THE ROBERT W. WHITAKER ARCHIVE

THE SPEED OF LIGHT | 2005-11-07

I don't know how many young people have been right by the track when a train went by tooting its horn. When I was a kid and the train came by we would make a pulling motion over our heads and the engineer would reach up for the cord and toot his whistle for us, long and loud.

As the train moved toward us the whistle was very high. The train was moving, so the waves came to us faster and sounded higher. After it passed us the whistle had a lower pitch. It was kind of a "WHEE-ooooooh" sound.

People noticed this before Einstein was born, and it was called relativity.

Einstein developed the Theory of SPECIAL Relativity. Just as sound differs with the point of view of the person standing still, so things are different between things traveling at or near the speed of light and things standing still.

Einstein made some excellent observations on this basis, but like all theorists, he tried to explain EVERYTHING with it and he ran into what I call The Bob Problem:

It doesn't WORK.

Einstein insisted that the speed of light was the fastest anything could travel. So it takes eight minutes for light to reach us from the sun.

So far, so good.

But then he said that the speed of light was the fastest ANY force could travel.

Huh-oh!

Actually, gravity moves MUCH faster than the speed of light. We have not been able to measure the speed of gravity, it may be infinite. But we do know that a gravity shift from the sun has an instant effect here on earth while light is coming toward us at light speed.

Einstein therefore inserted a cheat factor to take care of that inconvenience. He said gravity was a curve in space. I am not going into the details here, but it doesn't really make any sense. He just needed it and put it in.

Like all theorists who outlive their time, Einstein died a scientific reactionary. The last part of his life was spent fighting quantum physics, which is fully accepted today because it WORKS.

But this whole business of light speed is something we will have to deal with. You have watched satellite broadcasts on cable television, and the people talking sound a little retarded. A question is asked and there is a noticable delay in the reply.

With short wave radio we didn't have that problem. If you are in Baghdad and I am here, the radio waves travel the six thousand miles between us directly. At the speed of light it takes the signal one thirteenth of a second to get to Baghdad, so there is no noticable delay.

But the satellite is 43,000 miles up. So the signal has to go all the way up there and back, some 86,000 miles, which takes half a second at light speed. That means the question and answer gap is a full second. In the give and take we are used to on the news, that is a very noticable delay.

What else moves faster than light?

This is not a practical matter right now. I suppose that when it comes to the speed of light we are about where Ben Franklin was in the matter of electricity. He tried and tried to think of some way electricity might actually be practical, but finally stated flatly that he couldn't even imagine one.

By the way, the terms current, positive and negative and battery were all invented personally by Franklin.

So what I am saying here is just fascinating to me the way electricity was to Franklin. But they may become practical. I understand that some uses have been found for electricity since Franklin's time.

So what is faster than light? Gravity is, but using gravity for anything practical is as weird an idea as using electricity was to Franklin.

What about ESP? It take years to contact anyone in another star system at light speed. But if I were in ESP contact with someone there, would the contact be light-speed or instantaneous?

This sounds like science fiction, right?

Do you happen to know who invented the entire satellite communications system we use today, every day, cable TV and all?

It was invented in a science fiction story written in 1947 by Arthur C. Clark. At the time no one could imagine it could have the slightest use outside of science fiction.

So let's let Ben Franklin have the last word on this.

He was doing one of his experiments and some Practical Man asked him, "But of what USE is this?"

Franklin replied, "Of what use is a newborn baby?"

IN THE MEANTIME... | 2005-09-03

Sometimes the best thing a writer can do is shut up and let those who are interested actually absorb his ideas.

WhitakerOnline has come out every week for exactly seven years.

We have scarcely missed a week in all that time, so there's plenty there.

The WhitakerOnline archive is longer than the New Testament or the Koran, though it hasn't caught up with the Old Testament or the Talmud.

WhitakerOnline Article Archive

My broadcast archive consist of only a few programs, but I hit the very important points first.

If you think I am worth listening to, then the programs there are worth hearing at least twice. They represent my major concepts.

WhitakerOnline Audio Archive

My blog archive is there, but the blog itself may lose its liveliness for the year.

Bob's Blog

We have about sold out the first edition of my book, Why Johnny Can't Think: America's Professor-Priesthood. It will still be available from ReadBob.com until they are sold out.

The ideas in it are planted.

But, a plea on behalf of the book's message

Please, please, PLEASE never say, "Whitaker says Political Correctness is LIKE a religion."

Please do not say, "Political Correctness is a religion, ***OR*** at least a rigid belief system."

I wrote until my fingers were blue, over and over

"Political Correctness IS a religion."

I proved it and showed you why it is so important that Political Correctness IS a religion.

This is absolutely critical to the whole message of my book. To say PC is LIKE a religion is worse than saying nothing at all.

Auf wieder sehen, "until we meet again."

Whitaker's World View

I DO NOT DISHONOR THE GREATEST GENERATION | 2006-04-11

Look at what I just wrote Derek.

Derek is getting what the Greatest Generation gave young white gentiles.

It upsets me when people asy i do not give the Greatest Generation the honor they are due.

Let's get this straight.

They had no honor. Walter Cronkite and his predecessor Edward R. Murrow were spokesmen for them. You can't dishonor someone who grovels to evil and is self-righteous about it.

I don't just dishonor them. They had no honor.

I despise them. I would call them dung if it did not disparage the dung. Dung stinks, but dung betrays nobody.

Let me talk about the Tenth Circle.

THE SHREWD PROBLEM | 2005-07-09

Hitler talked about the Jewish Problem. Today's respectable conservatives and liberals talk about the White Problem, which they call the Race Problem, in exactly the same way. My focus is the Shrewd Problem. I will be talking about it on my Saturday Internet show

The Untrained Eye

Oliver Hardy of Laurel and Hardy summed up the Shrewd Problem best when he said, "There is nothing dumber than a dumb man who thinks he's smart."

Hardy was from Augusta, Georgia, and he would understand what I mean by the Shrewd Problem because that is the way we used the word "shrewd" down here. It is somebody who thinks he's smart and isn't, and the consequences are disastrous.

The first person killed in a railway accident was a Shrewd Man in South Carolina. It has pretty well been expunged from history, but the first regular passenger rail line in America ran across South Carolina from Charleston to the Savannah River.

It was called "The Best Friend of Charleston."

When the railway first started, a guy who had just been hired to work in the engine, handling wood or something, was irritated by the whistling noise the engine was making. He decided to do something about it.

So he looked around and found the source of that irritating noise. It was the boiler which was right beside where he was working up in the engine. He didn't ask the engineer.

After all, he was a smart man so he knew how you deal with something that makes an irritating noise.

He tied down the steam pressure relief valve.

A couple of minutes later the clamped steam boiler exploded, literally blowing his head off. This is real history.

It is lucky that this Shrewd Man was on an early train. On later trains a real boiler explosion could kill hundreds of people. Since then, Shrewd People have been killing hundreds, thousands, millions of people.