On May 8, 4:32 am, Ivan Voras <ivoras@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
> n...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
wrote:
> > The constraints are much more severe than I thought, so I must
> > answer "very little, actually". As Wayne Throop says you first must
> > have something fundamental against which to correlate the rate of time
> > in order to know that it has changed. In this Universe we have
> > gravitation to correlate it with, but not in your hypothetical
> > Newtonian Absolute Universe. We also have such things as the relations
> > between frequency, wavelength, and velocity for light, but they're
> > _empirical_ relations; c in particular has no theoretical requirement
> > to have its specific known value.
>
> You're right, both of you - I realize now that I need to refine the
> requirements, and that it's hard to do and also maintain internal
> consistency. Is there a technology in the relevant time period that
> could reliably generate and measure high-frequency electrical pulses?
> (how high? megahertz? gigahertz?)
In 1895 Jagadis Chandra Bose (informed by the pioneering optical
work of Newton) was playing with tabletop microwave setups in the 60
GHz range. He was measuring millimeter-range wavelengths to high
precision, using wax(!) prisms, lenses etc.
At the same time Nikola Tesla was diddling in the middle-to-high MHZ
but at much higher peak power. He was also doing early radio telescopy
in that range including what we today call Moonbounce and Marsbounce
radar. Had Tesla and Bose gotten together they'd probably have had
terawatt-pulse mm-wave radar in a week, mapping hills and valleys on
the outer planets (OK, that's a slight stretch, but not by a lot).
Also, in 1868 Angstrom (yes, _that_ Angstrom) had published a
compilation of all the Sun's visible spectral lines. Two years earlier
a spectroscopic analysis of a nova was done by Huggins.
Just a few examples of how "primitive" early 20th century science
and technology actually were...
Anyway, as Wayne says immediately above, by the early 20th century
we were already comparing a lot of fundamental physical "clocks" on
Earth's surface with similar ones both within and outside the Solar
system.
> > This is especially true in a zone large enough to contain the solar
> > system, populated by people at an early 20th century tech level.
> > Absent something like improbably detailed "religious" documentation or
> > an oral tradition accurate to several decimal places, why would the
> > population even think there might be anything amiss?
>
> The original idea is that they get some tiny bits of external knowledge
> / hints about their environment (something similar to the religious
> angle you proposed, but not exactly) but I see I'll maybe have to
> re-think this angle also.
Well, some people are very inventive, and Tesla in particular was
what we today call obsessive-compulsive about investigating things
that interested him. If he'd heard about some astronomical oddity
associated with a possible temporal disconnect between Earth and the
rest of the Universe detectable in the optical or radio spectra he
probably would have thrown his full intellect at it. Once that became
public others would chime in and it wouldn't have remained a mystery
for very long after that.
Mark L. Fergerson
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