It is important to note here that Andrew Schlafly, founder of Conservapedia and author of most of these articles, has a degree in electrical engineering and worked as an engineer for several years before becoming a lawyer. He would not only be capable of understanding the mathematics, he would have used concepts from the theory in his professional work.
In fairness to relativity crackpots, unless things have changed since my freshman days, the way special relativity is commonly taught in introductory physics courses is practically an invitation for the students to form crackpot ideas. Instead of immediately explaining the idea of the Minkowski spacetime, which reduces the whole theory almost trivially to some basic analytic geometry and calculus and makes all those so-called “paradoxes” disappear easily in a flash of insight, physics courses often take the godawful approach of grafting a mishmash of weird “effects” (like “length contraction” and “time dilatation”) onto a Newtonian intuition and then discussing the resulting “paradoxes” one by one. This approach is clearly great for pop-science writers trying to dazzle and amaze their lay audiences, but I’m at a loss to understand why it’s foisted onto students who are supposed to learn real physics.
David_Gerard:
In fairness to relativity crackpots, unless things have changed since my freshman days, the way special relativity is commonly taught in introductory physics courses is practically an invitation for the students to form crackpot ideas. Instead of immediately explaining the idea of the Minkowski spacetime, which reduces the whole theory almost trivially to some basic analytic geometry and calculus and makes all those so-called “paradoxes” disappear easily in a flash of insight, physics courses often take the godawful approach of grafting a mishmash of weird “effects” (like “length contraction” and “time dilatation”) onto a Newtonian intuition and then discussing the resulting “paradoxes” one by one. This approach is clearly great for pop-science writers trying to dazzle and amaze their lay audiences, but I’m at a loss to understand why it’s foisted onto students who are supposed to learn real physics.