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Mt. Holz Science Fiction Society
Club Notice - 12/15/00 -- Vol. 19, No. 24
Chair/Librarian: Mark Leeper, 732-817-5619, mleeper@avaya.com
Factotum: Evelyn Leeper, 732-332-6218, eleeper@lucent.com
Distinguished Heinlein Apologist: Rob Mitchell, robmitchell@avaya.com
HO Chair Emeritus: John Jetzt, jetzt@avaya.com
HO Librarian Emeritus: Nick Sauer, njs@lucent.com
Back issues at http://www.geocities.com/evelynleeper
All material copyright by author unless otherwise noted.
The Science Fiction Association of Bergen County meets on the
second Saturday of every month in Upper Saddle River; call
201-447-3652 for details. The Denver Area Science Fiction
Association meets 7:30 PM on the third Saturday of every month at
Southwest State Bank, 1380 S. Federal Blvd.
===================================================================
1. It is a little sad to me when I see someone take an idea from an
Isaac Asimov story--maybe it will be a robot story--and over-
acknowledges Asimov. We get a novel like ISAAC ASIMOV'S ROBOT
REVOLT by Herman Glimpshire. The "Isaac Asimov" will be in inch-
high letters. The "by Herman Glimpshire" will be in tiny print.
Even if it was idea that Asimov did not care for, it is more
profitable to give him credit.
Curiously enough that is what modern day physicists are trying to
do. Albert Einstein himself was embarrassed by how bad was the
science that led him to propose that there was a cosmological
constant. Einstein made the same mistake that Creation Scientists
make. He started with what he wanted the universe to be and worked
backwards to say what must be true if the universe were to be the
way he wanted.
Well, he had his reasons for doing that. If your cosmological
model of the universe says that you are here in the last years that
comets will be coming around the sun, then you are probably wrong.
It is much more likely that this is a typical year. Einstein
looked at the universe and decided that it was not a recently
created thing. The stars are there only slightly moveable. But
the universe goes back for an infinite amount of time. After all
what was there to start time running and what was there to put the
stars there? A universe of finite, limited age almost requires
some religious explanation. No the stars were at their distances
in a sort of equilibrium. They could not have stood where they
were for all time with gravity exerting a force to pull them
together without there being a force pushing them outward. So he
postulated an outward force that simply would counter gravity in
the equilibrium. It was a necessary evil in explaining why the
universe was fixed.
Einstein later called that his biggest blunder. Within a few years
he learned that the stars were not fixed in their places. The
universe was flying apart like embers from a fireworks explosion.
There was no longer any need for his fictitious outward force. The
outward force of the explosion was sufficient to explain why the
universe was not falling together. And Einstein breathed a sigh of
relief because he did not want to have to invent a new unknown
force. Instead what he had to accept was that there was a
beginning to the universe as we know it. That was a price he was
willing to pay. After that the universe followed the well-ordered
laws of physics. Right?
Wrong. Just over the last few years astronomers and cosmologists
wanted to measure how much the pull of gravity was slowing the
outward expansion of the universe. That would give them some idea
if the universe would be coming together in a big crunch or would
it keep expanding forever. Well, they got a shock. What the real
meaning of that shock is, we may never know in our lifetimes. But
it seems that not only is the expansion NOT slowing down enough to
cause things to fall back together, the best it can be measured the
expansion is not slowing from gravity at all. It is in fact
speeding up. The pieces of the universe are accelerating outward.
Force equals mass times acceleration. There must be an outward
force. This of course assumes that we can trust observations made
over a very long distance. We are assuming that the same
principles apply to measuring light that has traveled the short
distance from the sun to the earth and to light that has come
across the universe over long periods of time. That may be the
whole basis of the anomaly. But for now we do not know. It
appears that there is an acceleration outward against the
predictions of the physics we know.
So now people are saying that Einstein said there was an outward
force and we seem to be seeing one so he has been vindicated. This
is the force Einstein himself predicted. Wrong! First Einstein
would not want to be vindicated. If the stars are not going to
stay at sort of fixed distances, and they are not, then there is no
need for the force Einstein predicted and he would be the first to
want to dispense with it. Just because he mistakenly suggested one
mysterious outward force to explain one hypothetical effect that
was more the result of wishful thinking than of observation and
there is another effect that requires an outward force does not
mean it is the same force.
It seems to me that the people who want to say that Einstein
predicted this outward force are a lot like the people who try to
draw relations between the philosophy of ancient mystics and modern
physicists like Gary Zukav in his book THE DANCING WU LI MASTERS.
I don't happen to believe that ancient mystics knew anything of
modern quantum physics and the drawing of a relation between the
two smacks of superstition. One has to accept that coincidences
exist and if we have to postulate a new outward force in the
universe, it is deceptive to say that it was predicted by Einstein.
Einstein would be the first to say that the newly postulated force
should be associated with contemporary discoverers. [-mrl]
Mark Leeper
HO 1K-644 732-817-5619
mleeper@avaya.com
The power of accurate observation is commonly called
cynicism by those who have not got it. -- George Bernard Shaw
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