I want to start by reading some of a very old friend's words, about himself and about some problems. Whatever the date of this is, I think it is January 1990. Quote from Access to Energy by Petr Beckmann: "When my bladder was removed five years ago, the prostate gland should have been removed with it. But the doctor, who has since died, left a piece of it in by oversight. It has now also turned cancerous and has to come out on the 21st of December. I plan to survive the operation, because I have a lot more trouble to make." Well, thank God he did, and we all wish it would have been ten times longer. But to come to the point, untreated prostate cancer ultimately spreads to the bones and until the advent of nuclear medicine, there was no easy way to find out whether it had spread to the bones, for they would simply appear opaque to x-rays regardless of whether they contained cancer cells. But, one can use a radioisotope, technetium, that is, an element that does not occur naturally, but only as a product of fission. Technetium injected into the blood will collect in the bones, especially where they contain cancer cells. This tracer, you probably all know this, emits gamma rays, and the position of the sources can be monitored. A computer program then integrates the measurement into an image in which radiation-emitting technetium shows up. Cancer cells are darker spots in the already dark bones. Now, Petr does something which I don't think anybody has done before, he published his bones, right in Access To Energy. Reading this reminded me of the spirit of our friend, of the way he tried, and practically always succeeded, to remain in touch with reality concerning his own disease as well as anything else. The other thing I want to read is connected with the main purpose of Access To Energy. (I'm quite sure it is also the main purpose why all of us are here today.) He's talking here about a stunning blow to the nuclear industry: a decision that individual states can forbid nuclear reactors for economic reasons, but not for health reasons, because that is reserved for the Federal Government. There is a debate whether that's good or bad. It is claimed that it is good for the industry because of the restriction that the states cannot forbid reactors for reasons of health. "Quite true," says Petr, "but only in the sense that corns are not at all bothersome if your feet have been amputated. And then a supreme court decision is expected." Petr has no great confidence in that because, and I quote, "The supreme court is supremely incompetent. In matters of common sense, it is supremely obtuse. Far from safeguarding our freedom of research, all branches of the government have lately joined in the witch hunt and repression of technology." That is what Access to Energy is about, what the great contribution of Beckmann is about, and which I see with pleasure, we are pursuing. In defense, in energy production, questions of insecticides, and health questions, we need the support of technology, and we need adherence to truth. And here I want to make a very special point about truth. It has been said, perhaps even in this meeting, and it is a quote which I wish were correct, but it isn't. "Truth does not need support because it will win in the end." I don't believe it. I want to make a confession. I do not know what truth is. I know only this much—that I am addicted to it. That it is my religion to seek truth without knowing whether it is there. After it is found, sometimes you can be very sure, particularly in mathematics and maybe in physics, that actually it is there. And now, for a few minutes, I want to talk about a difficult subject. I told you I don't know enough about truth except that I'm dedicated to it, and by that I have admitted that it is conceivable that I maybe wrong in some things. And, what is worse, it is even conceivable that Petr might have been wrong about some things. I'm sure, as sure as I can be, that questions of defending technology, talking about nuclear energy, talking about the exaggerations concerning pollution, he has not been wrong. For 20 years, certainly for longer than most of us, he has been supremely worried about the witch hunt directed against technology. That was even before the present situation. I am learning, to a great extent from Dixy Lee Ray's new book, that on Environmental Overkill, we may be spending a trillion dollars a year .....twice as much as our President is promising to save in five years by his tax policy to reduce our indebtedness. So, if there is a simple explanation of our economic woes, it might conceivably be precisely in the Environmental Overkill. In another respect, I am about as certain as I can be that Petr Beckmann has been in error when he opposed the theory of special relativity of Einstein. Now I want to qualify that statement, circumscribe it, define it, and make recommendations. Relativity appears to be a tremendous step away from common sense. The title of my latest book is Conversations On The Dark Secrets of Physics. The title is a fraud; the book is not about nuclear explosives, it is about relativity and quantum mechanics. They are the dark secrets because the dark secret is not that which you don't tell, but that which you don't understand. In the very beginning of the book, I talk about special relativity in which I happen firmly to believe. And I'll talk a little more about it. I struggled with it when I was 18 years old. I failed to understand it until I found a formulation that the time interval between two events appeared different to different people. Einstein knew that and explained it, but the new emphasis of Minkowski was to find a simple quantity which remains the same for all observers. It has been said, and it is true, that relativity is a misnomer. The important thing is not what is relative, but what is absolute. In our old concepts, time intervals have been absolute. In our new concept, a little more complicated, but not much more, a combination between time and space is absolute. And what that means, is that time and space are much more closely interlinked than was known in the past. That is really what is meant by four dimensional space. Not merely that an event is characterized by four numbers: how far to the right, how far forward, how far up, and at what time. The new thing which is really the center of Einstein's relativity, that makes the structure wry simple is this: out of these quantities, you can compose something that does not change, that is absolute. While Einstein was right in physics, he was systematically and thoroughly wrong in his politics. Except in the one important special point: he did not like Hitler. And that, of course, was mutual, and in that, we agree with him. I'm sorry, I think our friend Petr Beckmann did not see the point that Einstein was clearly right in his ideas of 1905 which he later called special relativity. Then Einstein went further. While he discovered special relativity in a few weeks, he worked out general relativity in a few years. And that is something incomparably more complicated. I'm afraid I'm a little sympathetic even to abstract truths. And Einstein's general relativity had a few remarkable successes. But I'm as sure of special relativity as I am of anything in physics. General relativity has been verified in every case where it can be applied, but the cases are few. In general relativity, the four dimensional space, God help us, is curved, whatever that means. Now you know, when a two dimensional surface is curved. That you can see on the surface of the Earth because you can see that the shortest path from the North Pole to the South Pole is to the south along any of the longitudes. This is quite different from a plain two dimensional surface where there is only one shortest path between two points. We can see two dimensional curvature because it's curved in the third dimension. But what does it mean if three dimensional space, and even more horribly, four dimensional time space is curved? That you won't understand very readily. Still general relativity agrees with observations in a remarkable fashion. Concerning special relativity, I would like to suggest that we be very careful because continuing Beckmann's work, we have a job. We have a job to stop the witch hunt, and if we are proven wrong, on a point as simple as special relativity, then I think our chance of being helpful in the really important business will be gone. Now, let me propose a way in which I am quite sure Petr himself would have been satisfied to submit his theory (that he prefers to Einstein's) to a test. The reason why Einstein proposed relativity was the well-known Michelson-Morley experiment. Light was supposed to be propagated through a substance, people called it ether. Now, there was an attempt by Michelson and others: if there is such a substance, one may measure the change of the ether wind due to the difference of the motion of the Earth in summer and winter. You did that by sending out a light beam and reflecting it, and measuring the total time taken for the return journey. If there was an ether wind, you went with it half the way and against it the other half. Therefore, the first order effects canceled out, but the second order effects remained because the impediment of going against the wind turns out to be a little more effective than the advantage of coming back with the wind. That resulted in a shift in time which Michelson tried to find. But the shift was not there. Einstein explained this by concluding that there is no such thing as an ether and that there is no such thing as an ether wind. This led to his novel ideas and to unexpected consequences which were confirmed in the following decades. Petr Beckmann, in his book, Einstein Plus Two, is making the pleasing assumption to replace ether by the local gravitational field. Light moves with a fixed velocity relative to the local gravitational field. Once you get outside the field of the Earth, light will no longer worry about the Earth, but near the Earth, it will move with the Earth's gravitational field. And that explains the Michelson experiment very nicely. It leads, however, to a different result if you consider the effect of the rotation of the Earth and limit yourself to paths which stay in the gravitational field of the Earth.
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Vol. 21, No. 2
Newsletter: Access to Energy Newsletter Archive Volume: Issues Issue/No.: Vol. 21, No. 2 Date: October 01, 1993 04:47 PM Title: Dr. Petr Beckmann
Copyright © 2004 - Access to Energy Newsletter Archive
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