ERRORS (real and alleged) ...

... in Jim Jastrzebski's texts about Einstein's gravitation as perceived by referees and editors of scientific journals and identified by the visitors to this site (no real error reported so far).

(alleged) errors Jim's comments
(1) "[...] too speculative [...]. Maybe our judgement is at fault but, based on that judgement, our decision must remain against publication."
[Dr Philip Campbell, Physical Sciences Editor, Nature, February 1985]. This error is considered alleged because "too speculative" is too vague a term to figure out what the error is especially when the editor himself is not sure of his judgement.
(2) "This paper is seriously unsound and must not be published. The main result of the paper is apparently that the universe is static or stationary, i.e. not expanding [...]. The only imaginable way to account for both the microwave background and the cosmological redshift is to assume that the universe began as a hot dense fireball (details may differ) and has been expanding up to the present time."
[Anonymous referee, Physical Review Letters]. This error is considered alleged because "the only imaginable way" argument is an argument about the referee's imagination and not about the result of the paper. Furthermore, if what the referee says is "the only imaginable way" then how is it that the "details may differ"? Apparently it is not the only imaginable way even in the referee's opinion.
(3) "The author explains the 2.7K cosmic background radiation as being distant star light which has been 'redshifted' and attenuated by absorption."
[Dr. Michael S. Turner, Divisional Associate Editor, Physical Review Letters] This error is considered alleged because what Dr. Turner is talking about is not in the paper. Incidentally some of the results of the paper are based on the fact that the cosmic background radiation is not "distant star light", which is just opposite to what Dr. Turner thinks is in the paper.
(4) "The effect of light propagation on the expansion of the universe is of course taken into account in all the cosmological situations, contrary to what the author says in his first sentence. [..] light makes the Universe expand a little slower."
[Anonymous referee, Il Nuovo Cimento] This error is considered alleged because the author does not say in his first sentence what referee thinks he says. As the matter of fact, nowhere in his paper the author treats "expansion of the universe" as real.
(5) "[The paper does not support big bang hypothesis and] there are three strong reasons for believing in Big Bang theory. One is that the redshifts are explained in a standard way as Doppler shifts [...]. The second is that it explains easily the origin of the 2.7K cosmic microwave background. The third is that it explains the existence of the heavier elements in considerable detail. Any competing theory has to be equally successful in those three areas."
[Dr. Helmut A. Abt, Managing Editor, Astrophysical Journal] This error is considered alleged because it doesn't mater how many reasons there are for believing in a theory. If the theory violates one valid physical principle it can't be right. The big bang hypothesis violates more than one valid physical principle. For that reason it can't be considered right even if it explained all the mysteries of the universe (as all the existing religions do and still some scientists don't consider them valid theories). The violation of physical principles by the big bang hypothesis has been the reason for the paper. The paper presents solutions to the first two problems mentioned by Dr. Abt (potentially wrong solutions but for a while not violating any physical principle). So the paper is not a "competing theory" but fills an empty space in the understanding of the universe, which is not filled by any scientific (consistent with the rest of physics) explanation yet. It is not a theory but a simple conclusion of Einstein's theory of gravity, even accidentally (for different reason) agreed upon by Einstein himself. The important thing is not whether it explains all the things that the big bang hypothesis explains but that explaining some of them it does not violate valid physical principles. As far as the third problem is considered, not addressing it can't be of course a reason for the solutions to the first two problems being wrong.
(6) "The paper is unfortunately misguided. [...]. Global expansion (or contraction) is not only necessary but forced in the situation described, in any reasonable curved space theory."
[Anonymous referee, Journal of Physics] This error is considered alleged since even if the referee's proposition about the global expansion could be proven it would not imply that the results of the paper are wrong. The results of the paper make only the global expansion unnecessary to explain the observations. They don't imply the lack of global expansion and so its possible existence is irrelevant for the results.
(7) "Thank you for sending your interesting paper to us. I regret that we cannot offer to publish it, as it seems to me there is a basic error in the calculation. You have a photon traveling through a uniform distribution of dust and declare, rightly I think, that the dust particles behind the photon will exert a decelerating force. However, it is also true that the photons ahead will exert a comparable accelerating force, and I would assume (without any calculations) that the two forces cancel. I am sorry to be negative, but I hope these comments are of some use to you."
[Dr. David Lindley, Assistant Editor, Nature] This error is considered alleged since besides that it does not correspond to anything in the paper, Dr. Lindley apparently believes in accelerating and decelerating forces acting on photons despite that such forces disappeared from physics more than half a century ago. So his idea, "without any calculations", is not consistent with the contemporary theory of gravity. However his effort to help is appreciated.
The full response of Dr. Lindley is presented here to show that it is not all bad with the editors or referees of scientific journals. Even if none of them presents any valid critique of the paper, and some of them any knowledge of its contents, at least some of them want to help with the best advice that comes to their minds.

The above alleged errors were all presented by editors and referees of scientific journals. Below are remarks by private citizens who are just interested in gravity and therefore are not biased against the results and most likely don't have any particular interest in disproving them. Their remarks being objective are therefore more interesting. To bad there is only so few of them, and none related to the relativistic nature of the phenomenon. Even editor of "Nature" (alleged error 7) could think out only a vague Newtonian argument against the results ("without any calculations"). An objection to the results from the point of view of general relativity might have been the most interesting. Unfortunately none of general relativity experts who had been asked to evaluate the results found any valid argument against them from point of view of general relativity; at least not yet, which is only 20 years so far (in February 2005).

(8) "[...] it seems to me that your analysis would require a redshift due to the earth's atmosphere, and panes of glass, not to mention telescope lenses [and there seems to be no such redshift in the real world]".
[Bjarne G. Nilsen] Objections (8) and (9) may br answered together: the anaysis requires such a redshift but it predicts also that it is surely too small to be detected. The redshift due to the presence of the atmosphere (to the increase of gravitational energy of the atmosphere when the mass of the earth increases by the mass of a photon that hits the earth) is, as it is easy to calculate, only of order of 10^-18 and so it is many orders of magnitude below the present sensitivity of detection, and therefore negligible for all practical purposes. Redshift from the increase of gravitational energy of other objects (like lenses) is even more orders of magnitude smaller (as many as their masses are smaller than the mass of the earth atmosphere) so it is also negligible. Redshift from the presence of our galaxy is already counted in as the part of the redshift from all the galaxies in the universe that the photon passes on its way, which is not that much neither, but detectable, when the number of galaxies is of order of 10¹¹ (estimated number of galaxies in the universe).
(9) "Your effect is proportional to density and to distance. If this is valid also for 'large' densities, one must expect huge effects from our atmosphere, and also from traversing our galaxy. As far as I know there are no indications for such an effect."
[S. Refsdal, Universitaet Hamburg]
(10) [The approach creates, a possibly unsolvable, "clock paradox" in which two (or more) clocks in the universe, at rest in relation to each other, each runs faster than all other clocks.]
[Tom Cohoe, Compuserve Physics Forum] It's interesting that only one person mentioned that paradox. It might be either due to the fact that he is a really smart guy (as I know from elswhere) or to the fact that other people noticed also the solution of the paradox. I leave finding the solution to the readers not to take the fun away from them, and present it only when asked. I just mention an interesting fact that it is impossible to prove that a real logical contradiction is produced by this paradox (of course if it were real it wouldn't be a paradox but a real logical contradiction that would invalidate the results).
(11) [The influence of gravitational energy transferred from the photons to the galaxies on the positions of those galaxies (that is ignored in the paper) may be the reason for a possibly false result.]
[Clay Spence, Compuserve Physics Forum] To understand the physics of this objection one might imagine a tennis ball bouncing from the earth. Obviously the movement of the earth responding to the movement of the ball will influence the movement of the ball and the bouncing may be a bit smaller. So a small error is introduced by neglecting the movement of the earth. Obviously even smaller error would be introduced by neglecting the movement of a galaxy on the ball and even smaller by neglecting influence of a movement of the galaxy on the photon. If we don't worry that the movement of the earth may riun a tennis game then there is even less reason to worry that a movement of a galaxy will ruin the calculations of the redshift. If someone is worrying anyway, he may make a simple estimation of the amount of error to see that the influence of the displacement of the galaxy caused by the photon, on the movement of that photon is still much smaller than our ability to detect it.
(12) [Jim is an idiot.]
[Dr. Frank E. Reed, Gravity Physicist, Compuserve Physics Forum] Even if true, despite the deviation of Jim's IQ from the average in wrong direction to support the proposition, it does not make Jim's results automatically wrong even if the results slightly modify the gravity physics where Dr. Reed quite justifiably claims his superior knowledge. The result may be still right (see the remark of Galileo at the bottom of this page) and still needs a better argument to be disproved.
(13) "After a short appraisal of your premises, I think you are using the relativistic mass of photons to calculate their gravitational pull. I'm no expert on General Relativity, but I believe only rest-mass causes gravitational pull."
[Jonathan Doolin, good4usoul@yahoo.com] Note: Normally I don't place here objections that contradict elementary physics however Mr. Doolin insisted on placing here his objection and since my explanation why his idea is silly may benefit also other people who are not familiar with physics of gravity here it is: The "gravitational pull" (a term from Newtonian gravity) is proportional of course to so called gravitational mass (M and m in Newtonian formula for "gravitational force" F = G M m/r²). Newtonian mechanics says that gravitational mass must be equal to inertial mass if all objects fall with the same acceleration (as they do). The inertial mass is called relativistic mass because it changes with velocity as in m = m_o/sqrt(1 - v²/c²) where v is velocity of the object of rest mass m_o and c is speed of light. So relativistic mass being the same as inertial mass is necessarily the same as gravitational mass, the one that "causes gravitational pull", and so "gravitational pull" is not caused by rest mass as Mr. Doolin believes.
(14) "[Energy] is not conserved, and further discussion of this issue is too repetitive for sci.physics.research."
[Prof. John Baez, gravity physicists, moderator, sci.physics.research]
On another occasion Prof. Baez proposed the following epistemological theorem: "It is always surprising when it happens, but sometimes to learn more about the world we must stop asking certain questions... ...namely, those based on false assumptions."
Prof. Baez expressed an idea that energy is not conserved and in his other texts he has been assuring me that it is conserved only approximately, only in Newtonian physics, because energy can't be conserved in an expanding universe.
Yet in this particular case the result is that the universe may be stationary so the postulated by Prof. Baez non conservation of energy remains unproven as long as it hangs only on the assumption that the universe is expanding, i.e. it's a non sequitur. So considering an error an assumption that energy is strictly conserved has to be considered an alleged error.
Also the epistemological theorem by Prof. Baez about ways of learning more about the world, which he uses to reject questions from the physics news group, leaves open the question about who is to decide whose assumptions are false. Since Prof. Baez is a moderator his opinion is bound to prevail however in the best case it is orthogonal to the scientific truth and it might be not if he is as good physicists as he is an epistemologist. See also comments on Prof. Baez's epistemology in Einstein's Gravitation for Poets and Science Teachers.
(15) "My judgement that your manuscript above was of insufficient importance and interest for publication in this journal was based on the belief that the argument that lead to your conclusion was too speculative and therefore not convincing. [...] It is doubtful then that a photon could lose or gain energy through a gravitational interaction with the dust. Furthere more, if it did lose energy to the dust, the dust would heat up, which would have observational consequences, which, as far as I am aware, have not been seen."
[Jerome Malenfant, Senior Assistant Editor, Physical Review Letters] Here Dr Malenfant justifies his rejection of Jim's paper titled "Hubble redshift in Einstein's universe", which shows that the general relativity predicts the cosmological redshift, its value known as "Hubble constant", turning out to be H_o = c / R_E, where c is speed of light and R_E is "Einstein's radius", predicts the value of apparent universal expansion so far known only as "dark energy", and possibly the 'anomalous' acceleration of Pioneers, all verified observationally with accuracy to one σ.
Dr Malenfant is apparently neither aware that photons don't "lose energy" in free fall nor more trivial things like that "particles of dust" in "Einstein's universe" are meant to be galaxies or even clusters of galaxies and so it is highly unlikely that "if a single photon did lose energy to "them, they "would heat up, which would have observational consequences", which he brings as the reason for the rejection of Jim's documented claim that the general relativity correctly predicts many cosmological phenomena which scientists are not yet aware of.

"In question of science the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual." [Galileo Galilei, 1632] a quote signaling that what's above is surely by a crank and so it souldn't be believed blindly but judged only on its own merit.

(alleged) errors	Jim's comments
(1) "[...] too speculative [...]. Maybe our judgement is at fault but, based on that judgement, our decision must remain against publication." [Dr Philip Campbell, Physical Sciences Editor, Nature, February 1985].	This error is considered alleged because "too speculative" is too vague a term to figure out what the error is especially when the editor himself is not sure of his judgement.
(2) "This paper is seriously unsound and must not be published. The main result of the paper is apparently that the universe is static or stationary, i.e. not expanding [...]. The only imaginable way to account for both the microwave background and the cosmological redshift is to assume that the universe began as a hot dense fireball (details may differ) and has been expanding up to the present time." [Anonymous referee, Physical Review Letters].	This error is considered alleged because "the only imaginable way" argument is an argument about the referee's imagination and not about the result of the paper. Furthermore, if what the referee says is "the only imaginable way" then how is it that the "details may differ"? Apparently it is not the only imaginable way even in the referee's opinion.
(3) "The author explains the 2.7K cosmic background radiation as being distant star light which has been 'redshifted' and attenuated by absorption." [Dr. Michael S. Turner, Divisional Associate Editor, Physical Review Letters]	This error is considered alleged because what Dr. Turner is talking about is not in the paper. Incidentally some of the results of the paper are based on the fact that the cosmic background radiation is not "distant star light", which is just opposite to what Dr. Turner thinks is in the paper.
(4) "The effect of light propagation on the expansion of the universe is of course taken into account in all the cosmological situations, contrary to what the author says in his first sentence. [..] light makes the Universe expand a little slower." [Anonymous referee, Il Nuovo Cimento]	This error is considered alleged because the author does not say in his first sentence what referee thinks he says. As the matter of fact, nowhere in his paper the author treats "expansion of the universe" as real.
(5) "[The paper does not support big bang hypothesis and] there are three strong reasons for believing in Big Bang theory. One is that the redshifts are explained in a standard way as Doppler shifts [...]. The second is that it explains easily the origin of the 2.7K cosmic microwave background. The third is that it explains the existence of the heavier elements in considerable detail. Any competing theory has to be equally successful in those three areas." [Dr. Helmut A. Abt, Managing Editor, Astrophysical Journal]	This error is considered alleged because it doesn't mater how many reasons there are for believing in a theory. If the theory violates one valid physical principle it can't be right. The big bang hypothesis violates more than one valid physical principle. For that reason it can't be considered right even if it explained all the mysteries of the universe (as all the existing religions do and still some scientists don't consider them valid theories). The violation of physical principles by the big bang hypothesis has been the reason for the paper. The paper presents solutions to the first two problems mentioned by Dr. Abt (potentially wrong solutions but for a while not violating any physical principle). So the paper is not a "competing theory" but fills an empty space in the understanding of the universe, which is not filled by any scientific (consistent with the rest of physics) explanation yet. It is not a theory but a simple conclusion of Einstein's theory of gravity, even accidentally (for different reason) agreed upon by Einstein himself. The important thing is not whether it explains all the things that the big bang hypothesis explains but that explaining some of them it does not violate valid physical principles. As far as the third problem is considered, not addressing it can't be of course a reason for the solutions to the first two problems being wrong.
(6) "The paper is unfortunately misguided. [...]. Global expansion (or contraction) is not only necessary but forced in the situation described, in any reasonable curved space theory." [Anonymous referee, Journal of Physics]	This error is considered alleged since even if the referee's proposition about the global expansion could be proven it would not imply that the results of the paper are wrong. The results of the paper make only the global expansion unnecessary to explain the observations. They don't imply the lack of global expansion and so its possible existence is irrelevant for the results.
(7) "Thank you for sending your interesting paper to us. I regret that we cannot offer to publish it, as it seems to me there is a basic error in the calculation. You have a photon traveling through a uniform distribution of dust and declare, rightly I think, that the dust particles behind the photon will exert a decelerating force. However, it is also true that the photons ahead will exert a comparable accelerating force, and I would assume (without any calculations) that the two forces cancel. I am sorry to be negative, but I hope these comments are of some use to you." [Dr. David Lindley, Assistant Editor, Nature]	This error is considered alleged since besides that it does not correspond to anything in the paper, Dr. Lindley apparently believes in accelerating and decelerating forces acting on photons despite that such forces disappeared from physics more than half a century ago. So his idea, "without any calculations", is not consistent with the contemporary theory of gravity. However his effort to help is appreciated. The full response of Dr. Lindley is presented here to show that it is not all bad with the editors or referees of scientific journals. Even if none of them presents any valid critique of the paper, and some of them any knowledge of its contents, at least some of them want to help with the best advice that comes to their minds.

(8) "[...] it seems to me that your analysis would require a redshift due to the earth's atmosphere, and panes of glass, not to mention telescope lenses [and there seems to be no such redshift in the real world]". [Bjarne G. Nilsen]	Objections (8) and (9) may br answered together: the anaysis requires such a redshift but it predicts also that it is surely too small to be detected. The redshift due to the presence of the atmosphere (to the increase of gravitational energy of the atmosphere when the mass of the earth increases by the mass of a photon that hits the earth) is, as it is easy to calculate, only of order of 10^-18 and so it is many orders of magnitude below the present sensitivity of detection, and therefore negligible for all practical purposes. Redshift from the increase of gravitational energy of other objects (like lenses) is even more orders of magnitude smaller (as many as their masses are smaller than the mass of the earth atmosphere) so it is also negligible. Redshift from the presence of our galaxy is already counted in as the part of the redshift from all the galaxies in the universe that the photon passes on its way, which is not that much neither, but detectable, when the number of galaxies is of order of 10¹¹ (estimated number of galaxies in the universe).
(9) "Your effect is proportional to density and to distance. If this is valid also for 'large' densities, one must expect huge effects from our atmosphere, and also from traversing our galaxy. As far as I know there are no indications for such an effect." [S. Refsdal, Universitaet Hamburg]
(10) [The approach creates, a possibly unsolvable, "clock paradox" in which two (or more) clocks in the universe, at rest in relation to each other, each runs faster than all other clocks.] [Tom Cohoe, Compuserve Physics Forum]	It's interesting that only one person mentioned that paradox. It might be either due to the fact that he is a really smart guy (as I know from elswhere) or to the fact that other people noticed also the solution of the paradox. I leave finding the solution to the readers not to take the fun away from them, and present it only when asked. I just mention an interesting fact that it is impossible to prove that a real logical contradiction is produced by this paradox (of course if it were real it wouldn't be a paradox but a real logical contradiction that would invalidate the results).
(11) [The influence of gravitational energy transferred from the photons to the galaxies on the positions of those galaxies (that is ignored in the paper) may be the reason for a possibly false result.] [Clay Spence, Compuserve Physics Forum]	To understand the physics of this objection one might imagine a tennis ball bouncing from the earth. Obviously the movement of the earth responding to the movement of the ball will influence the movement of the ball and the bouncing may be a bit smaller. So a small error is introduced by neglecting the movement of the earth. Obviously even smaller error would be introduced by neglecting the movement of a galaxy on the ball and even smaller by neglecting influence of a movement of the galaxy on the photon. If we don't worry that the movement of the earth may riun a tennis game then there is even less reason to worry that a movement of a galaxy will ruin the calculations of the redshift. If someone is worrying anyway, he may make a simple estimation of the amount of error to see that the influence of the displacement of the galaxy caused by the photon, on the movement of that photon is still much smaller than our ability to detect it.
(12) [Jim is an idiot.] [Dr. Frank E. Reed, Gravity Physicist, Compuserve Physics Forum]	Even if true, despite the deviation of Jim's IQ from the average in wrong direction to support the proposition, it does not make Jim's results automatically wrong even if the results slightly modify the gravity physics where Dr. Reed quite justifiably claims his superior knowledge. The result may be still right (see the remark of Galileo at the bottom of this page) and still needs a better argument to be disproved.
(13) "After a short appraisal of your premises, I think you are using the relativistic mass of photons to calculate their gravitational pull. I'm no expert on General Relativity, but I believe only rest-mass causes gravitational pull." [Jonathan Doolin, good4usoul@yahoo.com]	Note: Normally I don't place here objections that contradict elementary physics however Mr. Doolin insisted on placing here his objection and since my explanation why his idea is silly may benefit also other people who are not familiar with physics of gravity here it is: The "gravitational pull" (a term from Newtonian gravity) is proportional of course to so called gravitational mass (M and m in Newtonian formula for "gravitational force" F = G M m/r²). Newtonian mechanics says that gravitational mass must be equal to inertial mass if all objects fall with the same acceleration (as they do). The inertial mass is called relativistic mass because it changes with velocity as in m = m_o/sqrt(1 - v²/c²) where v is velocity of the object of rest mass m_o and c is speed of light. So relativistic mass being the same as inertial mass is necessarily the same as gravitational mass, the one that "causes gravitational pull", and so "gravitational pull" is not caused by rest mass as Mr. Doolin believes.
(14) "[Energy] is not conserved, and further discussion of this issue is too repetitive for sci.physics.research." [Prof. John Baez, gravity physicists, moderator, sci.physics.research] On another occasion Prof. Baez proposed the following epistemological theorem: "It is always surprising when it happens, but sometimes to learn more about the world we must stop asking certain questions... ...namely, those based on false assumptions."	Prof. Baez expressed an idea that energy is not conserved and in his other texts he has been assuring me that it is conserved only approximately, only in Newtonian physics, because energy can't be conserved in an expanding universe. Yet in this particular case the result is that the universe may be stationary so the postulated by Prof. Baez non conservation of energy remains unproven as long as it hangs only on the assumption that the universe is expanding, i.e. it's a non sequitur. So considering an error an assumption that energy is strictly conserved has to be considered an alleged error. Also the epistemological theorem by Prof. Baez about ways of learning more about the world, which he uses to reject questions from the physics news group, leaves open the question about who is to decide whose assumptions are false. Since Prof. Baez is a moderator his opinion is bound to prevail however in the best case it is orthogonal to the scientific truth and it might be not if he is as good physicists as he is an epistemologist. See also comments on Prof. Baez's epistemology in Einstein's Gravitation for Poets and Science Teachers.
(15) "My judgement that your manuscript above was of insufficient importance and interest for publication in this journal was based on the belief that the argument that lead to your conclusion was too speculative and therefore not convincing. [...] It is doubtful then that a photon could lose or gain energy through a gravitational interaction with the dust. Furthere more, if it did lose energy to the dust, the dust would heat up, which would have observational consequences, which, as far as I am aware, have not been seen." [Jerome Malenfant, Senior Assistant Editor, Physical Review Letters]	Here Dr Malenfant justifies his rejection of Jim's paper titled "Hubble redshift in Einstein's universe", which shows that the general relativity predicts the cosmological redshift, its value known as "Hubble constant", turning out to be H_o = c / R_E, where c is speed of light and R_E is "Einstein's radius", predicts the value of apparent universal expansion so far known only as "dark energy", and possibly the 'anomalous' acceleration of Pioneers, all verified observationally with *accuracy to one σ*. Dr Malenfant is apparently neither aware that photons don't "lose energy" in free fall nor more trivial things like that "particles of dust" in "Einstein's universe" are meant to be galaxies or even clusters of galaxies and so it is highly unlikely that "if a single photon did lose energy to "them, they "would heat up, which would have observational consequences", which he brings as the reason for the rejection of Jim's documented claim that the general relativity correctly predicts many cosmological phenomena which scientists are not yet aware of.