View source for A Revolution Too Far: The Establishment of General Relativity

{{Infobox book
| name = A Revolution Too Far: The Establishment of General Relativity
| image = A Revolution Too Far: The Establishment of General Relativity 330.jpg
| author = [[Peter Rowlands]]
| published = 1994
| publisher = [[PD Publications]]
| pages = 268
| isbn = 1873694032
}}

Given that newspapers write the first draft of history, the person who manipulates newspaper coverage is the very first revisionist to mangle history.&nbsp; This book begins with the 6 November 1919 joint meeting of the British Royal and Royal Astronomical Societies, which served in part as a press conference for the release of the news about Einstein?s general theory of relativity and Eddington?s solar-eclipse expedition to obtain confirmatory data.&nbsp;&nbsp;Was it a stupendous manipulation?&nbsp;&nbsp;Maybe so.&nbsp; The situation at the time was that GRT had achieved a single prior victory, in predicting the ?anomalous? non-Newtonian part of the perihelion advance of Mercury.&nbsp;&nbsp;This is something, but perhaps perilously little, since the GRT calculation of the anomaly involves only a fixed Sun and test-particle Mercury, and so does not&nbsp; handle the much larger Newtonian part of the perihelion-advance problem, which requires free sun and other planets.&nbsp; To this day, few people are aware that, in the case of perihelion advance, full solution means combined solution.

So the light bending was a much needed success.&nbsp; Do you recall from somewhere in your upbringing that the essence of that success was a factor of two?&nbsp; That GRT correctly gave twice the incorrect classical result?&nbsp; But exactly what was that classical calculation?&nbsp; The truth is, there wasn?t one, at least not prior to the general theory and the eclipse expedition and the ?results? comparison.&nbsp; So proclaiming ?the? classical calculation wrong was perhaps an unfair characterization.&nbsp;&nbsp;While it may be easy to come up with a ?classical? calculation that is wrong in the amount described, it is also easy to come up with one that yields the right result (see, for example, H. Hayden, ?Light Speed as a Function of Gravitational Potential?, <em>Galilean Electrodynamics</em> 1, 15-17 (1990)).&nbsp;&nbsp;Or, one can go at it with SRT alone, as do several authors whose arguments are quoted by Rowlands.

The fact is that to this day there are only a handful of tests for GRT: the perihelion advance, and the optical effects of bending, slowing and red shift.&nbsp; And none of the tests is decisive, since other less complicated theories pass the same tests.&nbsp; It is a mystery that we would love the theory whose ratio of mathematical complications to verifiable predictions is maximum.&nbsp; Well, given the political environment, maybe it is not entirely a mystery.&nbsp; The twentieth century has been a century of revolutions.&nbsp;&nbsp;Maybe for that reason, ?revolution? has been an appealing metaphor even in science.&nbsp; GRT was appreciated as a revolution.&nbsp;&nbsp;But now at the threshold of the twenty first century, the feeling in the air is not about revolution and domination; it is about evolution and multi-culturalism.&nbsp; We shall see where that takes us.

One place it may take us is to a re-integration of the aether concept into physics.&nbsp; Rowlands points out an essential irony: Einstein?s SRT and GRT are incompatible.&nbsp; SRT has been understood as conferring license for an intellectual purge: aether ideas were to be driven from physics.&nbsp;&nbsp;But GRT, in reformulating gravity as not a force between point particles, but rather a ?curvature? of space time, is the quintessential aether theory.&nbsp; We just don?t say so publicly at present.

Maybe the time for purges really is over.&nbsp; Maybe at last we can openly say that reality is not just the point centroids of particles we observe, nor is it just the space between the points; it is both together.&nbsp; Like wave-particle duality, we need aether-point duality, and whatever new synthesis they may imply.&nbsp; It won?t be quantum gravity. - Cynthia K. Whitney, <em>Galilean Electrodynamics</em>, V10, N4, p. 62&nbsp;(Jul/Aug 1999).

==Links to Purchase Book==

* [http://www.amazon.com/revolution-too-far-establishment-relativity/dp/1873694032/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1219714228&sr=8-1 A Revolution Too Far: The Establishment of General Relativity][[Category:Book|revolution far establishment general relativity]]

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