And the Washington Monthly linked to this guy as a "contributing editor"

[mmcirvin]

Oh lordy lordy, Tom Bethell is attacking the theory of relativity again. This time, he uses a bunch of equivocation from various physicists about whether phenomenon X is really true or just appears to be true (inevitable when you're talking about a theory in which surprising things turn out to be observer-relative) to insinuate that the whole thing is destined for the dustbin of history.

I really don't have anything better to say about Bethell's take on relativity than John Farrell said back in 2000. Unlike, say, Rush Limbaugh's take on ozone depletion, it never caught on as widely repeated conservative dogma the previous times Bethell tried taking down Einstein in The American Spectator, but I guess hope springs eternal.

Comments

[jwgh]

I occasionally check in on the Relativity Wars on Conservapedia, which have resulted in a very odd mish-mash of an article.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

It occurs to me that a basic confusion Bethell displays in this article, and that shows up in a lot of, shall we say, outsider writing on physics, is that he thinks physical theories are about ultimate ontology. That, for instance, it's of crucial importance whether Time Itself slows down in some situation, or whether it's just the action of some crazy field that makes every possible clock and physical process slow down in exactly the same manner. This is the sort of thing physicists have open-ended late-night bull-shooting sessions about, but it doesn't really affect the question of whether you should regard special relativity as valid.

Part of the problem is that elementary textbooks and popular accounts often display confusion on this subject, and, furthermore, Einstein himself was prone to speculations and reversals on the matter. Einstein was fond of a kind of logical positivism in his youth, the idea that you should never have any entity in your theory that is not directly measurable. Later on, he rejected it. It's a good attitude to have at the outset of your theorizing, to remind yourself of what's really important and to keep yourself from committing to the reality of things that aren't there; but you soon find that if taken too literally it's an impediment.

That's what's going on in his rebuke to Heisenberg, and, I think, also in his statement about "reintroducing an aether". Early thinking about special relativity (echoed in intro texts to this day) considered it very important whether there or not there was some stuff in empty space that transmitted light. So every time somebody posits some kind of stuff in the vacuum, whether it be quantum field operators or dark energy or virtual particles or the curvature of the spacetime metric, somebody's bound to say "Aha! You've put the luminiferous aether back!" never mind that it doesn't affect the numerical conclusions of relativity one bit. And, unfortunately, Einstein himself abetted that kind of talk with his remark; but I think what he was really trying to say was that it was a mistake to focus so much on the absolute ontological absence of vacuum-aether-stuff in the first place; you can have unobserved entities in a theory as long as you're not committed to them in the face of countervailing evidence about observed entities.