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Friday, Jul 3, 2009
Is the great physicist's most famous theory a crock? Members of the anti-relativity underground think so.
Jul 6, 2000 | If you're tired of hearing about creationists and the war against Darwinism, you might be surprised to learn that another pillar of modern science, Einstein and his theory of relativity, is under attack.
An underground of "dissident" scientists and self-described experts publish their theories in newsletters and on the Web, exchanging ideas in a great battle against "the temple of relativity." According to these critics, relativity is not only wrong, it's an affront to common sense, and its creator, Albert Einstein, was a cheat.
A review of anti-relativity proponents and their publications reveals a plethora of alternative theories about how the universe really works. In spite of their many differences, common themes do emerge: resentment of academic "elites," suspicion and resentment of the entire peer-review process in the mainstream scientific journals and a deep strain of paranoia about government involvement in scientific projects.
One Web site, How Much of Modern Physics Is a Fraud, displays essays attacking everything from relativity to Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle. Another page cites the work of Stefan Marinov, a self-described iconoclast, who apparently threatened to immolate himself in front of the British Embassy in Vienna, Austria, because he was so angered by the refusal of the respected journal Nature to publish his "proofs" against relativity. An Aethro-Kinematics Web site claims to refute relativity by resurrecting Rene Descartes' theory that the Earth and all the planets are carried around the sun by an "Aether vortex."
Some, like Ruggero Santilli, an Italian physicist, have published hysterical attacks on mainstream science. Santilli maintained in his book "Il Grande Grido: Ethical Probe on Einstein's Followers in the U.S.A." that physicists Sidney Coleman, Sheldon Glashow and Steven Weinberg (the latter two are Nobel laureates) conspired to frustrate his attempts to conduct research on his theories to disprove relativity while he was at Harvard. The late Petr Beckmann, a professor of electrical engineering at the University of Colorado, self-published his theory about why relativity is wrong and started a newsletter called Galilean Electrodynamics, which has been carried on by his followers (although it isn't clear from recent issues that they still believe in their founder's theory).
The list goes on. Is this a new front in the war on science? Does the Kansas State Board of Education now need to take a vote on relativity?
The anti-relativity movement started as soon as Einstein's first paper on special relativity was published, in 1905; some scientists disputed its assertion that the old Newtonian concepts of absolute space and time -- never scientifically established -- were superfluous. Indeed, the attempt to restore these concepts to mainstream physics forms the essential foundation of almost every crank theory since.
Even more enraging to some scientists and engineers was the worldwide fame Einstein attained with the publication in 1916 of his general theory of relativity, which extended special relativity and offered a radically new explanation for gravity.
A number of Germans, many of them anti-Semites, despised Einstein's socialist views and envied his fame. In 1920, for example, an unseemly demonstration by a right-wing group at the Berlin Philharmonic Hall denounced Einstein's theory as "scientific dadaism" and a publicity stunt. They also accused him of plagiarizing the formula of a hapless German schoolmaster for his own benefit.
Outside Germany, however, Einstein's theory also met resistance. Albert Michelson, the American who devised the famous failed experiment to detect the ether, the absolute medium that 19th century scientists supposed responsible for the propagation of light waves through space, never accepted relativity. He politely admitted this to Einstein when they met. The Michelson Morley experiment is popularly (and inaccurately) taken to be the inspiration for Einstein's special relativity.
After his retirement in the 1930s Herbert Ives, a respected engineer for Bell Telephone Laboratories who helped develop television in the United States, spent years conducting his own experiments to try to prove the existence of the ether. He denigrated Einstein in his personal letters as "a great paradox swallower" and a bungler who stumbled onto the right answers using wrong methods.
More recently, astronomer Tom Van Flandern, who once worked for the U.S. Naval Observatory in Washington and who conducts eclipse expedition tours and runs a Web site with a newsletter that promotes interest in scientific ideas "outside of the mainstream of theories in Astronomy," claims to have discovered a dirty secret. Van Flandern was hired to do some consulting work for the physics department at the University of Maryland on the global positioning system (GPS), the ring of 24 satellites circling the Earth, which, among other convenient attributes, will be able to pinpoint precise locations for befuddled automobile drivers anywhere on the planet. According to him, the confusing "rigmarole" of relativity isn't needed to maintain the GPS, even though it clearly should be.
Van Flandern has argued that because of Einstein's theory of relativity, clock rates on GPS satellites should need to be adjusted continuously to keep them in sync with users on Earth. But they're not, he told the American Spectator (April 1999). The GPS programmers don't need relativity. "They have basically blown off Einstein," Van Flandern says.
Is this true? Could this be a real crack in the "temple" of Einstein's theory?
