Phil Scott

I find the idea that scientists have got it all wrong and have been going wrong for a century and that we're due for a complete overhaul of physics strangely compelling. It's the only conspiracy theory which holds interest for me. One website which caught my attention by claiming that relativity is fundamentally flawed is www.physicsmyths.org.uk. Since I don't understand the physics, it sounds authorative enough and uses enough big words to be quite convincing, though a bit of research and reading up on his debates on internet forums led me to believe that the guy is a crank. One of his arguments on his website seems to end by concluding that the only geometry which is valid is Euclidean geometry because the Euclidean metric gives the smallest values for distances between points: http://www.physicsmyths.org.uk/discu...cosmology1.htm

"the inhabitants of a non-euclidean world (would they exist), can not claim that their geometry yields the shortest possible distance between two points. Only euclidean geometry can do this and this singles out the latter against all other geometries. "

Anyway, I've still been looking out for these sorts of websites but with a bit more scepticism, and I came across the following website which sounds interesting. Anyone care to comment on it?

http://www.21stcenturysciencetech.co...odynamics.html

wade-w

Ummm... what does having the shortest metric have to do with anything?

Shadowy Man

Hmmm.... So, I guess that must be the reason that all of those GPS satellites don't work correctly.

Phil Scott

I've no idea. If you follow the link you'll see it was a last desperate attempt to make Euclidean geometry out to be the only valid one. The guy he was arguing with had pretty much floored him till then.

Any comments on the "SHOULD THE LAW OF GRAVITY BE REPEALED?" article?

Tetlepanquetzatzin

A metric can be neither short nor long (but it does determine what it is short and what is long). I believe the author of the crank page is thinking about how a curved space can be thought of as embedded in a higher dimensional flat space. The author probably doesn't know it, but there is in fact a theorem of differential geometry that tells us that this kind of embedding is always possible, although it appears that what is gained in simplicity by having a flat space is lost in the extra dimensions. However,
(a) it is not a Euclidean space that is singled out, but rather a Minkowski space (albeit the spatial part is Euclidean)
(b) the embedding in a higher dimensional space is completely optional and even if this option is chosen the curves of interest are not the straight line in the higher dimensional space, but the geodesics of the original manifold.

wade-w

That was my point. Perhaps I should have been clearer. I was refering specifically to this quote from the OP:

What I said was just as much nonsense as the above quote.