Side-Quest: Newtons Theory of Gravity is a Hoax!

Why Science is not done by debate, but by evidence, and constructive progress

Did you know that Einstein was swole af?

No, you didn't, did you?

"At close quarters, Einstein’s head was as I had imagined it: magnificent, with a humanizing touch of the comic," wrote C.P Snow about a meeting he'd had with the great Physicist in the 1930s;

"What did surprise me was his physique. He had come in from sailing and was wearing nothing but a pair of shorts. It was a massive body, very heavily muscled: he was running to fat round the midriff and in the upper arms, rather like a footballer in middle-age, but he was still an unusually strong man."

This description has been repeated by others who were lucky enough to meet him after a day of sailing, which was always one of Einstein's greatest pleasures.

When Einstein published General Relativity in 1916, the prevailing theory for describing gravity and other similar things was provided by Newton's Laws of Gravitation.

You know, the story about how he was sitting under an apple tree and when one fell, he asked himself "I wonder why that happens?"

The reason Einstein's theory was such a revolution was not that Einstein had somehow proved Newton wrong. In fact, if that was all he had done - pointed at the Laws of Gravitation and proclaimed "Look! It's wrong!" - he would quite rightly be laughed out of the physics community. What's the point of just overturning an existing theory that has worked so well for so many for so long, without an alternative that can be shown to be better in at least all the same areas covered by the existing theory?

Newtons laws were at the time the very best tool for making predictions about the motion of heavenly bodies and the effect of gravity, and they worked exceptionally well in most cases. Everyone knew they were imperfect, the raw predictions were usually off by a little bit compared to measurement, but the discrepancies were so small as to essentially be meaningless for most use cases. It was only when approaching extremely strong gravitational fields, or extremely high velocities or energies, that Newton's laws broke down entirely.

In fact, for a lot of things, Newtons laws are perfectly adequate and used regularly to this day. So, what happened? Why did Relativity become our dominant understanding of gravity?

Forces and Curves

Newton's theory said that gravity was a force, which operated instantaneously upon two bodies at any distance. Newton himself admitted he couldn't adequately explain where this force comes from, and it bothered him greatly.

Einsteins theory, in contrast, said no: gravity was not, in fact, a force. Einstein had found an explanation for the effect of Gravity, nearly 300 years after Newton's work, and it turned Newtons thinking on its head.

The effect of gravity is produced by the curvature in the fabric of 4-dimensional space-time, a distortion produced by mass. Like stepping onto a trampoline and trying to roll a ball across its surface in a straight line, the warping of the trampolines surface simulates the warping of space itself, and you realise that a straight line means different things at different points along the ball's journey.

I'm sorry, a what? A straight line is not necessarily... straight? What is this absurd nonsense?!

Relativity invokes the principle that everything has a frame of reference, and every event is seen differently from different frames of reference.

If one person is on a train bouncing a ball up and down so that it moves in a straight vertical line, and another person is on a platform watching the train go by, you can see how this works: for one person, the direction of motion is straight, but for the other, it's curved.

That's relativity.

But it isn't just that: space itself is a fabric that can stretch and squish. Heavy things stretch space inwards. A straight line is a bit like a piece of thread that is stitched into the fabric in a straight line, but when you stretch the fabric, the thread seems to bend with it, despite maintaining its position within the fabric, returning to place when you stop stretching. Your frame of reference can be quite different depending on whether you're in a stretched part of space or not.

Seems sensible, right?

Ha! You Sheeple!!

Nope, according to Einsteins detractors, it was all utter nonsense. Like he was "bringing dadaism into physics".

“The reality of the fourth dimension could not be directly seen, but that wasn’t a reason not to believe in it." wrote Matthew Stanley in his 2019 book Einstein's War;

"Imagine that you are looking at a circular object with a flat portrait on it, and someone else on the other side sees a different flat image. A third observer sees only a thin rectangle. These disparate points of view can all be reconciled if the observers are all looking from different angles at the same three-dimensional object—a penny. No reasonable person could doubt that the penny is real, even if it looked different to different people."

"Doubting the forth dimension was like doubting the penny."

Yet, random people on the street in Germany and in the coffee houses and on the trams of Berlin were found doubting the penny, and as Einstein wrote in a letter in September 1920:

“This world is a strange madhouse. Currently, every coachman and every waiter is debating whether relativity theory is correct. Belief in this matter depends on political party affiliation.”

By "Political Party Affiliation", he meant that it tended to be one particular side of politics which were most vocally opposed to his theory: The extreme right-wing, especially members of the National Socialist German Workers Party, a.k.a the Nazis.

It wasn't just the uneducated coming up with all manner of reason to doubt the pennies of Special and General Relativity - although there was plenty of that - you had gatherings of physicists who seemed particularly nit-picky about it, saying his entire paper was based on math tricks, and didn't prove anything at all.

One compendium of low-effort critique was called "One Hundred Authors Against Einstein" published in Germany in 1931, and contained only 28 actual author quotations (mathematics, I suspect, is not the strong suit of this group).

I think it only apt to quote verbatim and at-length from Hans Reichenbach, one of the great debunkers of the Anti-Einstein crowd, many of whom were writing in defence of what was later called "Aryan Physics", which became the defining mantra of science under the Third Reich.

The following is taken from passages re-printed in Hans Reichenbach Selected Writings 1909–1953 Volume One (Maria Reichenbach, Robert S. Cohen, et al)

The allegations made in this volume are truly astonishing.
Einstein is said to have made mathematical errors - unremarked, apparently, by the hundreds of mathematicians who have been checking over the calculations in his theory for the past fifteen years. The theory of relativity is supposed to contain contradictions.
One author, who is evidently ignorant of the elementary facts of optics, explains that the speed of light in a vacuum must be infinite.
Another asserts that Einstein postulates the speed of light to be infinite.

Light speed is a hoax.

Supporters may appeal to empirical confirmations of relativity theory, but, as one of the one hundred authors informs us, "It is the height of folly for relativity theory to seek confirmation in experience."

Empirical confirmation is a hoax.

Another of this company accuses relativity theorists of downright deception: “The photographs were carefully chosen so that they would tend to confirm Einstein's hypothesis [concerning the deflection of light]."

Photographs are also a hoax.

In the eyes of most of these authors, the whole sorry affair is to be laid at the door of mathematics, for there we can explore all sorts of things which have nothing to do with reality: "Relativity theory is a mathematical masquerade", and the square root of a negative number is not [so they claim here] in the least imaginary, contrary to the opinions of mathematicians

Mathematics is a hoax!!

In fact, yet another attempt to repeat this junk yet again came around in the 2000s, when a tiny "cabal" (heheh) of individuals in Germany had felt so personally oppressed by the teaching of Relativity theory, they compiled a compendium of every single piece of criticism ever made about it over the previous 100 years, into a book, called “95 Years of Criticism of
the Special Theory of Relativity (1908-2003)”, by G. O. Mueller and Karl Kneckebrodt.

They apparently sent it out in a mass-mailing (physical mail), which included an "interactive CD-ROM" (it was the 2000s), and an "open letter", to newly elected members of the German parliament, to the press, and various other individuals in German-speaking countries. The purpose?

To inform the general public about the existence of this documentation and to give rise to a public discussion about the problems brought to light by the documentation.

This is called "Science by Debate". It's a remarkably common tool used by those who feel incapable of challenging a theory with concrete facts and measurement. Instead, they appeal to the public: "We have the proof right here! They don't want you to know about it!"

Ok, so they think Relativity is a big hoax: what about the obvious evidence to the contrary? You know, like the measurement of the bending of light in an eclipse in 1919, the atomic bomb and nuclear power, the Global Positioning System and time dilation, and the ever-increasingly-accurate measurement of the absolute speed of light in a vacuum?

They were "pretend confirmations", so we're told.

There were no experimental confirmations for the pretended length contraction and time dilatation.

Ohhh but it gets worse:

The secret of this successful strategy was the combination of two lies: that general relativity had been overwhelmingly confirmed, and that this pretended confirmation of a theory with gravitation was at the same time - because of the pretended unity of the two relativities - a confirmation of special relativity, a theory without gravitation.

And most interestingly:

The year 1922 marks the seizure of power of the relativists in German physics.

As Wolfgang Pauli is reported to have once said: "Das ist nicht nur nicht richtig; es ist nicht einmal falsch!" (It's not only not right; it's not even wrong!)

That is to say: it's just bonkers.

So they threw down their "knowledge-bomb", and waited for the press to do their thing. Instead of the success and acclaim and praise and glory which I am sure they had imagined, they were met by silence. No one cared. Their righteous crusade against this science stuff was thwarted! How could that be?! Surely everyone on earth would be DYING to know that Relativity Theory is all made-up! Where is the Silent Majority?!

Well it's obvious: they're being censored! Censored by the RELATIVISTS!

In a 2006 re-attempt at getting the word out about the great conspiracy of Relativity, the same group lamented:

In sharp contrast to the liberality of the Internet, after four years of distribution of our documentation, none of the printed media, none of the corporate bodies in politics and none of the journalists and none of the prominent persons has forwarded the information about the existence of our Project to the general public.
The strong impact and censorship exerted by academic physics on the public and the media and their prominent figures is a success story of 80 years.

So, because no one chomped on their obviously irresistible lure, clearly they're being censored. Yes. They're being censored by the "relativists". The Relativists are the ones controlling the media, and government, and education. Like puppet-masters.

So far, the list of people that seemingly own the global media and mainstream public opinion grows ever-longer and more bizarre. It includes, but is not limited to:

• Relativists, i.e all physicists throughout history that accept relativity theory as current best-practice

• Virologists, i.e everyone that accepts germ theory as current best-practice

• Vaccinologists, i.e everyone including the people that literally eradicated smallpox that believe vaccines work (gosh, maybe smallpox just went away by itself?)

• Leftists (obviously)

• Wokeists (wokeism is also just leftism, apparently)

• Trans-humanists (?)

• Paedophiles (?!)

• Satanists (also leftists)

• The Deep State (did we say leftists?)

• Jews

Why do we even care, though?

Because it's a game that just goes on, and on, and on, and on. It never ends. Every time a crank comes out with something new, and is shown to be wrong, what is the response? "You're controlling my speech! Let the people decide!"

As I responded to one particularly irate YouTuber the other week: "Science is not done by debate". Thank god for that, too. Science is about the weight of evidence, about accuracy of prediction relative to measurement, and reproducibility. You can debate all day long, but at the end of the day, it doesn't matter who says what: you gotta prove it, and prove it again.

Imagine if Einstein had merely convinced us all that Newton's Laws of Gravitation were wrong, a big hoax, and should be just thrown out. What would we have been left with?

Ptolemy's Epicycles, developed by Ptolemy, who lived from the year 100 - 170 C.E

If the Germ Theory is somehow shown to all be one big hoax, what will we be left with?

Humoral theory (460 - 370 B.C.E) and Miasma theory (400 B.C.E).

This is the great secret that such claims don't really want you to understand: they have no ground to stand on, because they have no coherent alternatives to these theories which have worked so well for us for so very long.

The whole point of science is to stand on the shoulders of giants of the past and go further, to extend on their work and find greater heights. That's why the Einsteins of the world, who usher in true revolutions in science, actually get through: they are constructive.

Einstein never once intended to show Newton to be wrong.

As far as Einstein was concerned, Newton was right for the most part, there were just some missing pieces; pieces which Einstein was able to illuminate, which brought the most incredible clarity to some of the most mysterious aspects of the universe - like gravity - which no one had ever managed to piece together until then.

The same is true in Medicine: Miasma could be thought of as a very rough approximation of the germ theory of infection.

Miasmas were essentially "diseased air", which if you breathed them in, were likely to cause you disease. It got close to the idea of airborne infections, which was otherwise a complete mystery until Louis Pasteur nailed it in the 1860s with the “quanta” of infectivity: germs.

This discovery enabled us to investigate treatments and cures in a way we could never have imagined before, and all of the success we've had with advances in medicine is built on it.

There are many individuals, however, who would have us believe that we should just kick out these theories.

They're all pretend.

Hoaxes.

Fake.

Let's forget about them, and just go back to the way things were before.

Y'know, when average lifespan was about 40 years old.

Yeah, right.