Sugar Industry corrupted health research

Originally posted by twhitehead
I disagree. If you can't tell whether research is correct without looking at the sponsor then your aren't doing it right. We need systems that double check research regardless of who sponsored it. No research results should be assumed to be correct because the sponsor was neutral.
Bias almost always exists in scientific research. Researchers almost alway ...[text shortened]... other reward systems mostly goes towards new findings rather than double-checking old findings.

There are potentially ethical and practical problems with this. One would have to repeat large scale randomized trials for medicinal drugs which can take up to ten years. That means one can find oneself delaying a perfectly good medicine from use by an extra decade as well as incurring risks to trial subjects by pointlessly eliminating a drug one already knows is a duffer or giving half of them placebos which don't have harms but aren't expected to be effective either.

Originally posted by sonhouse
A person to listen to then. BTW I am working with my son in law, physicist ,Phd in statistical physic (used to be called 'biophysics' for some reason), on my grav lens formula.

Sorry, I never got round to finishing that little project.

Originally posted by DeepThought
There are potentially ethical and practical problems with this. One would have to repeat large scale randomized trials for medicinal drugs which can take up to ten years. That means one can find oneself delaying a perfectly good medicine from use by an extra decade as well as incurring risks to trial subjects by pointlessly eliminating a drug one alrea ...[text shortened]... giving half of them placebos which don't have harms but aren't expected to be effective either.

I don't quite understand. We currently have the problem that medicines sometimes get approved when they are actually dangerous or useless. I am not saying we should now halt all medicines until they are double-checked by everyone, I am saying we should encourage double checking and provide funding for it. Current incentives for research especially in medicine are in the wrong places. In medicine in particular, there needs to be incentives to find fault with drugs. Currently the only incentive is to find drugs that supposedly work as that is what makes money. Nobody gets paid to find that a drug doesn't work.

There are also two types of health research, there is research on drugs and research on health in general (such as the effects of sugar or fat). Major questions such as the effect of sugar or fat that are going to affect government approved dietary advice, food content etc for the whole nation, should be checked especially carefully. Yet that doesn't happen. Many major errors in the area of food and nutrition have gone virtually unnoticed for decades.

Originally posted by twhitehead
Sorry, I never got round to finishing that little project.

That's all right, I am finishing it, we (Son in law) and I are writing it up for publication.

My son in law Gandhi said it is not something earth shaking because it is only algebraic but it is original enough for a paper.

Originally posted by sonhouse
That's all right, I am finishing it, we (Son in law) and I are writing it up for publication.

My son in law Gandhi said it is not something earth shaking because it is only algebraic but it is original enough for a paper.

What I was planning to do was merely the calculation involved in how much energy reaches a given point along the focal line. There was nothing original in that as the formulas are well known and the phenomena in general is well known. There are surveys under way to search for inter-stellar planets and black holes etc using the phenomena. In addition it can be used to identify planets around stars. They go many steps further than I was planning and work out what complicated patterns will be seen when a multibody system creates the lens and maybe even use it to work out the mass of the planet.

Also the same formulas have been used to work out the mass distribution of distant galaxies which aids in the study of dark matter.

What might be original is your idea of using the extra energy to power a spacecraft, but I am somewhat sceptical about the extra energy being significant enough to be genuinely useful. If you are sending spacecraft out far enough that the sun's light is insufficient then it make sense to use alternative sources of energy such as nuclear.

Originally posted by twhitehead
What I was planning to do was merely the calculation involved in how much energy reaches a given point along the focal line. There was nothing original in that as the formulas are well known and the phenomena in general is well known. There are surveys under way to search for inter-stellar planets and black holes etc using the phenomena. In addition it ca ...[text shortened]... s light is insufficient then it make sense to use alternative sources of energy such as nuclear.

My formula for calculating the first focal point is original, nobody else came up with that.

Taking apart the grav constant and turning it into a number allowed me to rework the equation to give the actual focal point for a given radius and mass. I don't think anyone else even did that, turning the grav constant and c into a number since they are all constants the result is also a constant and therefore a number. 9.2 E-27 if I remember right, don't have it right in front of me. Or maybe it's 2.9 E-27, have to look up my notes.

Originally posted by sonhouse
My formula for calculating the first focal point is original, nobody else came up with that.

Taking apart the grav constant and turning it into a number allowed me to rework the equation to give the actual focal point for a given radius and mass. I don't think anyone else even did that, turning the grav constant and c into a number since they are all con ...[text shortened]... ber right, don't have it right in front of me. Or maybe it's 2.9 E-27, have to look up my notes.

But that's just basic maths. And no, you are certainly not the first to have worked out the first focal point and no your formula is not original. Combining constants is standard practice in astronomy.

For the sun the distance is quoted on Wikipedia.
There is even a plan to send a spacecraft there:
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/601331/a-space-mission-to-the-gravitational-focus-of-the-sun/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FOCAL_(spacecraft)

For a bunch of formulas see this paper:
http://mnras.oxfordjournals.org/content/341/2/577.full.pdf

Originally posted by sonhouse
My formula for calculating the first focal point is original, nobody else came up with that.

Taking apart the grav constant and turning it into a number allowed me to rework the equation to give the actual focal point for a given radius and mass. I don't think anyone else even did that, turning the grav constant and c into a number since they are all con ...[text shortened]... ber right, don't have it right in front of me. Or maybe it's 2.9 E-27, have to look up my notes.

When you say the "grav constant" what do you mean? Do you mean Newton's constant G which is 6.674×10^−11 N⋅m^2/kg^2? The dimensions of this constant are metres cubed per second squared per kilogram. If you divide by a couple of factors of the speed of light you will get 7.41x10^-28 metres per kilogram. If you now multiply by a mass you will indeed get a distance, but the distance you should have obtained is called the Schwarzschild radius, apart from a factor of 2.

Wikipedia helpfully gives GM for the sun, it comes out at 1.3271244E-11 km^3/s^2. Dividing this by the speed of light in kilometres per second (3E5 km/s) gets us to 1.474 km, the factor of 2 gets us to 2.948 km, which is the radius of a solar mass black hole. The mass of the Earth is of the order of 300,000 times less so the Schwarzschild radius is of the order of 1 centimetre.

The angle of deflection is 2r/b, where r is the Schwarzschild radius and b the impact parameter (distance of closest approach), for the sun. For an impact parameter of 1 solar radius, in other words for light just grazing the sun, we get 1.75 arc seconds. So we can get the point where parallel rays just grazing the sun converges to as 117,000 solar radii (1/tan(1.75 arc seconds)) and a solar radius is 0.00465 astronomical units to give a focus at 548 astronomical units.

So as long as your formula is something like b^2c^2/GM, where b is the radius of the sun and the other symbols have their usual meanings you will be out by no more than a factor of 4. One case where dimensional analysis (or a hack's guess as it's called in the trade) gives a pretty good answer.

Originally posted by DeepThought
When you say the "grav constant" what do you mean? Do you mean Newton's constant G which is 6.674×10^−11 N⋅m^2/kg^2? The dimensions of this constant are metres cubed per second squared per kilogram. If you divide by a couple of factors of the speed of light you will get 7.41x10^-28 metres per kilogram. If you now multiply by a mass you will indeed g ...[text shortened]... dimensional analysis (or a hack's guess as it's called in the trade) gives a pretty good answer.

I am not doing any of that. I am using the original formula 4GM/c^2 r and making a new constant out of 4G/c^2, which I called Z. Then, the actual first focus for a certain radius and a certain mass is r^2/ZM.

It's good working with you about this, I have to go over the stuff again anyway just for my own satisfaction.

So 4*6.67408 E-11 = 2.669632E-10 divide by c^2, with c in meters, 299,792,458 m/s squared which is 8.987551787E16 (which is all my little casio FX115 will give me, but I know G is known to a lot less digits). So the result is the 4G/c^2 part as its own constant which comes out at 2.970366 E-27 which I designate as Z.

Then the focus for any mass and any radius is r^2/ZM, r in meters, mass in Kg. I didn't see that in the paper.