Abstract

Einstein has long been a favorite subject for the media. Their presentations of his ideas to the general public are however invariably nonsense, replete with illogicalities and wrong science. The result is to undermine the standing of science as a rational activity that can be understood and overseen by the public. The implications for democracy in our increasingly science-oriented world are profound.

Once when Einstein had to fill out some form that asked his profession, he wrote “photographer’s model.” Portraitists constantly pestered him not just because he looked exactly like what a scientist should look like. The story of his work and his life had captured the imagination of the whole of the literate world, as they continue to do today. Everyone has heard of Einstein and everyone knows he is important. But the remarkable thing is that hardly anyone can tell you why. And even more remarkable, over the years, the media have eagerly seized on Einstein as a story to be explained to a breathless public, and without exception they have failed.

In December of 1999 after much trumpeting Time magazine named Einstein “Person of the Century.”¹ To make it all clear to their readers Time’s editors enlisted the world’s most recognizable physicist, Stephen Hawking. A highly intelligent non-scientist friend of mine read Hawking’s words and at the end said, “I’m so stupid. I don’t understand this at all.” Well, no, she is not stupid. What Hawking wrote did not make sense. He simply joined a long line of authors, television producers, journalists, and scientists themselves who have set out to explain Einstein and ended up saying things like “Cats Die. Socrates is dead. Therefore Socrates is a cat.”

The mystery is why the critical faculties and capacity for rational thinking of otherwise intelligent writers and editors seem to evaporate when faced with the man with the freaky white hair. The ideas are no longer new, and there is now little doubt that they are correct. This is not an inconsequential mystery. The enormous authority that science has acquired in our society has to be testable. Citizens must be able to confirm for themselves that what the scientists say is true. If the science is gobbledygook, how can they?

The nonsense that the books and TV programs generate falls into distinct patterns. First, many books start out with the assertion “All motion is relative. There is no fixed point in the universe from which to measure absolute motion.” That seems a reasonable though not self-evident proposition. But then a few pages later they say, “Nothing can move faster than the speed of light,” which is an absolute statement about speed and therefore meaningless in the light of the previous assertion. “Relative to what?” is the obvious question that they overlook. The correct answer (“relative to any observer”) leads us into a bizarre and baffling world.

The next common pitfall concerns the constancy of the speed of light. Measurements of the speed of light, we are told, are unaffected by any relative motion between the source of the light and the receiver. How can this strange claim be substantiated? The Michelson-Morley experiment is described in detail. Michelson and Morley, it says, set out to detect the ether drift and found none. (Actually they did find an ether drift,² but let’s not complicate this even more!) The absence of a drift shows the speed of light is a constant. But no, it does not! In the Michelson-Morley experiment, the source and the receiver of the light are both bolted onto a large stone table, and are not in relative motion.

Some books give us variations on these themes. The Universe and Dr Einstein by Lincoln Barnett, published in 1948, bears the imprimatur of a foreword by Einstein himself. Barnett was a reporter for Life magazine. Rather than saying that the Michelson-Morley result proves the constancy of c, he presents Einstein’s theory as an explanation of the missing ether drift. Then he says that Einstein dispenses with the ether altogether.³ But if there is no ether, we would not expect there to be an ether drift. The puzzle disappears in a flash! Why bother with contractions and time dilation?

Robert March in Physics for Poets confuses this even more by making the odd claim, without justification, that there would be an ether drift even if there were no ether.⁴

Martin Gardner in his classic Relativity for the Million, now republished as Relativity Simply Explained, says, “If there is no way to measure uniform motion relative to a universal, fixed frame of reference like the ether, then light must behave in an utterly fantastic way,” i.e. its speed must be constant.⁵ But this does not follow. Then some chapters later to explain the Twin Paradox he says that, “The stay-at-home does not move relative to the universe.”⁶ But he has already said there is no such thing as motion relative to anything “universal”!

A more recent book by David Bodanis⁷ includes the obligatory political correctness and lots of life-story stuff that is supposed to make science palatable to the non-scientist. To demonstrate why c must be constant, he pictures a surfer riding a wave – the wave to the surfer appears to be stationary. A light wave cannot be like that, he says, because it can only exist by constantly moving forward.⁸ But that is true of any wave!

Bodanis’s book points to a website in which he expounds at length about the Twin Paradox. Except he does not call it the Twin Paradox. It appears he does not even see what is paradoxical about it, and what the resolution is. Bodanis is typical of the non-scientists who think they are so intelligent they can understand Einstein without learning the nuts and bolts.

The aptly named Complete Idiot’s Guide to Understanding Relativity by Gary Moring does not even bother to justify the claim that c is constant. And interestingly, some pages earlier he refers to the Ultraviolet Catastrophe. He thinks it is called a catastrophe because it spelt the doom of classical theory, not that it indicated all life on earth would be wiped out.

Some writers aim to present what the problem was that launched Einstein on his work. What was wrong with the picture of the world offered by classical physics? Nigel Calder wrote the script for Einstein’s Universe, a weighty BBC TV documentary for the great man’s centennial in 1979. He points out that the earth circling the sun possesses immense kinetic energy if you look at it from the point of view of an astronaut hovering far out in space, but none if you are stationary with respect to the earth.⁹ Both cannot be correct, he says. But this is not a problem. Remember the calculations of potential energy we did in high school. If you lift a weight up, you give it so much potential energy. But what happens if you dig a hole under it? Has the potential energy magically increased? It doesn’t matter. Using a consistent point of view, the math always comes out right and energy is conserved. Calder then goes on to repeat the blunder about Michelson and Morley proving the constancy of c.¹⁰

It is not surprising that Einstein himself does not make this mistake. Einstein was a clever man. In his Relativity – the Special and General Theory, first published in 1916, he points to de Sitter’s observations of double stars as his reason for saying the speed of light is constant.¹¹ As it happens, the constancy of c does not follow from de Sitter’s results alone, but taken together with the (supposed) Michelson-Morley missing ether drift, maybe it does. One might suppose there could be a simpler explanation of de Sitter’s results¹² than the colossal edifice of relativity – they were, incidentally, disputed¹³ – until one notices a more immediate difficulty to do with dates. Einstein first published his theory in 1905. De Sitter made his observations in 1912. Was Einstein clairvoyant?

Hawking in Time seems to deduce the constancy of c from Michelson and Morley: “It was as if light always traveled at the same speed relative to you, no matter how you were moving.”¹⁴ He goes on to dispense with the ether, and then repeats an oft-heard assertion, that for the laws of physics to be the same for all observers, they must all measure the same value for c. Why so? The parameters of physics change even as the laws stay the same. The boiling point of water is lower at the top of Pike’s Peak than in Malibu. All this on Hawking’s first page. No wonder my friend was confused.

Einstein is not alone as an inspiration of scientific misinformation. Much of modern physics has the same effect. Gary Zukav’s celebrated book The Dancing Wu Li Masters amongst plenty of other nonsense proves (fallaciously) from the experiment with three crossed polaroids that not only is traditional physics obsolete but traditional logic is as well.¹⁵ In The End of Time, Julian Barbour starts propounding his theories by explaining the difference between solar time and sidereal time.¹⁶ But he gets it wrong. I still remember some of what I learnt in Astronomy 101 at MIT.

While many of the implications of relativity and quantum theory are too abstruse for the outsider to appreciate substantially, the topic of quantum computing would seem to entail tangible results that we could see and be sure of. We are told the CIA is losing sleep over the possibility that its most secret codes could be cracked. The Feynman Processor is by Gerard Milburn of the University of Queensland, we are told a leading researcher in quantum computing.¹⁷ On page 67 he says “Photons have another property, polarisation….” On page 35 he says, “Photon polarisation… cannot be regarded as a property of a photon….” One wonders whether he gives Fs to students who write stuff like that. Many of his other errors read like students’ blunders.

TV producers are apt to tell me when faced with these criticisms that they have to cut corners. No popular treatment can deal with every minutia. But I am not talking about minutiae. I am talking about the whole point. If one disagrees with the third verse of a poem, one can go on to enjoy verses four, five and six. But the nature of scientific reasoning is that it is sequential. “If this, then this, then this, then that…” If one link in this chain does not hold, then the whole of the remainder is worthless. And if the reader/viewer cannot follow the reasoning, it changes the whole nature of the discourse. We are back to the days of a priesthood, scientists now rather than clergy, who say, “You can’t understand this, you have to believe me.” So if they can’t understand, why bother to explain?

Time magazine’s justification for its anointing of Einstein is that he transformed our universe and the way we think about it. But did he really? Certainly Newton changed the way we look at the world. The picture of the universe as a piece of clockwork is due to him – no longer did there have to be a supernatural force pushing the sun across the sky. Do people now think in Einsteinian terms? “As I drive down the freeway my car gets slightly smaller.” Of course not. The science that engineers and car mechanics and high-school students use is still Newtonian. Einstein’s analysis of quantum photoelectric effects has no bearing on the practical use of photocells. Lasers are useful but they have not fundamentally changed our world. Nuclear power is on the wane, and nuclear weapons have thankfully not been used for over half a century.

Even in atomic physics Einstein can be in the back seat. Stephen Leacock once asked Ernest Rutherford what he thought of Einstein’s relativity. “Oh, that stuff!” Rutherford replied. “We never bother with that in our work!”¹⁸

Nevertheless, Einstein has arrived and nothing I say is going to stem the tide of drivel. It is often said that relativity is quite simple. Professor Sir Sam Edwards, the former chairman of Britain’s Science Research Council, once said to me, “You can explain relativity to sixth-formers.” (High-school seniors.) But the moral of all I have shown is that it is not simple. I have a rather naughty game I play with young physics majors I meet. I ask them if they have encountered the assertion that c is a constant. They say yes. I ask do they believe it is true. They say yes.

I ask, “Why do you believe it is true?”

At this point the intelligent ones say, “I don’t know. I just plug the figures into the formula, get the right answer and pass the exam. I don’t understand it.”

The less intelligent ones start to explain to me about the Michelson-Morley experiment, until I point out the problem. Then they say, “I hadn’t thought of that.”

Richard Feynman said, “I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics.”¹⁹ And no one understands relativity. Does it matter? Yes. It raises a major social problem. The scientific revolution of the 17th and 18th centuries brought about a fundamental shift in power amongst people. No longer did the mass of humanity have to sit open-mouthed before the priests and receive all truth from them unquestioned. Anyone claiming insight into something had to convince us. The motto of the Royal Society, founded in 1660, was and is Nullius in Verba, which is best translated “Take nobody’s word for it.”

With Einstein all that is changed, and the new priesthood is as fallible as its predecessors. But science has acquired limitless authority in our society. So many political arguments lead to the assertion, “Studies show that….” How do we decide whom to believe? Maybe the cloud of unknowing over modern physics will lead people to question their absolute faith in science as the answer to everything. That must be a good thing.

In the meantime recall Sir John Squire’s continuation of Pope:

Nature, and Nature’s laws lay hid in night.

God said, Let Newton be! and all was light.

It did not last: the Devil howling “Ho!

Let Einstein be!” restored the status quo.

Nancy Banks-Smith, TV critic of the British daily the Guardian, added yet another couplet in reviewing Nigel Calder’s long program:²⁰

The BBC as things could be no worse

Said let them sleep, show Einstein’s Universe.

References

1. Isaacson, Walter 1999. “Writers for the Century,” Time, Dec. 31, p. 4.

2. Polanyi, Michael 1958. Personal Knowledge, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, pp. 12-13.

3. Barnett, Lincoln 1948. The Universe and Dr Einstein, Morrow, New York, p. 38.

4. March, Robert H. 1992. Physics for Poets, McGraw-Hill, New York. p. 95.

5. Gardner, Martin 1997. Relativity Simply Explained, Dover Publications Inc., Mineola NY, p. 32.

6. Ibid. p. 114

7. Bodanis, David 2000. E=mc² a biography of the world’s most famous equation, Walker, New York.

8. Ibid. p. 49.

9. Calder, Nigel 1982. Einstein’s Universe, Greenwich House, New York, p. 7.

10. Ibid. p. 105.

11. Einstein, Albert 1961. Relativity – the Special and General Theory, Crown, New York, p.17.

12. De Sitter, Willem 1913. “Constancy of the Velocity of Light,” Physikalische Zeitschriften, 14, May 15, p. 429.

13. Freundlich, E. 1913. “Constancy of the Velocity of Light,” Physikalische Zeitschriften, 14, Sept. 1, 835-838. Et seq.

14. Hawking, Stephen 1999. “A Brief History of Relativity,” Time, Dec. 31, p. 67.

15. Zukav, Gary 1980. The Dancing Wu Li Masters, Fontana, London, p. 278.

16. Barbour, Julian 2000. The End of Time, Oxford Univ. Press, Oxford, p. 98.

17. Milburn, Gerard 1998. The Feynman Processor, Perseus Books, Cambridge MA.

18. Leacock, Stephen 1945. “Common Sense and the Universe,” in Last Leaves, Dodd, Mead & Co., New York, p. 43.

19. Feynman, Richard 1967. The Character of Physical Law, MIT Press, Cambridge MA, p. 129.

20. Banks-Smith, Nancy 1979. “Einstein’s Universe,” Guardian, March 15.