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Questioning Einstein: Is Relativity Necessary?

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Questioning Einstein: Is Relativity Necessary
by, Tom Bethell

That 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.

My fascination with science and mathematics began in the 1940s when I was a teenager, a fascination which has never abated. My present understanding of math and science derives from high school classes, university courses (undergrad EE, graduate math), and many years of reading uncounted books and articles in professional journals. In short, I am an old math/science junkie with an accumulated understanding sufficient to my own satisfaction of many abstruse ideas. But I've never been able to make sense of relativity, and have little hope that I ever will.

But Tom Bethell's book, "Questioning Einstein: Is Relativity Necessary?" makes a well documented and thoroughly convincing argument that relativity is not necessary for a satisfactory understanding of modern physics. Experimental results which are said to prove relativity theory, can be said to prove simpler theories as well. But such "proof" is deceptive. As I understand the idea of scientific proof, it can only be said that an unfalsifiable theory is consistent with known facts, not that facts prove the theory. Bethell reports on attractive alternatives to relativity which are also consistent with the facts and yet are more intuitive than relativity. Since the fully qualified contenders are simpler, Einstein's relativity may eventually be excised from the face of physics by Occam's razor, not in my lifetime surely, but eventually.

Bethell's book is a must read for science junkies of any age. Someone should expound on the (gravity-field)/(electromagnetic-ether) duality ala Petr Beckmann, and publish a book with a title something like "The Relatively Incorrect Guide to the New Ether". I will go to my grave a happier man for having read it.

This is an engaging history of the evidence that is overlooked in the enthusiasm for the paradoxes of special relativity. Gee, are time and space really distorted at high velocity? Is there really no ether? As Bethell demonstrates there was no evidence leading to such conclusions. And there is solid theory and experiment to the contrary. If we accept that "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence", it is clear that such a demand was not made on Einstein. And Occam's Razor, the principle that the simplest explanation of any phenomena should be preferred, seems to have been set aside at that point in 20th century physics and ignored henceforth.
Bethell has marshalled convincing evidence for overdue skepticism. It is alarming that this line of thinking is considered unconventional.

The subtitle of this book asks, "Is relativity necessary?" For now, the answer is yes.

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 couches his criticism of relativity in anti-elitist terms, noting that new developments in science after the discovery 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.

Even ignoring his history of making selective use of facts to support a preconceived conclusion, Mr Bethell just doesn't have the grounding in theoretical physics necessary to write a serious critique of relativity, and chances are you don't have the grounding to read it; if you haven't received A's in two semesters of physics, or educated yourself with material on the level of Feynman's lectures (or the condensed version, Six Easy Pieces), maybe Brian Greene's books, or Einstein's own book for the layman, Relativity: The Special and the General Theory, you just aren't intellectually equipped to see through the chicanery here. Bethell 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.

But it's not just ignorance of current physics that prevents Bethell from writing a scientific work worth reading; it's his disregard for the scientific process. Bethell's purpose here is 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.

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 aether, a medium pervading all the space between stars and planets that allows light waves to propagate. 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-hundredth of what Bethell claims would be expected, fully attributable to experimental error; so much for aether.

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 aether 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." For me, 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?

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. One can only wonder why Tom Bethell has taken up this cause despite relativity having no obvious political implications. Perhaps, like one favorable reviewer, he thinks relativity has something to do with moral relativism, which he abhors. Or perhaps, to paraphrase Bethell's own mentor, Dr Beckmann, Bethell just drivels about a "priesthood of science" because science has wounded him with the ultimate insult: he can't understand it anymore.

Edit: An op-ed that for some reason was published in The Washington Times confirms that Bethell objects to relativity on ethical grounds: "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.'"

If you are inclined for emotional, political, economic, or any other non-scientific reasons to suspect the scientific establishment (or the "Priesthood of Science" as Bethell calls it - see his article online by searching for "Relativity and the Priesthood of Science"), then you will probably be attracted to this book and its argument. You will probably give it five stars as a rating as several other reviewers have done. It will also help if you have always had a sneaking suspicion there was something wrong with Einstein's Theory of Relativity (both Special and General) for any reasons of science or otherwise.

Alternatively, if you are trained in the physical sciences and in these subjects specifically, you will probably immediately label Bethell one of those "cranks and crackpots" that Clifford Will says are the only ones who question Special Relativity today (see "Special Relativity: A Centenary Perspective" by Clifford Will by searching online). You will give the book one star (and maybe say you would give it less if you were allowed) as another reviewer has done here and you will feel quite comfortable in your view.

But there is a third perspective (and I don't' mean to suggest everyone must fit into just one of these groups) and that is concerning what you can learn through this book. Note I did not say "learn from this book." It is from this perspective that I suggest a five star rating and recommend you consider reading (and studying it).

First of all, this book is well written, organized and edited and that can be unusual for books written to challenge conventional scientific wisdom. Tom Bethell is a journalist and experienced writer and, other than a few slips on references here and there, he has crafted a good read if you can set the content aside and generally consider these qualities. The chapters are short and focus on mostly just one aspect of relativity or the history and issues that surround it. As it happens, this feature is what makes it very useful for folks in my third group. I will call them "students" for want of a better term.

These students will be people who are intellectually skeptical and curious (and who have a good deal of free reading time!) and who genuinely want to understand this subject. Now I personally have a background in science and engineering but only a passing familiarity with Einstein's theories. The subject had been on my "to do" list of things to approach for a while but just never made it to the top. A chance sharing of Bethell's "Priesthood" paper by a friend caused me to see if I could get the book from my local library. I was determined not to buy it (because of one review here) until I could make a good case for that (I think I am doing that with this review) but the library was willing to look for an inter-library loan and found a copy at a small Eastern religious school.

Many of the references in the book are equally hard to get except by purchase but I found that as each chapter progressed I would ask myself "is this really true?" or "what does that reference really say on the subject?" The book became (and remains) a topic study guide on Einstein, his theories, and his scientific peers (throughout time). I suggest others read it with this in mind as their objective as well.

Bethell is attempting to promote the alternative views on relativity of Petr Beckmann. Those views reject Special Relativity while generally accepting General Relativity and provide the arguments to support them. I have not yet been able to study Beckmann's "Einstein Plus Two", where I hope there are true details, including mathematics, of his concerns but perhaps my local library will come through with its network again.

I have been able to find some of Bethell's references and I have both learned enough detail of the theories and the experiments that confirm them to begin to form an opinion that Beckmann (and Bethell) are probably wrong and do not completely understand the theories and experiments. Any other conscientious "student" in this group may reach a different conclusion. I have also found myself reading in the history and philosophy of science and in biographies of Einstein and some other scientists mentioned in Bethell's book. I have also found one or two other Internet references that seem to have a similar view of the book - that is, clearly (or probably wrong) but provocative enough to seek out more information on the subject.

So I will buy a copy now (since I have to return the borrowed copy today) and that will possibly please Tom Bethell. He should be most pleased, however, since, at least for me, he has accomplished what any journalist would wish - he got someone to think about what he said and to dig further to see if it makes sense. I don't think it does but I invite you to reach your own, well-informed, opinion.

I studied nuclear physics in the 1950's and 60's. This book is the clearest exposition of the subject I have read.
This is a MUST read for anyone with common sense, perspective and balance.
This is not a book for the doughead seeking lipstick for a quick fix.

This is a Christmas gift that you must read as well ... read it.