Conservapaedia vs. Relativity?

[davegodfrey]

     Conservapaedia, that bastion of idiocy got its arse handed to it when trying to pick fights with scientists over the Long Term Evolutionary Experiment . This is a multi-million generation breeding experiment involving bacteria, that turned up all sorts of interesting things, including some novel characters of the sort the average creationist claims can't exist. Knowing where to pick its fights its gone after that well-known shaky theory, beloved of Liberals, Relativity.

Andrew Schafly & Co. vs. Physics. Fight! FIght! Fight!

I'm not a physicist, but even I can see most of this is bollocks, and if a physicist can point out to me where I'm going wrong I'd be very grateful.

"The theory of relativity is a mathematical system that allows no exceptions. It is heavily promoted by liberals who like its encouragement of relativism and its tendency to mislead people in how they view the world.[1] Here is a list of 29 counterexamples: any one of them shows that the theory is incorrect."

Now I'm no physicist, but at a cursory glance even I can tell half of this is just crap.

• The Pioneer anomaly.
• Anomalies in the locations of spacecraft that have flown by Earth ("flybys").[2]

And how large are these anomalies? I have no idea what caused this- but it could be something to do with the spacecraft itself, unobserved bodies, etc. Its interesting its not been seen with the other probes or indeed planets

• Increasingly precise measurements of the advance of the perihelion of Mercury show a shift greater than predicted by relativity, well beyond the margin of error.[3]
• The discontinuity in momentum as velocity approaches "c" for infinitesimal mass, compared to the momentum of light.
• The logical problem of a force which is applied at a right angle to the velocity of a relativistic mass - does this act on the rest mass or the relativistic mass?

I've no idea. I was never very good at physics. Perhaps the physicists have worked this out? Have you asked them?

• The observed lack of curvature in overall space.[4]

Space is really, really big. You won't believe how mindbogglingly big it is. I mean, you might think its a long way to the shops, but you can't see the curvature of the Earth at that scale, and that's peanuts compared to space.

• The universe shortly after its creation, when quantum effects dominated and contradicted Relativity.

We know that QM and relativity don't mesh together. Just because at the very small it doesn't work doesn't mean its not a good theory. it explains lots of things at the very big.

• The action-at-a-distance of quantum entanglement.[5]
• The action-at-a-distance by Jesus, described in John 4:46-54.

1. This is another QM vs GR argument. 2. You're taking the word of a book that thinks locusts have four legs against that of mathematics?

• The failure to discover gravitons, despite wasting hundreds of millions in taxpayer money in searching.

We can't find it therefore it doesn't exist. Gravitons are really had to see. Hell, gravitational waves are really hard to see- you need huge laser beams and supernovae to detect any sign of them. I'm not surprised they're elusive. And aren't gravitons a QM thing anyway? Does relativity require that they exist?

• The inability of the theory to lead to other insights, contrary to every verified theory of physics.

Well, mainly the things it explains are really big, and really far away. Just because 20th Century physics got obsessed over atoms doesn't mean there aren't things being done with relativity. And are you seriously suggesting that "Not been helpful = Not true" Seriously?

• The change in mass over time of standard kilograms preserved under ideal conditions.[6]

I think that has rather more to say about what the standard kilogram is made of than it does about black holes, etc, etc.

• The uniformity in temperature throughout the universe.[7]

Isn't the CMB data a prediction of relativity? Isn't that why this was written?

• "The snag is that in quantum mechanics, time retains its Newtonian aloofness, providing the stage against which matter dances but never being affected by its presence. These two [QM and Relativity] conceptions of time don’t gel."[8]

Either relativity is wrong or QM is wrong. Which would you rather. (I'm going to ask this question again later).

• The theory predicts wormholes just as it predicts black holes, but wormholes violate causality and permit absurd time travel.[9]

Just because something is absurd, doesn't mean it isn't true. QM comes up with some ridiculous predictions. And we've seen them happen.

• The theory predicts natural formation of highly ordered (and thus low entropy) black holes despite the increase in entropy required by the Second Law of Thermodynamics.[10]

2nd law only applies to closed systems. Black holes are not a closed system- stuff falls in, and Hawking Radiation means that stuff falls out. You've tried arguing this one with biologists against evolution. What makes you think physicists will roll over? When you lose to biologists about physics don't pick fights with physicists on the same turf...

• Data from the PSR B1913+16 increasingly diverge from predictions of the General Theory of Relativity such that, despite a Nobel Prize in Physics being awarded for early work on this pulsar, no data at all have been released about it for over five years.

According to Wikipedia "In 2004, Taylor and Joel M. Weisburg published a new analysis of the experimental data to date, concluding that the 0.2% disparity between the data and the predicted results is due to poorly known galactic constants, and that tighter bounds will be difficult to attain with current knowledge of these figures." So perhaps because there are some things we haven't got nailed down quite so accurately as we'd like (including "g", the gravitational constant) the data doesn't fit the predictions. Predictions which are presumably based on constants which aren't as accurate as we'd like leading to... Predictions that don't quite fit the data perhaps?

• The lack of useful devices developed based on any insights provided by the theory; no lives have been saved or helped, and the theory has not led to other useful theories and may have interfered with scientific progress.[11] This stands in stark contrast with every verified theory of science.

Really? What about GPS?  And how many peoples lives have been saved by heliocentrism?

• Relativity requires different values for the inertia of a moving object: in its direction of motion, and perpendicular to that direction. This contradicts the logical principle that the laws of physics are the same in all directions.
• Relativity requires that anything traveling at the speed of light must have mass zero, so it must have momentum zero. But the laws of electrodynamics require that light have nonzero momentum.
• Unlike most well-tested fundamental physical theories, the theory of relativity violates conditions of a conservative field. Path independence, for example, is lacking under the theory of relativity, as in the "twin paradox" whereby the age of each twin under the theory is dependent on the path he traveled.[12]
• The Ehrenfest Paradox: Consider a spinning hoop, where the tangential velocity is near the speed of light. In this case, the circumference (2πR) is length-contracted. However, since R is always perpendicular to the motion, it is not contracted. This leads to an apparent paradox: does the radius of the accelerating hoop equal R, or is it less than R?

I have no idea. But there's all kinds of weird stuff predicted by QM too. Though I'd be interested to see what explanation a physicist has for this. I'm sure there is one.

• The Twin Paradox: Consider twins who are separated with one traveling at a very high speed such that his "clock" (age) slows down, so that when he returns he has a younger age than the twin; this violates Relativity because both twins should expect the other to be younger, if motion is relative. Einstein himself admitted that this contradicts Relativity.[13]

As I understood it the twin who travels very fast is the one who doesn't age. Time for him has slowed down relative to the other one. I could be wrong, but just because it makes your head hurt to think about it doesn't mean its wrong.

• Based on Relativity, Einstein predicted in 1905 that clocks at the Earth's equator would be slower than clocks at the North Pole, due to different velocities; in fact, all clocks at sea level measure time at the same rate, and Relativists made new assumptions about the Earth's shape to justify this contradiction of the theory; they also make the implausible claim that relativistic effects from gravitation precisely offset the effects from differences in velocity.[14]

Do they? Do they really? And what shape is the Earth? Precisely?

• Based on Relativity, Einstein claimed in 1909 that the aether does not exist, but in order to make subatomic physics work right, theorists had to introduce the aether-like concept of the Higgs field, which fills all of space and breaks symmetries.

Even I know that the aether was predicted to exist as something for light to travel through. Its not like the Higgs field. Which might not exist anyway. Not every model of QM needs a Higgs Boson.

• Minkowski space is predicated on the idea of four-dimensional vectors of which one component is time. However, one of the properties of a vector space is that every vector have an inverse. Time cannot be a vector because it has no inverse.

I find it hard to believe that Minkowski would have got published if he couldn't account for this.

• It is impossible to perform an experiment to determine whether Einstein's theory of relativity is correct, or the older Lorentz aether theory is correct. Believing one over the other is a matter of faith.

Michelson and Morely would disagree I think.

• In Genesis 1:6-8, we are told that one of God's first creations was a firmament in the heavens. This likely refers to the creation of the luminiferous aether.

Does it now. Because as I understood it the Israelites believed that the heavesn were a dome and the stars were nailed on. Perhaps thats what the "Firmament" is?

• Despite a century of wasting billions of dollars in work on the theory, "No one knows how to solve completely the equations of general relativity that describe gravity; they are simply beyond current understanding."[15}

No-one knows how to solve the Navier-Stokes equations. No-one knows if the Riemann Hypothesis is true. No-one knows if super-symmetry is correct. "There's stuff we don't know! It must be wrong!" This is, frankly anti-intellectualism and anti-knowledge at its most sickening.
Comments, especially welcome, as I've cobbled this together after a pint or three, and have, frankly no idea what I'm talking about. Although I have listened to more episodes of "In Our Time", so I'd like to think I had a layman's idea of roughly what these scientist fellows are talking about.

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