The results of the test were claimed as a triumph for Einstein, and his world-
wide fame dates from this event. Ironically enough, attempts made at later eclipses sug-
gest that Eddington underestimated the uncertainties inherent in such a difficult obser-
vation, and even today Einstein’s prediction has not been tested with the precision one
would wish.
The first thing I notice about those links is that they tell stories about people. Even more telling, they’re stories about celebrities. This is an extremely good heuristic for identifying crackpots. It mostly talks about who proposed theories and how credible those people supposedly are, but this is not how science works and this is not what scientific papers sound like. Science is about the theories and experiments themselves; the information about who did them is relatively unimportant, and when scientists do mention people it’s to acknowledge their contributions, and it takes up only a very small fraction of the text.
On the other hand, when a non-scientist tries to make sense of a field like physics without the necessary technical skills, politics-level arguments are all they have to go on, since they can’t actually understand the subject at the object-level. They then imagine that everyone else is going on politics, too. Then, when every scientist they talk to tells them to take their politics-level arguments and get lost (because they’re busy working at the object-level), they don’t understand why, and imagine it’s because of a conspiracy. Common pattern, easily recognizable, and anti-correlated with truth.
The author is one of the world’s foremost experts on the Global Positioning System and a former president of the Institute of Navigation. His book discusses GPS satellite data that contradicts Einstein’s relativity theories and proposes his own Modified Lorentz Ether Gauge Theory (MLET) as a replacement for Einstein’s relativity. It agrees at first order with relativity but corrects for certain astronomical anomalies not explained by relativity theory.
It’s worth noting that the Michelson-Morley experiment—designed in 1887 specifically to test the idea of light traveling through an ether (the prevailing theory before relativity), which would cause some sort of ether drift—came up essentially null. It placed an upper limit of 30 km/s on the speed of an ether, far lower than it would need to be if it truly existed. Each subsequent experiment that was performed using more accurate equipment has lowered this upper limit. The current upper limit of anisotropy in a single direction (that is, the most the speed of light can vary between two observers) based on an M-M style experiment is 0.9 m/s, and bidirectional anisotropy is 2x10^-13 m/s. More recent alternative experimental procedures have reduced these figures even further.
Unentrained ether (i.e. doesn’t interact with matter or gravity) should have an ether drift exactly matching the speed of the earth’s rotation around the sun, or 108,000 km/s. M-M style experiments and many others have conclusively proven this idea false. While an entrained or partially entrained ether (matter and/or gravity drag the ether along to some degree) can have a drift considerably lower, one still expects there to be a significant difference in the observed speed of light for two different observers. Also, it has it’s own problems that an unentrained ether does not have—namely that light must slow down over time in an entrained ether, even when traveling through a vacuum. This is clearly not observed.
In other words, Hatch’s theory was proven false a century before he proposed it, and further experiments on the subject (motivated by the search for a quantum theory of gravity) have only served to drive ever larger nails in its coffin.
This was actually very present in my mind when I read about Hatch’s idea, because I’m currently reading Hawking’s “A Brief History of Time”, and he goes into the proof against ether. Of course I’d heard of it before, but since nobody else mentioned it and I had been thinking about it already, I simply had to.
It’s amazing what people who haven’t learned their physics think about physics! It reminds me of another new version of an old theory of physics I read about on one of these posts—a new expansion theory of physics, which would require us to throw away everything since Newton. Pretty arrogant, and the explanations for it amounted to declarations by fiat that it was so—there was no evidence for it at all, and in fact require great convoluted maths in order to explain our observations. The author of that particular theory was apparently unaware of Newton’s inverse-square law of gravity, nor Einstein’s more accurate formula for the same, and the extensive experiments demonstrating it over the last couple hundred years.
Note that I’m not saying I have learned my physics even as well as these misguided would-be physicists have, I’m just saying I would never propose a new theory of physics without be certain it hadn’t already been conclusively disproven!
There have been literally thousands of confirmations of gravitational lensing—hell cosmologists have created a 3D map of dark matter based on gravitational lensing observed by the Hubble Space Telescope. It’s a phenomena that does not occur with Newtonian gravity, but absolutely must occur if General Relativity is correct.
It is one of those side-effects of the theory that can be used to disprove it if the side-effect does not occur. GR specifically demands this effect exist, because gravity is literally the bending of space-time, which affects the straight-line path of anything traveling across space-time. Light travels across space-time just as much as matter with mass, so its path must be affected by any curvature caused by a massive object. It’s the same kind of test as bouncing a ping-pong ball straight up and down on a train going 90mph—if the ball falls off the table (as Aristotelian motion suggested) instead of bouncing in the same spot, Newton’s laws of motion are worthless.
This also happens to be how cosmologists expect to see the first direct observational evidence of black holes. My understanding is that there is not currently a radio-telescope large enough to discern such an effect yet, but one cosmologist is connecting radio-telescopes across the US to create a massive virtual telescope that would have the resolution required. Pretty cool stuff.
I’m not a physicists so I can’t comment on the details of theory. The links that I provided claim that the original experiment that proved Einstein correct didn’t in fact do so. If the claim is right it would put in question the modus operandi of the scientific community. That doesn’t mean Einstein was wrong but maybe we should be a bit more distrustful of the scientific consensus that is presented as correct and proven.
That’s disingenuous. Your original suggestion was clearly that Einstein was wrong, not just that one experiment was exaggerated. The Amazon book claims Einstein’s entire theory is incorrect. The very quote you provide also says that “even today” Einstein’s theories have not been tested with enough precision, and the conclusion of the quoted article seems to be that General Relativity is incorrect.
Thus, if you distrust anything, it should probably be the article and the book.
Regarding the experiment, the article says that scientists merely mistakenly thought the experiment was greater confirmation than it was, which has already been noted. Surely the fact that the scientists themselves eventually realized this, and designed many other experiments which did confirm General Relativity, is enough to give some measure of trust in the “modus operandi” of the scientific community today.
Scientists are only human, and make mistakes like anyone else. Conspiracy theories and distrust are unwarranted, I think.
Was Einstein really correct? This link http://www.infinite-energy.com/iemagazine/issue87/hoax.html
Lead me to the following: http://www.scientificexploration.org/journal/jse_13_2_mccausland.pdf
From where I quote:
The first thing I notice about those links is that they tell stories about people. Even more telling, they’re stories about celebrities. This is an extremely good heuristic for identifying crackpots. It mostly talks about who proposed theories and how credible those people supposedly are, but this is not how science works and this is not what scientific papers sound like. Science is about the theories and experiments themselves; the information about who did them is relatively unimportant, and when scientists do mention people it’s to acknowledge their contributions, and it takes up only a very small fraction of the text.
On the other hand, when a non-scientist tries to make sense of a field like physics without the necessary technical skills, politics-level arguments are all they have to go on, since they can’t actually understand the subject at the object-level. They then imagine that everyone else is going on politics, too. Then, when every scientist they talk to tells them to take their politics-level arguments and get lost (because they’re busy working at the object-level), they don’t understand why, and imagine it’s because of a conspiracy. Common pattern, easily recognizable, and anti-correlated with truth.
The clocks on GPS satellites must be corrected for relativistic time dilation.
There is some controversy in this respect:
http://www.amazon.com/Escape-Einstein-Ronald-R-Hatch/product-reviews/0963211307/
It’s worth noting that the Michelson-Morley experiment—designed in 1887 specifically to test the idea of light traveling through an ether (the prevailing theory before relativity), which would cause some sort of ether drift—came up essentially null. It placed an upper limit of 30 km/s on the speed of an ether, far lower than it would need to be if it truly existed. Each subsequent experiment that was performed using more accurate equipment has lowered this upper limit. The current upper limit of anisotropy in a single direction (that is, the most the speed of light can vary between two observers) based on an M-M style experiment is 0.9 m/s, and bidirectional anisotropy is 2x10^-13 m/s. More recent alternative experimental procedures have reduced these figures even further.
Unentrained ether (i.e. doesn’t interact with matter or gravity) should have an ether drift exactly matching the speed of the earth’s rotation around the sun, or 108,000 km/s. M-M style experiments and many others have conclusively proven this idea false. While an entrained or partially entrained ether (matter and/or gravity drag the ether along to some degree) can have a drift considerably lower, one still expects there to be a significant difference in the observed speed of light for two different observers. Also, it has it’s own problems that an unentrained ether does not have—namely that light must slow down over time in an entrained ether, even when traveling through a vacuum. This is clearly not observed.
In other words, Hatch’s theory was proven false a century before he proposed it, and further experiments on the subject (motivated by the search for a quantum theory of gravity) have only served to drive ever larger nails in its coffin.
Proven false a century before he proposed it? That’s… well, not exactly surprising but definitely embarrassing!
It certainly is!
This was actually very present in my mind when I read about Hatch’s idea, because I’m currently reading Hawking’s “A Brief History of Time”, and he goes into the proof against ether. Of course I’d heard of it before, but since nobody else mentioned it and I had been thinking about it already, I simply had to.
It’s amazing what people who haven’t learned their physics think about physics! It reminds me of another new version of an old theory of physics I read about on one of these posts—a new expansion theory of physics, which would require us to throw away everything since Newton. Pretty arrogant, and the explanations for it amounted to declarations by fiat that it was so—there was no evidence for it at all, and in fact require great convoluted maths in order to explain our observations. The author of that particular theory was apparently unaware of Newton’s inverse-square law of gravity, nor Einstein’s more accurate formula for the same, and the extensive experiments demonstrating it over the last couple hundred years.
Note that I’m not saying I have learned my physics even as well as these misguided would-be physicists have, I’m just saying I would never propose a new theory of physics without be certain it hadn’t already been conclusively disproven!
Ether does some crazy things to the minds of its users… both the theory, and the substance. Ha! Ha!
I think you should probably pick a different example—a book published by a guy in 1992 that has one review on Amazon?
ETA: And the review is by some guy who tends to positively review books that discuss that special relativity is incorrect?
Well if you google the author he seems to be quite an authority on GPS:
http://www.spoke.com/info/p6ecb1w/RonaldHatch
My point was that flaws in Eddington’s experiments are infinitesimally weak evidence of flaws in GR. I have no opinion on successors to the theory.
Ooops, you are violating the conservation of expected evidence.
There have been literally thousands of confirmations of gravitational lensing—hell cosmologists have created a 3D map of dark matter based on gravitational lensing observed by the Hubble Space Telescope. It’s a phenomena that does not occur with Newtonian gravity, but absolutely must occur if General Relativity is correct.
It is one of those side-effects of the theory that can be used to disprove it if the side-effect does not occur. GR specifically demands this effect exist, because gravity is literally the bending of space-time, which affects the straight-line path of anything traveling across space-time. Light travels across space-time just as much as matter with mass, so its path must be affected by any curvature caused by a massive object. It’s the same kind of test as bouncing a ping-pong ball straight up and down on a train going 90mph—if the ball falls off the table (as Aristotelian motion suggested) instead of bouncing in the same spot, Newton’s laws of motion are worthless.
See Wikipedia for more on gravitational lensing.
This also happens to be how cosmologists expect to see the first direct observational evidence of black holes. My understanding is that there is not currently a radio-telescope large enough to discern such an effect yet, but one cosmologist is connecting radio-telescopes across the US to create a massive virtual telescope that would have the resolution required. Pretty cool stuff.
...the most feared of all scientists. Now there’s a profession I’d like to go into!
I’m not a physicists so I can’t comment on the details of theory. The links that I provided claim that the original experiment that proved Einstein correct didn’t in fact do so. If the claim is right it would put in question the modus operandi of the scientific community. That doesn’t mean Einstein was wrong but maybe we should be a bit more distrustful of the scientific consensus that is presented as correct and proven.
You should be a bit more distrustful of perpetual motion advocacy websites.
That’s disingenuous. Your original suggestion was clearly that Einstein was wrong, not just that one experiment was exaggerated. The Amazon book claims Einstein’s entire theory is incorrect. The very quote you provide also says that “even today” Einstein’s theories have not been tested with enough precision, and the conclusion of the quoted article seems to be that General Relativity is incorrect.
Thus, if you distrust anything, it should probably be the article and the book.
Regarding the experiment, the article says that scientists merely mistakenly thought the experiment was greater confirmation than it was, which has already been noted. Surely the fact that the scientists themselves eventually realized this, and designed many other experiments which did confirm General Relativity, is enough to give some measure of trust in the “modus operandi” of the scientific community today.
Scientists are only human, and make mistakes like anyone else. Conspiracy theories and distrust are unwarranted, I think.