Dale said:
If I understand correctly you believe that the experimental device you developed tests Mach’s principle, correct?
If you read my paper I said in the beginning that I do not take any position on the how or why of the causes of inertia. It is too controversial of a subject. The only position I take is that inertia is an extrinsic property of matter. I do lean toward a position but I chose not to discuss or include it in my paper. My paper was only focused with what inertia can do not what causes inertia. The main hypothesis of the final experiment was that inertial forces can impact the center of mass of a system.
The testable hypothesis which was derived from the friction equation stated that the time the platform moves in one direction as the spheres rounded their curves would be less then the time the platform moves in the opposite direction after the spheres make their inelastic collision with the platform. If you look at the graphs of the time differences it does seem to confirm the testable hypothesis.
Granted my experimental methods were crude and do not rise to the level of a rigorous scientific experiment. That is why I explicitly stated in my paper that more accurate experiments need to be conducted that would replicate and confirm the effect. The ideal experiment would be done in a zero-gravity environment.
Now, do I personally believe in Mach's principle? I probably lean in that direction because Einstein was initially interested in it. Here are some citations:
“Gravitation”, Misner, Thorne, Wheeler, page 543: “To make a long story short, one can say at once that Einstein’s theory (1) identifies gravitation as the mechanism by which matter there influences inertia here…”
“The Meaning of Relativity”, Lecture IV, Princeton University, Einstein, page 106: “1. The inertia of a body must increase when ponderable masses are piled up in its neighborhood.
2. A body must experience an accelerating
force (italics mine) when neighboring masses are accelerated, and, in fact, the force must be in the same direction as the acceleration.
3. A rotating hollow body must generate inside of itself a “Coriolis field”, (note the word field) which deflects moving bodies in the sense of the rotation, and a radial centrifugal field as well.” (Again note the word field used.)
“The Fabric of the Cosmos”, Brian Greene, page 416-417: “To see the connection to Mach, think about a version of frame dragging in which the massive, rotating object is a huge, hollow sphere. Calculations initiated in 1912 by Einstein (even before he completed general relativity), which were significantly extended in 1965 by Dieter Brill and Jeffrey Cohen, and finally completed in 1985 by the German physicists Herbert Pfister and K Braun, showed that space inside the hollow sphere would be dragged by the rotational motion and set into a whirlpool-like spin. If a stationary bucket filled with water – stationary as viewed from a distant vantage point- were placed inside such a rotating sphere , the calculations show that the spinning space would exert a
force (italics mine) on the stationary water , causing it to rise up the bucket walls and take on a concave shape.
…In fact, for a shell that contains enough mass, an amount on a par with that contained in the entire universe, the calculations show
that it doesn’t matter one bit whether you think the hollow sphere is spinning around the bucket , or the bucket spinning within the hollow sphere.” (Italics mine.)
