Scenario
3C:
Exact Satellite GPS Time Changes
However, another consideration must still be explored. How is
it possible that Einstein managed to get his equations accurate
when his reasoning has been seen to be flawed? If it is not
time changing, but just the clock, then why are his formulae
apparently being used?
One
answer applicable to some scenarios could be that he simply
measured how clocks on Earth moved at different rates depending
on their height above sea level – and from there figured
out his formulae. Another answer in other scenarios is that
the calculations or even the formulae are not accurate at all.
There
are many online claims that the GPS satellite adjustment would
require a 38 microsecond difference per day for Relativity.
This daily amount is said to be comprised of +45 microseconds
for General Relativity and -7 microseconds for Special Relativity.
Supposedly this would result in an adjustment for the Relativities
of about 11km per day.
This
is currently the top-ranked search-engine source for this claim:
www.astronomy.ohio-state.edu/~pogge/Ast162/Unit5/gps.html
(search “GPS relativity”)
However,
consider this: If a satellite is moving at 4000 m/s and its
clock is fast by 0.001 seconds in a day, then it will be accurate
to within 4 meters in a day. But if the difference is 0.000038
seconds as Ohio State suggests then:
0.000038s
x 4000m/s = 0.152m … (Calculation i)
About
15cm per day seems to be the correction that should be required
for both Relativities for the moving satellite. My first point
of corroboration for 15cm as the apparent correction for the
satellite’s daily difference of 38 microseconds is here:
alternativephysics.org
I’ll
get back to how Ohio State (and most of the rest of the online
sources) made that 11km error adjustment in a bit. But first
let me clarify that a position on the Earth is determined by
the GPS from the comparative proportional delay between the
signals sent to the receiver on Earth from numerous satellites.
Only
the proportions between the delays in the signals matter for
this, and these proportions would all be affected by the same
Relativistic proportion. (Careful, there are two types of proportion
here.) So the proportions of the signals to each other would
be the same regardless of Relativity. The Relativity proportions
would cancel each other out!
How
the GPS works is a process called ‘trilateration’,
and is similar to triangulation. Here is a good online account
of trilateration:
www.mio.com/technology-trilateration.htm
A
simple way to think about this is to consider your self as a
target within an equilateral triangle with satellites at each
corner of the triangle. If a signal is sent from each satellite
to the target, and the times each signal took are the same amount,
then it follows that the target must be at the center of the
triangle.
If
we double or halve the time it takes for all of the signals,
then nothing changes. We can also change the size of the triangle
without getting a different result. The same proportional process
works for any other position of the target in relation to any
other triangle.
It
also makes no difference what the clocks at each point on the
triangle register. So long as the clocks all have the same wrong
starting time, nothing changes. This is because the GPS compares
the delays from all the signals to the target in order to figure
the proportions. The clock on the target device itself has nothing
to do with it.
Even
if the velocity of the electromagnetic signal itself needed
to be altered for Relativity, the result is unchanged. It’s
a much simpler process than one at first thinks. In affect the
calculation is merely one of geometric proportions. Of course
it is not a 2-d triangular process, but a 3-d process instead.
But I am just explaining it in its simplest terms. We have to
just infer the extra dimension or read this link for a more
precise definition:
www.mio.com/technology-trilateration.htm
There
are a vast number of websites that claim all sorts of things,
best you take plenty of time looking around at all the varieties
of theories to be certain. It would be a good logical positivist
idea to actually double-check the arithmetic too. You can read
the mio.com description here:
www.mio.com/technology-gps-accuracy.htm.
There is no mention of Relativity at all in the accuracy of
GPS.
How
am I so sure that www.mio.com and alternativephysics.org are
correct? After all, the internet is so full of so many
claims about this. And the famous websites all say that GPS
does use Relativity. Think on it logically for yourself:
If
the clocks on the satellites were all somehow twice as slow
as the clocks on the Earth, it would not result in any adjustment
to how the position on the Earth is calculated because the geometric
proportions between the delays of the signals from the satellites
would be unchanged.
www.phys.lsu.edu/mog/mog9/node9.html
has this to say:
…at
present cannot easily perform tests of relativity with the system…
Several
relativistic effects are too small to affect the system at current
accuracy levels, but may become important as the system is improved;
these include gravitational time delays, frequency shifts of
clocks in satellites due to earth's quadrupole potential, and
space curvature
But
of course it may become feasible to actually measure the alleged
affects of Relativity on satellites at some point in the future.
A few sources suggest that such experiments are underway currently.
So every piece of this analysis is still immanent. But if you
do not believe that it is possible to see into the future, then
such experiments can only show how a ‘clock’ changes
due to the affects of gravity on the mechanism.
(iii)
