A Proposed Mechanism for the Intrinsic Redshift and its Preferred Values Purportedly Found in Quasars Based on the Local-Ether Theory

Quasars of high redshift may be ejected from a nearby active galaxy of low redshift. This physical association then leads to the suggestion that the redshifts of quasars are not really an indication of their distances. In this investigation, it is argued that the high redshift can be due to the gravitational redshift as an intrinsic redshift. Based on the proposed local-ether theory, this intrinsic redshift is determined solely by the gravitational potential associated specifically with the celestial object in which the emitting sources are placed. During the process with which quasars evolve into ordinary galaxies, the fragmentation of quasars and the formation of stars occur and hence the masses of quasars decrease. Thus their gravitational potentials and hence redshifts become smaller and smaller. This is in accord with the aging of redshift during the evolution process. In some observations, the redshifts of quasars have been found to follow the Karlsson formula to exhibit a series of preferred peaks in their distributions. Based on the quasar fragmentation and the local-ether theory, a new formula is presented to interpret the preferred peaks quantitatively

An Ignored Mechanism for the Longitudinal Recoil Force in Railguns and Revitalization of the Riemann Force Law

The electric induction force due to a time-varying current is used to account for the longitudinal recoil force exerted on the rails of railgun accelerators. As observed in the experiments, this induction force is longitudinal to the rails and can be the strongest at the heads of the rails. Besides, for the force due to a closed circuit, it is shown that the Riemann force law, which is based on a potential energy depending on a relative speed and is in accord with Newton's law of action and reaction, can reduce to the Lorentz force law

Modifications of Schr\"{o}dinger's Equation Complying with the Effect of Earth's Rotation on Quantum Energy in Atoms and with the Electromagnetic Force

Recently, we have presented a local-ether wave equation incorporating a nature frequency and the electric scalar potential, from which the speed-dependences in the angular frequency and wavelength of matter wave, in the mass of particle, and in the energy of quantum states are derived. These relations look like the postulates of de Broglie and the Lorentz mass-variation law, except that the particle speed is referred specifically to a geocentric inertial frame and hence incorporates earth's rotation for earthbound particles. Further, the wave equation is extended by connecting the scalar potential to the augmentation operator which is associated with a velocity difference between involved particles. Then the electromagnetic force law is derived, which under some ordinary conditions reduces to the modified Lorentz force law. In this investigation, the interaction of atoms with electromagnetic radiation is explored. Then it is shown that the time evolution equation derived from the wave equation is substantially identical to Schr\"{o}dinger's equation incorporating the vector potential, if the latter is observed in the atom frame and if the source generating the vector potential is electrically neutralized, as in common practice

Local-Ether Wave Equation of Electric Field and Interferometry Experiments with Moving Medium and Path

Recently, we have presented the local-ether model, whereby the propagation of earthbound waves is supposed to be referred uniquely to a geostationary inertial frame. Further, in order to comply with this propagation model, the modified Lorentz force law is developed. Thereby, the corresponding wave equations of potentials and fields are derived in this investigation. It is shown that the local-ether wave equation of electric field can account for various precision interferometry experiments in a consistent way, including the one-way-link experiment with a geostationary fiber, the Sagnac rotating-loop experiment with a comoving or a geostationary dielectric medium, and Fizeau's experiment with a moving dielectric medium in a geostationary interferometer. These experiments together then provide a support for the local-ether wave equation. Meanwhile, some other phenomena are predicted, which provide a means to test its validity

Resonant Absorption between Moving Atoms due to Doppler Frequency Shift and Quantum Energy Variation

By taking both the Doppler frequency shift for electromagnetic wave and the quantum energy variation of matter wave into consideration, a resonant-absorption condition based on the local-ether wave equation is presented to account for a variety of phenomena consistently, including the Ives-Stilwell experiment, the output frequency from ammonia masers, and the M\"{o}ssbauer rotor experiment. It is found that in the resonant-absorption condition, the major term associated with the laboratory velocity is a dot-product term between this velocity and that of the emitting or absorbing atom. This term appears both in the Doppler frequency shift and the transition frequency variation and then cancels out. Thereby, the experimental results can be independent of the laboratory velocity and hence comply with Galilean relativity, despite the restriction that the involved velocities are referred specifically to the local-ether frame. However, by examining the resonant-absorption condition in the M\"{o}ssbauer rotor experiment to a higher order, it is found that Galilean relativity breaks down

Modifications of the Lorentz Force Law Complying with Galilean Transformations and the Local-Ether Propagation Model

It is generally expected from intuition that the electromagnetic force exerted on a charged particle should remain unchanged when observed in different reference frames in uniform translational motion. In the special relativity, this invariance is achieved by invoking the Lorentz transformation of space and time. In this investigation an entirely different interpretation of the invariance of force is presented. We propose a new model of the electromagnetic force given in terms of the augmented potentials, which are derived from the electric scalar potential by incorporating a velocity difference between involved particles. The propagation of the potentials is supposed to follow the local-ether model. All of the position vectors, time derivatives, and velocities involved in the proposed potentials and force law are referred specifically to their respective frames. By virtue of this feature, the electromagnetic force is independent of reference frame simply based on Galilean transformations. The proposed model looks quite different from the Lorentz force law, except the electrostatic force. However, under the common low-speed condition where the mobile charged particles forming the current drift very slowly in a neutralizing matrix, it is shown that the proposed model reduces to the Lorentz force law, if the latter is observed in the matrix frame as done tacitly in common practice.Comment: This paper is one part of the brand-new theory of Quantum Electromagnetics (http://qem.ee.nthu.edu.tw

A Wave Interpretation of the Compton Effect As a Further Demonstration of the Postulates of de Broglie

The Compton effect is commonly cited as a demonstration of the particle feature of light, while the wave nature of matter has been proposed by de Broglie and demonstrated by Davisson and Germer with the Bragg diffraction of electron beams. In this investigation, we present an entirely different interpretation of the Compton effect based on the postulates of de Broglie and on an interaction between electromagnetic and matter waves. The speeds of interacting electrons in the Compton scattering are quite fast and its mechanism relies heavily on the mass variation. Thus, based on this wave interpretation, the Compton effect can be viewed as a further demonstration of the postulates of de Broglie for high-speed particles. In addition to the scattered wave, a direct radiation depending on the mass variation is predicted, which provides a means to test the wave interpretation

Learning Compressible 360{\deg} Video Isomers

Standard video encoders developed for conventional narrow field-of-view video are widely applied to 360{\deg} video as well, with reasonable results. However, while this approach commits arbitrarily to a projection of the spherical frames, we observe that some orientations of a 360{\deg} video, once projected, are more compressible than others. We introduce an approach to predict the sphere rotation that will yield the maximal compression rate. Given video clips in their original encoding, a convolutional neural network learns the association between a clip's visual content and its compressibility at different rotations of a cubemap projection. Given a novel video, our learning-based approach efficiently infers the most compressible direction in one shot, without repeated rendering and compression of the source video. We validate our idea on thousands of video clips and multiple popular video codecs. The results show that this untapped dimension of 360{\deg} compression has substantial potential--"good" rotations are typically 8-10% more compressible than bad ones, and our learning approach can predict them reliably 82% of the time

Leaving Some Stones Unturned: Dynamic Feature Prioritization for Activity Detection in Streaming Video

Current approaches for activity recognition often ignore constraints on computational resources: 1) they rely on extensive feature computation to obtain rich descriptors on all frames, and 2) they assume batch-mode access to the entire test video at once. We propose a new active approach to activity recognition that prioritizes "what to compute when" in order to make timely predictions. The main idea is to learn a policy that dynamically schedules the sequence of features to compute on selected frames of a given test video. In contrast to traditional static feature selection, our approach continually re-prioritizes computation based on the accumulated history of observations and accounts for the transience of those observations in ongoing video. We develop variants to handle both the batch and streaming settings. On two challenging datasets, our method provides significantly better accuracy than alternative techniques for a wide range of computational budgets

Learning Spherical Convolution for Fast Features from 360{\deg} Imagery

While 360{\deg} cameras offer tremendous new possibilities in vision, graphics, and augmented reality, the spherical images they produce make core feature extraction non-trivial. Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) trained on images from perspective cameras yield "flat" filters, yet 360{\deg} images cannot be projected to a single plane without significant distortion. A naive solution that repeatedly projects the viewing sphere to all tangent planes is accurate, but much too computationally intensive for real problems. We propose to learn a spherical convolutional network that translates a planar CNN to process 360{\deg} imagery directly in its equirectangular projection. Our approach learns to reproduce the flat filter outputs on 360{\deg} data, sensitive to the varying distortion effects across the viewing sphere. The key benefits are 1) efficient feature extraction for 360{\deg} images and video, and 2) the ability to leverage powerful pre-trained networks researchers have carefully honed (together with massive labeled image training sets) for perspective images. We validate our approach compared to several alternative methods in terms of both raw CNN output accuracy as well as applying a state-of-the-art "flat" object detector to 360{\deg} data. Our method yields the most accurate results while saving orders of magnitude in computation versus the existing exact reprojection solution.Comment: NIPS 201