HAWKING WRONG AGAIN, RESEARCHER TELLS
MARS CONFERENCE
Released on = August 27, 2004, 8:05 am
Press Release Author = Belinda Rozdale/World.Net.News
Press Release Summary = At the 7th Annual International Mars Society
Conference
Another mistake by famed cosmologist Stephen Hawking was revealed
along with others
by Michio Kaku, Kip Thorne and more.
Press Release Body = For Immediate Release:
HAWKING WRONG AGAIN, RESEARCHER TELLS MARS CONFERENCE
by Belinda Rozdale
(cleared for redistribution with World.Net.News credit )
Dateline August 21 2004 Chicago, Illinois, USA: Research and development
engineer
Marshall Barnes stood before a packed audience in PDR 9 in the luxurious
Palmer
House Hilton in Chicago and explained to members of the International
Mars
Conference (see http://www.marssociety.org/docs/sched_04.pdf bottom
of Saturday's
schedule, 4:30 ) how Stephen Hawking and others have made as yet
undetected errors
in their published works. These mistakes form a pattern of hidden
assumptions which
may extend elsewhere in the science and technology community, resulting
in holding
back progress which NASA now recognizes needs more imaginative solutions.
Before it
was over no one disagreed with Marshall. Debate did rage for a while
over the ways
in which Hawking's betting partner, Kip Thorne was wrong about a
wormhole time machine model.
The Mars Society is a non-profit U.S. organization which promotes
the expansion of
the space program and efforts to send human beings to establish
bases on Mars. This
year's 7th convention was held August 18th to 22nd in Chicago, Illinois
(
http://www.suntimes.com/output/news/cst-nws-mars19.html ). Marshall
submitted his
paper's abstract, which asserts that "if Man is to go vigorously
beyond his
immediate cosmic neighborhood, the shackles that constrict the ability
and the
willingness, of free form thought, must be broken once and for all;
while
simultaneously not ignoring the need for rigorous analysis and application
of the
scientific method to insure that those ideas that appear to be revolutionary
breakthroughs do indeed become revolutionary realities". The
presentation "Avoiding
Hidden Assumptions While Thinking Outside The Box" drew considerable
attention
because of the inclusion of Hawking's comments on Thorne's wormhole
time machine
suggestion, due to the fact that Ha
wking, who is seen by many as the successor to Einstein, recently
admitted to being
wrong about the nature of black holes (
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/3897989.stm ). This mistake
has cost Hawking a
bet with a fellow physicist at Cal Tech. According to Marshall,
before that
admission, he attempted to bet Hawking through his collegue Kip
Thorne, whose time
travel model Hawking said wouldn't work. Thorne has yet to respond,
perhaps because
Marshall does agree that Thorne's wormhole time travel idea wouldn't
work either,
but for an entirely different reason.
"I found mistakes in it that were more than significant,"
Barnes said before the
talk as he waited outside PDR 9 to go on. Many talks that day were
going over the 30
minute limit. Barnes and his audience were kept waiting more than
20 minutes before
he could take the podium and face the expectant crowd of engineers,
scientists,
teachers and space enthusiasts.
"I just want to hear what he has to say," one school
teacher from Cleveland
commented. "It seems like it should be interesting at least."
"This young man is very good, he has very complex ideas",
a man who identified
himself as Dr. Senu-oke, commented with his female companion. The
doctor claimed
that he had flown to Chicago in his private jet to catch that day's
conference and
to see Marshall. He was concerned that he wouldn't be able to stay
for the whole
presentation since everything was running behind schedule. He left
just before
things got heated, but when asked for his opinion he gave the thumbs
up sign.
Marshall began his talk with a bit of levity, reading the bet he
had sent to Kip
Thorne, offering to take Thorne's place in betting against Hawking
and his
chronology protection conjecture theory. Though Thorne hasn't responded
yet,
Marshall chose to read the bet anyway since its subject would be
covered in the
presentation. After delivering the opening statement from the abstract
he quickly
and effectively revealed errors in interpreting dimensional relationships
in
geometry made by Rudy Rucker and Michio Kaku, then scored again
with an attempt by
Kaku to illustrate a closed timelike loop from an example from the
sci-fi story All
You Zombies, before plunging headlong into what he's described as
the
Thorne/Geroch/Wald/Hawking train wreck. Based on Thorne's idea that
two mutually
connected wormhole mouth's could become a time machine once one
was placed aboard a
spaceship traveling near the speed of light, Marshall pointed out
numerous
miscalculations made by Thorne which kept
the audience on its toes. Laughter broke out though when Marshall
introduced the
Geroch/Wald factor, where the two professor at the University of
Chicago ( see
Robert P. Geroch http://physics.uchicago.edu/t_rel.html#Geroch and
Robert Wald
http://physics.uchicago.edu/t_rel.html#Wald ) had told Thorne that
his wormhole
idea wouldn't work because when the ship was within 10 light years
of Earth that
electromagnetic radiation traveling through the wormhole could make
it collapse.
Marshall pointed out that this would be impossible because the ship
is supposed to
fly out and back to Earth within a total elapsed time of 10 years,
flying at a
sub-light speed. The ship could never reach a 10 light year distance
from Earth
because it would never make it back in time. The audience broke
out in laughter.
Things got a little rowdy when the Hawking part of the equation
was introduced.
Marshall described Hawking's chronology protection conjecture,
a theoretical
physical feature in spacetime physics that Hawking believes would
prevent time
travel from ever occuring. He then pointed out how Hawking made
the same mistake as
Geroch and Wald, pointing to a 10 light year distance from Earth
as the point where
the wormhole connection would collapse. The crowd was at first surprised
that it was
such simple mistake that Hawking made, but then one audience member
pointed out that
it wasn't the first time, remarking about the admission of the black
hole theory
error in Ireland. That's when another man suggested that the wormhole
still might
provide travel to the past because wormholes are from general relativity.
Marshall
was not moved.
"The wormhole isn't providing the time travel aspect, only
the connection between
two different positions in spacetime. Outside those wormhole mouths,
it's still the
same story as the twin's paradox, even Thorne says so, but then
goes on to get
things completely confused. He didn't even catch that Geroch and
Wald were wrong and
it's his own thought model. "
Another audience member sided with Marshall and within moments
the full audience was
either calculating the problem outloud to their neighbors or arguing
with the man in
the back. "It appears that Thorne's train wreck has caused
a train wreck here",
Marshall smiled wryly from the podium as a woman appealed for quiet
near the back.
Marshall continued once the audience settled down. He deconstructed
Hawking's
chronology protection conjecture, relating how Hawking fails to
explain why quantum
gravity fluctuations or electromagnetic radiation would build up
through any
arbitrary opening to the past without doppler effects, further emphasing
that
connections to the past are not direct connections via linear pathways.
"Deutsch and Wolf use the Everett/Wheeler many-worlds theory
to argue for time
travel without paradox, but I'll go one further", he commented.
"I'll use the
Copenhagen interpretation which shows that you only get one outcome
from a
superposition, whether you want to surmise that the alternate outcome
exists in a
parallel universe or not. So if you go back in time, or open a door
to the past,
it's a parallel past, not a direct linear one with a casual relationship
to the
future you came from. So nothing is going through and then coming
back before it
left anymore than it does when you open a door to the next room."
Marshall mentioned how Hawking had also been wrong about time reversing,
if the
universe were to begin to contract instead of expand, something
that Hawking
admitted to in his movie, A Brief History of Time.
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