Chapter 7 Chapter 7 Down with Einstein

In physics and chemistry, as in all other disciplines, there has never been a sharp line separating pseudoscientific speculation from the doctrines of educated men.The two are inseparable, so there is always something in between.British physicist Oliver Heaviside, for example, was as elusive a scientist as he was an eccentric.When the theory of relativity came out, he was the only famous physicist who publicly criticized Einstein.Many of his speculations were so absurd that no reputable journal would publish them.At the same time, he made many practical contributions to the theory of electricity.Nikola Tesla, who invented the AC motor, transformer (the Tesla coil), and many other valuable electrical devices, became increasingly paranoid as he grew older.In his interesting biography "Waste Talent", John O'Neill revealed to people how Tesla spent his later years: he was alone, he was alone, and he didn't bother to associate with anyone; he was very jealous of Edison; Willing to shake hands for fear of getting germs; horrified at the sight of round surfaces (like billiard balls and pearl necklaces); loves nothing but his Manhattan pigeons; spends his extraordinary genius trying to invent death rays Or a camera that shoots thoughts from the retina of a person.

It often happens that a theory in physics or chemistry will be unanimously rejected by experts, but those who defend it have high intelligence, rigorous argumentation, and high professional level. in conclusion.Take nuclear chemistry as an example. Dr. Albert Kerich spent most of his life defending what he called the "Krich atom".In short, Kerich opposed the accepted view that electrons orbit the nucleus when the atom is in a stable state.He believed that electrons were part of the nucleus itself.According to him, gravity is due to the rotation of positive charges within the atomic nucleus.Many of Kerich's works (the most recent of which was The New Electrodynamics in 1950) were generally considered worthless by his colleagues.Kerich, on the other hand, was an associate professor of physics at Dartmouth University, a Ph.D. from Cornell University, and an accomplished teacher and inventor.Therefore, people have to hesitate if they want to stick to their views.

However, we need not worry about such controversial cases.In extreme cases, there are quite a few papers in physics and chemistry that are so obviously nonsense that they can be classed unequivocally as pseudoscience.Anne Besant and Charles Leadbeater, for example, published The Mysterious Chemistry in 1908 (revised in 1919), and no one but theosophists would find any merit in it.This work is the result of a study with extraordinary vision of the atomic structure, including that of several elements hitherto undiscovered by orthodox chemists.Unfortunately, most of these articles are boring, so we only focus on a small number of them that are interesting.

Any radically revolutionary scientific theory, once it has won the approval of the majority of scientists, is always met with a fierce attack by paranoid lunatics who oppose established authority.In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the great symbol of authority was Newton.As one might expect, there were wild attacks on his articles.The accumulation can reach hundreds of huge volumes.Even the great Goethe wrote a two-volume treatise on color in which he vehemently disproved Newton's principles of optics.Since Goethe was ignorant of experimental methods, and even more of a layman in mathematics, his attack became one of the most insignificant criticisms in the history of physics.

In the United States, it was a New York City Methodist pastor named Alexander Hall (1819-1902) who desperately wrote articles against Newton.His major work, The Problem of Human Life, is 524 pages long in its 20th revised edition.Most of the book is attacking the theory of evolution, but Hall also makes a detailed defense of a theory called "ontology" that originally existed in physics.According to this theory, all so-called forces, including gravity, are "substances."Of course, these forces are made of atoms, which are much smaller than the entities of "matter", but are still made of real particles.Light, heat, electricity, magnetism, and even sound are "substantial" like the particles that transmit odors.In the first edition of the book (1877), Hall inexplicably argues in diagquic tetrameter verse like Longfellow's "Song of Hiawatha."The following excerpts are typical sentences:

I dare say without a doubt, The chirping of crickets, The swallow whispers, through the surrounding air, through every object nearby, Scattering atoms that are real— It is real matter, As from the mysterious cavity of roses and honeysuckle, Fragrant particles are emitted. Father Hall used to point out that the locusts could be heard a mile away.He argued that if the acoustic fluctuations were true, it would mean that the gigantic air mass, weighing thousands of tons, was kept in constant vibration by a small insect.No one in their right mind would believe that, he said.But he doesn't explain how a tiny locust can fill a huge space with solid matter.Hall doggedly persisted in the polemic.For 11 years he edited a monthly magazine called Microcosm (and for another two years a magazine called Science Forum).In the magazine he managed to provoke contemporary scientists to debate him.The scientists refused.This convinced Hall that his theory was irrefutable.

Another American, Joseph Battelle (1839-1915, a native of Middlebury, Vermont), also tried his best to maintain the particle theory of sound.Battelle owned several farms and 20,000 acres of forest in Vermont, bred Morgan stallions, and was manager of the American Publishing Company.It was this company that published his major work - Ellen - Whispers of an Old Pine Tree - in three large volumes (each with over 600 pages). Few books are stranger than "Ellen" in America.All three volumes are written in the form of a platonic dialogue between a 6-year-old girl named Ellen and a narrator.The narrator is an old pine tree in Vermont.No one understood how the two sides of the conversation had acquired such a wide range of scientific and mathematical knowledge.Battelle, like Hall, opposes all fluctuation theories, and he especially opposes the fluctuation theory of voices, saying that it is "a big lie."Battelle would correct anyone who imagined that the vibration of the tuning fork produced sound.He said it was the sound from the tuning fork that caused the arms of the tuning fork to vibrate.The book also spends much of its time attacking orthodox algebra and geometry.There are about 200 photos of Vermont's mountain landscapes as illustrations throughout the book.Ellen is featured in many of the illustrations.

After the advent of Einstein's theory, Newton's theory of universal gravitation and the theory of sound are no longer the main monsters attacked by madmen.Since Einstein unleashed the greatest revolution in physics since Newton, it is no wonder that the scale and force of the articles attacking him rivaled the earlier invectives against his famous predecessor.Attacks were often carried out in Newton's name.For Newton had then become an outcast, and thus a symbol of heretical views. Of course, many of the early attacks on Einstein (mostly in French and German) cannot be considered pseudoscience.These attacks are often from colleagues who are difficult to accept novel doctrines.For example, Charles Poole, a professor of astromechanics at Columbia University, wrote a book entitled "Gravity and Relativity" (Putnam Press, 1922), which criticized the experimental evidence on which Einstein's views were based at the time.It puts forward objections worthy of attention, but does not draw conclusions arbitrarily, but says: "The theory of relativity may be correct, but no sufficient and strong evidence has been presented yet." In 1932, Arthur Lynch's book " The Case Against Einstein, while far from being a rigorous treatise, should not yet be dismissed as worthless.Many other anti-Einstein writings in the 1920s and 1930s were written not so much by eccentrics as by journalistic or unscientific people.They rush to publish articles without fully understanding what they are opposing.It should be pointed out that there are still many famous physicists today who hold views that are quite different from Einstein's.A prominent example is the "Kinematic Relativity" of the great British mathematician Edward Milne.

However, completely different from the above-mentioned critical articles are articles against the theory of relativity in a different tone and content.As much a product of brutality and ignorance as those written against Newton and Darwin.It reveals that these writers had no knowledge of the views opposed, although they would have had every opportunity to acquire such knowledge.Even the major assertions that Einstein later found to be wrong did not make it into the realm of decent scientific debate on which these articles crossed.At this stage of the development of physics, Einstein's theory has proposed a large number of simplified theories (such as the famous induction of gravity and inertia into the same phenomenon), which has been gradually confirmed by more and more experimental evidence.If Einstein's opponents did not fully consider these monumental achievements, their objections would be as far-fetched as Hall and Battelle's wave of attack.

A striking recent example of this senseless attack is the self-styled French physicist Georges de Botezza's "Return to Newton's Time", which was published in the United States in 1936, a few years before the author's death. publishing. While Botezza considers his book a "stern refutation" of relativity, its content is more invective than relevant debate and evidence.He not only accused Einstein of "doing not understand Newton's great concept at all", but even marveled that Einstein had no self-knowledge.Those scientists who accept the theory of relativity "are not qualified to study this problem because of the general lack of basic knowledge of physics".In order to explain why Einstein's point of view is recognized by the broad scientific community, the author believes that it may be due to "the weakening of the critical spirit of the scientific community caused by the world war".

It would be tiresome to detail this muddled botch, but one aspect is perhaps worth pointing out, since it is common to many of the arguments against relativity.This is why Botezza used Dr. Dayton Miller's experiments as a basis for opposing the idea of ​​relativity.Miller is a conscientious physicist. He repeated the famous Michelson-Morley experiment in the 1920s, and the results obtained were not conducive to the theory of relativity. The Michelson-Morley experiment is one of the main experimental foundations of the theory of relativity.Prior to this, people have known that the light emitted by a moving object, no matter how fast the light source moves, the speed of light is constant.This means that if light is measured from different directions on the Earth's surface, the velocity of light is expected to vary due to the Earth's motion relative to the light path. When Michelson and Morley first performed this experiment in 1887, they were surprised to find that the speed of light did not show the expected change.This is one of the most unexpected things in the entire history of science.In a certain sense, Einstein's special theory of relativity is an explanation for the failure of the Michelson-Morley experiment. Forty years after this historic experiment, Dr. Miller decided to repeat the experiment.The results of his experiment proved that the speed of light has a small change, which he said was a negation of Einstein.He repeated this experiment many times, and all obtained positive results.He wrote more than a dozen articles in scientific journals and, until his death in 1941, still insisted that his results were correct. To this day, no physicist has figured out why Miller's experiments worked the way they did.But Botezza and some other irresponsible critics of the theory of relativity did not tell the readers why the Michelson-Morley experiment was repeated thousands of times, and only Dr. Miller's experiment obtained such a result.This experiment has been carried out in various scientifically advanced countries, at different altitudes, in different seasons, and with various equipment.In every case—except for Miller's experiment—the results were negative.Now, the consensus among physicists is that some kind of regional disturbance affected Miller's instrument, perhaps an inadvertent mistake he made while recording the data. A serious bias against complex mathematical equations is often found in pseudoscience articles against Einstein.The author of the article, of course, did not understand these equations, and justified his ignorance by insisting that nature always obeys some simple mathematical laws.A good example of this tendency is the work of the American chemist Thomas Graydon (Santa Monica, CA).In his book New Laws of Natural Phenomena (published by a small press in 1938), he wrote: "In this respect I am the exact opposite of the fixed system of method which seems to be the more complex the better, . . . My ideas may not be popular with some intellectuals whose authority is maintained by the difficulties encountered in their orthodox methods..." Grayton's method of simplifying astronomy is to completely abandon gravity instead of an outward "push" from the sun, which he supposed.Incidentally, this is an old saying that attacked Newton in his early years. Grayton's self-published 1947 mimeographed work, The Failure of Relativity, is available from the Ford Institute.The book argues that Einstein's theory of universal gravitation seems less credible than the "thrust" theory.If gravity didn't exist, the planet would fall into the sun - not because of "gravity", but because "it is always looking for the minimum tension, the shortest time to make a revolution...".Thanks to gravity, there is enough outward push for the planets to maintain their positions.So why do objects fall to the ground? "...this is because there is not enough radiation emanating from the Earth to keep objects in orbit above the surface." Grayton, unsurprisingly, calls himself a modern-day Galileo.A prominent astronomer wrote to the publisher dissuading him from using Grayton's manuscript.The astronomer said Grayton's theory was so simple that if it was worth anything, someone would have created it long ago.Grayton denounced, "This letter shows an arbitrarily domineering attitude..., which is the same as when Galileo reported that he discovered the four satellites of Jupiter with the first self-made telescope, he was reprimanded by the famous astronomer Francisco Siez at that time." Almost the same." Even more interesting than Graydon is another paranoid.This is what George Gillette and his "spiral universe" say, as much admired by Tiffany Thayer and the Fordists.Little is known about Gillette's life, only that he was born in 1875, studied at the University of Michigan, and held engineering and technical positions in several large companies.The four books he published at his own expense can be regarded as a permanent monument to his uniqueness and ingenuity. The theory of relativity has been discredited in all of Gillette's writings. "Was Einstein a scientist?" he asked. "It's hard to imagine anyone who was more out of step with what a scientist should be doing.  … Einstein was not so much a physicist in his right mind as he was a sane physicist." Said he was a good violinist." He slandered relativity as "a moron's product of mental cramps," "squinted physics," "absolute madness," "bad nonsense" and "wizard's Nonsense." He predicted (writing in 1929) that by 1940 "the theory of relativity would be a laughingstock." "Einstein was dead and buried with Andersen, Greene, and the Mad Hatter." Gillette had infinite admiration for Newton, praising him as the greatest immortal genius. The theory of "spiral universe" is naturally the development of Newton's theory, as Gillette boasted, it is "more Newton than Newton". What exactly is a spiral universe?It is not easy to explain it.There is an indivisible and unchanging basic unit called a single particle (unimotes).Our universe is a supersingle particle (supraunimote), and the entire universe is a "maximote".There is another kind of "elementary particle" (ultimote), which refers to "Nth sub-universe plane".Here's an example of Gillette's claim: Each elementary particle is also an integral part of an infinite number of other plane units. Only in this way can the infinite all-plane velocity and energy of the elementary particle be further divided into an infinite number of finite velocities and Energy ratings (planar puotos). "Bumping" is an important concept of Gillette. "All motions tend to go in a straight line until they collide." In fact, everything in the universe is ultimately just motion against each other. "There is nothing but that, and collisions are everything." "There is nothing else in the whole universe but straight flight, collision, rebound, and straight flight again. Phenomena are nothing but aggregations, jumps, and collisions The development process of a large unit is just gathering, jumping, colliding, jumping again, colliding again, and finally decomposing." One of Gillette's greatest contributions to physics is the famous "gravitational reverse spin theory".The concept is difficult to explain clearly, but it may be helpful to quote him: "Radiation is the bolt that screws in, and gravitation is the nut that turns back." "Gravity and back-spin mean the same thing. All large units are solar systems composed of small units that precess each other." Finally, "the gravitational effect is only the reaction that is manifested in the way each secondary solar system spirals into a higher level of matter. " Predictably, Gillette is not happy that his views have been refuted by what he calls "the orthodox bulls of science."He complained: "There is no such stupid cow as the orthodox anymore," they are "self-proclaimed scientists" and "popular men promoted by publishers." "They're the opposite of real scientists, they're clowns." All because "they're bound in the 'sibling kingdom', and the 'secondary' and 'super' realms that have to do with elementary particles are always ignorance." Gillette took pride in the fact that these "professors" attacked his doctrine with "stiff dogma."He admitted poignantly that "the author should not have wasted his means by printing at his own expense established doctrines." But he realized that against him was "the vast financial and material resources of mysticism. It manipulates the press, politics, publishing, the academy , public libraries, and all direct means of that sort.” He was oppressed and misunderstood, like Columbus, Galileo, and Copernicus, yet he took it all in stride and was not discouraged by it all. "The man who seeks the truth is never a blind believer. He has nothing blind in mind. He is therefore calm, and human and educated." Gillette lamented in one of his books that only one "professor" ever encouraged him—"a noble, courageous Russian. I salute him!" As for the scientific Others, "Bah! They'll be quickly forgotten". In 1931 a more solemn attack against relativity was launched by Father Jeremiah Callaghan.Callahan was then president of Dakena University in Pittsburgh.To understand Father Callahan's accusation, it is necessary to first discuss a little about the nature of non-Euclidean geometry. In Euclid's classic work, The Elements, his theorems are all proved in terms of a set of axioms and postulates.These axioms and postulates are regarded as "self-evident" and unprovable.But the fifth postulate seems to be more complicated than the others.It points out that only a straight line parallel to the known straight line can be drawn through a point outside the known straight line.Some mathematicians after Euclid thought this postulate was a flaw in Euclid's system.This defect can be overcome if this postulate can be proved on the basis of some other assumptions.Thousands of proofs have been tried, some of them very clever, but all of them were found to be wrong.Finally, it was not until the nineteenth century that a Russian mathematician named Lobachevsky and others confirmed that this famous parallel postulate was completely independent of, and impossible to demonstrate by, other assumptions. Once the independence of this postulate was fully understood, mathematicians made even more astonishing discoveries.They found that this postulate could be replaced by an assumption contrary to it—for example, the assumption of more than one parallel line can be made by knowing a point outside the line.Therefore, this new postulate combined with other assumptions of Euclid can form a logically complete geometry.This geometry is called non-Euclidean geometry.The early research on non-Euclidean geometry was entirely out of mathematical curiosity and hobby.But when Einstein was working on relativity, he discovered that studying space in non-Euclidean geometry led to many important practical consequences.It was non-Euclidean geometry that provided the mathematical framework for his general theory of relativity. So it can be said that the theory of relativity and non-Euclidean geometry are inseparable.If the logical contradictions of non-Euclidean geometry can be found, the framework of the theory of relativity will collapse.And if one could prove the parallel axiom using Euclid's other postulates, non-Euclidean geometry would not exist.Therefore, an easy way to overthrow the theory of relativity is to prove the parallel axiom. One day, Father Callahan was sitting on an underground tram in New York when this idea suddenly flashed through his mind.Shortly thereafter, over dinner with a friend, he suddenly exclaimed, "That's proven!" By late 1931, Father Callahan had completed his proof and announced to the world that relativity had been overthrown. In the nineteenth century, the famous French mathematician Lagrange once reported to the academic circles the proof of a difficult problem he obtained through research.He had just begun to read the paper, stopped immediately, frowned, and then folded his manuscript and said: "Gentlemen, I have to think about it." Unfortunately, Father Callaghan did not fold his paper. manuscript. In 1931, he published his proof of the parallel axiom—a 310-page tome titled Euclid or Einstein? 》Any competent geometer can point out the errors in his proof, but this unscientific scientist is not very willing to get helpful help from others. Father Callahan lashed out at Einstein with as much acerbity and exaggeration as Gillette.Callahan writes: "We certainly cannot think of Einstein as a famous scientific inventor in physics, but rather as a dizzy attempt to find some meaning for some mathematical formulas, which even he himself doubted. , but he took it upon himself to try to prove it. . . . Einstein had no logical mind." Father Callahan found an unconscious sense of humor in the "foolish thoughts" and "a mass of meaningless words" that made up Einstein's geometry.He declares: "It's irritating and funny that such a hodgepodge should be taken seriously somewhere as thought.  … But it's a waste of effort to make Einstein reason." He added: "His [Einstein's] thought was fragmented, cobbled together, inconsistent, shoddy, and contradictory. . . . Regardless of his achievements as a theoretical mathematician . . . and equations, and he becomes the most absurd thinker. . . . His mind is dizzy, staggering, staggering, stumbling, like a blind man riding a blind horse." These comments are quoted in paragraphs throughout this book because they are typical examples of pseudoscientists attacking great scientists.Although Callahan's father was a priest, his attacks degenerated to the point where they amounted to almost personal attacks.There must be his psychological motives at work here, but the priest didn't realize it. A good explanation of Father Callaghan's mathematical attainments is that in the year he "proved" the axiom of parallelism, he also discovered the method of trisecting an angle!Duquesne University has published it in the form of a pamphlet. "At that time, he also announced that he was working on the problem of doubling the cube and the problem of changing the circle to the square, but both of them were obviously unsuccessful. In 1940, at the age of 62, he retired as the president of the University of Duquesne. Since then, he has been unknown. Of all the attacks on relativity, Ford somehow always seemed to call the shots.When discussing the Michelson-Morley experiment, which is the basis of the theory of relativity, he pointed out that the change of the speed of light has not been found, and two conclusions can be drawn.One is Einstein's conclusion that the speed of light has absolutely nothing to do with the motion of the earth.Another conclusion that is simpler and "easier to understand" is: the earth does not move at all! Then he added: "Unfortunately, if I were to say my own thing, I would have to ask a third question: Who, . . . proved that light has a speed?"