Questioning Einstein: Is Relativity Necessary?, by Tom Bethell
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Questioning Einstein: Is Relativity Necessary?, by Tom Bethell
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Questioning Einstein: Is Relativity Necessary? by Tom Bethell is a serious scholarly work that is very well written, absorbing the reader in a tale of long-neglected experimental results that plays out to a deep satisfaction in finally answering the question, "Why can't I understand relativity?" This is a fresh, unique review of both special and general relativity. It takes for granted that Einstein’s mathematics is properly done. It does not quarrel with the numerous experimental results that support Einstein’s general relativity theory. Then what is the quarrel with Einstein? Bethell argues that special relativity theory is wrong and general relativity theory is not necessary. For example, Einstein himself derived E= mc2 without relativity theory, and he also argued in a lecture in 1920 at Leiden that “space without ether is unthinkable,” only 15 years after having said that the ether was superfluous. Bethell’s book is not mathematical; after all, he does not quarrel with Einstein’s mathematics. Importantly, it is strongly based on experimental foundations. Time dilation, for example, is supported by—but not proved by—moving muons and clocks carried around the globe. In particular, Bethell promotes Petr Beckmann’s case that the medium of propagation of light is the dominant gravitational field. That idea is actually part and parcel of Einstein’s general theory of relativity, save that the latter hides the simplicity behind tensors in curved space-time.
Questioning Einstein: Is Relativity Necessary?, by Tom Bethell - Amazon Sales Rank: #641094 in eBooks
- Published on: 2015-06-25
- Released on: 2015-06-25
- Format: Kindle eBook
Questioning Einstein: Is Relativity Necessary?, by Tom Bethell About the Author Mr. Bethell is a journalist in Washington D.C. He is a senior editor of The American Spectator. Earlier he was Washington editor of Harper's and an editor of the Washington Monthly. He has written for many other magazines, including Fortune, the New York Times Magazine, and The Atlantic Monthly. He has been a columnist for the Los Angeles Herald Examiner and the Washington Star. Today he is also a media fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford.
He has written several books, including The Noblest Triumph: Property and Prosperity through the Ages (St. Martin's Press) and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Science (Eagle Publishing). The writer and hi-tech analyst George Gilder has said that Bethell commands the most eloquent prose in American journalism. In 1988, a collection of his journalism was published under the title The Electric Windmill. Tom Wolfe said that the book establishes Tom Bethell as one of our most brilliant essayists.
His new book on Einstein's theory of relativity is written for the benefit of laymen, includes no math and argues that the facts of physics can be more simply explained without relativity theory. In plain language, it advances the views of Petr Beckmann, who wrote Einstein Plus Two and for years taught at the University of Colorado.
A graduate of Oxford University where he studied philosophy, physiology and psychology, Mr. Bethell came to the United States in 1962. He is married to Donna Fitzpatrick Bethell. They live in Washington, D.C.
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71 of 95 people found the following review helpful. Petr Beckmann's Relativity By Neil DeRosa Questioning Einstein: Is Relativity Necessaryby, Tom BethellThat a book by a great and established writer like Tom Bethell, who is a long-time science writer and political columnist at The American Spectator, hasn't been officially reviewed yet, says more about those who pose as the intellectual and editorial guardians of literature than it does about the quality of this book or the stature of its author. In fact, it is an engaging, well researched book about one of the most interesting paradigm struggles of the twentieth century (and still ongoing today). That Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity (SR) was influenced by and made quickly popular by the relativistic ideologies of its time (1905) seems to this writer a foregone conclusion. But it was the Michelson-Morley experiment that failed to detect a "luminiferous ether," which gave SR scientific credibility. But Michelson himself soon doubted its conclusions and proved it in the later Michelson-Gale experiment which did detect an ether.H. Lorentz, a contemporary of Einstein, and a scientist of equal stature, argued in numerous debates with Einstein that all "relativistic effects" (such as the bending of starlight as it passes near the sun) were the result of light traveling through an "entrained ether" which surrounds and moves with planetary bodies--otherwise known as the gravitational field. Other well-known physicists of the day also doubted the veracity of SR, especially its principle of space-time distortion. A few were: Herbert Dingle, whose "paradox" asked the question of which "clock" would run slow (and thus experience time dilation predicted by SR) of two relativistic travelers; as for example two rocket ships in different inertial frames (i.e., going at different speeds relative to each other). Another physicist, H. Ives, of the famous Ives-Stillwell experiment to test the Doppler effect of fast moving mesons, became a lifelong enemy of Einstein because he felt that his results were being misinterpreted. And there were many others who disagreed with Einstein's fundamental conclusions.Even Einstein himself, as Bethell points out, later in life admitted that forces propagating through empty space without a medium in which they could be conveyed, was a logical absurdity--a fact never mentioned in textbooks, or in other "easy Einstein" books. In the later part of the twentieth century, other scientific critics picked up where Lorentz and his contemporaries had left off. Among them were Tom Van Flandern, Carver Mead, and Petr Beckmann. Bethell concentrates on Beckmann's critique, written in a technical book called Einstein Plus Two, in which the author claims that all the effects of both Special and General Relativity can be explained using classical physics. Bethell brings Beckmann's book down to earth from the arcane heights of Mt. Olympus by rendering Beckmann's mathematical descriptions understandable to the layman.If you are interested in the history of one of the most pivotal scientific ideas of our time, if you have always believed that the world should make sense but would still like to know about the mysteries of relativity, this book may be for you. And this reviewer might add that although Bethell might not know it yet, this may be his most significant book.
89 of 128 people found the following review helpful. Read real science first (or better yet, instead) By Cal Engime (This review was greatly rewritten on 6 September 2012, imposing greater structure and incorporating some material I first posted in the comments.)In brief: the subtitle of this book asks, "Is relativity necessary?" For now, the answer is yes. This review will be divided into answers to four questions: I. What is relativity? II. Who is Tom Bethell, and why does he want us to question relativity? III. What does Tom Bethell have to say about relativity? IV. Should we question relativity?I. What is relativity?The theory of relativity holds that the laws of physics are valid for all inertial reference frames, as opposed to the idea that they only apply in one special inertial reference frame. Credit for this insight belongs to the great Italian physicist Galileo Galilei (1564-1642), who used it to his advantage. He used to bet sailors that if a cannonball were dropped from the crow's nest of a moving ship, it would fall straight down relative to the mast. On at least one occasion, this bet was accepted by a sailor who thought that the cannonball would fall straight down relative to the Earth, moving towards the stern relative to the ship. Galileo won, because he understood that the same laws of physics applied whether one said that the Earth was still and the ship was moving, that the ship was still and the Earth was moving, or that the ship and Earth were moving relative to each other while both in orbit around the Sun.Sir Isaac Newton (1642-1727), building on Galileo's ideas, established a comprehensive system now known as classical mechanics. One of his great triumphs was his law of universal gravitation, a mathematical model which fully accounted for the observed movements of the planets. Not quite, though: after Newton's death, astronomers discovered a slight discrepancy between the observed precession of the perihelion of the orbits of the planets and that predicted by the Newtonian calculation, which only accounted only for the gravitational influence of the other planets. You can look up what all this means if you want, but it's only important to understand that the law's predictions differed slightly from observed reality.Albert Einstein (1879-1955) made a revolutionary breakthrough when he extended the principle of relativity from mechanics to all known physical laws, including electrodynamics and gravity, and incorporating the principle that the speed of light is the same for all inertial observers regardless of the speed of the source. The new theory had highly unintuitive implications which turned out to be true, such as time dilation, the bending of light by gravity, and the existence of black holes. It even exactly predicted the correct precession of the perihelion of the orbits of the planets.It has since been recognised that some of Einstein's assumptions are not actually necessary; /all/ of the consequences of relativity are fully implied in Galileo's ideas, and he could have gone as far as Einstein did if he had known some more modern mathematics. Thus, the theory of relativity does not mean that "everything is relative." Some things are relative and some things are absolute, just as in classical mechanics. Furthermore, if the predictions of relativity are wrong, then classical mechanics is wrong too, because fundamental principles of classical mechanics imply relativity. For example, there is a very elegant and very well-known derivation of the magnitude of time dilation from the law of conservation of mass and energy, so any theory without the same time dilation predicted by relativity would flagrantly violate conservation of energy.More detailed information on relativity and physics in general can be found in Relativity: A Very Short Introduction,Feynman's lectures (or the condensed version, Six Easy Pieces and Six Not-So-Easy Pieces), maybe Brian Greene's books, or Einstein's own book for the layman, Relativity: The Special and the General Theory; it might be wise to audit a few semesters of physics at your local college. Until you know what scientists really have to say and how they know what they do, you won't be intellectually equipped to see through Bethell's chicanery (which I will discuss momentarily). He calls modern science a "private party," but anybody who wants an invitation will find an abundance of educational material easily available online and in libraries. It requires some thought to understand, but in this field, the so-called experts are the actual experts, and there's no massive conspiracy to pretend relativity fits the evidence when it doesn't.II. Who is Tom Bethell, and why does he want us to question relativity?The author of this book, Tom Bethell, is an Oxford-educated journalist who has made a living partly by reassuring fellow conservatives that the world isn't warming, species don't evolve, and radiation is good for you. He is also an advocate of the long-discredited hypothesis that the works of Shakespeare were written by somebody else. He couches his criticism of relativity in anti-elitist terms, noting that new developments in science after Einstein's development of relativity became impossible for the educated layman to understand and claiming that relativity remains the ruling theory because its supersession by the "simpler" theory he prefers would "constitute a serious challenge to the priesthood of science." I wonder if he recognises the irony that attacking the "bourgeois" scientific establishment is a traditionally leftist position.One might wonder why Bethell has taken up this cause despite relativity having no obvious political implications. It turns out that although he has no scientific grounds to question relativity (as we will see in the next part of this review), he objects to it on moral grounds. As he was regrettably permitted to write in an op-ed in the Washington Post, "Relativism and relativity are said to be quite different. One is a philosophy in the realm of culture and morals; the other is strictly scientific. But I wonder how different they really are. ... One individual's experience is as 'valid' as another's. There is no 'preferred' or higher vantage point from which to judge these things. Not just beauty, but right and wrong are in the eye of the beholder. The 'I' indeed is the 'ultimate measure.'"One might also ask what business Bethell has questioning Einstein, a man who literally knew more about mathematics when he was in grade school than Bethell knows about mathematics now and had the decency to obtain a PhD in the old physics before overthrowing it with the new. But of course, if Bethell remains ignorant, it's only because the facts concern him little; while conclusions in science are supposed to be based on the evidence, Bethell is religiously devoted to arriving at the conclusion, "something other than relativity." Bethell aims not to follow the evidence where it leads, but to persuade the reader that the "priests of science" have gone down the wrong path, and he isn't above ignoring the most recent experiments (if he's even aware of them), manipulating the words of legitimate scientists to make it sound like they agree with him, rationalising away well-established evidence, and in some cases, making statements about relativity that I might characterise as lies if I thought he knew the truth.III. What does Tom Bethell have to say about relativity?So what does this particular "revolutionary" have to tell us? I've wasted no time reading this book, but Bethell's views are well publicised. He is a follower of the late Petr Beckmann, a personal friend of his who taught electrical engineering at the University of Colorado from 1963 to 1981. In 1987, he self-published Einstein Plus Two with no peer review, a treatise claiming he had superseded relativity with a modified version of the pre-Einsteinian concept of the luminiferous æther, a theoretical medium pervading all the space between stars and planets that allows light waves to propagate. (Light was thought to be a wave, so naturally it was presumed that it needed a medium to propagate through like other waves do. According to the modern theory of quantum electrodynamics, light is a particle, and any wave-like phenomena exhibited by large quantities of these particles are purely due to statistical effects.) Bethell's book presents Beckmann's theory for the layman with no mathematics, which is a strike against it, because it means you can't check his work or verify that the theory makes any useful predictions.However, Bethell offers us a specific, falsifiable prediction: he claims that the Michelson-Morley experiment of 1887, which famously failed to find evidence of the aether, didn't really fail: "There was no way that so small an effect could be detected using 19th century equipment. But modern interferometers and laser beams can do so. In fact the most sensitive interferometer experiment ever conducted, by John Hall in 1979, did detect a fringe shift of the correct magnitude, confirming Beckmann's theory of the ether. Ironically Hall's experiment was done at Petr Beckmann's home base, the University of Colorado in Boulder, and while he was there. But he didn't know about the experiment and Hall didn't know of Beckmann's theory (still unpublished at that point)."Hall was not expecting to see this fringe shift and he assumed the effect was 'spurious' - the artifact of a design error in his own equipment. In an interview with me in 2004, Hall (who won the Nobel Prize in Physics but not for this experiment) agreed that his 1979 experiment should be redone."Bethell's prediction for the Michelson-Morley experiment is based on the bizarre claim that "The Earth...rotates within its gravitational field. Analogously, if a woman wearing a hoop skirt does a pirouette - assume she has a circular waist and friction is minimal - she will rotate within her skirt. It won't swing around with her." One might as well say that if you rotate a flashlight, the beam won't swing around with it. When I wrote Dr Hall about whether he thinks his experiment cast doubt on special relativity, this is what he had to say:"You are seeing one of the reasons that older people tend to appear grumpy: what was said is transformed and stretched up to, if not beyond the limits of actual fact."There was a mechanical problem with the 1979 experiment because of the lack of stable leveling during rotation and, due to the brevity of the postdoc's appointment, we were not able to rework the mechanical mounting. In more recent times there have been several experiments led by a friend in Germany, Prof Achim Peters. The most recent one was by Sven Hermann and Achim Peters, and shows the correctness of the Einstein model up to two more digits. [ PRL 95, 150401 (2005) ]This experiment compared two length-based clocks which differed only in their angular orientation. No positive results have ever been obtained for a deviation from [special relativity]."So the latest Michelson-Morley repeat shows a fringe shift one-one-hundred-thousandth of what Bethell claims would be expected, fully attributable to experimental error; so much for æther.I wish to emphasise this, lest anybody not get the message: Bethell predicts that a certain experiment would have a certain result, and it doesn't. This proves that Bethell's theory is wrong.Bethell goes so far as to claim that the speed of light in a vacuum is not constant: "If the earth rotates through the ether (gravitational field), then there should be a difference in the speed of light east to west and west to east." He devotes a whole chapter to the famous Hafele-Keating experiment, with clocks on two planes flying in opposite directions around the Earth, and he thinks that relativity would predict that they would run at the same speed because they're flying the same distance, which only shows that he does not understand the experiment because he does not understand relativity. He has also claimed, quoting Tom Van Flandern, that the engineers working on the Global Positioning System have "blown off Einstein," when in fact the adjustments made to the clocks aboard the GPS satellites are exactly the adjustments relativity predicts would be required, and GPS is a classic example of the theory of relativity being applied in practice.Bethell claims that we've never observed time dilation. We only appear to observe it because the action of atomic clocks is slowed down by æther resistance: "When a clock moves through this medium 'it takes longer for each electron in the atomic clock to complete its orbit.' Therefore, it makes fewer 'ticks' in a given time than a stationary clock. Moving clocks slow down, in short, because they are 'ploughing through this medium and working more slowly.' It's not time that slows down. It's the clocks. All the experiments that supposedly 'confirm' Special Relativity do so because all have been conducted in laboratories on the Earth's surface, where every single moving particle, or moving atomic clock, is in fact 'ploughing through' the Earth's gravitational field, and therefore slowing down." Forget for a moment that, as mentioned, such a thesis flagrantly violates conservation of mass and energy: this raises more questions than it resolves. Are gravitational fields composed of particles so small and numerous that an electron passing through a bunch of them will encounter drag? Why don't we observe such a gravitational drag on macroscopic bodies?IV. Should we question relativity?Relativity is one of the great triumphs of modern science, and the theory that supersedes it would be the most exciting development in physics of my lifetime. This isn't it. Aether deservedly fell into discredit a long time ago, and we have more interesting, more exciting, more accurate, and more useful theories now.Advocates of fringe physics, facing the fact that they are opposed by every physics professor in the world (think about that--every one), often note that "a lot of experts used to think the world was flat too." I think the flat Earth analogy is relevant, but not in the way they think. I think the physicists who regard relativity as a fact are like philosophers who recognised that the world is round, a fact that had been recognised from the time of Aristotle (384 BCE-322 BCE) and which Pliny the Elder (23 CE-79 CE) claimed everyone agreed about, and Tom Bethell is like Lactantius (c. 240-c. 320), who ignored the evidence and mocked the idea of a round Earth for religious reasons. There have been many cases in history where a fringe theory became the established theory, but it is hard to think of a case where this happened and it turned out a century later that the previous established theory had been right all along.I don't mean to suggest that what's in the textbooks should never be questioned. However, it's hard to fruitfully question what's in the textbooks if you don't thoroughly understand it. Before they revolutionised physics, Galileo was a university professor, Newton studied at Cambridge, and Einstein had a PhD. Of course, every time in the past that people thought they understood everything, mankind was in for a surprise, and the situation is likely the same today, but I doubt that it's a good use of the interested layman's time to explore the fringes of science, hoping to be the first to know about a breakthrough. Most cutting-edge theories and shocking results aren't going to pan out. Just look at the recent faster-than-light neutrino results from OPERA. Some people jumped to say that this heralded the new physics that would finally overthrow Einstein, but then it turned out to be due to a loose cable connection. I think that less science news and more basic science education would give us all a more solid foundation to think critically about nonsense like this, and I think one should get this education from books by responsible scholars with qualifications in the field writing to explain established knowledge rather than books by journalists motivated by nonscientific concerns attempting to popularise demonstrably incorrect fringe theories.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful. Gravity is the ether! It's about time! By silver fox Best book I've read in a long time. Always thought that the special theory of relativity was stretching it! I've been looking for something more basic and satisfying. Gravity!! That makes sense for the ether. It also means light can go very fast across vast open spaces where gravity is nil. It would be great if someone could devise a way to measure the speed of light at various distances from the sun out of earth's gravitational influence. Then we could get a curve on the effect of the density of gravity on the speed of light. At the present, we have only measured the speed of light through a very narrow change in gravitational density, the earth's surface at varying altitudes. Not enough to make a graph and extrapolate. Great book! Of course, it would upset all of physics, astronomy, and evolutionary theory. But bring it on! It's about time. The next book I am waiting for is one that explains what time is. "It's what clocks measure" (Albert Einstein) If the speed of light is linked to gravity then it makes sense that time is linked to gravity, also. How fast the ripple moves is how fast time moves is how fast clocks tic. Great book!
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Questioning Einstein: Is Relativity Necessary?, by Tom Bethell
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Questioning Einstein: Is Relativity Necessary?, by Tom Bethell
