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At 08:56 24/09/11 -0700, DW wrote:
>
>Speaking of Russians, when the USSR was still a going concern, they used to
>organize the most quirky conferences......
>
>A *large* section of the Soviet academy *rejected* some of Einsteinium
>physics. They would have conferences organized with papers *against* E=MC2.
You have really hurled an insult at the USSR, but perhaps it was well
deserved. A conference whose participants actually disagreed with the
special theory of relativity would have the same respect among the physics
community as a conference of the flat earth society. What's more, if you
were to have attended such a conference during the USSR, I suspect you
would have found yourself among a large number of conspiracy theorists and
Jew-haters!
First let me state that I applaud intellectual freedom and the RIGHT to
hold such conferences in the SU (too bad they didn't extend that right to
"fringe" political positions!). I classify it under "freedom of religion,"
a freedom I strongly support. Freedom of religion is a special case of the
"right to be stupid," a right I also strongly support but hate to see
exercised!
The special theory of relativity (a consequence of which is the
impossibility of matter or signals travelling faster than the speed of
light) is perhaps the most tested theory in physics (especially if you
include all the unrelated predictions which at some point relied on
relativity in their derivation). Opposition to it is absolutely without any
reasonable basis and has existed largely due to anti-semitism, given that
Einstein (who's Jewish) became very well known in 1918 and during the
subsequent two decades during which quantum mechanics matured. Many Nazi
scientists rejected the special theory of relativity (but of course this
didn't prevent them from trying to develop an atom bomb which they knew
would have released an amount of energy given by E=mc^2). The fact that
there has been antisemitism among officials and scientists in the Soviet
Union is an unfortunate fact that probably contributed to the attendance of
any such conference.
But I repeat that special relativity is about as certain as the earth being
round rather than flat. The round earth is easily accepted by lay-persons
because it is easily visualized, as with a globe of the earth. The
space-time fabric that special relativity describes has never been
"visualized" by anyone, as it describes a four-dimensional space, but more
importantly because it is a non-Euclidian space which is unlike our
experience and which is only concisely described using equations, not
pictures. Tom's question that "if something is moving 99% the speed of
light why can't you just push it a little faster?" are extremely normal
reactions to special relativity and such paradoxical thought experiments
often stump expert physicists before they have a chance to think it through.
Physicists who witness experiments (such as this neutrino experiment) which
appear to contradict special relativity, are interested in resolving the
paradoxes posed by such results, but do not join the media commentators who
have written that this places a question mark over the theory itself. By
way of example, here is an otherwise GOOD scientific experiment which in
1838 determined that the earth isn't round:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bedford_Level_experiment
>Many geologists rejected the idea of fossil-fuel being from, well, fossils
>and think the whole thing is bogus and oil originates in mantel and lower
>levels of the Earths crust.
I have no expertise in geology so I won't comment on such theories, except
to state that they are PROBABLY wrong (but I wouldn't stake my life on it,
as I would with special relativity). In particular, they probably were
motivated by the economic value of Russia's large gas and oil reserves in
opposition to moving away from fossil fuels (whoops, I mean "underground
hydrocarbons") back when people used to worry about "peak oil." Nowadays
the concern with global warming makes the point largely moot.
>And, dozens of other what we in the West cal
>"junk science". Some of this stuff is carried over to this day in "modern",
>post-Soviet Russia.
Mysticism and anti-semitism? Yes, I am afraid so.....
- Jeff
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