Science Magazine for Critical Thinkers
Science Magazine for Critical Thinkers
Smoot’s mission was to see if there were “wrinkles” in the CBR representing the earliest signals of the Big Bang – from about 300,000 years after the bang. Smoot & team also had to make a detailed map of radiation from our galaxy and indeed from the whole sky so that they could remove “noise” radiation from their data.
I have analyzed the Twin Paradox of Special Relativity for 50 years and am very familiar with all of its aspects. This led me to create a 30+ video series on “Time in Physics”. “Time”...
For the reader who is unfamiliar with physics academia, it might seem difficult to understand why Special Relativity (SR) remains one of the key foundation blocks of academic, theoretical physics. After all physics thinking should be based on empirical data and logic – there should be little room for subjective preferences, etc.
The earliest empirical data directly related to “time dilation” came from particle accelerators. These results seemed to confirm Einstein’s time dilation prediction. When unstable particles had “high velocity”, their half-lives were greatly increased – in other words, “high velocity” particles survived longer than “low velocity” particles before they decayed.
Sometimes one can get a much deeper insight into a theory by comparing it to a quite different theory covering the same domain. We will do that here by comparing Special Relativity (SR) to Lorentz Aether Theory (LAT) of the late 1800’s or, to be more precise, we will compare SR to the top level, conceptual framework of LAT.
But not so fast. First, let me give you an analogy. There’s a very funny 2007 British comedy/mystery film. The story goes as follows. The top cop in London, loves and lives his job. He’s so good at his job that he soon gets promoted to Sergeant. However, the only open position is in a quiet village that has been named as the “Safest Place in the UK” every year for decades. The top cop’s …
Albert Einstein is a revered icon of science and a symbol of genius. Time Magazine named him, not just Person of Year, but Person of the 20th Century. Einstein’s Theory of Relativity is often touted as the “greatest achievement in physics”. It would seem to take a lot of chutzpah to contradict Einstein on any topic, but to challenge him regarding relativity would se…
In 1956, I entered the ninth grade. My math teacher, Mr. Nash, was an excellent and caring teacher. One day he wrote some things on the blackboard and then said something like, “We don’t know what the square root of minus one is.”