The Corrupt Use of Statistics in Divorce
Rates
Dr. Siepmann,
I read your a couple of your articles and found them quite enlightening. You
through in a teaser about post abortion death rates being higher the birth
givers. Have you expounded on that somewhere else?
Also I was wondering if you had researched the so called 50% percent divorce
rate? I heard a guy on talk radio who was being interviewed about this (I
was in the car and didn’t write down anything). I am paraphrasing but
he said the divorce rate is actually around 20%.
The “pro-divorce media and therapists” have disingenuously skewed the
numbers. One example he gave was as follows. Take 5 married couples who have
never been divorced and add my mother- in-law who has been married seven
times you get a total of 12 marriages and 6 divorces. Voila! a 50% divorce
rate. This pissed me off when I heard this!!!
It gets worse. If America records 200,000 marriages in a given year and
records 100,000 divorces in that same year, again 50% is thrown about.
However the 4+ million people who married previously but stayed married that
same year are ignored. Here I was dumbfounded.
He then broke down all sorts of factors including religious beliefs.
Promiscuity, living together, alcohol, and divorced parents. His finally
went something like this: Individual, virgin, Christians who meet someone
like themselves, marry. Their chance of divorce is .009%.
The church, at least mine, seems to believe the divorce rate in the church
is the same as out the church community. He said that is like saying your
chance of death in a hospital is 97% greater than dieing at a grocery store.
So tell that ambulance driver to take me to Safeway instead of Virginia
Mason.
Would love to know the truth!
Taylor Aldridge
ta@brainstormmedia.com
Dr. Siepmann responds:
Thank you for your email. When I was using the WHO data to evaluate the
lifetime risk of lung cancer to the smoker, I came across the statistics
which showed that he post-abortion death rate was higher than that for
giving birth. I did not have the time to pursue it any further though.
In regards to the divorce rate, you are indeed correct that the actual
divorce rate is about 20%. Here's the truth:
Pollster Louis Harris has written, "The idea that half of American marriages
are doomed is one of the most specious pieces of statistical nonsense ever
perpetuated in modern times. It all began when the Census Bureau noted
that during one year, there were 2.4 million marriages and 1.2 million
divorces. Someone did the math without calculating the 54 million marriages
already in existence, and presto, a ridiculous but quotable statistic was
born." Harris concludes, "Only one out of eight marriages will end in
divorce. In any single year, only about 2 percent of existing marriages will
break up."
--J. Allan Petersen in Better Families, quoted on the
Christianity.Net home page, "Preaching Resources," Copyright(c) 1996 by
Christianity Today, Inc./LEADERSHIP journal -- Summer 1996 Vol.XVII, No.3,
Page 69
More on the 50%
projection issue.
Your exactly right about multiple divorcers (a common occurrence) skewing
the statistics. Those who try to use the 50% figure are trying to promote a
liberal agenda where divorce is OK and normal and marriage is trivialized.
Keep up your pursuit of the Truth.
The Doppler Effect: A New Approach
The Doppler effect is so
common in every day occurrences that we are barely conscious of it. We
hear a siren from an ambulance or police car going by and we notice that
the sound is high as the siren approaches and becomes lower as the siren
passes us and moves away. The same thing happens with light. A star that
is receding from earth will emit light that is more reddish in color than
one that is at a fixed distance.
Rather than the
traditional treatment, using sound or light waves, we get a deeper
insight, and a clearer understanding, by using pulses of sound or light.
Suppose I am on a train, moving along a track and let the engine emit
pulses at one-second intervals – whether light or sound will make no
difference. What matters is the speed of the train relative to the
propagation of sound or light. To make matters simple we call v the ratio
of the speed of the train to that of the sound or light velocity. For
intuitive reasons, we first consider sound. To make the illustration even
easier we assume the train is speeding along at one half the speed of
sound. Now, let’s assume the train is speeding away from the observer. At
the beginning of the experiment the train is 10 sound seconds away. That is
to say he is far enough ahead that it takes 10 seconds for the sound to
reach the observer. A second later the train is 10.5 sound seconds ahead
because of the speed at which the train moves. At that point the engine
emits a second pulse. So when will the observer receive this pulse? The
answer in the case of sound is easy. The air carries the sound at the same
speed as the first pulse. If we add the one second delay to the extra
distance we get 1+ 0.5, so the sound will be heard at 11.5 seconds after it
is emitted. The spacing is 1.5 seconds at the receiver, even though it is
one second at the sender. In general the formula for the spacing is 1+v.
Nothing could be simpler. If it were a pure note that is sent, the received
tone would be a factor 1.5 lower. In the case of light the situation is
more complicated since there is no known medium, no aether to carry the
pulse of light.
If we turn the problem
around and let the light (or sound) pulses originate, at the point of
departure, on the ground, and ask when the train detects these, we have a
more tractable problem. The first pulse, by assumption, will be detected
10 seconds after emission. The second pulse, emitted one second later, must
travel 10.5 light seconds to reach the place where the train is one second
later. (Note: one light second is about 300,000km.) However, when this
pulse gets to that point, the train will have moved on, since it is moving
during the time that the pulse is underway. The train has advanced an
additional .25 light seconds. This is the famous tortoise and hare problem!
The pulse actually reaches the train two seconds after the first pulse was
emitted, not 1.5 seconds later, as was calculated in the previous case.
The formula now becomes 1/(1-v) for the spacing between pulses, that is to
say with v=0.5 the spacing is doubled. The received frequency is 1/2 the
magnitude of the emitted frequency. If blue light was emitted, red light is
received. The same result applies to sound. To revert to the original
problem, where the emitter in on the train, we can, in the case of light,
simply use the first principle of relativity. It allows us to interchange
sender and receiver. This is not the same as in the case of sound. The
first principle does not apply when there is air as the carrier. But the
principle shows that the movement of the receiver or that of the emitter
leads to the same result in the case of light.
Another way to understand
this is to imagine the source to be situated at the front of a long train,
whose other end just reaches to the second body at the time the experiment
begins. As the source moves away from the receiver the rear of the train
also recedes from the receiver. The light reaches the end of the train in
the time it would take to reach the receiver if the source were at rest.
But now it takes longer since the light must still cover the distance from
the end of the train to the receiver.
It is easy
to show that if the train is twice as long as the original distance between
source and receiver the end of the train will coincide with the receiver
when the light signal arrives – just as is the case if the receiver is in
motion.
The second
principle of relativity, that the speed of light is independent of the
movement of the source, is thereby ruled out. Under that principle we
should get the same result as for sound, in the case the sender is in
motion. We should remember that this argument was couched entirely in
terms of the spacing of pulses, or what amounts to the same thing, the
frequency of sound or light – not the wavelength.
It follows
that under Newtonian thinking, as well as under SRT, the Doppler effect for
light depends only on the total separation rate between the sender and
receiver - as is to be expected under symmetry. But it is larger than
predicted by SRT, which is why for a given Doppler Effect the recession
rate, and all that it implies in cosmology, is SMALLER than under SRT.
The Doppler
effect, in this case, is z=1, based on the decrease in frequency. No value
larger than this has been found, even for the most distant supernovae, in
the optical region, where presumably only motion plays a role. The larger
values of z, in the microwave region, are most likely due to energetic
effects and cannot be used to estimate cosmological distances. This in turn
implies that recession velocities larger than c/2 did not occur. The
implication is that the big bang was not nearly as dramatic as current
theories maintain. The universe could very well be the result of a gigantic
supernova, which in due time will collect its fragments, and repeat the
process of star formation, explosion, and reformation. An even more
important consequence is the following: Planck's formula, E = h x
frequency, asserts that the kinetic energy of a photon is proportional to
its frequency. But which frequency is to be used here, the emitted or the
received frequency? The formula carries the hidden assumption that the
receiver is stationary with respect to the source, so then the two are
equal.
An observer
does not know that the light signal originated from a moving source without
additional information. For example, if he knows that the light was
emitted from a hydrogen atom, and he knows the emission spectrum of
hydrogen, he can infer from the displacement of the spectrum that the
hydrogen atom was in motion. But without this knowledge the observer does
not know what color, or light frequency, was emitted. A detector located
at the receiver registers energy appropriate, not to the emitted, but to
the received photon. Since for a receiver in motion with respect to the
source the color of the photon can change from blue to red, or vice versa,
the energy transfer depends on the relative motion of source and receiver,
as would be expected under classical mechanics. The implications for
contemporary physics are too extreme for the present work. We are dealing
with the perennial question of philosophy – the distinction between
appearance and reality. What does this tell us about the character of
physical laws?
I should perhaps add that
the result of these deliberations can, theoretically, be confirmed by using
a single observer, and no clock. We need only station this observer half way
between the points A and B on the ground, between the position of the rear
and of the front of the train at the beginning of the experiment. A trip
wire can be used to generate a pulse of blue light at the points A and B on
the ground, as the train passes by; and simultaneously a blue pulse on, and
at the front of, the train. The train is presumed to be traveling at
one-half the speed of light. What the observer should notice is that the two
blue pulses from the ground reach him simultaneously, while the pulse from
the train will be red in color and will presumably reach him after the other
two pulses have arrived.
This is an example of how to use, what I have dubbed 'e-simultaneity' in my
book: aquestionoftime.com.
Hans J.
Zweig, PhD
HJZWEIG@aol.com
A Thought Experiment about Space & Time
As a thought experiment, imagine a perfectly smooth homogenous
liquid or "fluid" that stretches out to infinity. An open universe of infinite
space-time radius, is equivalent to a closed finite compression universe.
There are as many fractions from zero to one as there are natural numbers from
zero to infinity.
The fluid has a small distortion or vortice moving in it. How can the velocity
of the "vortice" in the fluid be measured? Its motion can only be relative to
another vortice.
Total space-time energy is given by the Einstein-Pythagorean equation:
E^2 = {mc^2}^2 + {pc}^2
Space is at right angles to time:
S
| | | |---->T
The thermodynamic arrow of time, points in the direction of continually
increasing space-time density. Increasing density gradients. It is a ratio
adaption:
{S/T}_n = {S/T}_n+1
S and T are reducing in tandem, such, that their ratio remains a constant c,
for the velocity of a photon of light.
S<--{energy}---------->T
Energy compresses {resists} space and dilates {stretches} time.
Since potential energy equals kinetic energy, gravitational mass must equal
inertial mass. An increase in kinetic energy always causes resistance in
space-time.
Potential energy is at right angles to kinetic energy and gravity is at right
angles to inertia. Time is at right angles to space.
Russell E. Rierson
analog57@yahoo.com