Natural Science Forum / Physics / Relativity / February 2006

Tim did not "make a selection to indicate why Einsteins's
SR was wrong". He did not post a "justification of his theory"
and he did not "add a qualifying explanation".
Actually he gave you a powerful hint, but it seems you didn't
get it.

Dirk Vdm

xxein:  Gee.  What were those choices again?  I thought the second
postulate was light and the first was consistency (your words).

I don't think I would trust you with baking soda and water in the same
room.

Dirk, once again, got his own name right.

Apparently you never saw my response.

    Indeed it does not appear in google under that thread.
    Apparently one of my account's news server is not well
    connected for posting. I'll look into that -- I have
    occasionally noticed that the newsgroup seems partially
    segmented (not all posts appear everywhere)....

I "picked" a, b, and c, along with a discussion of why -- mainly poor
phrasing on your part -- my main point is that your question is the
_wrong_ question: scientific theories are not "right or wrong", they are
valid or invalid (i.e. in agreement with experiments or not) in a
specific domain of phenomena.

And, of course, a poll like this has no standing at all. Scientific
theories stand or fall on their merits and agreement with experiment,
not on peoples' opinions. And the opinions of most people around here
are _particularly_ useless.

Tom Roberts    tjroberts@lucent.com

But Shuba isn't even an anti-relativist!  Neither's Tom Roberts, for that
matter.  Both of them seem to be answering your question in a way
that's analogous to the way any physicist might answer the question, "Why
is Newtonian mechanics wrong?". The answers may be informative but they
don't seem to have anything to do with what you _appeared_ (to me, at
least) to be investigating.

So to summarize, in your poll asking people who think relativity is wrong
to say why, _nobody_ who actually thinks relativity is wrong said why.

Small surprise, I guess.

You might try it again with Newtonian mechanics, come to think of it.
We've got at least a couple regular posters who are convinced Newton was
out to lunch, and who apparently feel his version of mechanics is wrong at
any scale (not just for very large, very small, very fast, and very heavy
things).

And lest you put me down as picking one of (a) through (d), I should
hasten to add that AFAIK relativity as laid out in Einstein:1905 appears
to be correct within its originally described domain of applicability, and
has since been extended (with no fundamental changes) to cover some things
outside that domain, and that's about the best you can say for any theory.
(Acceleration, in particular, wasn't in the original DOA but post-1905 SR
has been extended to deal with accelerated frames.)

[...]

The second postulate is derivable from the first.

[..]

Why even bother asking why the idiots think SR is wrong? There is no
debate here, they are WRONG in every conceivable fashion. The only
reason the debate is taking place here is because there is no other
place that will entertain their delusions in the slightest.