Science Magazine for Critical Thinkers
Science Magazine for Critical Thinkers
The purpose of this article is to publish and comment upon a letter written by Louis Essen and sent to Dr. Carl Zapffe. The letter is interesting because it compresses into a few short lines the essence of Louis Essen’s criticism of Einstein’s theory of relativity.
In his book Science and Hypothesis, first published in French in 1902, Poincare gives to the principle of relativity the status of a unifying principle in both mathematics and physics. It is an important theme of the book, which unifies this collection of essays. At the end of the book, Poincare discusses how this principle is rendered safe in Lorentz’s theory of electro-dynamics. It is certain that Einstein drank deeply from the waters of Poincare’s book and fully embraced the ideas contained in Poincare’s Principle Of Relativity.
While I was working there, I sometimes had to go down to the basement and peel potatoes alone, in a dark, cold, and wet room. At first, I didn’t like this dungeon-like place, especially when it was icy cold and snowing outside. But I found that because my task was easy, and there was no one around to bother me, I could spend lots of time thinking about physics, while peeling those potatoes. At the time, I was reading a book about Einstein’s Relativity Theory.
The press love stories about dinosaurs, especially if it includes everyone’s favourite dinosaur Tyrannosaurus rex (T. rex), so it’s no surprise that a new science study in 2017 was well publicised. The study shows a T. rex’s running ability was limited by the strength of its leg bones. It couldn’t run in our gravity.
Thomas Kuhn generally is a hero among dissidents. Along with his explication of what it all meant, his invention of the word “paradigm” was his greatest achievement. A paradigm forms the body of data, assumptions, and interpretations guiding a discipline during a particular period. A paradigm cannot be overthrown by anyone whose livelihood depends on it—only outsiders need apply for that infrequent function.