- Bethell, Tom.
Questioning Einstein.
Pueblo West, CO: Vales Lake Publishing, 2009.
ISBN 978-0-9714845-9-7.
-
Call it my guilty little secret. Every now and then, I enjoy nothing
more than picking up a work of crackpot science, reading it with the
irony lobe engaged, and figuring out precisely where the author went
off the rails and trying to imagine how one might explain to them the
blunders which led to the poppycock they expended so much effort getting
into print. In the field of physics, for some reason Einstein's
theory of
special
relativity attracts a disproportionate number of such authors, all
bent on showing that Einstein was wrong or, in the case of the present
work's subtitle, asking “Is Relativity Necessary?”. With a little
reflexion, this shouldn't be a surprise: alone among major theories of
twentieth century physics, special relativity is mathematically accessible
to anybody acquainted with high school algebra, and yet makes predictions
for the behaviour of objects at high velocity which are so counterintuitive
to the expectations based upon our own personal experience with
velocities much smaller than that they appear, at first glance, to be
paradoxes. Theories more dubious and less supported
by experiment may be shielded from crackpots simply by the forbidding
mathematics one must master in order to understand and talk about them
persuasively.
This is an atypical exemplar of the genre. While most attacks on special
relativity are written by delusional mad scientists, the author of the present
work,
Tom Bethell, is a respected
journalist whose work has been praised by, among others, Tom Wolfe and
George Gilder. The theory presented here is not his own, but one
developed by
Petr Beckmann,
whose life's work, particularly in advocating civil nuclear power, won
him the respect of Edward Teller (who did not, however, endorse his
alternative to relativity). As works of crackpot science go, this is one of the
best I've read. It is well written, almost free of typographical and factual
errors, clearly presents its arguments in terms a layman can grasp, almost
entirely avoids mathematical equations, and is thoroughly documented with
citations of original sources, many of which those who have learnt
special relativity from modern textbooks may not be aware. Its arguments
against special relativity are up to date, tackling objections including the
Global Positioning System,
the Brillet-Hall experiment, and the
Hafele-Keating
“travelling clock” experiments as well as the classic tests. And
the author eschews the ad hominem attacks
on Einstein which are so common in the literature of opponents to relativity.
Beckmann's theory posits that the
luminiferous æther
(the medium in which light
waves propagate), which was deemed “superfluous” in Einstein's
1905 paper, in fact exists, and is simply the locally dominant gravitational
field. In other words, the medium in which light waves wave is the gravity
which makes things which aren't light heavy. Got it? Light waves in any experiment
performed on the Earth or in its vicinity will propagate in the æther of its
gravitational field (with only minor contributions from those of other
bodies such as the Moon and Sun), and hence attempts to detect the
“æther drift” due to the Earth's orbital motion around the
Sun such as the
Michelson-Morley experiment
will yield a null result, since the æther is effectively “dragged” or
“entrained” along with the Earth. But since the gravitational field
is generated by the Earth's mass, and hence doesn't rotate with it
(Huh—what about the
Lense-Thirring effect,
which is never mentioned here?), it should be possible to detect the much smaller
æther drift effect as the measurement apparatus rotates around the Earth, and it
is claimed that several experiments have made such a detection.
It's traditional that popular works on special relativity couch their examples
in terms of observers on trains, so let me say that it's here that we feel the
sickening non-inertial-frame lurch as the train departs the track and enters
a new inertial frame headed for the bottom of the canyon. Immediately, we're
launched into a discussion of the
Sagnac effect and its
various manifestations ranging from the original experiment to practical
applications in
laser ring gyroscopes,
to round-the-world measurements bouncing signals off multiple satellites. For
some reason the Sagnac effect seems to be a powerful attractor into which special
relativity crackpottery is sucked. Why it is so difficult to comprehend, even by
otherwise intelligent people, entirely escapes me. May I explain it to you? This
would be easier with a diagram, but just to show off and emphasise how simple it
is, I'll do it with words. Imagine you have a turntable, on which are mounted four
mirrors which reflect light around the turntable in a square: the light just goes
around and around. If the turntable is stationary and you send a pulse of light
in one direction around the loop and then send another in the opposite direction, it
will take precisely the same amount of time for them to complete one circuit of
the mirrors. (In practice, one uses continuous beams of monochromatic light and
combines them in an interferometer, but the effect is the same as measuring the
propagation time—it's just easier to do it that way.) Now, let's assume you
start the turntable rotating clockwise. Once again you send pulses of light around
the loop in both directions; this time we'll call the one which goes in the
same direction as the turntable's rotation the clockwise pulse and the other
the counterclockwise pulse. Now when we measure how long it took for the
clockwise pulse to make it one time around the loop we find that it took
longer than for the counterclockwise pulse. OMG!!! Have we disproved Einstein's
postulate of the constancy of the speed of light (as is argued in this book at
interminable length)? Well, of course not, as a moment's reflexion will reveal.
The clockwise pulse took longer to make it around the loop because it
had farther to travel to arrive there: as it was bouncing from each mirror
to the next, the rotation of the turntable was moving the next mirror further away,
and so each leg it had to travel was longer. Conversely, as the counterclockwise
pulse was in flight, its next mirror was approaching it, and hence by the time it
made it around the loop it had travelled less far, and consequently arrived sooner.
That's all there is to it, and precision measurements of the Sagnac effect confirm
that this analysis is completely consistent with special relativity. The only possible
source of confusion is if you make the self-evident blunder of analysing the system
in the rotating reference frame of the turntable. Such a reference frame is trivially
non-inertial, so special relativity does not apply. You can determine this simply by
tossing a ball from one side of the turntable to another, with no need for all the
fancy mirrors, light pulses, or the rest.
Other claims of Beckmann's theory are explored, all either dubious or trivially
falsified. Bethell says there is no evidence for the
length contraction
predicted by special relativity. In fact, analysis of
heavy ion collisions
confirm that each nucleus approaching the scene of the accident “sees” the
other as a “pancake” due to relativistic length contraction. It is
claimed that while physical processes on a particle moving rapidly through a
gravitational field slow down, that an observer co-moving with that particle
would not see a comparable slow-down of clocks at rest with respect to
that gravitational field. But the corrections applied to the atomic clocks in GPS
satellites incorporate this effect, and would produce incorrect results if it
did not occur.
I could go on and on. I'm sure there is a simple example from gravitational lensing
or propagation of electromagnetic radiation from gamma ray bursts which would
falsify the supposed classical explanation for the gravitational deflection of light
due to a refractive effect based upon strength of the gravitational field, but why
bother when so many things much easier to dispose of are hanging lower on the tree.
Should you buy this book? No, unless, like me, you enjoy a rare example of
crackpot science which is well done. This is one of those, and if you're well
acquainted with special relativity (if not, take a trip on our
C-ship!) you may find it entertaining
finding the flaws in and identifying experiments which falsify the arguments
here.
January 2011 