Relativity, Philosophy, Occam’s Razor and Popper's 'falsifiability'
Einstein's cult was always a philosophical imperative. It has never been connected to reality and fails basic tenets of philosophical and scientific axioms.
Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889 – 1951) from the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus:
‘Occam's Razor is, of course, not an arbitrary rule nor one justified by its practical success. It simply says that unnecessary elements in a symbolism mean nothing. Signs which serve one purpose are logically equivalent; signs which serve no purpose are logically meaningless.’
Ludwig is right and this is one reason amongst hundreds why Relativity is a false religion. It is suffused with meaningless maths and symbols.
The Dogma
One of the greatest frauds in history is the Relativity cult. It has elevated and cojoined abstruse mathematical models with ‘science’. We are assaulted with the destructive arcana and tautological calculations used by the cult of Relativity as described on this substack in various posts. Because the cat jumped does not mean that Relativity is true. Relativity has no connection with physical, mechanical proofs or experimentation.
If we address philosophy, we know that in reality, in our world, the word ‘science’ has come to mean nothing. It is now defined as the ‘right answer’, as demanded by the ‘Enlightenment’ theory of ‘reason’ uber-alles, sermonised to the peasants by the high priests of the Church of ‘The Science’. We live in the matrix of Saint Simon’s ‘Church of Reason’ where reason and rationality are not understood and are applied without definition.
Much of what is deemed rational is irrational, and much which is described as reasonable is unreasonable and unverifiable.
Scientism is the imposition of a theological belief system conflating ‘progress’ and ‘technology’ with ‘science’ and ‘reason’. This is fraudulent and leads to a totalitarian ideal of state enforced philosophical-scientistic conformity where ‘science’ is the ‘only means’ to create technological, social, and even intellectual ‘improvements’.
There is however, nothing ‘modern’ about the pagan cults of our age. The merger of space-time does not exist, light speed is variant, gravity has nothing to do with ‘fields’, the aether exists, light is refracted due to gravity and the aether; and quantum mechanics nullifies Relativity. About 1000 A4 pages on this substack provide proofs for these and much more.
Occam’s Razor
Mathematical probability theory and Bayesian calculations are premised on the 14th century observation by the Catholic monk, William of Ockham Surrey (1287-1347), namely that the simplest sequence is probably the most valid. This is sometimes called the ‘law of parsimony’. The probability that you can flip a coin 80 times in a row with ‘heads’ coming up every time is about 1 in 1 billion trillion. In other words, it does not happen unless there is fraud involved. The simplest explanation is that fraud, not luck chance, flipping skill, or the Roman god of the coin is at work if someone generates heads 80 times sequentially.
(Occam/Ockham): ‘Entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity.’ Or more directly from Ockham’s Latin, ‘Plurality must never be posited without necessity.’
Ockham’s philosophical ‘razor’ shaves the skin of competing hypotheses about the same prediction. When assessing competing claims, we should select the solution with the fewest assumptions and links in the chain. Within physics, parsimony was an important principle used by many investigators including Pierre Louis Maupertuis and Leonhard Euler in the 17th century, and by Ernst Mach, Max Planck, Werner Heisenberg and Louis de Broglie in quantum mechanics, which disproves Relativity, in the early twentieth century.
Ernst Mach (1838 – 1916): ‘Scientists must use the simplest means of arriving at their results and exclude everything not perceived by the senses.’ (This destroys Relativity).
In philosophical jargon, when applied to ‘science’, William’s razor is described as an ‘abductive heuristic’ which simply refers to a practical, intuitive, or common sense-approach to generate the most plausible explanation for a given set of observations or data. It is described as a ‘law’ but like most ‘scientific’ or philosophical ‘laws’ this is specious. An event might have an incomprehensible number of possible and more complex alternatives, which could be true and validated.
In spite of caveats, in general the razor works given that simpler theories are more easily testable and falsifiable. We see this in IT. I can build a complex system few understand and it might work for a while. But in general, the simpler system, easier to test and manage would be far preferable. This concept is validated by the extreme incomprehensibility of Relativity. The rather extraordinary onion of ridiculous unverifiable, untestable complexity, based on uprovable maths which few if any understand, should tell anyone using common sense, that it is wrong.
English Philosopher, Bertrand Russell (1872 – 1970): ‘Whenever possible substitute constructions of known entities for inferences to unknown entities.’ (Destroys the mathematical manipulations of Relativity).
The Confusion
Relativity is composed of two theories which negate each other and which were developed to explain why light experiments found no movement of this planet. Special Relativity, based on plagiarism, false assumptions and incorrect conclusions about the 1887 Michelson Morley failure to find the Earth’s movement, was fabricated in 1905. STR attempts and fails to describe how masses behave as they travel ‘relative’ to an invariant (wrong) speed of light. An example would be the Earth’s movement in space. STR denies the aether and ignores gravity. Both exist and both falsify STR.
(Explanation why the postulates are junk)
General Relativity was cooked up in 1915 to add back the aether and gravity (fields) and deploy the non-existent space-time dimension to elaborate the complete ‘relativisation’ of time and existence and to explain how objects in ‘space’ are warped by gravity. GTR like STR explains nothing and possesses no physical proof. Logically extended, GTR categorically states that no reality exists. The Relativity brothers are mental experiments and science fiction.
Marketers, Apostles of the Relativity Cult
Relativity provided ‘mathematical garb’ to dazzle, and this permitted geometry and calculus to supersede ‘science’. In lieu of hard, difficult physical experimentation, thin-armed, pampered armchair wizards could now manipulate equations and declare that they were ‘The Science’.
In the competitive world of ‘academia’ and national scientific prestige, this ‘shortcut’ was a revelation. Instead of proving something with evidential experimentation, I can now confuse and claim divine status using my maths you will never understand. Key Apostles within Einstein’s church of unholy maths and philosophy included:
Professor Max Planck (1858 – 1947), was a German theoretical physicist, famous for the discovery of energy quanta which earned him the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1918. Planck did make some significant contributions to theoretical physics and is considered one of the founders of quantum theory. Planck was essential to the Relativity propagation given he was a key ‘science’ gatekeeper. He was an editor of a major physics journal and supported Einstein’s theory and published Einstein's first paper on STR in 1905 entitled, ‘On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies’. No Planck, no Relativity.
Professor Hermann Minkowski (1864 – 1909) was a German mathematician and professor at Königsberg, Zürich, and Göttingen who taught Einstein. Minkowski developed the geometry of numbers and applied geometrical methods to solve problems in number theory, mathematical physics, and the theory of Relativity. He created a mathematical framework for relativity known as ‘Minkowski spacetime’, used by Einstein to build his GTR in 1915. Minkowski plagiarised Palagyi, Riemann and others. Einstein was also famous for plagiarism.
Professor Georg Bernhard Riemann (1826 – 1866) was a German mathematician who contributed to analysis, number theory, and differential geometry. In 1854 Riemann delivered lectures marketing his ‘Riemannian geometry’, copied and reused by the Einstotle. Riemann’s abstractions laid the foundations for the mathematics of curved non-Euclidean space, which underpins GTR (merged space-time), though Einstein later admitted (1932), that we live in a 3 dimensional universe.
Professor Hermann Weyl (1885 – 1955) was a German mathematician, theoretical physicist, and philosopher who influenced theoretical physics and various mathematical disciplines, including number theory. Weyl supported Relativity, as evidenced by his 1918 paper ‘Gravitation and Electricity’. Weyl was also an important gatekeeper within German physics.
Professor Arthur Eddington (1882 – 1944) was an English astronomer, physicist, and mathematician. He was a philosopher and popularise of ‘science’ and one of the high priests of Relativity. Eddington was a Pauline figure within the Einstein cult. Relativity was spread and accepted due to Eddington’s proselytising and preaching.
Apostle Eddington wrote several epistles that introduced and explained Einstein's theory of GTR to the English-speaking world. He was ‘the science’ and the factotum in the English speaking world. Eddington led an expedition in 1919 (described here) which ‘proved’ Relativity though it did no such thing. This 1919 ‘proof’ was the single biggest ‘experiment’ which ‘confirmed’ Einstein’s ideas and elevated Relativity to be a pillar of ‘science’. It was a fraud of course.
In reality, none of these little philosopher kings and dandies proved a thing. As noted in the post about the 1919 fraud, Eddington deliberately tortured data and created inaccurate pictures, 600 times the actual resolution, to state that bending ‘starlight’ validated the cult’s maths. It was a complete sham and has been known to be a scam since the 1920s. To wit:
· The accuracy of astronomical observations by Eddington in 1919 was in a word, pathetic, and the results were plagued by systematic error and confirmation bias, which in common language, indicates a strong philosophical disposition to manufacture a result which confirms your belief system,
· This confirmation bias was reflected in statements by Eddington, despite all the evidence, that Relativity was proven from the deflection of photons, when a number of observations showed that this was untrue,
· In 1960, Schiff showed that the solar glancing photon is not a valid test of relativity and stated:
‘….the first-order changes in the periods of identically constructed clocks and the lengths of identically constructed measuring rods can be found without using general relativity, and how the red shift and the deflection of light can be computed from them.’
· In 1980, Earman and Glymour discussed astronomical observations of the deflection of photons due to the Sun in 1919 and noted inconsistencies in Eddington’s procedures. Experimentally, aberrations and variations for the deflection of the photon in the Sun’s ultra hot corona might be expected and in fact, variations in the deflection angle of the photon were recorded:
‘The natural conclusion from these results is that gravity definitely affects light, and that the gravitational deflection at the limb of the Sun is somewhere between a little below 0.87 arcseconds and a little above 2.0 arcseconds’.
Eddington’s claim that solar glancing photon was a definitive proof of Relativity, is just another example of junk science and propaganda, previously ‘debunked’ here and here.
Falsifiability
According to one of the ‘pillars’ of the philosophy of science, falsifiability is a standard of evaluation of scientific theories and hypotheses. Falsifiability was introduced by the philosopher, Karl Popper, in his 1959 text The Logic of Scientific Discovery as the logical condition that if a theory is falsifiable, or refutable, it can be contradicted by an empirical test.
What Popper wanted was mechanical proof. Relativity has none.
Popper’s falsifiability thesis was designed to separate real science from pseudo- science. He was trying to build criteria to distinguish between empirical and non-empirical, or pseudo empirical methods. Popper gives two important instances to demarcate science from quackery or pseudo-science.
Newton’s law of gravitation is a valid theory of science; it can be falsified. Falsifiability also includes finding errors or anomalies. These do exist within Newtonian physics. It is therefore safe to assume that much of Newtonianism is grounded in real science.
The fraud of psychoanalysis by Sigmund Freud, was found by Popper to be pseudoscience. Popper found that psychoanalysis theory could not contradicted and falsified because an ad hoc hypothesis could always be added to explain diagnoses. Hence, psychoanalysis is a pseudoscience or quackery.
I do wonder why Popper never applied his axiom to the Einstein cult. As a trained mathematician he may have been impressed or intimidated by the arcane calculus and geometry. In any event the world today is littered with Popper’s pseudo-science or nonscience, including but not limited to: evolution, climate change, globaloneywarming, virology, Relativity, psychology, gender-mental illness, amongst many other domains. They all fail Popper’s observation that empirical evidence must be used to assess, modify, or disprove a theory.
Why are the quackeries and non-sciences accepted so readily? Look no further than the recent Corona plandemic or Einstein’s theology. Relativity and its mathematical propaganda were published and forcibly disseminated, despite receiving strong and notable peer criticism. It was not ‘acceptance’ but coercion which allowed Relativity to become the queen (or queer?) of physics.
Many posts here describe the deep opposition in the 1920s and 30s to Einstein’s twaddle. The cult of maths used fraud, as demonstrated by Eddington’s 1919 eclipse expedition, where confirmation bias led to data manipulation and false claims. This mendacity and manipulation suffuses ‘science’ and ‘scientific history’. None of Relativity’s claims of proof are valid. Hundreds of thousands of experiments disprove Relativity (see Dayton Miller for example).
However, by 1930 an entire industry around Einstein’s claptrap had been erected (including the well greased ‘Einstein Institute or Tower’ in Potsdam), with key gatekeepers controlling important scientific journals. A high priesthood was build and were quite satisfied with the conflation and confusion of maths with empirical science.
This was Einstein’s goal - to replace real physical science with mathematical philosophy. Such an endeavour was necessary to support Copernicanism and explain why we can’t measure the movement of this planet.
Bottom Line
Relativity was always a philosophical, not a scientific enterprise. It does not conform to Occam’s razor, nor to the common sense ‘law of parsimony’. An example of parsimony is shown by chemistry, where the ‘perfect gas law’ was modified slightly to the real gas laws.
Relativity also fails Popper’s falsifiability assessment and like ‘evolution’ or ‘climate change’, it can never be proven or disproven given its mutable and tautological basis. Relativity was and still is, premised only on ‘thought experiments’ which do not produce empirical truths, data or observations, and thereby do not contribute to knowledge.
An example: how does one possibly prove that space (objective) and time (subjective) are ‘merged’ to create a 4th dimension, when your lying eyes see only 3 dimensions? It is a mathematical illusion whose ‘proofs’ exist only in geometry.
So why Relativity? Philosophy, explaining away contradictory non-Copernican experiential proofs, and over time, propaganda, brain washing, money, power, control and ‘awards’. ‘Science’ and its egos are just as corrupt as anything else. Einstein was a massive ego preaching a theology and philosophical disposition that maths could explain all phenomena and provide a unified view of nature and space.
If this is harsh and if you prefer the propaganda-narrative of the humble, hardworking, ‘saving the world’ ‘scientist’ (the ‘greatest evah’), maybe we can be more recondite and charitable and suggest that Einstein was just another confused Jewish comedian and magician playing ‘scientist’. A little wizard with his hat and rabbit.
All hail.
Sources
J. Earman, C. Glymour, “Relativity and the eclipses: the British eclipse expeditions of 1919 and their predecessors”, Historical Studies in the Physical Sciences”, University of California Press, 1980, pp. 49-85
L. Schiff, “On Experimental Tests of the General Theory of Relativity”, American Journal of Physics 28, 340, 1960
K. Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery, Routledge, London, 1963
G. Heald, Relativity, Philosophy and Scientific Method, 2022
A. Grünbaum, “Space, Time and Falsifiability Critical Exposition and Reply to "A Panel Discussion of Grünbaum's Philosophy of Science”, Philosophy of Science, Vol. 37, No. 4, Dec., 1970, pp 469-588
R. Buenker, “Comparison of the Phenomena of Light Refraction and Gravitational Bending”, arXiv:0904.3232 [physics.gen-ph], 21 April, 2009