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Originally Posted by Southtown
... Other than myself, the only ones to question Einstein are EWright, CraigD, Bobby, xersan, etc. ...
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Not that I’m anything but flattered to be included in this list, but I’d like to clarify
how I “question Einstein”.
My only serious concerns with Relativity stem from its foundations as a theory of Classical Mechanics. I believe that it is fundamentally incompatible with Quantum Mechanics, and thus must be superseded by a QM-compatible “theory of everything”. I suspect this will be difficult.
I have misgivings with the equivalency principle for Special Relativity, which states (in my own words) that for a given inertial frame, the effect of gravitation field is indistinguishable from the effect of acceleration, because it is in a very real sense, untrue: the effect of a gravitation field can be distinguished from that of acceleration by the observation that, in the case of a gravitational field, a object some distance “above” another experiences less force than an equal mass “below” it. In the case of an object undergoing acceleration, the forces experienced by objects of equal mass are equal.
I suspect my misgivings are the result of my failure to understand a subtlety of GR. In the near future, I plan to start a thread in the hope that someone can help me resolve this problem.
Despite my own acceptance of nearly all of Relativity, I’m interested in the opinions of people who reject all or parts of it, and try to listen to them with an open mind.
I question the popular image of Einstein, because, like most popular figures, the actual person agrees poorly with his popular image. Again, this line of questioning belongs, I think, in a separate thread, not in “Science under siege”.
