Totalitarianist

I have not been this angry in a long time. I was communicating with one of those White Nationalist ninnies on some forum, and he believed and claimed that Einstein was a fraud, "like all Jews". Then he gave me this link. What an absurd article!

<a href="http://www.biblebelievers.org.au/einstein.htm" target="_blank">http://www.biblebelievers.org.au/einstein.htm</a>

[ November 30, 2002: Message edited by: Lady Anoteros ]</p>

strubenuff

Which part of the article do you disagree with?

eh

And people also think our earth is the center of the universe. It seems that stupid people tend to believe stupid things, so I don't see why doubting Einstein is such a special case.

Undercurrent

I don't know about Trebax^H^H^H^H^H^HLady Anteros, but I do disagree that Maxwell believed that the speed of light was a constant in all reference frames. The non-Galelei invariance of Maxwell's equations of electormagnetism was well known, but Maxwell took the more conservative position that the Galelei transform was correct and his equations were wrong in all but one reference frame (the one at rest relative to the aether.) The purpose of the Michelson-Morley experiment was to find that frame.

I aslo disagree with the statements about the Lorentz. Lorentz did, of course, come up with the Lorentz transformation, and noted that Maxwell's equations were, in fact, Lorentz invarent, while for low velocities relative to the speed of light, the transformation is asymptotically similar to the Galelei transform. To say that Einsten tried to hide the authorship while still calling it the "Lorentz Transform" is absurd.

However, what Lorentz and Fitzgerald did not realize, that Einsten did, was that the L-F contraction was caused by the way things are measured, and was thus observer-dependent. L and F had proposed that it was a real contraction that would be precievable even by someone at rest with respect to the object that was contracted.

Einstein was a first-tier physicist. He was not, however, so far ahead of everyone else that the advancement of physics would have been hindered had he not been born. As was mentioned in the article, Poincare' (whom I think deserved to be a lot more famous than he is) was hot on his heels.

Einstein, in SR, provided a synthesis and a common understanding of a number of things that had been partially understood before as disjoint pieces. Perhaps that's not as exciting as rewriting all physics from whole cloth in the face of "the establishment", but it is a worthy accomplishment.

m.

&lt;Wonders why he's wasting his time refuting anti-semetic garbage... must be bored&gt;

eh

The site actually isn't outright lies, as is it exreme. Einstein did not come up with a lot of the ideas that are attributed to him, such as the constant speed of light, but he was the only one to put them together into a consistent framework. While others may have come up with great discoveries, none of them alone were able to put them into a complete theory, as it took Einstein to do to. To claim a moron could do this, is absurd. After all, with a billion bible believing simpletons on the earth at the time, why didn't at least one of them do it before Einstein?

Oxymoron

Does it really matter even if Einstein was a fraud? (not that I think he was). All the predictions of SR and GR have been verified to the nth decimal point, everything else is history.

thebeave

You expect us to accept as the truth something that comes from a website called "biblebelievers.org"? If you look around, you can also find people who believe the following:

1) Elvis is alive
2) The earth is flat
3) The moon landing was faked
4) Martha Stewart wasn't insider trading.

Wizardry

<a href="http://www.mathpages.com/rr/s8-08/8-08.htm" target="_blank">Who Invented Relativity?</a>

Answerer

Its funny to note that while the life of mythical Jesus must be true and the life of most scientist must be a fraud. So, I concluded both GR and SR all drop from the sky.

Friar Bellows

If all that Einstein had done was to invent SR, I would agree with you. But his subsequent accomplishment in inventing GR puts him significantly above people like Poincare and even the quantum theory originators (like Bohr, Heisenberg, and Dirac), in my opinion of course! Einstein deserves all the accolades.

By the way, if you're interested I can point you to an article which argues that the reason Poincare missed out on inventing SR before Einstein did had something to do with Poincare's philosophical ideas about science. It's an interesting read.