anti-relativists (was: Re: A historical episode)

[Pentcho Valev <pvalev@BAS.BG>]

Note that this is less a science forum and more a science EDUCATION forum.
There is little danger for a wrong or incompetent scientific statement to
be taken too seriously, to mislead the scientific community etc. Rather,
like any student's question, it would always be useful - e.g. it could show
what in textbooks is not clear. I am afraid your attitude makes
participants too prudent - for instance, they may refrain from discussing
different approaches in textbooks, textbook confusions etc.

Pentcho


On Tue, 12 Aug 2003 19:37:52 -0700, Stephen Speicher
<sjs@COMPBIO.CALTECH.EDU> wrote:

> On Tue, 12 Aug 2003, Pentcho Valev wrote:
>
> > Stephen Speicher wrote:
> >
> > > Reading Gamow's account of the Soviet persecution leaves me with
> > > a dual sense: one of horror at the state intervention, trial, and
> > > penalties, along with a farcical sense -- the jury which judged
> > > the scientists were the machine-shop workers of the institute!
> > > (A bit reminiscent of the anti-relativists making judgments on
> > > this group.)
> >
> > What is the problem with those anti-relativists?
>
> That is a very good question. I would say that, more than
> anything else, the  most basic problem with the
> "anti-relativists" is their intellectual dishonesty -- the
> refusal to think and recognize their errors no matter how many
> times, or in how many ways, such errors are clearly identified by
> those who actually understand. This sort of
> epistemological/psychological aberration is not anything new to
> relativity.
>
> In a 1922 letter to Max Born, Einstein incidentally mentions a
> "monumental blunder" he made "some time ago (my experiment on the
> emission of light with positive rays)." In his commentary on this
> letter, in the book "The Born-Einstein Letters," _Macmillan_,
> 1971, Born first mentions the "anti-relativists" who fail to
> learn from their mistakes as Einstein did.  In one paragraph,
> Born notes:
>
>   "Finally, there are the pure cranks, outsiders who can
>    point to no positive scientific achievements themselves
>    but who believe that they have found defects in some
>    new doctrine such as Einstein's theory of relativity.
>    One would think there would be fewer of these as time
>    goes on. But this is not so. Over the years a large
>    number of first-class physicists and mathematicians
>    have thoroughly investigated the theory of relativity
>    and none has found fault with it. It is hard,
>    therefore, today to take seriously anyone who believes
>    he has discovered a mistake. I have frequently taken
>    the trouble to uncover the errors in papers written by
>    cranks of this type, but never in all my experience has
>    any of them admitted that he had made a mistake, as
>    Einstein did."
>
> Born's comments were written a long time ago, but his words
> remain true today.  There will always be a small but hard-core
> group of intellectually dishonest "anti-relativists" who neither
> understand the theory nor have the integrity to see the error of
> their ways.
>
> --
> Stephen
> speicher@caltech.edu
>
> Ignorance is just a placeholder for knowledge.
>
> Printed using 100% recycled electrons.
> -----------------------------------------------------------