Einstein wrong, says poly politics lecturer.
I’ve just come across a very odd press release issued from one of northern England’s lesser-known seats of higher education. In an academic treatise to which the release refers, Dr Peter Hayes – a senior lecturer in politics at the University of Sunderland – takes issue with Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity. Which particular theory – special, general or both – is not stated.
“Over the years many people have pointed out that there are logical flaws in the theory. Back in the 1960s Professor Herbert Dingle warned that large scale experiments drawing on relativity theory might end by destroying the world. Perhaps we are lucky that the Large Hadron Collider merely broke down!”
So far so bad.
In the highlighted research paper, published in January of this year in the journal Social Epistemology, Hayes claims that Einstein’s theory is not science, but “ideology”. Relativity theory contains “elementary inconsistencies”, says Hayes, and the reason why these errors went unnoticed when Einstein first published his ideas was that the world in 1919 had just:
“…come through a terrible war followed by a flu pandemic. Einstein’s ideas were the tonic they needed. In the rush to celebrate them few people stopped to question the obvious logical flaws in the theory.”
Good heavens! Why did I never consider that?
And just what are these flaws to which Hayes alludes? This is not clear, and in the press release the specialist in social policy touches on the clock paradox, which is not paradoxical at all when one moves beyond common-sense perception and looks at the problem in physical detail. If Hayes thinks of the clock paradox as a flaw in relativity, then he has clearly failed to grasp the essential physics, and has only a very shallow understanding of that on which he writes.
If relativity is wrong, then we should all throw out our GPS receivers, and fear for the future of the many communications and other satellites currently orbiting the globe. Seriously, though, maybe future scientists will find flaws in either or both of Einstein’s theories of relativity. That’s the nature of science; I’m not sure that political ideologies develop in quite the same way.
If there are errors in our current understanding of objects moving at high speeds, and the nature of space and time around large masses such as planets and stars, then they will be subtle, and their discovery will not overturn Einstein’s core idea. Describing relativity as a “craze” which should have died out is a bizarre stance for a serious academic to take. As is likening Einstein’s ideas to those of Karl Marx, whose work continues to provide insights into the dynamics of capitalist economies, while no longer being taken seriously as an all-encompassing social framework.