A LITTLE PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE

As indicated last time, Dr Howard C. Hayden, professor of physics at the U. of Connecticut, has convincingly shown that Einstein's theory of relativity leads to results contradicted by experiment.

Those are fighting words, and we will first go through some points that are not too clear to many laymen, and, alas, to many scientists. All physical theories must ultimately be anchored in experiment. It is their job to explain the available evidence as simply as possible.

The main point is this: When you test a theory by experiment, one thousand experiments will not prove it, but a single experiment will refute it. The reason is that the 1,000 experiments may be consistent with the theory, do what the theory predicted, support the theory, etc., but that is no proof that the investigated theory is the only one that does so. To the contrary, if the experiment shows the theory is wrong, there is no more to argue about (or ought not to be); the theory is dead.

Time and again it has happened that the correct predictions of a theory were so spectacular that scientists were lulled into complacency and accepted it as holy, only to find that the holy theory collapsed like any other that holds its own for a time. I have earlier given the example of the caloricum theory.

The fact that this progression toward more and more accurate truth takes place so slowly and by hairline breadths shows that we are on the right path. It is not that what we thought was a monkey turned out to be a rhinoceros, but that when we thought the monkey had 300,008 hairs, it proved to have 300,009.

Now this goes for all theories, but there is something additional that goes for the theory of relativity. A law like that of the conservation of energy, which rests on experiment like any other, has been demonstrated in thermodynamics, mechanics, optics, acoustics, wave propagation, atomistics, nucleonics, and even further removed subjects like chemistry and biology.

The spectacular successes and predictions of the theory of relativity have been very numerous; but over what breadth? The slowing of processes in moving systems (allegedly due to "time dilation") and elementary particle physics, plus a few, often disputed, scraps here and there. There has not, in the past, been a case of applying the theory to well defined macroscopic bodies with well defined velocities. Such a case has now been found and the Theory of Relativity has fallen flat on its face, as I will try to explain in a moment.

None of us is likely to know more about electromagnetics than Berkeley physics professor W. Jackson. Yet he has been lulled into the false belief that the Theory of Relativity is "proven" by experiments. You may not ever know as much electromagnetics as he does, but if you have understood what I had to say above, you are a fundamentally better scientist than he is.