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Talk:Theory of relativity (view source)
Revision as of 02:54, November 25, 2009
, 02:54, November 25, 2009→Jfraatz's comments: new section
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== Jfraatz's comments ==
:: Andrew;
::Relativity predicts absurd physical discontinuities
::I've studied relativity in depth, and those paradoxes all have very neat resolutions once you account for the change in reference frame.
::"and it contradicts logic,"
::That doesn't follow. Relativity is based on two premises and follows very logically from them.
::"the evidence,"
::On the contrary:
::Special relativity:
::1. E=mc^2: nuclear power and the atomic bomb
2. Time dilation: The airplane experiments, and the time dilation of subatomic particle decay rates in a particle accelerator.
3.Mass increase: The exponential increase in energy required to get things fractionally closer to the speed of light.
::General relativity:
::1. Prediction of a non-static universe.
2. Gravity waves -detected by their combined perturbative effect to a the rotation of a neutron star
3. Gravitational microlensing.
4. Time dilation experiments conducted with skyscrapers
5. Red-shifting near gravitational sources.
::"and the Bible."
::That is a very bizarre claim. There is nothing in the Bible that contradicts relativity and it is about like saying that the theory that the sky is blue contradicts the Bible. I'm curious. Where did you get this idea?
::"The biggest promoters of relativity today are more liberal than the Democratic Party, and that's saying a lot."
::""First of all that's an ad hominem. Secondly it's not true. The physics department at my SECULAR university has a higher predominance of conservative and Christian people than any of the other sciences and much more so than the Marxist laden humanities departments.
::The professor who taught my relativity class -who happens to be the department expert on general relativity and quantum gravity- even invited us all to a talk after class once regarding the possibility of intelligent design of the physical constants. As it turns out this talk about intelligent design of the physical constants was given by a world famous physicist who happened to specialize in general relativity.
::"Promoting relativity causes a great deal of harm in how people view the world,"
::No, you're confusing relativity with relativism. The two are radically different. My other interest is in philosophy and the people in the philosophy dept. -many of whom are left-wing- laugh at the postmodernists who try to prove relativism with relativity.
::One is a physical theory based on constancy of the speed of light in all reference frames and the equivalence of physics in all reference frames. The other is a moral and epistemological theory that says that there are no absolutes. Special and general relativity are founded on absolutes. RelativiTY does not cause any harm. RelativiSM causes a lot of trouble. The two have nothing in common though save for a similar sounding name.
::"and has cost taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars on fruitless projects like LIGO."
::LIGO, (which my university participates in -we do the supercomputer analysis of the data) has no results yet because they still need to make the instruments another order of magnitude stronger before they can get results.
::And LIGO is not a waste of money. Once they can detect gravity waves they will have a whole new way to study astronomy. The idea is to turn it into the gravity wave equivalent of a telescope. Instead of seeing the universe in light only we can see it in gravity waves as well. The advances in science accomplished by this are well worth the money put into them. A few million dollars is nothing compared to the billions the government wastes on social programs, and is a legitimate usage of money rather than money wasted on welfare programs. It's like funding NASA, you'd agree that manned moon landings are worth while right?
::":You've heard none of this before because liberals control universities and don't allow open discussion and debate about their pet theories."
::No I've heard them before, but the arguments made are easily debunked and are rather pseudoscientific in nature. Usually the people making them don't even understand the theory properly. And I have no idea where you get the idea that they would have a political agenda that needs relativity to support it. Once again relativity and relativism are two very different things. Einstein even once said that he though that the theory of relativity was a poor choice of names.
::"Perhaps you think man-made global warming is not a liberal theory either?"
::Where do you come off comparing the two? One is a derived science open to much biased interpretation and data manipulation, the other is experimentally validated every time we turn on a particle accelerator. In fact some of the experiments they do at these labs require relativity to work. If relativity is false then they could not be doing the experiments that they are doing.
::And no Newtonian Mechanics and Atomic theory are not liberal theories either.
::I'm awfully curious as to what motivated this anti-relativity view. Your implication that relativity is "liberal" in any sense is highly bizarre. Also why single out relavity rather than QM classical mechanics or electrodynamics?
--[[User:jfraatz|Johanan Raatz]]