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CHAPTER EIGHT

HYADEANS HAD NEVER FALLEN into the Terran habit of creating false gods that would reveal the ultimate truths of the Universe. One of the most recent creations to be elevated to the status of infallible deity was mathematics. The Hyadeans took advantage of the fortuitous fact that some mathematical procedures approximated real-world processes sufficiently closely over a limited range to be useful, and looking no further than that, found an invaluable servant. Terrans turned things upside down by persuading themselves that their manipulations of formal systems of symbols defined "laws" that reality was somehow obliged to imitate. In doing so they subjected themselves to a tyrannical master. 

Relativity theory had pursued mathematical elegance by seeking to extend to electromagnetism the familiar principles of Galilean relativity, whereby the equations describing mechanical motion came out the same regardless of whose moving reference frame measurements were made from. A consistent solution required that the velocity of light be the same for all observers, which became one of the theory's postulates. Peculiar distortions of space and time were necessary to maintain a velocity as constant, and the various relativistic transformations followed. These also enabled the famous experiment by Michelson and Morley in 1886, and its variants repeated to greater accuracies ever since, which failed to find an ether "wind" due to the Earth's motion around the Sun, as demonstrating that there was no ether—no "preferred" reference frame in which "true" laws of physics operated.  

The Hyadeans went out into space—which required, after all, solid engineering more than esoteric theories—and discovered that the sought-after medium was simply the locally dominant electromagnetic field. Since in the vicinity of Earth this traveled with the Earth around the Sun, the Terran physicists had, in effect, been trying to measure the airspeed of their plane with their instruments anchored solidly inside the cabin.  

In the Hyadean scheme of things the Galilean transformations remained valid; yet experiments performed on the surfaces of planets yielded the same results that appeared to support relativity. The reason was that the electric field surrounding a photon experienced an aerodynamic-like distortion when moving through a gravity field, which affected the propagation velocity. Since local gravity varied from place to place, the speed of light changed in different parts of the cosmos, upsetting all manner of long-cherished Terran calculations and models. 

This distortion was responsible for the phenomenon measured as inertial mass, which explained why mass increased with velocity. Increase in mass resulted in the slowing down of a moving system's clock rates. Hence, "time" didn't dilate in the way relativity maintained—for example to extend the lifetimes of incoming muons created in the upper atmosphere. The "clocks" of particles moving through the Earth's gravity field ran slower than laboratory clocks at rest in it. Hence, the Twin Paradox didn't arise, and space and time remained what common sense had always said.  

The associated energy dynamics restricted velocities in situations where the gravitational field of the body being accelerated was small compared to the field through which the acceleration was taking place. This had been observed in experiments performed on Earth using nuclear particles, and been misread as a universal limit. But that was merely a locally valid approximation. Away from large gravitating masses, hyperlight velocities could be achieved with surprisingly little outlay of energy, and that was why the Hyadeans were able to measure their interstellar journeys in weeks and months. 

The gravitational effect itself emerged as a residue of the electrical asymmetry arising from the distortion of hadrons within nuclei by intense internal field stresses. Disturbances superposed on it propagated at close to ten billion times the speed of light, which afforded the basis for Hyadean long-range communications.  

Evidence hinting at such possibilities had been available on Earth all along, filed in the reports of unfashionable experiments and cited by critics of the orthodoxy. But the mainstream had always ignored it, or found ways to explain it away.  

Because it didn't fit with the theory. 

 

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Framed


Title: The Legend That Was Earth
Author: James P. Hogan
ISBN: 0-671-31945-0
Copyright: © 2000 by James P. Hogan
Publisher: Baen Books