This is from Les Schaffer on energy conservation: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2010/02/22/energy-is-not-conserved
------------- This was less helpful than the Bondi article which was outrageously difficult, but ultimately something that I could vaguely work out by ignoring the field equations and trying to concentrate on the words. I looked around and found this link by John Baez another heavy weight in the field that was more helpful for me: http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/vacuum.html A couple of years ago I posted some links to Saul Perlmutter (and other teams) work that imply dark energy. Here is a discussion by the three PIs involved who shared the noble prize in 2011: http://www.nobelprize.org/mediaplayer/index.php?id=1745 The opening paragraph says, ``Sometimes kooky people get really excited about the idea that if we could only use this energy somehow, all our problems would be solved.'' Well that was exactly my thought at the conclusion of Bondi's paper. I wrote a humorous post about Captain Kirk demanding that Scotty use the gravity pulse oscillator to increase velocity to escape some alien ship. Scotty is reluctant because of the potential to over heat the engine. Nevermind. The basic idea is that changing the shape of an outside shell will effect a change in the gravity field of a solid inside the shell, if the shape changes are an oscillation. Bondi's example was you could use the increase in energy density to charge a battery. The example promoted the idea you could get energy for free, i.e. perfect engine. Bondi's example, assumed work-free device to effect the external shell oscillation. My problem besides the math deficit, is that I cannot escape the idea that these sorts of strange consequences are entirely math induced artifacts. They might be real on paper, but not `out there'. Whatever. All this tells me, that something is really wrong in depth with our concepts of how the universe works, period. The fall back is to ignore everything but the raw observations and just suspend judgements, conclusions, and rationalizations. CG _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
