Edwin E. Hatch
The two Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatories (LIGO) are designed to detect gravitational waves and are expected to provide a powerful new tool for exploring the universe. They will not. Clearly, gravitational waves are real, but the LIGO observatories will not be able to detect them. This book tells us how and why this LIGO failure may ultimately trigger the most radical change in theoretical physics since Einstein's introduction of special relativity in 1905.
Ed Hatch, near the end of a thirty-year career in the computer sciences, became aware of his brother Ron's Modified Lorentz Ether Theory (MLET) and found it too fascinating to put aside. After retiring in 1991, he has since spent most of his free time examining the implications of the theory. This involved reading extensively and included development of some computer simulations of some fundamental phenomena based on the MLET model.
Since MLET predicts some very explicit and generally unexpected results with regard to some planned experiments, Ed felt it important to make these predictions known before the experiments are fully operational. Ed wrote this book to create awareness of the MLET predictions and to introduce the basic theory.
The author of the theory is Ed's brother, Ron. Ron Hatch is the current chair (an elected office) of the Satellite Division of the Institute of Navigation. This is the organization that conducts the premier conference relating to GPS, a conference typically drawing over 2,000 people to the sessions and exhibits.
Ron has been working with navigation and communications using satellites since 1962, when, still in college, he worked for the U.S. Science Exhibit at the Seattle World's Fair demonstrating the Doppler effect on the signals received from the TRANSIT satellites of the Navy Navigation Satellite System. This system was developed by John's Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, where Ron worked developing navigation algorithms immediately following college.
In late 1993, after many years of working for others, Ron began what proved to be a very successful private consultation practice that included such clients as NASA, FAA, Motorola, and Leica, the Swiss survey company. In 1995, he, along with four other consultants, started NavCom Technology, which has grown into a successful GPS and satellite communications company employing more than 50 people. Although full time at NavCom since 1997, Ron has maintained some independent consultation work with others.
In 1994, Ron was awarded the Johannes Kepler award for 'Sustained and Significant Contributions to Satellite Navigation' from the Satellite Division of the Institute of Navigation -- only the fourth recipient of this prestigious award. These 'sustained and significant' contributions were made over many years. He's received eight patents relating to GPS and satellite navigation, with several more in process. Among contributions not patented, is a technique Ron developed for removing much of the noise caused by electromagnetic reflections from the fundamental Global Positioning System measurements. This technique is now employed in virtually all GPS receivers and is referred to in FAA algorithm documents as the 'Hatch filter.'
Ron's understanding of the GPS system includes awareness of the effects of gravity and velocity on precision atomic clocks and other important relativity effects. His Modified Lorentz Ether Theory came from a driving preference for rigorous understanding, rather than from any personal desire to significantly impact theoretical physics. But in the course of that effort he became convinced that acceptable understanding of relativity effects could only come with a radical departure from consensus thinking. MLET, in its current form (including the prediction that LIGO will not detect gravitational waves) has far surpassed his original, rather modest goal.
- So, why won't they find what they're looking for?
- The problem is with the second assumption. MLET, in providing Einstein's long sought 'unified confirmation' of the 'gravitational field and the electromagnetic field,' tells us that the gravitational waves are not of the expected form.
- Oh, great. A brand new wave form. A Nobel Prize for someone, I'm sure.
- It's current theory that requires the extraneous wave form. The very real gravitational waves are identical to electromagnetic waves.
- That's preposterous.
- Why two when one will do? Nature tends to be conservative, don't you think?
Seriously, MLET very clearly tells us that these gravitational waves are, in fact, identical in every sense to the waves that we commonly refer to as electromagnetic waves ¾ interacting compressive (gravitational) and shear (kinetic) distortions of the ether.
- And you believe that?
- I believe that. Just look at why current theory is forced to consider them two different types of waves ¾ why Einstein was forced to give us divergent explanations of the gravitational field and the electromagnetic field in the first place. Einstein3 wrote:
Since the special theory of relativity revealed the physical equivalence of all inertial systems [his absolute symmetry at all levels] it proved the untenability of the hypothesis of an ether at rest. It was therefore necessary to renounce the idea that the electromagnetic field is to be regarded as a state of a material carrier. The field thus becomes an irreducible element of physical description . . .
Without some medium supporting electromagnetic waves, Einstein was clearly forced to make the fields, in themselves, irreducible. But gravitational waves propagate through a medium as distortions of that medium (ripples of spacetime curvature). Irreducible fields propagated through a vacuum in the one case, ripples in spacetime in the other ¾ very different waves, but propagated at identical speeds.
On the other hand, with a medium supporting electromagnetic waves, the electromagnetic fields are no longer irreducible but are seen as elastic distortions of that medium. Numerous considerations make it very clear that gravitational waves are composed of the same kinds of distortions ¾ both are gravitokinetic waves, compressive and shear distortions, in phase, both propagated at the speed of light. In other words, gravitational and electromagnetic waves are the same kind of 'ripples in the ether'.
- So you simply discard special relativity? Not smart. Paul Davies4 has reminded us that,
If relativity were wrong, our detailed understanding of subatomic physics would collapse. . . From quarks to quasars, scientists would no longer be able to understand the basis of their own immense knowledge.
- Davies is wrong. With the transition to MLET scientists are now 'able to understand the basis of their own immense knowledge,' for the first time ever in very many particulars. Since current theory is, in a sense, little more than the skeleton of MLET ¾ MLET arbitrarily stripped of physical meaning ¾ MLET's restoration of a physical model is in no way destructive of understanding.
- How could even an idiot make such a ridiculous claim?
- Current theory can't tell us much beyond the raw experimental data and experimentally verified mathematical relationships. Stephen Hawking5 expressed this impotence rather succinctly when he wrote:
I take the . . . viewpoint that a physical theory is just a mathematical model and that it is meaningless to ask whether it corresponds to reality.
MLET, on the other hand, gives us a consistent physical model that allows the derivation of the current mathematics. This was Lorentz's position when, prior to Einstein, he derived the mathematics (the Lorentz equations) supposed to support special relativity. And the reason Einstein rejected Lorentz's physical model is clear ¾ Einstein6, in a speech in 1920, stated:
For the theoretician such an asymmetry in the theoretical structure, with no corresponding asymmetry in the system of experience is intolerable.
Einstein's positivism is showing here. It wasn't the mathematics or the experimental data that dictated the rejection of Lorentz's sensible, visualizable physical reality ¾ it was nothing more than a quaint personal notion that a reality that in any way exceeds direct experience is intolerable.
Virtually the whole difference between MLET's visualizable, sensible reality and current theory, arises from Einstein's rejection of Lorentz's underlying asymmetry.
- And, I suppose, you'll show me how this sensible reality is reflected in the current mathematics and is consistent with our massive experimental base? A pretty big order, if you ask me.
- Granted ¾ it is a large order. That's why you're here for a month.
Again, the point I really want to emphasize today, is that the sensible reality clearly tells us that the LIGO observatories will never detect gravitational waves.
- You expect me to believe this nonsense?
- Me? No. I understand where you're coming from. I'm personally fairly sure you won't be able to question SRT, no matter the strength of the evidence. But I do hope that a few years from now, when LIGO scientists are struggling with the frustration of not being able to detect what they know is out there, you'll remember that there's a very good explanation for the null results.
- You're different than most nut-cases ¾ I'll grant that. As crazy as they come, but different. It's very unusual for people like you to stake all hope of credibility on an unambiguous prediction that'll soon be tested.
- Good theory should do that. Don't you think?
- Good theory? Yeah, sure.
- Stay with us and we'll show you just how good it really is.
- You really depress me.
- What's to be depressed about?
- You're willing to spend millions of dollars to argue that the physics community doesn't know what it's talking about and you wonder why that depresses me?
- Science is about change. Significant challenge to consensus shouldn't depresses you.
- Surely even you can understand the danger to good science. I'm not the best known theoretical physicist by any means, but based only on my limited credibility, I must get at least two or three proposed papers a month from crackpots like you with some new theory that shows how ignorant we mainstream physicists are.
- And you simply toss them ¾ as any good physicist would? Right?
- I do, of course. But I think Leon Lederman7 best expressed the real concern with regard to this glut of nonsense when he wrote:
The tragedy in all this is not the sloppy pseudoscience writers, not the Wichita insurance salesman who knows exactly where Einstein went wrong and publishes his own book on it. It is the damage done to the gullible and science-illiterate general public, which can so easily be duped.
You'll get the treatment you deserve from the physics community. But the general public can't so easily be protected from well-funded kooks ¾ and if you compromise the general public's trust in informed consensus, then support for important experiments may be jeopardized.
- You shouldn't worry, there's a solid majority that isn't all that gullible.
- Do you think the gravitational-wave experiments would've been funded at the current level if you'd come forward with multi-million-dollar backing a decade or two ago claiming, as you do now, that they are worthless?
- Worthless? Well, the author of MLET did once say that he believed the huge amounts of money being spent on gravity-wave detectors were being wasted. But that was said with respect to the stated aim of the experiments ¾ to eventually use gravitational waves to detect things that couldn't be detected in other ways. Paul Davies8 wrote:
Using gravity-wave detectors as 'gravity-telescopes' is on the horizon. With such a facility we could 'see' into the dense hearts of quasars and neutron stars, probe to the very edges of black holes and maybe eventually listen to the rumble of the primordial big bang itself.
If one sees this as the only benefit of the observatories, then sure, they're worthless. But from our perspective they're far from worthless
.
- What do you mean? You claim to know they'll never detect gravitational waves.
- And you claim to know they will. Who's right? The situation demands experimental resolution.
- Very funny. There's no 'situation' to resolve. The observatories were designed to observe ¾ they're 'observatories' not experiments designed to test your ridiculous hypothesis.
- But they will. And that makes them important.
