Re: [Phys-l] how to prove relativity

["John Clement" <clement@hal-pc.org>]

> > 1. Talk about esoteric evidence (eg muon lifetimes or accelerator
> > operation) that they will resist?
>
> By itself, that will never be convincing ... and indeed, by
> itself, no single piece of evidence *should* be convincing ...
> especially if it is at all esoteric.
>
> The better approach is to marshal a mountain of evidence
> in support of one simple idea.
But just a mountain of evidence won't work until the person has also been
convinced that their point of view may not work well.  They have to be
willing to question their own paradigms.  And that may not be possible
without connecting the ideas to what they already think they understand.

It should now be well known by now that you can do persuasive demonstrations
which challenge preconceptions, but several weeks later the students will
remember results which confirm their preconceptions.  Evidence alone is not
enough.  Even a mountain of evidence alone is not enough, especially when it
all is very abstract and obscure.

If you can build an anchor and bridging analogy a la Clement/Camp (no
relation to me), it is possible to make a convincing argument.  It is not
the weight of evidence, but the way of presenting it that is most important.
The specific steps to getting there are most important.  So Mazur/Crouch
have shown that demos must be preceded by predictions, and followed by
student discussion of the results.

So far nobody has presented any reasonable sequences which may begin to
convince the non physicist of relativity.  And there is much more to
relativity than just the "time dilation".  Actually I suspect that someone
who thinks the time dilation is nonsense probably accepts E=mc^2.  But they
probably do not accept the idea that things that appear simultaneous but at
different locations in one frame are not simultaneous in another.  This
latter idea might be easier to attack.

Actually the non physicist who has taken a physics course usually views
physics as a random collection of disjointed ideas which do not mean
anything because they are not consistent with "real life".  So it is no
wonder that a psychologist might consider physics evidence to be nonsense.
But if she could realize that some psychology results appear to be nonsense
to the non psychologist, perhaps that would serve as an entry into changing
paradigms.

There is also the problem that women take different paths to knowing than
men do.  Notice that this is not a matter of simple logic.  Everyone follows
a path to deeper understanding and this path may seem to the expert to be
illogical.

And relativity is filled with things that are paradoxical and illogical from
the layman's point of view.  The idea that two observers can "look" at
different events and come up with completely different conclusions is
paradoxical from a classical perspective.  But psychology also has things
like this.  Two different people always observe and remember different
things according to their paradigms, and their memories may even be
completely opposite.  But a video of what happened may reveal the "physical
truth".  So psychologists "know" that you construct and even modify memories
in a variety of ways which do not correspond to "reality".  But the idea
that two different videos taken from different frames will show different
things violates their view of "external reality".  Psychologists have
changed their paradigms about how the mind works, but not about how the
physical world works.  OTOH physicists have changed their views about the
physical world, but not usually about how the brain and learning really
works.

Bridging this gap will not be done with just simple physical facts and
abstract ideas.  The idea that a mountain of evidence will work is a
misconception.

John M. Clement
Houston, TX