Rejecting Einstein Relativity & Developing Newton Physics

Scientific Paper
Title	Rejecting Einstein Relativity & Developing Newton Physics
Read in full	Link to paper
Author(s)	Zifeng Li
Keywords	special relativity, essence, philosophy, science, society, influence, space-time view, mass-energy view, Einstein, Newton, physics
Published	2008
No. of pages	22

Read the full paper here

Abstract

This paper discusses the current status of special relativity in science and philosophy, as well as society, the reasons for special relativity becoming famous, three viewpoints on special relativity in academe, four attitudes of public on special relativity, comments of famous scientists on special relativity, periodicals and scientific meetings as well as networks studying questions on special relativity. This paper sums up arguments that focus on special relativity, analyzes the mistakes of logic in special relativity, investigates the authenticity of validations and applications of special relativity, and concludes that the essence of special relativity is a wrong logical inference embarking from the idealist standpoint. It analyzes special relativity's harm in science and philosophy as well as society. This paper advocates the materialism style of seeking truth from facts and the publication policy of "a hundred flowers blossom and a hundred schools of thought contend", in order to liberate scientific research from its imprisonment in special relativity. The views of space-time and mass-energy of idealistic special relativity should be abandoned, and the views of space-time and mass-energy of materialism should be restored and developed. This paper re-derives the coordinate transformation between two coordinate systems moving uniformly along beeline one to another, and make it clear that the special relativity is a absurd theory based up wrong explanation of constant speed of light. This paper discusses the relationship between mass and energy. It discusses the measures for supporting relativity. Based on Newton's space-time view, it advances observation theory of moving objects. It forecasts the development of physics.

Overview

The full text of this paper is in Chinese, under the title 抛弃爱因斯坦相对论，发展牛顿物理学. Its author, Zifeng Li, is a petroleum engineer — director of the Petroleum Engineering Research Institute at Yanshan University, with a 1992 doctorate in oil and gas field development — and one of the most prolific participants in the Chinese anti-relativity movement of the 2000s. The paper is a survey and manifesto rather than a narrow technical note. It runs to eight numbered sections and cites some 126 references, of which more than a hundred are Chinese-language critiques of relativity, together with G. O. Mueller's 1,100-page compilation of ninety-five years of Western criticism.

Li's thesis is that Special Relativity is not a partially correct theory in need of repair but "a wrong logical inference embarking from the idealist standpoint" — an error of philosophy expressed as an error of algebra. Where the mainstream account treats the Lorentz transformation as the unique linear map preserving the light-cone, Li holds that it rests on a misreading of the light-speed postulate, and that once the postulate is stated correctly the transformation collapses to the Galilean one. The framing is explicitly dialectical-materialist: the Newtonian view of space, time, mass and energy is "materialist" and to be restored; the relativistic view is "idealist" and to be discarded. The paper is unusual among wiki holdings in devoting whole sections not to physics but to the sociology of the dispute — how relativity became famous, how its defenders (维相派, the "relativity-maintaining faction") suppress the critics (反相派, the "anti-relativity faction"), and what conditions would be needed to overturn it.

The argument

The materialist view of space, time, mass and energy

Section 2 lays down definitions treated as prior to any physics. Space is one of the forms of existence of matter: continuous, infinite, three-dimensional, isotropic, and independent of consciousness. Time is likewise a form of existence of matter — the durability and sequential order of material processes — continuous, one-directional, uniformly flowing, without beginning or end. Mass is an essential attribute of matter, "the amount of matter a body contains", and there is no matter with mass less than or equal to zero. Energy, by contrast, is not a substance but a state attribute of matter, characterising a body's capacity to do work.

Li supports the three-dimensionality of space with two arguments he takes from the literature: a biological one, that organisms with many non-intersecting nerve pathways require at least three dimensions, and Ehrenfest's 1917 result that stable planetary orbits and stable atomic states are impossible in four or more spatial dimensions. Against time travel he offers the grandfather paradox as a reductio. The classical Chinese gloss "四方上下曰宇，古往今来曰宙" — space is the six directions, time is past and future — is quoted to make the same point, as is Engels in Anti-Dühring: "the basic forms of all being are space and time, and being outside time is as gross an absurdity as being outside space."

The misread postulate

Section 3 is the technical core. Li distinguishes two readings of light-speed constancy: (1) in any inertial frame, light from a source fixed in that frame has the same speed relative to that frame; (2) light from the same source has the same speed relative to its source in all frames. Around 1900, he notes, source and apparatus were fixed together and the round-trip speed, not the one-way speed, was what was measured — so the experiments support only reading (1). The Lorentz transformation, he argues, instead assumes that one particular beam has the same coordinate speed in every frame, and in doing so "neglects the relative motion between the coordinate systems".

He then attacks the standard derivation directly. From x = k(x′ + vt′) and x′ = k(x − vt) one determines k by substituting x = ct and x′ = ct′. Li's objection is that these two substitutions describe two different photons — one emitted from O, one from O′ — so the step "replaces the description system of one event with that of another". He makes the point vivid by repeating the derivation with the origins initially separated by a distance S: the two candidate substitutions then give equations from which k cannot be determined at all. He raises three further objections: that x − vt is identically zero for the point being tracked, so the transformation reads 0 = 0; that composing two boosts K → K′ → K″ does not give the same result as the direct boost K → K″; and that a sphere contracted to an ellipsoid, and at v = c to a disc, would turn three dimensions into two, contradicting the postulates. His remedy is to take both substitutions from the same source at O: x = ct, x′ = ct′ − vt′. This yields k = 1 and hence the Galilean transformation x = x′ + vt′, t = t′ — "independent of the speed of light". Relative speeds greater than c are then permitted. Li presses the point with an analogy: substitute "speed of sound" for "speed of light" throughout the derivation and one concludes that nothing can move faster than sound, which bullets and aircraft plainly refute.

Mass and energy

Section 4 denies that mass and energy are interconvertible: "mass is mass, energy is energy". Any transfer of energy ΔE is accompanied by a transfer of mass Δm, but the two conservation laws hold separately. Li offers an alternative account of the observed mass increase in accelerators — an open system with momentum input, giving m = m₀/(1 − v/c), the increase being due to absorbed photons and the speed limit following because the pushing agent itself travels at c. He argues that a parallel derivation for energy input yields a formula of the same shape as Einstein's but is self-contradictory, since perfectly inelastic merging does not conserve kinetic energy. Einstein's kinetic-energy derivation is rejected on the ground that m = m₀/√(1 − v²/c²) was obtained for force-free uniform motion and cannot then be substituted into an integral over an accelerating body; the agreement of the leading term with (1/2)m₀v² is "pure coincidence or deliberate patchwork". Li credits Hasenöhrl's 1904 experimental work with the proportionality of mass increase to radiated energy, and finds Einstein's 1946 radiation-pressure derivation defective because opposing pressures on the two faces of the body should cancel. His own relation for energy carried off by photons is ΔE = (1/2)Δmc².

The sociology, and the replacement theory

Sections 5 and 6 argue that the burden of proof lies with relativity's defenders — the analogy is with a dispute over the existence of ghosts, where the sceptic need produce nothing — and catalogue ten tactics by which Li says critics are silenced, from political labelling to editorial refusal to infiltration of critics' own forums. Section 7 introduces the "observation theory of moving objects" of Wang Zhihai and Xu Hui as the replacement, built on absolute time and absolute length together with a distinction between the apparent time and length obtained by observing a moving frame with light signals and the true values. Its second postulate is that light travels at constant speed relative to its source in space, or relative to the medium within a medium. A comparison table closes the section: on Li's reckoning the observation theory has both theoretical and experimental support, no length contraction, no time dilation, no mass increase, no light barrier and no paradoxes.

Assessment

The paper's genuine contribution is documentary. Its bibliography is the most thorough guide in the wiki's holdings to the Chinese-language critical literature on relativity from the 1950s to 2004, including the proceedings of the 2003 Beijing and Xi'an conferences and dozens of articles from 发明与创新. Li is also right about one thing that mainstream textbooks routinely blur: the experiments of the Michelson era measured a round-trip speed, and the one-way isotropy of light is a convention fixed by the synchronisation procedure rather than an independent measurement — a point made carefully within relativity itself by Reichenbach and later by Bell. His insistence on distinguishing the observed from the true value of a quantity is likewise a real distinction, and one that the "observation theory" he endorses at least tries to formalise. The section on mass and energy correctly notes that Hasenöhrl and others were working on mass-energy proportionality before 1905, which is a piece of history often omitted.

The central technical argument, however, does not hold. Li's objection is that x = ct and x′ = ct′ describe two different photons; but in the standard derivation they describe one spherical wavefront emitted at the single event where the origins coincide, and the two equations are its equation in the two coordinate systems. His alternative substitution, x′ = ct′ − vt′, simply assumes the answer — it presupposes Galilean velocity addition for light, so obtaining k = 1 is circular. The claim that x − vt ≡ 0 mistakes the tracked origin for a general event; the transformation is a map between coordinate systems, not a statement about one worldline. The composition objection is the reverse of the truth: Lorentz boosts do compose, but by the relativistic velocity-addition rule (u + v)/(1 + uv/c²) rather than u + v, and Li's demonstration that the two disagree is a derivation of that rule, not a refutation. The sound-speed analogy fails because sound has a medium whose rest frame is detectable, which is precisely what the Aether-drift experiments failed to find for light.

The empirical difficulties are not addressed at all. Muon lifetimes in the atmosphere and in storage rings, the Ives–Stilwell transverse Doppler measurement, the mass-dependent operation of every synchrotron built since 1950, and the relativistic corrections without which GPS would drift by tens of kilometres a day are not discussed, and the blanket claim that all such tests are "invalid or fabricated" is asserted on the authority of two secondary sources. Li's own replacement formula m = m₀/(1 − v/c) is not the same function as m₀/√(1 − v²/c²) and disagrees with accelerator data by a factor that grows with β; the paper does not compare the two against any measurement. The relation ΔE = (1/2)Δmc² is stated without derivation and conflicts by a factor of two with measured nuclear binding energies. The claim that astronomical observation has "many times" seen two bodies with relative speed above c does not identify the observations; the well-known apparent superluminal motion in quasar jets is a projection effect with a standard geometric explanation.

Finally, much of the paper is not argument but advocacy. Sections 5 and 6 assert bad faith on the part of physicists — "they know special relativity is wrong, but out of political, economic and personal considerations they will not admit it" — and the appeal to burden-of-proof rules from Chinese civil procedure is a rhetorical device, not evidence. Relativity is called "a malignant tumour in the body of science" and "a religion wearing the clothes of science". Readers sympathetic to the critical project will find the strongest material in the bibliography and in the narrow point about round-trip versus one-way light speed; the algebraic case against the Lorentz Transformation, which is what the title promises, rests on a misidentification that the paper never tests.

See also

• Zifeng Li
• Special Relativity
• Albert Einstein
• Isaac Newton
• Lorentz Transformation
• Simultaneity
• Length Contraction
• Time Dilation
• Speed of Light
• Mass
• Energy
• Herbert Dingle
• Louis Essen
• Ernst Mach
• Galilean Electrodynamics