are invariant with your frame of reference, by comparing the enthalpy of crystallisation of the two enantiomers (mirror images) of a chiral compound. If the laws of physics vary with space (i.e. there's a slight energetic preference to certain orientations in a universal "ether"), then the enthalpies of crystallisation will be different for each enantiomer as your orientation in space changes (achieved by performing the experiment at different times of day, so your orientation changes as the Earth rotates).
It's one of these experiments which can't absolutely disprove the effect it's looking for (in this case, the idea of a universal reference frame) and instead aims to set an increasingly minute upper bound on the magnitude of that effect. My hat goes off to the people who keep performing such demanding, yet thankless, work.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
You == pedantic to a fault.
If I were your science teacher, I'd be a bit disappointed in your attempt at adroitness. You see, the moon, being much larger than the feather and the hammer is affected by acceleration toward the earth, the sun, other planets, etc, as well and to such a larger degree that it bears much stronger consideration than your hammer and feather. You have not established the positions of these objects relative to your Moon/feather/hammer arrangement and therefore have not satisfactorily established your conclusion of the hammer landing first. Furthermore, since you've not established the position of the feather and hammer relative to the Moon's tidally-locked orbit around the earth. Since the acceleration the Moon experiences from the hammer must be considered by your pedantry, surely you considered the other vector-summable accelerations in this system!
"But how feasible is this? .... "Gravitational wave detectors are great starting points,""
:)
Hey I have one of those... it's called a bathroom scale. So I'll keep my eye on it during that 1/1000th of a second and publish my results
The TIMECUBE.
Wh47 d1d j00 541, 31337 15n't t3h r0xor5 ne m0r3???
Now I may be totally off on this, seeing as how I am not a physicist (and probably cant spell it either), but by him testing this theory, isn't he in a way proving and disproving it?
I thought that the laws of quantum physics/mechanics stated that just bt observing, one changes the outcome, so by him running these experiments, he is neither proving or disproving his theory, he is just seeing the results of his interaction with the particle?
Somebody, please mod the AC up.
Rethinking email
Avoiding any air-resistance, you don't need some gravity-from-the-moon argument to show that the hammer will hit first. It's quite clear from the equation that the hammer will hit before the feather. The extreme mass of the Earth relative to both hammer and feather makes the difference in acceleration practically irrelevant. Nevertheless, the hammer does hit first.
Stare at: F=G*((m1*m2)/r^2) for a while.
-metric
F=(m1)a
(assuming the hammer has mass m1 and the Earth has mass m2). So, substituting:
a = (G*((m1*m2)/r^2)/(m1) = G*m2/r^2
i.e., independent of the mass of the hammer.
HA!
He changed the outcome by observing it.
Essentially speaking, it really doesn't matter what frame of reference you are using. From a certain point of view, everything in the Universe is gravitationally attracted to you, not the other way around. Or that the Earth, while you are falling above it, is accelerating toward you at 9.8 m/s. All physical effects are one body relative to another, and there is no independent frame of reference.
Of course this guy could be claiming that there is in fact a universal frame of reference that is independent of all other objects in the universe, and can try to define all sorts of motion based on this universal reference. That, however, is a bold theory and requires some extraordinary proof, not just some minor discrepencies as is being demonstrated here.
Of course Relativity is based in part on the fact that no matter which way you measure light traveling toward you, it is always going at the same speed. This of course is one of the reasons why it is called Relativity... as this is also a demonstratable way to prove that there is no universal frame reference that would influence the speed of light. This is something that would have to be explained in a universal reference frame theory.
This isn't to say that gravitational effects don't show up, because they do, but those effects don't need to be defined in any particular frame of reference, other than to simplify the mathematics of trying to figure out what the acceleration would be for any set of objects.
While not explictly stated in the article or paper, I think this particular person with the MOND theory is also implying a universal frame reference, or else the issue with having specific lattitudes and precisely timed periods of time that only happen a couple of times per year makes no other sense.
And we know for a fact that Newton's laws are not perfect, and need further refinement due to Einstein's theories. The motion of Mercury needs to be accounted for the fact that it is moving very close to a massive body, where being deep in the gravity well of the Sun time actually slows down.
If you are talking about orbital vectors and trying to derive the data from the GPS constellation, you need to account for relativistic effects both due to the fact that the GPS satellites are further out of the Earth's gravity well, and the fact they are also traveling at large enough velocities that measurements of the atomic clock signals that are broadcast from the satellites have relativistic time dilation effects.
Basically, Einstein both proved this guy correct (Newton's 2nd law does need to be adjusted on some fine points) and flat out wrong (that you need to use a universal frame reference to detect this adjustment).
For me, if you want to make some very genuine physical science research, I would recommend two huge areas of study:
Neither area of study has may physicists who
The post was a satire (slightly lame I admit) of the original story. The original story is an April Fools joke as was pointed out by the first poster.
;-)
The bump story was devised by an old bush pilot. His greatest joy in life was to see how many newbs he could sucker as he flew them north. There was indeed a bump but it was caused by the pilot.
The one part of the original story that was accurate was the description of 80 deg. north as being unhospitable. In the Canadian arctic, the only people living there are 'imported'. I camped for several months (including the spring equinox) on John Richardson Fjord just across from Greenland at 80 deg. N. That's when I learned the 30 30 30 rule: At 30 below (F) with a 30 mph wind, exposed skin freezes in 30 seconds. On the other hand, if you think vegitation (like trees for instance) gets in the way of the scenery, you'll love it. The mountains are completely unsullied by ugly green living things.
Even if this *isn't* an April Fool's joke, Mr. Ignatiev is forgetting that the sun is not the only mass which exerts force on the earth.
Am by no means a physicist, but most likely this phenomena is simply explained by "upstream" forces such as the Milky Way itself, the universe beyond that, etc. My simplistic image is that of an underwater stream, causing ripples on the surface, whose effect you could override by swirling a stick. As soon as you stop swirling, the stream's inertia is again able to affect the water around it.
If it works, use it.
Evolution theory works better than 'God made it'.
Sorry.
Blar.