The Eagle Has Landed - Signal Propagation Delay

[jab2]

Being born and living in a country far from the USA, my source of info on the moon landings was mainly through radio and newspaper reports. I was however a firm believer in that it really happened, although my grandfather would always maintain it was a lie and un-Bible like. :QuestionM

 

With the start of the global info age, I was fortunate to be a relatively early internet user. Through the internet I started reading reports of nay sayers with compelling arguments against the moon landings and also the counter explanations to their arguments. Since I have a little physics and chemistry background, I could always understand the flawed arguments of the hoax crowd.

 

Today I happened on a web page that really upped this "bogus work" that was to have been done to a superbly high levels.

 

Those of you familiar with the Special Relativity deduction of the Relativity of Simultaneity, would know that the sequence of events as experienced by different observers separate in space will differ due to their distance from the source of the events. On a page by John Walker, co-author of AutoCAD, on the topic, he presents radio communication recordings of the Apollo 11 moon landing to illustrate this principle. Some of the recordings is "manufactured" to illustrate the point. What is clear however is the difference between the sequence of events as recorded on earth compared to the sequence and timing of events as recorded by the lunar lander recorder.

 

This page has nothing to do with the "hoax" but it struck me that if this, the first moon landing was a hoax, the designers of this "hoax" has my greatest respect, as they even accommodated the Relativity of Simultaneity in there "hoax".

 

But then, the "budget" for this "Holywood stunt" is becoming so high with all the branches of physics so accurately portrayed, that it would be easier to believe in the reality of the moon landings than in the fabrication of it.

 

I am however amazed that there are still people, posting as recent as this year, that perpetuate this hoax believe and tirelessly work to debunk the moon landings. For it to have been a hoax, a hell of a lot of work (and money) must have gone into this efforts.

[Tormod]

Good post. But I think you should change the title of the thread...it's not really about whether the moon landing(s) were fake, but about a website which uses a twisted understanding of relativity to "prove" it were so.

[Janus]

As Tormod has already pointed out, the author of the web page linked obviously does not understand what the Relativity of Simultaneity is. All he is demonstrating propagation delay, something that would exist with or without taking Relativity into account. It is equivalent to, when at a ball game, you see the batter strike the ball before you hear the crack of the bat. This does not mean that you conclude that the events of ball hitting bat and the sound it creates did not happen simultaneously. Only that it took longer for the sound to reach your eyes than the light did.

 

Relativity of Simultaneity deals with the fact that observers in motion with respect to each other will not agree as to what order the events that originally created the light actually occured.

[modest]

As Tormod has already pointed out, the author of the web page linked obviously does not understand what the Relativity of Simultaneity is. All he is demonstrating propagation delay, something that would exist with or without taking Relativity into account.

 

The site addresses it:

 

Technical note: Some physicists prefer to reserve the term “relativity of simultaneity” for cases where observers are in motion relative to one another and the effects of special relativity obtain... But to me, the phrase “relativity of simultaneity” means precisely what it says, notwithstanding relativistic effects or their absence. In this case, three observers of the same two events see three different orders in which they appeared to occur from their particular vantage points; hence their perception of simultaneity is relative even though it is entirely due to light travel time instead of motion.

 

Despite that oddity, I think it's an interesting real-world and historic exercise or perspective on signal lag. He's not making any extraordinary claims about relativity or the moon landing. But, rather does a good job of testing an hypothesis. I've heard that transmission many times and never considered why Armstrong was pausing mid-sentence there.

 

~modest

[jab2]

John Walker did not use the sound recordings to prove whether the moon landings were fake or not. Nowhere on the site does he say so or even infer that.

 

My point is that if the moon landings were a hoax as some wants us to believe, the planning and execution of this would have been huge, as it had to accommodate a lot of phenomena in physics, which could have been checked later. Even things that would not have been obvious to the general public that was to have been the people to have been "fooled" like the timing of the radio events as experienced by the ground station and by Columbia/Eagle on the Apollo 11 mission.

 

Tormod, after having read para 1 on Definition of Simultaneity from Einstein's 1905 paper on The Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies, I am a bit, or actually totally, unclear as to what you mean by "uses a twisted understanding of relativity". Do you care to explain?

I must say I'm not a scholar of Einstein, other than his most basic theories, so please bare with my ignorance.

[Tormod]

Tormod, after having read para 1 on Definition of Simultaneity from Einstein's 1905 paper on The Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies, I am a bit, or actually totally, unclear as to what you mean by "uses a twisted understanding of relativity". Do you care to explain?

I must say I'm not a scholar of Einstein, other than his most basic theories, so please bare with my ignorance.

 

You got me there. I was fooled by your title into thinking the page was about the lunar hoax...but I didn't read the entire page and I didn't realize it was from Fourmilab! Good one. Now that's why the new topic title is much better. :evil:

[TheBigDog]

The biggest question I had about faking the moon landings is why was there the near calamity of Apollo 13? Why would you fake failure? How about Apollo 1? Why would you kill Astronauts? And was it Apollo 8 that orbited the moon but didn't land? Why bother with all of that if you are faking it?

 

Bill

[jab2]

Exactly, Bill. The budget to have faked this all to such detail would be comparable to doing the real thing.

[Boerseun]

I've never fallen for the hoax crowd's bull; shine a laser up at the moon and be amazed as the reflectors (put there by human hands) shine back at you. It's as simple as that. But to be the Devil's Advocate (the poor sod needs a helping hand every now and then), the failures as mentioned by Bill could have been intentional to lend creedence to the entire thing - letting people raise the very question you asked!

 

On the one conspiracy theory site I read that the Apollo 1 'nauts were killed because they threatened to expose the hoax. Go figure.

 

I don't think there's any way of proving anything to anybody who wishes to believe the opposite - regardless of facts, evidence or proof.

[jab2]

don't think there's any way of proving anything to anybody who wishes to believe the opposite - regardless of facts, evidence or proof.

As per the first two quotes in my sig.

[Simon]

On the one conspiracy theory site I read that the Apollo 1 'nauts were killed because they threatened to expose the hoax.

 

In fact, that was the plot of "Capricorn One"!