Relativity

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Wikipedia Dispute: wikipedia:Theory of relativity

This Natural Philosophy wiki page disputes content found on Wikipedia page wikipedia:Theory of relativity

Scientific Theory
Name	Relativity
Type	Theory of space, time, and gravitation
Author(s)	Albert Einstein (building on Hendrik Lorentz and Henri Poincaré)
Keywords	Special relativity, General relativity, spacetime, Lorentz transformation, gravitation, E = mc2
Year	1905 (special); 1915 (general)

Relativity is the branch of modern physics founded by Albert Einstein in the early twentieth century, comprising the special theory (1905), which concerns space, time and motion for observers in uniform relative motion, and the general theory (1915), which reinterprets gravitation as the curvature of spacetime. In mainstream physics the two are regarded as among the best-confirmed theories in science.

They are also the most disputed subject on this wiki. Relativity is the second most heavily used keyword in the paper archive maintained by the John Chappell Natural Philosophy Society, and Category:Relativity runs to several thousand pages. This article is the hub for that literature: it states briefly what the mainstream means by relativity, and then sets out — at length, and as a body of work — the criticisms, alternatives and research programmes of the scientists documented here. The detailed arguments belonging to particular sub-topics are developed on their own pages, listed under Sub-topics below, and are not duplicated here.

What the mainstream means by relativity

Three distinct things go by the name.

Galilean relativity is the oldest and is not in dispute among the critics documented here — several of them regard it as the correct principle that Einstein displaced. It holds that the laws of mechanics are the same in all frames moving uniformly with respect to one another, so that no mechanical experiment performed inside a closed, steadily moving laboratory can reveal its motion. William Wilson's Origin and Development of the Theory of Relativity (1958) locates an explicit statement of the restricted principle in Newton's Principia itself.

Special relativity (1905) rests on two postulates: that the laws of physics are the same in all inertial frames, and that the speed of light in vacuum is the same for all observers regardless of the motion of source or observer. From these follow the relativity of simultaneity, time dilation, length contraction, the Lorentz transformation and the mass–energy relation E = mc².

General relativity (1915) generalises special relativity and Newtonian gravity, treating gravitation as a consequence of the curvature of spacetime produced by mass and energy. Its classic predictions include the precession of Mercury's perihelion, the bending of starlight, gravitational redshift, gravitational waves and black holes.

Special relativity did not appear in isolation. It grew out of nineteenth-century electrodynamics and out of the failure of experiments — above all the Michelson–Morley experiment of 1887 — to detect the Earth's motion through the luminiferous aether. The mathematics later associated with Einstein's theory was developed earlier by Hendrik Lorentz and by Henri Poincaré. That fact is the starting point for one of the main strands of criticism below.

The critical literature as a body of work

Opposition to relativity is nearly as old as the theory itself, and this wiki treats it as a continuing research tradition rather than as a curiosity. Its scale is easy to underestimate. The German documentation project publishing under the pseudonym G O Mueller compiled, over some years, a catalogue of 3,789 publications critical of the special theory between 1908 and 2003, identifying around 1,300 critics by name; the results appear in 95 Years of Criticism of the Special Theory of Relativity (1908-2003) and in the project's open letters on scientific freedom. The paper archive behind this wiki holds several hundred more.

Two things should be said plainly about that literature before surveying it.

First, it is not one position. The authors below disagree with each other at least as sharply as they disagree with Einstein. Some want a preferred frame and keep the Lorentz transformation; some reject the Lorentz transformation and keep Galilean kinematics; some accept the constancy of light speed and reject only Einstein's velocity composition; some reject the second postulate outright on astronomical evidence. These are not variants of a single argument.

Second, the objections are of different kinds — logical, conventional, experimental, astronomical and constructive — and they do not stand or fall together. The sections that follow group them by kind.

Strands of criticism

Logical consistency: simultaneity and reciprocity

The oldest and most persistent line holds that special relativity is not merely wrong but internally inconsistent, and that the inconsistency can be exhibited without any appeal to experiment.

The classic modern statement is Herbert Dingle's. Having written a well-known popular exposition of the theory (Relativity for All, 1922), Dingle came from the 1950s to argue that if each of two relatively moving clocks must run slow relative to the other, the theory cannot say which of two reunited clocks has lost time. He pressed the argument for two decades, culminating in Science at the Crossroads (1972). His exchange with G H Keswani over the history of the theory — Keswani's Origin and Concept of Relativity, Part 1 (1965), Dingle's Note on Mr Keswani's articles, Origin and Concept of Relativity (1965) and Keswani's Reply to Professor Dingle and Mr Levinson (1966) — is preserved here in full. Harold S Slusher took up the cosmological side of the same critique in The Dingle Problem, Cosmology, and the Postulate of Relativity (1985), on Dingle's reading of the Doppler shift.

The most-attacked single construction is the relativity of simultaneity. John E Chappell, the founder of the tradition this wiki continues, argued in Simultaneity Cannot Possibly be Relative to Motion (1999) — developing a 1962 critique by the philosopher Melbourne Evans — that in the moving-train thought experiment Einstein reached relative simultaneity only by contradicting himself within a single chain of reasoning, and that avoiding the contradiction leads inevitably to absolute simultaneity whatever velocity is attributed to light. Shao-Zhi Xu and Xiang-Qun Xu reach the same conclusion in On the Relativity of Simultaneity (1993), calling it a false proposition arising from an error in logic. Andrew R Dring's The Definition of Simultaneity (1996) argues that Einstein's definition is logically circular, proposes a manifestly frame-independent replacement, and derives from it a proof that the postulates of relativity are inconsistent. Robert S. Neiswander's Simultaneity, Absolutely (1996) traces the non-simultaneity to the position-sensitive term in the Lorentz time transform and argues that this term is not supported by properly designed experiments or by satellite clock behaviour. Vesselin C Noninski constructs a gedanken experiment in Conclusions About the Simultaneity of Two Events (2003) in which the special theory's verdict on simultaneity contradicts a plain physical fact, and generalises the method in On the Physical Consistency of the Special Theory of Relativity (STR) (2003).

Parallel arguments attack the reciprocity of the effects rather than simultaneity. Harry E Mongold's How Relativity Theory Conflicts With Reality (1980) and The Continuing Appeal of Einstein's Relativity (1990) argue that relative motion cannot supply the standard of rest that the theory's claims about slowed clocks and shortened rods require, and that the theory's continuing prestige rests on a failure to distinguish the Lorentz formulae from Einstein's interpretation of them. Neil E Munch identifies the mechanism in Are Flaws Due to Shifting Assumptions in Relativity Too Simple to Grasp? (2000): assumptions such as the symmetry of length and time variations shift inappropriately between steps of the argument, obscured by inadequate notation. Sergey N Arteha's Some Remarks to Relativistic Kinematics (2003) offers a systematic catalogue of such contradictions, and Alexander L Kholmetskii poses the question directly in Is the Theory of Relativity Self-consistent? (2001), having found in Remarks on the Correspondence of the Relativity and Causality Principles (2001) a conflict between relativity and the causality principle for light pulses under constant acceleration.

Other contributions in this strand: Adolf Grünbaum's Fundamental Philosophical Issues in the Special Theory of Relativity (1958); Burniston Brown's What is Wrong With Relativity? (1967), which acknowledgedly inspired many later dissidents by arguing that Einstein's two postulates are of quite different logical types — one a law about laws, the other an algebraic representation of a possible fact; Boris I Peshchevitsky's Relativity Theory: Alternative or Fiasco? (1992), which contends that the derivation actually requires three postulates rather than two; A Seifert's On the Impossibility of Relativity, Classical or "Special" (1987); Lee Coe's Galilean-Newtonian Relativity versus Einsteinian Relativity (1991); Jozef S Wilczynski's Critical Remarks on Einstein's Derivations of the Equations of Motion (1989); Jeff Alford's Einstein's Theory and Common Sense (2001) and The Mechanical Part of Einstein's First Postulate in SRT (2001); Wen-Xiu Li's Problems with the Special Theory of Relativity (2001); Laszlo Szego and Peter F. Ofner's Truth and the Special Theory of Relativity (1997) and Einstein's Errors (1997); Temur Z. Kalanov's The Theory of Relativity: An Error of the Transformation of Coordinates (2003); and Shao-Zhi Xu's A Brief Reexamination of Relativity (1997), which argues among other things that the Lorentz transformation contradicts itself and is unqualified as a coordinate transformation. S Richard Hazelett turns a different instrument on the theory in Does Relativity Theory Explain Too Much? (1997), applying Popper's falsifiability criterion and arguing that a theory consistent with multiple sets of facts explains none of them, and draws out a moral consequence in Does Einsteinian Relativity Negate Freedom of Will? (1997). Gary E Novak's The Truth about Relativity presses the elementary form of the objection: the velocity of light is said to be constant, but constant relative to what?

The conventionality of clock synchronisation

A distinct and more technical strand accepts the experimental record and attacks the theory at the point where a choice has been smuggled in as a result: the synchronisation of distant clocks. If the one-way speed of light cannot be measured without already-synchronised clocks, and clocks cannot be synchronised without assuming a one-way speed, then Einstein's synchronisation is a convention, and theories using other conventions are empirically equivalent to special relativity while being physically quite different.

R G Zaripov has developed this most systematically, in a series of five papers: Convention in the General Definition of Simultaneity (1998), Convention in Defining Simultaneity by Slow Clock Transport (1999), Convention in the General Definition of Distance (2000), Convention in the Definition of Geometry of Space-Time (2000) and Clock Synchronization and Finsler Structure of a Flat Anisotropic Space-Time (2001). His conclusion is that with general non-standard synchronisation one obtains new coordinate transformations describing Euclidean, pseudo-Euclidean and Galilean kinematics alike, and that all such cases have validity equal to relativistic mechanics for describing the phenomena — the choice between them is not settled by experiment.

Franco Selleri reached a related result from the rotating platform. In Time on a Rotating Platform (1997, with François Goy), Noninvariant One-Way Speed of Light and Locally Equivalent Reference Frames (1997) and On a Physical and Mathematical Discontinuity in Relativity Theory (1997) he calculated the velocity of light relative to the rim of a uniformly rotating disc and found it necessarily different from c — and, crucially, unchanged as the radius is increased with the rim velocity held constant. Since in that limit any small piece of the rim can be regarded as better and better at rest in an inertial frame, there is a discontinuity between accelerated and inertial frames that the theory cannot smooth over. Goy pursued the same question for free fall in On Synchronisation of Clocks in Free Fall Around a Central Body (1997), concluding that in accelerated systems only a theory maintaining absolute simultaneity is consistent with the natural behaviour of clocks. Joseph Levy's Is Simultaneity Relative or Absolute? (1997) argues the same case from the criteria used to demonstrate relative simultaneity.

Priority, history and the 1919 eclipse

A third strand concerns not the physics but the record: who did what, and what the celebrated confirmations actually showed.

G H Keswani's Origin and Concept of Relativity, Part 1 (1965) documents Poincaré's formulation of a principle of relative motion from 1895, his denial of absolute time and of intuitive distant simultaneity in Science and Hypothesis (1902), and his restatement of the principle in 1904 — a chronology that has become the standard reference point for the priority claim. Vyacheslav N Streltsov draws the conclusion in "Einstein Reconsidered" (2003): the theory should be named the Lorentz–Poincaré–Einstein–Minkowski relativity theory. Galina Granek examined the aether Poincaré actually held in Poincaré's Ether: What characterizes Poincaré's ether? (2001). Ludwig Kostro documented the other half of the historical claim — that Einstein himself did not abandon the medium — in The Physical Meaning of Albert Einstein's Relativistic Ether Concept (1994) and The Physical and Philosophical Reasons for A. Einstein's Denial of the Ether in 1905 and its Reintroduction in 1916 (1997). Jan Czerniawski's What is and What is not Essential in Lorentz's Relativity (1994) asks why the Lorentzian version, though empirically equivalent, remains barely known and its partisans routinely accused of incompetence. Julio Palacios's The Clock Paradox and the Possibility of a New Theory of Relativity (1959) and Valerio Tonini's Reality and Structural Relativity (1962) belong to the same early continental tradition, as does Otto Golling's The Principle of Relativity (1962).

On the confirmations, Ian McCausland's Anomalies in the History of Relativity (1999) examines the 1919 eclipse announcement — the event from which Einstein's fame arose directly — and notes that the accuracy of the observations was later recognised as insufficient to constitute a reliable confirmation. Roberto A Monti makes the same case more broadly in Three Major Errors in Relativity and Cosmology (2000), arguing that the Michelson–Morley–Miller experiments never gave a null result, that the 1919 eclipse never proved general relativity, and that the difference between the Newtonian and Einsteinian light deflections was never subsequently confirmed; his The Keys of Relativity (1999) sets out the three quantities on which he thinks the whole question turns. Domina Eberle Spencer's Parry Moon 1898-1988: A Search for the Foundations of Relativity (1998) records Parry Moon's decision to question the postulates rather than the details, and the near-fatal end of his attempt to disprove relativity experimentally at MIT. Roberto A Monti, Ludek Nerad's A Relativity Questionnaire (1997) and Theodore D. Mitsopoulos's Revising Relativity (1998) document the difficulty of publishing such work at all — the reason Petr Beckmann founded Galilean Electrodynamics in 1989.

Clocks, atomic time and GPS

The strand with the strongest claim to be experimental comes from metrologists and navigation engineers — people whose working instruments are clocks.

Louis Essen, who built the first caesium atomic clock, is the senior figure. Relativity and Time Signals (1978) argues that in 1905 the comparison of distant clocks by radio was not the precise routine technique it later became, which excuses the mistakes in Einstein's thought experiments but does not excuse their retention afterwards. Atomic Clocks Coming and Going (1977) charges the authors of the Hafele–Keating experiment with ignoring documented and unrefuted criticisms of the theory in their theoretical discussion. Relativity – Joke or Swindle? (1988) states his position that the theory is invalidated by its internal errors, so that experimental disproof is not even required; and the Letter from Louis Essen to Carl A Zapffe: Harry Ricker Commentary (1984) contains his most-quoted line, that relativity is "not a theory".

Alphonsus G Kelly's Hafele and Keating Tests: Did They Prove Anything? (2000) is the central experimental paper of this strand: he reports that the original test results were not the figures Hafele and Keating published, publishes the actual data for the first time, and argues that no credence can be given to their conclusions.

Ronald R Hatch, one of the principal algorithm designers of GPS, contributes five papers. Relativity and GPS - I (1995) argues that the global positioning system supports the Lorentz ether theory over Einstein's special theory; Relativity and GPS - II (1995) turns to the general theory, and in particular to the claim that an object in free fall is acted on by no forces and so defines its own Lorentz frame. Clock Behavior and the Search for an Underlying Mechanism for Relativistic Phenomena (2002) presses a structural point: special and general relativistic clock effects sometimes cancel and sometimes add, which cannot be coincidence, yet nothing within two disjoint theories suggests the underlying mechanism. Gravitational Energy and the Flatness Problem (1999) reinterprets the Pound–Rebka experiment: since atomic clock frequency depends on gravitational potential, the experiment showed a higher frequency compared with a lower reference frequency, not a falling photon gaining energy. The Speed of Light, Conservation Laws, and Gravity Probe B (1996) works out what conservation of energy does and does not fix. With Ruyong Wang he set out a decisive test in Conducting a Crucial Experiment of the Constancy of the Speed of Light Using GPS (2002): the speed of light in the Earth-Centred Inertial frame remains c relative to the frame but not relative to a receiver moving in it.

Tom Van Flandern, an astronomer at the U.S. Naval Observatory, made the same observation about synchronisation in Implications of Relativity Without Einstein Synchronization in the GPS (1997) and What the Global Positioning System Tells Us about Relativity (1997): the GPS constellation's twenty-four clocks are continuously synchronised with one another and with ground clocks worldwide, at relative velocities high enough for the predicted effects to matter, and this is accomplished by ignoring the relativity of simultaneity. His The Speed of Gravity - What the experiments Say (1999) applies standard propagation-speed techniques to gravity and reports speeds far above c, on the grounds that gravity exhibits no detectable aberration even for binary pulsars. The engineering counterpart, Henry P. Fliegel and Raymond S. DiEsposti's GPS and Relativity: An Engineering Overview (1996), is archived here alongside them.

Other clock and timing papers: Charles M. Hill's Timekeeping and the Speed of Light - New Insights from Pulsar Observations (1995), which compares "pulsar seconds" with uncorrected atomic seconds; Curtis E Renshaw's Pulsar Timing and the Special Theory of Relativity (1996); Tuomo Suntola's Re-Evaluation of the Scout D Experiment as a Test of Relativity Theory (2003), which re-analyses the 1976 hydrogen-maser rocket test; Donald T. MacRoberts's The "Time Dilation" of Mesons Re-Examined (1992), which accepts the velocity dependence of meson lifetimes at CERN but denies that it has anything to do with time dilation; and John Philip Claybourne's A New Analysis of Time Dilation (1990), which attributes the verified slowing to the accelerations the clocks underwent rather than to velocity as such.

Electrodynamics and the laboratory experiments

A further strand argues that particular electromagnetic experiments already conflict with relativistic electrodynamics.

Francisco J. Müller's work on unipolar induction is the best known. Unipolar Induction Experiments and Relativistic Electrodynamics (1990) re-examines the relativistic requirement of relative motion between conductor and magnet, notes that Kennard showed in 1917 that no such requirement holds for a rotating system — which drove relativists to invoke general relativity for the rotational unipolar inductor — and reports further tests with a modified rectilinear version that he argues rule out the general theory as well. With Neil E Munch he examined the Doppler effect classically and relativistically in Discussion of Relativistic and Non-relativistic Theories of the Doppler Effect (1997).

The Trouton–Noble experiment is a second focus. Edward M Kelly treats it in Relativity Statics Via Two-Way Energy Currents - Illustrated by the Trouten-Noble Experiment (1987). Andrew R Dring's Trouton-Noble and the Relativistic Gyroscope (1996) argues that the mechanical torques relativity introduces to balance the predicted electromagnetic torques would produce easily observable gyroscopic precessions, and are therefore experimentally invalid. Patrick Cornille, Jean-Louis Naudin and Alexandre Szames report in Stimulated Forces Demonstrated: Why the Trouton-Noble Experiment Failed and How to Make It Succeed (1999) that the original experimenters observed the jerking and torquing effects and dismissed them as experimental error, and that recent replications reproduce them.

Stefan Marinov's Propulsive and Rotating Ampère Bridges and the Principle of Relativity (1991) reports that the historical Ampère bridge and his own rotational variant appear to violate the principle of relativity: the rotating bridge is a motor without a stator, turning under internal forces, yet back tension is induced by its rotation although there is no mutual motion between magnet and wire. Umberto Bartocci and Marco Mamone Capria show in Some Remarks On Classical Electromagnetism and the Principle of Relativity (1991) that classically interpreted electromagnetism and special relativity already diverge in their predictions for a very simple electrodynamic system, even at low velocities. Georg Galeczki argues in What Does the Lorentz Force Have to do with Maxwell's Equations? (1998) that the Lorentz force has nothing mathematically or physically to do with Maxwell's field equations, and in Minkowski's Scalar Invariant Incompatible with any Equation of Motion (2000) offers what he calls the first purely mathematical proof of the incompatibility between Minkowski space and particle dynamics. Vesselin C Noninski's Special Theory of Relativity and the Lorentz Force (2003) attacks the criterion by which the founding paper is usually held to be validated. Chalmers W Sherwin's New Experimental Test of Lorentz's Theory of Relativity (1987) proposes a test exploiting a neglected concept of Lorentz — that the contraction of moving matter is caused by the shortening of low-mass electronic bonds parallel to the motion, producing a transient Lorentzian stress on reorientation.

The Silvertooth experiment, which claimed to detect an aether wind with counter-propagating beams, is treated critically from within the dissident community: B. A. Manning's A Preliminary Analysis of the Silvertooth Experiment (1988) and Sherwin's An Analysis of the Silvertooth Experiment (1989) both find fault with it. Robert V. Krotkov and colleagues re-examine the 1913 rotating-magnetised-sphere test in Relativity and the Electric Dipole Moment of a Moving, Conducting, Magnetized Sphere (1999).

Astronomy: binary stars, precessions and the second postulate

The most prolific single contributor in this collection is Joe Alexander Nahhas, with twenty-six papers in the relativity set alone. His programme is unified and easy to state, though its tone is polemical: the effects credited to relativity are, he argues, visual effects — light aberrations and signal time delays — derivable from a time-dependent solution of Kepler's areal-velocity law that he says was missed for 350 years, and requiring no space-time physics at all.

The core claim is developed on the perihelion precession of Mercury. Perihelion precession period 400 years old formula found in hiding ending relativity (1973) presents a formula he says he found at fifteen, and his 1977 paper on Mercury's "apparent" advance of perihelion derives 43 arcseconds per century from light aberration along the line of sight; 50 out 1001 Mersury's perihelion precession advance (1973) offers fifty of a claimed thousand-and-one routes to the same figure and treats the residual as an experimental error made on Earth.

The heart of his case, however, is close detached binary stars, a dozen of which were chosen by astronomers as tests of the general theory. Nahhas argues that the theory failed each of them and that his time-dependent Newton–Kepler equation solves them. Where Relativity Collapsed: Apsidal Motion of Binary Stars Solution (1977) states the programme; DI Her 1980: The problem that started a wave to unseat Einstein (1980) treats the system posed as a puzzle by Moscow University professors in 1980; Alpha Coronae Borealis: A Binary Stars System Motion in Contradiction with Relativity Theory (1986) adds another case; and the numbered "Einstein's Relativity Failures" series (1984–1990) works through As Camelopardis, DI Herculis, V1143 Cygni, DI Hydrae and V541 Cygni in turn.

He also attacks the second postulate from binary-star data. First Experimental Proof of "Not" Constant Velocity of Light (1983) argues that measured light aberrations from binary systems are dependent on the spin velocity and spin orientation of the component stars, which he reads as velocity addition to light speed; Red-Shift Spin Dependence Experimental Proofs (1983) reports the same dependence in redshifts; and De Sitter Wrong: The Binary Stars Thought Experiment (1978) turns de Sitter's classic argument for light-speed constancy against itself, arguing that if the thought experiment is valid then a very large number of binary systems must be single stars with double images. Related papers cover the Shapiro delay (Einstein's Relativity Space-Time physics is the result of Earth-Planet light signal miss reading by Astronomers, 1978), the Pound–Rebka experiment (Harvard Physics Department Monopoly Games: The Insignificance of Relativity Experimental Proofs, 1978), the Michelson–Morley experiment (MMX: It Took Glamorous Aether and Gave Dumb Space-time, 1973), the hydrogen atom's binding energy (Atomic Energy and Academic Fraud: The Case of the Hydrogen Atom, 1979), and the general position, stated in Time: is a scale and not a dimension except on Campus (1977), Planetary Motion Around The Sun: Deleting Relativity Without Loss of Subject (1977), Einstein's Relativistic Bully of Time Equation (1973), Royal England wrong physics and wrong Physicists Newton Eddington Einstein (1976) and Relativity theory is dead (1977).

Nahhas is not alone in the astronomical strand. Harold W. Milnes and Thomas E Phipps's Astronomical Counterevidence to Relativity (1983) applies the Lorentz transformation to the arrival times of two photons simultaneously emitted from a star and derives large predicted discrepancies between observers moving oppositely at the Earth's equatorial or orbital velocity — 11.05 hours in the case of Rigel. Ruyong Wang, Zhongying Chen and Xianquan Dong ask in Has the Relativity Principle in the Special Theory of Relativity Been Fully Verified by Experiments? (1980) whether the principle has ever been tested outside the Earth's frame at all, and propose a Michelson–Morley experiment in Spacelab. Ernest W. Graham's The Classical Correlation of Orbital Precessions (1997) relates the precession of the binary pulsar PSR 1913+16 to those of Mercury and the inner planets by one simple non-relativistic formula, and Reiner Georg Ziefle's Calculation of So-Called General Relativistic Phenomena by Advancing Newton's Theory of Gravitation, Maintaining Classical Conceptions of Space and Relativity (2003) derives the perihelion advance, light bending and pulsar phenomena from a Newtonian theory with finite propagation speed. Halton C Arp's Evolution of Quasars into Galaxies and its Implications for the Birth and Evolution of Matter (1997) argues that the observed ejection of high-redshift quasars from low-redshift active galaxies invalidates the assumptions of Friedmann and Einstein in general relativity. Lars Wåhlin's Mach's Principle vs. Einstein's Relativity (1993) and Hoff Lu and Shi-Ming Wang's A Direct Test of Mach's Principle (1995) pursue the Machian alternative.

General relativity, gravitation and black holes

Criticism aimed specifically at the general theory is developed at length on General relativity; the papers in this set cluster around three claims.

That black holes cannot form: Paul Marmet's Relativity and the Formation of Black Holes (1990) argues that on Einstein's own general relativity matter has no time to cross the Schwarzschild radius, whether one uses the proper time or the Schwarzschild time, and that black holes are therefore incompatible with a time-limited Big Bang cosmology.

That the classic tests do not require the theory: Thomas G. Barnes and Raymond J. Upham's Another Theory of Gravitation: An Alternative to Einstein's General Theory of Relativity (1976) argues that all three astronomical effects on which the theory's early fame rested follow from more conventional physical analyses. John B Kizer's Three Arguments on the Nature of Space (1983) argues that non-Euclidean geometry exists only as a special case of a higher-dimensional Euclidean geometry, thereby negating general relativity, and his The Total Gravitational Flux of Free Space (1983) uses the theory instrumentally while calling it logically contradictory. Vyacheslav N Streltsov argues in Gravitation: Frequency Shift vs. Lensing (2003) that gravitational lensing and the gravitational frequency shift mutually exclude one another, so that the atomic-clock experiments confirming the shift call the lensing observations into question; Elongation of Moving Bodies (2003) presses a geometrical objection to length contraction.

That gravitation should be built classically instead. This is the largest group. Oleg D. Jefimenko's Derivation of Relativistic Transformations for Gravitational Fields from Retarded Field Integrals (1995) derives Lorentz–Einstein-analogous transformations for gravitational fields from retarded field integrals, showing that Newtonian gravity extended to time-dependent fields is fully compatible with the relativity principle. Thierry De Mees develops gravitomagnetism from the Maxwell analogy in A Coherent Dual Vector Field Theory for Gravitation (2003) and states its relation to relativity in Discussion: the Dual Gravitation Field versus the Relativity Theory (2003). Mayeul Arminjon's Cosmology in a Scalar Ether Theory of Gravitation (2000) is a preferred-frame theory with a flat background metric and a curved physical metric. Peter G Bass offers Gravitation - A New Theory (2003) as an alternative to the general theory and The Special Theory of Relativity: A Classical Approach (2003) as a classical reformulation of the special one. S X K Howusu's On the Gravitation of Moving Bodies (1991) builds a theory of gravitation on the weak equivalence principle alone. David F. Roscoe's Galilean Metric Gravity (1995) argues that metric gravity does not require curved space-time manifolds; Theodore Theodorsen, the head theorist at NACA, made the same case in Relativity and Classical Physics (1995). Gary C Miller's prize-winning A Search for the Known Properties of Gravitation (1978) surveys which common beliefs about gravitation are actually supported by evidence. Anatoly A. Denisov's Bases of Gravitation (1999) holds that gravitational waves do not exist.

Relativity and quantum mechanics

A smaller strand holds that the incompatibility of relativity with quantum mechanics is a fact about relativity rather than an unsolved technical problem.

Evert Jan Post's A Dutch Uncle's Tirade about Relativity Matters directs its complaint at both sides — at the establishment for allowing the principle of general covariance to be emasculated, and at the Galileans for taking establishment attitudes too seriously — and argues that a refinement of general covariance resolves both the Galileans' problems and the establishment's failure to reconcile quantum theory with relativity. Jose L. Sanchez-Gomez argues in Are Quantum Mechanics and Relativity Theory really Compatible? (1997) that the two are incompatible unless the projection postulate is abandoned; Augusto Garuccio's Entangled States and the Compatibility Between Quantum Mechanics and Relativity (1997) describes an interferometer with a phase-conjugate mirror that he argues could transmit superluminal signals using only the axioms of quantum mechanics plus wave-packet reduction, and with Liberato De Caro he treats the same question in Correlation Functions and Einstein Locality (1994). Gino Tarozzi's Nonlocality, Relativity, and Two Further Quantum Paradoxes (1997) traces Einstein's own use of relativistic principles against the Copenhagen interpretation. Yi-Fang Chang's Contradiction Between the Uncertainty Principle and the Constancy of Light Speed (2001) argues that if velocity is subject to uncertainty relations then so is the velocity of light. Friedwardt Winterberg's Nonlinear Relativity and the Quantum Ether (1985) derives the Lorentz transformations from quantum-mechanical commutation rules and obtains a nonlinear generalisation that departs from special relativity at very high energies and establishes an observable substratum. H. Pierre Noyes and David O. McGoveran's An Essay on Discrete Foundations for Physics (1989) builds physics and cosmology on finiteness and discreteness instead. A. P. Bredimas's Schrodinger's "Aether" Unifies Quantum Mechanics and Relativistic Theories (1997) and André K. T. Assis's Charged Particle Oscillating Near a Capacitor (1999), which compares Weber electrodynamics with relativistic mechanics, approach the same junction from other directions.

Alternatives proposed on this wiki

Criticism is only half of this literature. The larger half is constructive, and it divides into three families that are not compatible with one another.

Neo-Lorentzian and preferred-frame theories

The most common alternative is not to abandon the Lorentz transformation but to reinterpret it. On this view a preferred frame exists — often identified with an aether or with the cosmological frame — and length contraction, clock retardation and light-signal synchronisation are physically real consequences of motion through it rather than symmetric appearances. Lorentz was right; Einstein re-described him, at the cost of turning real physical effects into conventions of measurement.

Franco Selleri produced the most developed version. Starting from two empirically based assumptions — that the two-way velocity of light is c in all inertial systems and all directions, and that time dilation occurs with the usual factor — he constructed in Space, Time, and Their Transformations (1995) a whole set of transformations equivalent to the Lorentz transformations for explaining the evidence, of which the Lorentz transformation is one member. Noninvariant One-Way Velocity of Light and Particle Collisions (1996) shows that energy and momentum defined consistently with these transformations reproduce all the precise data on inelastic thresholds and particle masses, and Recovering the Lorentz Ether (2004) draws the conclusion: his transformations explain the empirical data better than the special theory and eliminate the features that give rise to paradoxes, at the price of — or thanks to — recovering a preferred inertial frame in which the Lorentz ether is at rest.

Simon J Prokhovnik gave the position its name in the exchange Does Neo-Lorentzian Relativity Exist? (1980) with Victor Clube. Alexander L Kholmetskii's On Relativistic Kinematics in the Galilean Space (1995) and Relativity in Galilean Space: Why? (1996) describe spacetime as two four-dimensional orthogonal subspaces with Galilean and Lorentz transformation laws respectively, and claim this explains the physical sense of Lorentz's "world ether". Chalmers W Sherwin, Robert B Driscoll (Material Relativity: One Facet of Neo-Ritzian Theory, 1990), Mogens True Wegener (A Classical Alternative to STR, 1995, and Milne's Kinematic Relativity, 2000), Phillip Scribner (Relativity and Absolute Space, 1989) and Paul Wesley (Evidence for Newtonian Absolute Space and Time, 1997) all argue in this direction. Petr Beckmann's A Seductive Fallacy (1991) removes one of the standard supports for the orthodox reading, arguing that the well-known derivations of the Lorentz transformation "without the light postulate" are flawed by illegitimately identifying a constant with the dimensions of a velocity as the velocity of light. Ken Seto's Doppler Relativity Theory (2001) and G. E. Ivanchenko's Relativity of Absolute Space and Time True and False Indications of Measuring Devices (2001) are further variants. For the aether models underlying this family, see Aether; for the frame question itself, Preferred frame.

Galilean and classical-electrodynamic alternatives

A second family keeps Galilean kinematics and modifies electrodynamics instead — the reverse of Einstein's choice. Parry H. Moon and Domina Eberle Spencer stated the fork exactly in The New Electrodynamics and its Bearing on Relativity (1958): when the aether became untenable, one could either keep Maxwell's equations and replace the Galilean transformation with the Lorentz transformation, or keep Galilean relativity and replace Maxwell's equations with an extension of the Ampère–Gauss formulation. Einstein chose the first; they argue there was never any necessity to.

Adolphe Martin worked the same seam in Light Signals in Galilean Relativity (1994) and Reception of Light Signals in Galilean Space-Time (1997), replacing the constancy postulate with the invariance of space and time and using the Doppler factor to fix the time of reception — the reception of light by a moving observer and by an observer at rest being, on his account, two different events that Einstein treated as one, which is where the paradoxes enter. Curtis E Renshaw developed an aetherless Galilean space in Fresnel, Fitzeau, Hoek, Michelson-Morley, Michelson-Gale and Sagnac in Aetherless Galilean Space (1996) and The Restoration of Space and Time from a Galilean Approach to Relativity's Second Postulate (1998), arguing that Maxwell's equations by themselves say nothing about the velocity of propagation with respect to a given source; his A Test of Relativistic Simultaneity (1997) proposes an experimental discriminator. Horst E Wilhelm's Galilei Covariant Electromagnetic Field Equations (1990) derives generalised Galilei-covariant Maxwell equations containing the substratum velocity explicitly and reducing to the usual equations when it vanishes. Constantin I Mocanu built a competing Hertzian electrodynamics in Hertz's Special Relativity and Physical Reality (1994) and Hertz's Relativity: A Complementary Theory to Einstein's SR (1995), on the ground that real-world motions are non-inertial while Einstein's theory is limited to inertial ones. David Tombe's Maxwell's Equations and Galilean Relativity (1984) locates the velocity in v × B as absolute velocity through a dense electron–positron sea entrained with the Earth. Charles K. Thornhill's Real or Imaginary Space-Time? Reality or Relativity? (1996) contrasts the real space-time of Newtonian mechanics with the imaginary space-time of the non-aether concept. Charles W. Lucas and Joseph C. Lucas's Electrodynamics of Real Particles vs. Maxwell's Equations, Relativity Theory and Quantum Mechanics (1992) obtains the "relativistic effects" from the self-fields of finite-sized particles instead. Related: D E McLennan's Maxwell Equations: A New Approach (1989), Jean-Jacques Gruffat's Criticism on the Foundations of Relativity (1996), Trevor Morris's The Limiting Nature of Light-Velocity as the Causal Factor Underlying Relativity (1994), and A. I. A. Adey's A Note on Transverse Doppler Effects (1996), which finds transverse Doppler effects of relativistic magnitude already present in classical physics.

Replacement theories

A third family replaces relativity outright with a new system. These are mutually exclusive and are listed here as a guide, not as a synthesis.

• Autodynamics — Ricardo L Carezani replaces special relativity with a theory in which the neutrino is unnecessary, the "missing" energy and momentum in beta decay being an artefact of applying relativistic equations. See A New Experiment With RaE (1988), Nucleus-Nucleus Collision (1998), Neutrinos at Fermi Lab (1998) and Super-Kamiokande: Super-Proof for Neutrino Non-existence (1998).
• Millennium relativity — Joseph A Rybczyk accepts the constancy of light speed and the equivalence of inertial frames but introduces spherical reference frames, deriving different composition laws: Millennium Theory of Relativity (2001), Millennium Relativity Velocity Composition (2002) and Millennium Relativity Acceleration Composition (2003).
• Dynamic space — Tuomo Suntola treats space as the three-dimensional surface of a contracting and expanding 4-sphere, with the velocity of light appearing as the velocity of space in the fourth direction and relativistic phenomena following from a zero-energy balance, restoring absolute time and distance: New Cosmology Model Shows Relativity in Universal Time and Distant Observations in Euclidean Geometry (2001) and Dynamic Space Converts Relativity Into Absolute Time And Distance (2002).
• Observational physics / space density — James P Siepmann treats Space as a fourth form of energy and time as non-relative: The Laws of Space and Observation (1999), The Light Clock: A New Method of Measuring True Time (1999), A New Method of Calculating Gravity without the Gravitational Constant (1999), The Laws of Space and Observation: A Unified Theory (2002) and Proving that Space Density Theory is Different and More Complete than Spacetime (2004), which proposes an observable difference between his theory and spacetime.
• Exact classical mechanics — Ron Pearson's Alternative to Relativity including Quantum Gravitation (1991) derives E = mc² in a Euclidean geometry with universal time and a background medium.
• Discrete scale relativity — Robert L Oldershaw proposes a discrete cosmological self-similarity relating each class of systems on one scale of nature to its analogue on any other; see Discrete Scale Relativity and SX Phoenicis Variable Stars.
• Aether-replacement programmes — William R Jones's How the Ether Replaces Relativity (1987) argues that a tangible particulate ether supplies literal cause-and-effect mechanisms in place of time dilation and curved space; John Philip Claybourne's Why an Ether is Positively Necessary and a Candidate for the Job (1993), Frank M Meno's Planck-length atomistic kinetic model (1991), Miles Osmaston's A Particle-Tied Aether: Indications of a Deeper Foundation for Physics and Relativity (2000), Bernard L. Feldman's Discontinuous Ether Model (2000), Giuseppe Cannata's Ether and Relativity (1999) and Carl A Zapffe's A Magnetospheric Ether-Drag Theory and the Reference Frames of Relativistic Physics (1979) belong here. Fuller treatment is at Aether.
• Others — Steven Dinowitz's Super-Relativistic Dynamics (1991), in which mass depends on motion relative to the locally dominant gravitational field; T Chang's Multiple Concepts of Time in Flat and Curved Space (1992), arguing that Einstein time is not the only permissible definition of time in flat space and that general relativity's is too arbitrary; Georg Galeczki and Peter Marquardt's non-expanding, non-relativistic universe (1996); Hitoshi Kitada and Lance R. Fletcher's Local Time and the Unification of Physics (1996); Ian J Cowan's Relativity (1998) and Update on the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies (2003); Irving C Laucks's Was Newton Right After All? (1959), which asks why the transformation equations should hold for light if they are unthinkable for sound; and Milan R. Pavlovic's The Problem of Motion in the Theory of Relativity (2002).

Internal disagreements

It is worth stating the disagreements plainly rather than leaving them implicit, because they are what makes this a research tradition rather than a slogan.

• Whether the Lorentz transformation is right. Selleri, Hatch, Kholmetskii and the neo-Lorentzians keep it and reinterpret it. Moon and Spencer, Renshaw, Martin, Wilhelm and Peshchevitsky reject it and modify electrodynamics instead. Both call themselves critics of relativity; they are not making the same criticism.
• Whether the second postulate is false or merely conventional. Zaripov, Selleri and Goy argue that the one-way speed of light is a matter of convention and that the theory is therefore underdetermined rather than refuted. Nahhas and Monti argue that it is straightforwardly contradicted by measurement. The first position does not support the second.
• Whether the problem is physical or logical. Dingle, Chappell, Dring and Noninski hold that the theory can be dismissed on internal grounds without any experiment. Essen, Kelly, Hatch and Van Flandern rest their case on clock and satellite data. Hazelett argues from falsifiability that the theory is not the kind of thing that could be refuted by data at all.
• Whether an aether is required. Jones, Claybourne, Osmaston and Zapffe hold that a medium is indispensable. Renshaw builds an explicitly aetherless Galilean space. Selleri's preferred frame needs no substance, which the mechanical aether theorists regard as an evasion.
• What to say about general relativity. Kizer uses the general theory instrumentally while calling it logically contradictory; Post wants general covariance strengthened rather than abandoned; Barnes, Jefimenko and De Mees want gravitation rebuilt classically.

Sub-topics with their own pages

The arguments summarised above are developed in detail on the following pages, which this article does not duplicate.

• Special relativity and General relativity — the two theories, each with its own criticism section
• Time Dilation and Twin paradox — the reciprocity problem and the paradox that dramatises it
• Lorentz transformation — the mathematics, its Lorentzian and Einsteinian readings, and the alternatives to it
• Michelson–Morley experiment — the experiment and the long dispute over what it showed
• Preferred frame — whether absolute motion exists
• Aether — the medium, its many incompatible versions, and the drift experiments
• Speed of Light — the second postulate, one-way versus two-way speed, and the 1983 redefinition
• Sagnac Effect and GPS — the two experimental arenas where the theory is most sharply contested
• Albert Einstein — biography and the criticisms of his work
• Autodynamics — Carezani's replacement for special relativity
• Galilean Electrodynamics — the principal dissident journal on relativity; see also Apeiron and the Index of Journals
• Category:Relativity — the full index of relativity-related pages on this wiki

Early opposition to the theory, including the German controversies of the 1920s and the book A Hundred Authors Against Einstein (1931), is documented on the pages of the critics themselves: Ernst Gehrcke, Charles Lane Poor and Arvid Reuterdahl. Modern critics repudiate the political dimension of the early German opposition and rest their case on physical and logical arguments alone.

See also

• Special relativity
• General relativity
• Time Dilation
• Twin paradox
• Lorentz transformation
• Michelson–Morley experiment
• Preferred frame
• Aether
• Speed of Light
• Sagnac Effect
• Albert Einstein
• G O Mueller
• John Chappell Natural Philosophy Society