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THREE
Drifting in the Ether
Did Relativity Take A Wrong Turn?

Nature and Nature's laws lay hid in night: God said Let Newton be! And all was light.

— Alexander Pope. Epitaph intended for Sir Isaac Newton

 

It did not last. The Devil, shouting, Ho! Let Einstein be! restored the status quo.

— Unknown

 

 

It is generally held that few things could be more solidly grounded than Einstein's theory of relativity which, along with quantum mechanics, is usually cited as one of the twin pillars supporting modern physics. Questioning is a risky business, since it's a subject that attracts cranks in swarms. Nevertheless, a sizeable body of well-qualified, far-from-crankish opinion exists which feels that the edifice may have serious cracks in its foundations. So, carried forth by the touch of recklessness that comes with Irish genes, and not having any prestigious academic or professional image to anguish about, I'll risk being branded as of the swarms by sharing some of the things that my wanderings have led me to in connection with the subject.

The objections are not so much to the effect that relativity is "wrong." As we're endlessly being reminded, the results of countless experiments are in accord with the predictions of its equations, and that's a difficult thing to argue with. But neither was Ptolemy's model of the planetary system "wrong," in the sense that if you want to make the Earth the center of everything you're free to, and the resulting concoction of epicycles within epicycles correctly describes the heavenly motions as seen from that vantage point. Coming up with a manageable force law to account for them, however, would be monumentally close to an impossibility. 63 Put the Sun at the center, however, and the confusion reduces to a simplicity that reveals Keplerian order in a form that Newton was able to explain concisely in a way that was intuitively satisfying, and three hundred years of dazzlingly fruitful scientific unification followed.

In the same kind of way, critics of relativity maintain that the premises relativity is founded on, although enabling procedures to be formulated that correctly predict experimental results, nevertheless involve needlessly complicated interpretations of the way things are. At best this can only impede understanding of the kind that would lead to another explosion of enlightenment reminiscent of that following the Newtonian revolution. In other words, while the experimental results obtained to date are consistent with relativity, they do not prove relativity in the way we are constantly being assured, because they are not unique to the system that follows from relativity's assumptions. Other interpretations have been proposed that are compatible with all the cited observations, but which are conceptually and mathematically simpler. Moreover, in some cases they turn out to be more powerful predictively, able to derive from basic principles quantities that relativity can only accept as givens. According to the criteria that textbooks and advocates for the scientific method tell us are the things to go by, these should be the distinguishing features of a preferred theory.

However, when the subject has become enshrined as a doctrine founded by a canonized saint, it's not quite that simple. The heliocentric ideas of Copernicus had the same thing going for them too, but he circulated them only among a few trusted friends until he was persuaded to publish in 1543, after which he became ill and died. What might have happened otherwise is sobering to speculate. Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake in 1600 for combining similar thoughts with indiscreet politics. The Copernican theory was opposed by Protestant leaders as being contrary to Scriptural teachings and declared erroneous by the Roman Inquisition in 1616. Galileo was still being silenced as late as 1633, although by then heliocentricism was already implicit in Kepler's laws, enunciated between 1609 and 1619. It wasn't until 1687, almost a century and a half after Copernicus's death, that the simpler yet more-embracing explanation, unburdened of dogma and preconceptions, was recognized openly with the acceptance of Newton's Principia.

Fortunately, the passions loosed in such issues seem to have abated somewhat since those earlier times. I experienced a case personally at a conference some years ago, when I asked a well-known physicist if he'd gotten around to looking at a book I'd referred him to on an alternative interpretation to relativity, written by the late Czech professor of electrical engineering Petr Beckmann 64 (of whom, more later). Although a friend of many years, his face hardened and changed before my eyes. "I have not read the book," he replied tightly. "I have no intention of reading the book. Einstein cannot be wrong, and that's the end of the matter."

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