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 two related theories: the special theory of relativity (1905), which concerns space, time, and motion for observers in uniform relative motion, and the general theory of relativity (1915), which reinterprets gravitation as the curvature of spacetime. Together they replaced the absolute space and time of Newtonian mechanics and, in mainstream physics, are regarded as among the best-confirmed theories in science. Since their inception, however, both theories have drawn sustained objections and claimed refutations; this wiki, maintained by the John Chappell Natural Philosophy Society, documents that critical tradition at length.
The two theories
- 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) generalizes special relativity and Newtonian gravity, describing 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.
Origins and precursors
Special relativity did not appear in isolation. It grew out of nineteenth-century electrodynamics and the failure of experiments — above all the Michelson–Morley experiment (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 (the Lorentz transformation, local time, and, with George FitzGerald, the length-contraction hypothesis) and by Henri Poincaré, who formulated a principle of relativity and much of the formalism before 1905. A recurring theme in the critical literature is that these precursors show relativity to be less original — and its aether-free interpretation less necessary — than is usually claimed.
Criticism of relativity
Opposition to relativity is nearly as old as the theory itself, and this wiki treats it as a serious and continuing research tradition. The arguments summarized below are attributed to their authors; many run contrary to the mainstream scientific consensus, which holds the theories to be extensively confirmed. Several thousand relevant pages are collected under Category:Relativity.
Early scientific opposition (1910s–1930s)
Criticism began almost at once. In Germany the spectroscopist Ernst Gehrcke published against the theory from 1911, and after Einstein's fame grew a public "anti-relativity" campaign developed: an Einstein-focused rally was held in the Berlin Philharmonic in 1920, and Einstein was drawn into a celebrated debate with the Nobel laureate Philipp Lenard at Bad Nauheim later that year. The book A Hundred Authors Against Einstein (Hundert Autoren gegen Einstein, 1931) collected short critical statements from many contributors — prompting Einstein's often-quoted reply that "to defeat relativity one did not need the word of 100 scientists, just one fact." In the United States the Columbia astronomer Charles Lane Poor and the engineer Arvid Reuterdahl were prominent critics in the 1920s.
Historical note: the early German opposition mixed genuine scientific objections with nationalist and, increasingly, antisemitic politics — Lenard and Johannes Stark became leaders of the "Deutsche Physik" ("German Physics") movement that denounced relativity as "Jewish physics." Modern critics generally repudiate that political dimension and rest their case on physical and logical arguments alone.
The Dingle controversy
One of the most sustained twentieth-century challenges came from Herbert Dingle (1890–1978), an English physicist and philosopher of science and a President of the Royal Astronomical Society. Having earlier written a well-known popular exposition of relativity (Relativity for All, 1922), Dingle from the 1950s came to argue that special relativity is self-contradictory: 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 this "reciprocity" argument for two decades, culminating in his book Science at the Crossroads (1972). Mainstream physicists held that Dingle's argument rested on a misunderstanding of the theory; his critics on this wiki regard it as unrefuted.
Modern dissident criticism
The contemporary community around the Natural Philosophy Alliance and the John Chappell Natural Philosophy Society has produced an extensive technical literature challenging relativity. Recurring lines of argument include:
- Logical and philosophical objections — that the relativity of simultaneity and the reciprocity of time dilation are logically incoherent (e.g. John E Chappell, Francisco J Müller).
- The twin paradox — treated not as a resolved feature of the theory but as a symptom of that incoherence (e.g. Nick Percival).
- Experimental challenges — reinterpretations of the data usually cited in support of relativity, including GPS timing, the Hafele–Keating experiment, and muon decay, argued to reflect asymmetric clock retardation rather than symmetric time dilation (e.g. Nick Percival, Peter Ripota).
- Electromagnetic experiments — claims that laboratory experiments in electromagnetism contradict relativistic electrodynamics, most notably Francisco J. Müller's work on unipolar induction (the Faraday disc, or homopolar generator), which he argues produces induction across magnetically field-free regions that a local field theory such as special relativity cannot explain.
- The Sagnac effect — that the travel-time difference between counter-rotating light beams, a first-order effect exploited commercially in ring laser gyroscopes and corrected for in GPS, exhibits an anisotropic one-way speed of light that the theory cannot naturally accommodate. The testimony most often cited here is that of Cynthia Kolb Whitney, who took an MIT doctorate in special relativity in 1967 and was assigned that same year to ring laser gyroscopes at the Charles Stark Draper Laboratory: she spent a decade arguing the relativistic case to the engineers there and, by her own account, lost. See also Ruyong Wang's report of a Sagnac-type effect in uniformly moving fibre in Physics Letters A (2003), and Franco Selleri's infinite-radius argument.
- Priority and originality — that the essential results were due to Lorentz and Poincaré.
Detailed criticism specific to each theory is collected on the special relativity and general relativity pages.
Neo-Lorentzian and aether alternatives
The most common alternative advanced by critics is not to abandon the Lorentz transformation but to reinterpret it. In neo-Lorentzian (or "Lorentzian aether") theories, a preferred reference frame exists — often identified with an aether or with the cosmological frame — and the effects of relativity (length contraction, clock retardation, and light-signal synchronization) are physically real consequences of motion through that frame, rather than symmetric appearances. Prominent modern advocates documented on this wiki include Franco Selleri (his "inertial transformations"), Joseph Levy, Simon J Prokhovnik, and Ludwig Kostro (who documented Einstein's own later "relativistic ether"). Petr Beckmann developed a Galilean, aether-based electrodynamics and founded the journal Galilean Electrodynamics as a venue for such work, while Ricardo Carezani proposed replacing special relativity outright with his "Autodynamics."
Resources on this wiki
- Special relativity and General relativity — the two theories, each with its own criticism section
- Sagnac Effect and GPS — two experimental arenas where the theory is contested
- Albert Einstein — biography and the criticisms of his work
- Category:Relativity — the full index of relativity-related pages on this wiki (several thousand)
- Galilean Electrodynamics — the principal dissident journal on relativity; see also Apeiron and the Index of Journals
- Notable critics with pages here: Herbert Dingle, Charles Lane Poor, Arvid Reuterdahl, Franco Selleri, Joseph Levy, Simon J Prokhovnik, Petr Beckmann, Ludwig Kostro, Ricardo Carezani, Alphonsus G Kelly, Nick Percival, Cynthia Kolb Whitney, Ruyong Wang