New Insider Material Discusses Sun Transition, Dewey Larson, and More

[Tenet Nosce]

For discussion, I came across this:

http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Dewey_Larson

Dewey Bernard Larson (1898-1990) was an American engineer best known for developing a Theory of Everything known as the "Reciprocal System." Most of his writing dates from the 1950s and 60s and predates much of the Standard Model of physics, which effectively nullified many of his claims. However, Larson still maintains a strong and passionate following among a few cranks who think that they've stumbled upon some great secret body of knowledge.

None of Larson's work was ever published in any peer-reviewed scientific journal.[1] The only evaluations of Larson's work were performed by known supporters of the Reciprocal System, and have an alarming tendency to use the word "published" when they really mean "uploaded to a WordPress blog."[2]

Because Larson was nothing more than a lone crank, his Wikipedia page was deleted for the non-notability of the subject.[3] The article in question was entirely a piece of fancruft, based largely on a biography of Larson hosted by his supporters.[4][5]

... and it goes on from there...

This is also interesting:

Questioner: Could you tell me the difference between space/time and time/space?

Ra: I am Ra. Using your words, the difference is that between the visible and invisible or the physical and metaphysical. Using mathematical terms, as does the one you call Larson, the difference is that between s/t and t/s.

Larson says that space/time and time/space are both physical, and that there is a third "metaphysical" sector which exists independent of space and time. Ra says space/time is physical and time/space metaphysical.

Also, should we interpret this as a blanket "nod" toward Larson's theories?

20.7 Questioner: Is the physics of Dewey Larson correct?

Ra: I am Ra. The physics of sound vibrational complex Dewey is a correct system as far as it is able to go.

Consider these rebuttals:

http://www.madsci.org/posts/archives/199....As.r.html

Example 1: in their view of stellar evolution stars begin as red dwarfs (low surface temperature, low luminosity) and as they grow older their density, temperature, and luminosity increase, culminating in an explosion. I'd want to see numerical predictions of the history of the Sun: how old it is, how its luminosity has changed with time, how fast it should be changing now, and so on. We know from the fossil record, however, that the surface temperature of the Earth hasn't changed very much over the planet's history, and since this temperature reflects at least partially the energy input from the Sun, the solar luminosity can't have changed by very much either, maybe a factor of two. That sounds like a lot, but the red dwarfs which are the supposed early stage for the Sun are thousands of times less luminous than the Sun is now. This kind of luminosity is incompatible with the geologic record.

Example 2: the prediction is made that hotter and brighter main sequence stars are denser than the cooler and fainter ones; this is directly contradicted by observations of stars. We can estimate masses and diameters of stars in some binary star systems in which the two stars happen to take turns blocking our view of each other -- these are called eclipsing binaries. By taking repeated spectroscopic observations of the stars we can work out the the orbits of the stars around each other. This involves using the Doppler effect (see here, among many other places on the web, for something about it) to tell how fast the stars are moving -- this same physical effect is used by radar "guns" to measure the speeds of stars, and then using three of Issac Newton's inventions, calculus and the laws of motion and gravitation, to solve for the orbit. (There's a nice description of binary star orbits here. Many of the properties of orbits were discovered by Kepler when analyzing observations of the planets; Newton developed the physics and mathematical tools for understanding why those are.) The orbit tells us how fast the stars are moving, so using that and timing how long the eclipses last tells us how big the stars are (that is, their diameters). The orbit also tells us how much mass there is in the system (the more mass, the more gravity, and the faster things move). Once we have both the mass and the diameter of the stars, then we know the density as quickly as we can do the geometry problem of computing the volume of a sphere when given its diameter; density is equal to mass divided by volume. Once you've done the measurements, the numbers indicate that among main sequence stars the hottest, most luminous stars have the lowest density, while the cool, low-luminosity dwarfs have the highest density.

Example 3: In some of the stuff "worked out" about the structure of the Sun and the nature of sunspots, the implication is clearly made that the oblateness of the Sun (that is, how flattened the Sun's disk appears to us) should change over the course of the 11-year sunspot cycle, in the sense that it should become more oblate as the cycle progresses and sunspots appear at lower solar latitudes. This also is directly contradicted by observations: the oblateness of the Sun is constant over time within the accuracy of our measurements.