C. K. Raju's Blog

Retarded gravity

ckr — Sun, 06 May 2012 09:58:00 +0000

Presented this talk at a school at Petropolis, Brazil. Lorentz covariance requires that gravity be velocity dependent. But old physicists can’t get over the 19th c. idea, reiterated by Eddington, that introducing velocity dependence in gravity makes the two-body problem unstable! They never studied functional differential equations, and no physics texts yet mentions my first solution of functional differential equations in a serious physical context. Old-time physicists confuse the mathematical theory of ordinary differential equations with physics. But young people do better.

National year of mathematics and delayed monsoon

ckr — Sat, 05 May 2012 18:48:48 +0000

But why a year on the Christian calendar? That calendar embodies the European ignorance of elementary arithmetic and simple fractions (hence their persistent inability to determine Easter correctly until the Gregorian calendar reform of 1582 when they got the length of the year from Indian books). Click the image for the text version. This newspaper has a circulation of 40 million.

Even so, the Gregorian calendar retains the unscientifc chaos about months. This is a disaster for Indian agriculture. (More details of the monsoon mess in my book Cultural Foundations of Mathematics, or an early preliminary article at http://www.indianscience.org/essays/t_es_raju_monsoon.shtml.)

More recent newspaper clips on the “delayed monsoon” effect are at http://ckraju.net/papers/Monsoon-pages-from-calclnm.pdf.

Open source software: a charter of demands

ckr — Sat, 05 May 2012 18:31:03 +0000

Strange that governments do not support the use of open source, when it has so many advnatages. Some news reports below on the press conference by the Consumer Association Penang on 13 April, and a full charter of demands.

More press reports.

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http://ckraju.net/press/2012/star-13-April-2012.gif.

Islam and the Philosophy of Science

ckr — Sat, 05 May 2012 18:22:07 +0000

The Pusat Islam organized a talk on Islam and the philosophy of science. (Click the image for the paper. But the paper does not cover the queston of ethics of science, taken up during the talk.)

New curriculum for history and philosophy of science

ckr — Sat, 05 May 2012 18:10:24 +0000

A workshop was held at Al-Bukhari International University to formulate a new curriculum for the history and philosophy of science. Scholars from 3 countries participated. Here is the announcement for the workshop, and an earlier one on the Multiversity site.

The issue is part of the decolonisation agenda, but was precipitated when a person who trained as a missionary in Singapore Bible College, and never acquired any knowledge of science or philosophy, but got a PhD from Cambridge in the philosophy of science, started trying to use the classroom as a pulpit. See the minutes of the discussion, and the draft syllabus.

Here is a group photo

and a press report in Alef (Iran). (Click image to go to site, and use Google translate for hilarious results.)

Reimagining science teaching

ckr — Sat, 05 May 2012 17:42:38 +0000

To teach science one needs to know the right stories of how science developed. That is one needs a truthful history of science, not the trash history one gets from the West. Strange that all those who talk of teaching students to innovate can only blindly imitate the syllabus from Western universities!

Einstein’s mistake and CERN experiment

ckr — Fri, 23 Mar 2012 20:02:30 +0000

For the last six months I have been repeatedly answering the question about superluminal neutrinos. I post below one such response from Sept 2011.

Einstein was, of course, wrong, but not for this reason. He (and most other physicists after him) wrongly thought relativity matters only for speeds close to light. That is true only for the one body problem. For the many body problem, relativity matters even at lower speeds. Einstein never understood this subtle mathematical point all his life.

CERN is wrong because the claim about superluminal neutrinos is conceptually confused. (But, of course, Western journalists superstitiously believe in the authority of CERN, “God particle” and all that. They have the money, so they must be right.)

—————email of 26 September—–

The point I made is that theory of relativity starts off by defining a clock. There is no God-given time out there to be measured, as Newton wrongly thought.

So what clock should one use?

If you do not know exactly how to measure time, you cannot measure velocity either, so it is meaningless to speak of velocities greater than that of light.

To understand the first thing about relativity, you must understand this point.

Also, Einstein did not make any seminal contribution, as you say. As a patent clerk he knew a legal way to grab credit which he did (also for the work of Hilbert, and earlier Botlzmann and Gibbs). He made a mistake in the process. If Western history could falsely belittle Egyptians, why do you think the people it glorifies are the right one’s?

Secondly, relativity is only a theory, not some grand universal law. The measure of time used just happens to be a convenient one (as emphasized by Poincare) so it can, of course, be changed. But there is no indication in the news report that any such fundamental reconceptualisation was done, and an alternative way of measuring time was defined.

Finally, the theory of relativity does allow tachyons—faster than light particles. My friend Waldyr Rodrigues has written specifically on superliminal neutrino solutions. However, in that situation, one cannot then hang on to the simple notion of causality used in the news report that the neutrinos left CERN and then arrived in Italy. You may like to check out the chapter on “Time Travel” in my book The Eleven Pictures of Time (Sage, 2003), and the parts about the tachyonic anti-telephone. If Shakepeare dictated Hamlet to Bacon, Shakespeare did not have “control” over it, and cannot be regarded as the author. If you are more mathematically inclined, you can check out my paper on “Time travel and the reality of spontaneity” on the arxiv (published in Foundations of Physics, 2006).

Swaraj in thought

ckr — Sat, 17 Mar 2012 12:24:18 +0000

Colonialism used church propaganda to inculcate the myth of Western superiority among the colonised. It is high time to break this dirty and evil myth, which is still propagated by our schools and universities. Had the British not got Mahatma Gandhi assassinated (through Savarkar), to ensure Nehru’s supremacy, we would have got real freedom, real swaraj. Not Hind Swaraj, not Swaraj in Ideas, but swaraj in thought

My paper on swaraj in thought was presented at the 35th Indian Social Science Congress, Wardha in Dec 2011. What a pity that the vice chancellor of the Mahatma Gandhi University is a police official.

Secret refereeing: quality control or thought control?

ckr — Fri, 02 Mar 2012 21:57:54 +0000

Many people think that the system of secretive refereeing (euphemistically called “peer review”) serves as a system of quality control. Whole groups of nations (such as the Organization of Islamic Conference) have formed their science policies on the basis of that belief. (See my paper on “Benchmarking science” for the USM-PSU conference at Hat Yai, October, 2011.)

But, what is the scientific evidence that such secretive refereeing serves the purpose of quality control?

Historically, the system of secretive refereeing was invented by the church for its evil purpose of thought control. (See my article on “Decolonisation: time for change“.) Church power derived from a bunch of the most abject lies and superstitions with which it filled the mind of Western man since childhood. So, it needed a system to actively maintain those lies. The key point of the system was to not allow dissenters to articulate their views. Thus, the church successfully suppressed Newton’s views that it had fabricated and manipulated the Bible. Those views could have brought about a real Newtonian revolution.

Today, the secrecy in refereeing serves two purposes. If people are asked to submit their ideas to journals controlled by Westerners, it allows Westerners a chance to steal those ideas. How often does this happen? Probably more often than people are willing to admit. After all, so many prominent Western scientific icons since Copernicus systematically “independently rediscovered” their ideas, just when dependent discovery was possible! (See, Is Science Western in Origin?)

Some editors must be honest, but in the above article on decolonisation I gave examples of blatant editorial dishonesty, at the topmost level of mathematics, endorsed by Western academics in the name of editorial freedom. If that is what happens in the full public gaze, one can only imagine what happens with secret refereeing, where one does not even know who is doing the “independent rediscovery”. There is no scientific basis for trust in this secretive system on the basis of the facts one does know.

The second purpose that secretive refereeing serves is the enforcement of orthodoxy. Secrecy allows the referee to talk any nonsense for it hides the ignorance of the referee, and thus allows an ignorant person to judge a knowledgeable person. The only thing the referee needs to know is whether or not something is orthodox. The claim that secrecy allows frank articulation of opinion is absurd and meant to cloak the fact that in most cases it allows editors and referees to exercise power (and grab the money that goes with hegemony) like the medieival church.

It is this technique of preserving orthodoxy which led to the preservation for so many centuries of the foolish creation date for the world 6000 years ago, set with exquisite prevision by the Vice Chancellor of Cambridge. In science, we have had phlogiston and ether. Now “science” has filled the world with dark matter and dark energy like the dark forces which fill the potty world of Harry Potter (obviously much cited, with a high impact parameter, hence the truth on these bibliometric considerations!).

Scientific opinion must be articulated publicly, not in secret. As argued in my paper (and booklet) on Academic Imperialism, peer review should be post-publication, public review in this digital age. Science requires public discussion. Scientific belief should not be based just on misplaced trust in the secret doings of Western editors and referees.

Ordinary academics have to demand this, for science managers often have Wested interests.

Islam and science

ckr — Sun, 19 Feb 2012 08:55:16 +0000

Another way to see the religious bias in present-day science (see previous post) is to look at the way it is used to attack Islam. (Note: specifically science vs Islam, not science vs “religion”.) See my paper on “Islam and Science” Indian Journal of Secularism, 15(2), 2011, pp. 14-29.

For example, consider the claim that Islam is anti-science because it does not believe in “laws of nature” or “laws of physics”. As my paper explains, belief in “laws of nature” is part of the post-Crusade theology of Aquinas; it is no part of science. Newton himself believed that theology and thought that he was a prophet to whom God had revealed those laws. (He also thought he was born on 25 December.) So, here we have a simple situation where science is pro-church but anti-Islam (as in Hawking’s singularities which support the church doctrine of creation against Islam).

It is true that people are still taught “Newton’s laws of physics” in school. But that is bad terminology which spreads church indoctrination. Because colonial education blindly imitates the West, this propaganda is still propagated through science teaching in schools which should have changed that long ago. Newton’s “laws” have proved to be false, and science cannot ever lay claim to any eternal truth. Science only constructs fallible models.