Why Einstein Was Wrong About Relativity
IMAGINE you are on a bicycle, pedalling across the cosmos. A beam of light - perhaps sent off by a distant collapsing star - zings past you. How fast are you and the light approaching each other? You are travelling at hardly any speed, so the answer will be more or less exactly light's speed through the interstellar vacuum, around 300 million metres a second.
Now imagine you abandon pedal power for the day. Bowling along in your spaceship at half light speed, you meet another light pulse head-on. What is your speed of approach now? Surely it is just your speed plus that of the light: in total, one and a half times light speed.
Wrong. Your speed of approach will be the speed of light, no more -and that's true however fast you are travelling. Welcome to the weird world of Einstein's special relativity, where as things move faster they shrink, and where time gets so distorted that even talking about
events being simultaneous is pointless. That all follows, as Albert Einstein showed, from the fact that light always travels at the same speed, however you look at it.
Really? Mitchell Feigenbaum, a physicist at The Rockefeller University in New York, begs to differ. He's the latest and most prominent in a line of researchers insisting that Einstein's theory has nothing to do with light - whatever history and the textbooks might say. "Not only is it not necessary," he says, "but there's absolutely no room in the theory for it."
What's more, Feigenbaum claims in a paper on the arXiv preprint server that has yet to be peer-reviewed, if only the father of relativity, Galileo Galilee, had known a little more modern mathematics back in the 17th century, he could have got as far as Einstein did (www.arxiv.org/abs/0806.1234). "Galileo's thoughts are almost 400 years old," he says. "But they're still extraordinarily potent.
They're enough on their own to give Einstein's relativity, without any additional knowledge."
The claim has got other physicists thinking. Take...
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