View source for About Albert Einstein and on the Meaning of his Relativities

{{Infobox paper
| title = About Albert Einstein and on the Meaning of his Relativities
| url = [http://www.naturalphilosophy.org/pdf/abstracts/abstracts_472.pdf Link to paper]
| author = [[Dan Romalo]]
| keywords = [[Albert einstein]], [[Theory of Relativity]], [[Fitzgerald Contraction]]
| published = 2006
| num_pages = 14
}}

'''Read the full paper''' [http://www.naturalphilosophy.org/pdf/abstracts/abstracts_472.pdf here]

==Abstract==

The essay presents the author's point of view on Albert Einstein's complex personality and on his relativistic philosophy. Yet, the true aim of the expose is to remind us of some older but still significant problems concerning the basics of the Theory of Relativity, suggesting some alternative explanatory hypotheses. The present essay tries to:

# Review the reported morphologic anomalies in Albert Einstein's brain, conjecturing if those are not explanatory for the logic laxity in his Relativist principles
# Analyze the fundamentals of Albert Einstein's principles
# Compare Albert Einstein's relativist philosophy with H.E. Ives' intuitive one&nbsp;- based on G.F. Fitzgerald, H. A. Lorentz and H. Poincare works
# Propose some suggestions for a more intuitively principled relativism
# Sketch the base-lines for a tentative model of the universe supposed born inside a bubble of ether.

The essay leans on a demonstration delivered long ago by Ives, widely despised or neglected, and now seemingly forgotten; it is The Fitzgerald Contraction [Scientific Proceedings of the Royal Dublin Society, new series, 26 (1052, pp. 9-26] and on the more recent article of [[Horst E Wilhelm|Horst E. Wilhelm]], [Z. f. Naturforschung, 45 a, 736-748 (1990)] who demonstrates, or just confirms, that the Fitzgerald-Lorentz contraction has to be real because it is a strict consequence of the electromagnetic field theory itself. Perhaps it is not quite inadequate to try to understand the profound meaning of Ives works, and to think about it.

''(The PDF as archived carries the shorter running title'' On Albert Einstein and his Relativities''.)''

==Overview==

Dan Romalo's essay is not an attempt to refute the Lorentz transformation. It is an attempt to separate that formalism from the interpretation [[Albert Einstein|Einstein]] attached to it, and to argue that a physically explanatory version of the same mathematics already existed in the work of [[Herbert E Ives|Herbert E. Ives]], building on FitzGerald, [[Hendrik Lorentz|Lorentz]] and [[Henri Poincaré|Poincaré]]. Romalo describes himself as "a non-believer in Einstein's relativity principles but still eagerly in search of how to shape a formalized relativist description of nature's phenomena in a more intuitive manner".

The paper's central contention is that Einstein's relativity is descriptive rather than causal — "a simple descriptive facility, even if pretending to be explicative" — whereas the FitzGerald–Lorentz–Poincaré–Ives line treats [[Length Contraction|length contraction]] and clock retardation as real physical modifications of moving matter, produced by motion relative to a medium, and therefore explains the same observations by cause and effect. Romalo is careful to concede that the two formalisms are mathematically the same and that Einstein's predictions work; his objection is to the claim that they ''explain''. The essay is unusual, and controversial, in opening with a discussion of the anatomy of Einstein's brain.

==The argument==

===The opening on Einstein's brain===

Romalo begins with the post-mortem history of Einstein's brain, which he calls a "morally-abusive" episode: removed for study, transported in a glass jar, sectioned arbitrarily and stored uncontrolled for years. He cites the ''Lancet'' report and related literature for three findings — moderate atrophy around the principal sulcus in both hemispheres; a brain weight of 1230 g against a 1400 g average, which he notes Calvin puts at about 10% low even allowing for age; and the absence of the parietal operculum in both hemispheres, which occupies 6.1 and 3.6 cm<sup>2</sup> in the left and right hemispheres of an archetypal brain. The absence implies a shortening of both Sylvian fissures and hence, he argues, a reduced cortical area, which he connects with Diamond's report of excess glial cells and a thinned frontal cortex.

He is explicit that the ''Lancet'' authors called their results "only of a heuristic value" and that his own comments are heuristic in the same sense, and he closes the thread by conceding that the question "could the lack in logical rigor of Einstein's relativist philosophy have been linked to the absence of opercula on his brain?" cannot be answered here. The premise on which the speculation rests — that intelligence depends on cortical extent — is stated as an assumption drawn from the increasing complexity of cerebral convolutions across evolution.

===The logical charge against special relativity===

The substantive criticism is narrower and sharper. Romalo argues that Einstein was "lured by the lack of evidence of a transport effect in a strongly particular type of experience" into treating absence of evidence as evidence of absence, and that this is illegitimate "till all possible alternative explanatory hypotheses are exhausted" — which, he says, they were not, since FitzGerald and Ives supplied one.

His most specific point concerns [[Simultaneity|simultaneity]]. Experiments of the [[Michelson-Morley Experiment|Michelson–Morley]] class, he insists, involve no measurement at all and no comparison conditioned by simultaneity: they are "100% pure, quasi-stationary interference events", asking only whether the fringe pattern shifts on its own material support when the apparatus is reoriented. He likens this to photographing a standing wave field off a sea wall as the wind direction changes — a qualitative question answerable by superposing photographs. It follows, on his reading, that Einstein's redefinition of non-local simultaneity is not required by, and not tested by, the experiment that motivated it. Two analogies carry the wider objection that transforming a description does not transform its object: a device that flatters a photograph is no basis for marriage, and an aerofoil analysed by conformal mapping onto a circle is no reason to build circular wings.

He also traces Einstein's own shifting position on the [[Aether|ether]], quoting the 1905 dismissal of the luminiferous ether as "superfluous" against the 1920 Leiden lecture — "space is endowed with physical qualities; in this sense, therefore, there exists an ether" — and calls the resulting philosophical basis "defective by lack of logic coherence", while explicitly not disputing "the validity of its formalism's descriptive power".

===Ives' derivation===

The paper's technical core is a walk-through of Ives' 1952 paper ''The Fitzgerald Contraction''. Romalo emphasises the method. Ives starts from two experimental facts — that the propagation speed of light is independent of source motion, and that Michelson–Morley interference spectra are invariant under the equipment's inertial motion — and from an "operational principle" requiring every symbol in the final equations to correspond to a performable measurement. He then refuses to assume in advance that the outbound and return speeds of light are equal, carrying them as separate quantities ''c''<sub>o</sub> and ''c''<sub>b</sub>, and carries the length-modifying and time-modifying factors ''f''<sub>d</sub>(''w'') and ''f''<sub>t</sub>(''w'') as unknowns, together with a rod-clock ratio ''q'' for a slowly transported clock and a further parameter χ for the offset between clocks at the two ends of a moving platform.

Romalo notes Ives' correction to FitzGerald: contraction along the line of motion by β = √(1 − ''V''<sup>2</sup>/''c''<sup>2</sup>) is not the unique way to preserve the fringe pattern, since a transverse dilation by 1/β would do as well; what is required in general is the ratio of longitudinal to transverse lengths. Imposing constancy of both the one-way and two-way speed of light across inertial frames, Ives finds that rods and clock rates must be modified by factors of the same functional form, and that in the case ''c''<sub>o</sub> = ''c''<sub>b</sub> — the platform at rest in the transmitting medium — both reduce to exactly the FitzGerald factor. The resulting equations Ives himself called of "a considerable complexity", remarking that "complexity of this sort is the price we have to pay for equations which tell a complete and unambiguous story in symbols all of which have a definite operational meaning"; a change of variable collapses them to the Lorentz–Poincaré form, which Ives says then only "mimics" the physics.

The decisive link, on Romalo's account, is Ives' theorem that if either relativistic modification — clock slowing or length contraction — is shown to be physically real, the other follows. Ives then supplied the experimental half himself with the hydrogen canal-ray experiment demonstrating the retardation of rapidly moving atomic oscillators.

===Priority, ethics and the sociology of the case===

A long section, leaning on Dean Turner's ''A Scientific Priesthood'' and the Hazelett and Turner collection ''The Einstein Myth and the Ives Papers'', argues that Einstein praised the Ives–Stilwell experiment as direct proof of relativity while never again publicly mentioning Ives or his theory, despite friendly meetings at Princeton and at conferences. Turner's judgement, quoted approvingly, is that the experiment "supports equally either relativity or the Absolute Space and Time Theory of Ives" and that the silence amounted to "passive kidnapping". Romalo generalises this into a charge of "political correctness" within an elite guild, and asks why no first-rank physicist intervened.

===Geometrised physics, and a proposal===

Romalo then places relativity in a longer history of geometrising physics — Heron's shortest-path law of reflection, Fermat's least-time principle for refraction — arguing that in each case the geometric statement is a "thinking-recipe" later replaced by a causal wave account. Einstein's error, he says, was to grant physical reality to the redefined time coordinate while denying it to length contraction. General relativity he treats generously as a "black-box" methodology of "terrific power", "widely confirmed, yet not factually exhaustively and thoroughly verified", whose merit is methodological rather than phenomenological: it predicts without explaining how inertia arises, how gravitation is generated, or why gravitational and inertial mass are equal.

His own sketch has three postulates: the ether is a physical reality filling classical space; any point mass acts as an ether sink driving a radial inflow with velocity profile ''kM''/''R'', these flows being derivable from a potential and therefore additive; and a free mass moves such that δ(''v''<sub>et</sub> + ''v''<sub>m</sub>) = 0, with forces entering as δ(''v''<sub>et</sub> + ''v''<sub>m</sub>) = ''F''<sub>em</sub>/''m''. He observes that using a single constant ''m'' here, rather than two, may account for the observed equality of inertial and gravitational mass. On cosmology he suggests the Hubble [[Redshift|redshift]] is better read as an ether-stretching effect in an expanding "ether bubble" than as the time-stretching of general relativity. Finally, on [[Time|time]], he argues that since any spatial coordinate along a trajectory can be taken as the independent variable, time is "essentially, only a convenient descriptive parameter", a "ghost-like tool" rather than a fundamental category, with causality rooted in the spatial configuration of matter.

==Assessment==

The strongest part of this essay is its treatment of Ives, and it is genuinely valuable as an accessible route into work that is hard to obtain. Romalo's emphasis is well chosen: what distinguishes Ives is not a different answer but a different discipline of derivation — refusing to assume the isotropy of the one-way speed of light, carrying the length and time factors as undetermined functions, and demanding that every symbol denote a performable operation. That method does establish something real and often forgotten: the one-way speed of light is not independently measurable without a synchronisation convention, so the Lorentz transformation can be reached from a medium-based, absolute-time picture with contraction and clock retardation as physical effects. The point that this is an interpretive rather than an empirical difference is correct, and Romalo states it more fairly than most critics do — he repeatedly concedes that Einstein's formalism works and that general relativity is a predictive instrument of great power.

The essay is nevertheless damaged by its opening. The neuroanatomical section is the weakest material in the paper and the least connected to the rest of it. The inference chain — absent operculum, hence shortened Sylvian fissure, hence reduced cortex, hence reduced logical rigour — is unsupported at every joint; the assumption that intelligence tracks cortical area is stated without evidence and is not what the cited literature claims; and the ''Lancet'' study's authors' own restriction of their results to heuristic value is quoted and then set aside. Romalo half-acknowledges this by declining to answer his own question, but the material sits at the front of the paper and colours everything after it. An argument about logical coherence is exactly the argument that gains nothing from speculation about the arguer's anatomy.

Several later steps are asserted rather than shown. The ether-sink model is a sketch: no field equation is derived, no observational consequence is calculated, no value of ''k'' is offered, and the claim about inertial and gravitational mass equality is described by Romalo himself as "not deductive". The proposal to read the Hubble redshift as ether stretching is stated in a paragraph without any quantitative comparison against the redshift–distance relation it must reproduce. And the treatment of time as a parameter rests on a reparametrisation argument that shows time can be eliminated from a description, not that it lacks physical content — the same move would eliminate any coordinate.

Two further difficulties concern the physics as it now stands. First, the claim that Michelson–Morley-class experiments involve no measurement conditioned by simultaneity is right, but modern tests of Lorentz invariance are not confined to that class: rotating optical resonator experiments and Kennedy–Thorndike-type experiments constrain the separate length and time factors far more tightly than the parameters Ives left free. Second, a preferred-frame interpretation of the kind Romalo wants must explain why no such frame shows up in any of these, which is exactly the observation Ives' own analysis anticipates but which leaves the interpretation empirically indistinguishable from Einstein's — a fact Romalo grants when he concedes the formalisms are identical. That concession is honest, and it also marks the limit of what the essay can achieve: it argues for a preference in explanation, not for a difference in prediction.

==See also==
* [[Dan Romalo]]
* [[Herbert E Ives]]
* [[Hendrik Lorentz]]
* [[Henri Poincaré]]
* [[Albert Einstein]]
* [[Length Contraction]]
* [[Simultaneity]]
* [[Michelson-Morley Experiment]]
* [[Aether]]
* [[Horst E Wilhelm]]
* [[Dean Turner]]

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