This world is a strange madhouse. Currently every coachman and every waiter is debating whether relativity theory is correct. Belief in this matter depends on political party affiliation . The quote comes from a letter Einstein wrote three weeks after a huge rally in Berlin against relativity, in which Einstein was denounced as a fraud and scientific philistine. Despite experiments showing that light was bent by the gravitational pull of the sun, exactly as his revolutionary theory had predicted ten years earlier, a right-wing rabble-rouser named Paul Weyland attacked him and his theory of relativity, and won widespread support. Summarizing a German book on this phenomenon, van Dongen writes: ...anti-relativists were convinced that their opinions were being suppressed. Indeed, many believed that conspiracies were at work that thwarted the promotion of their ideas. The fact that for them relativity was obviously wrong, yet still so very successful, strengthened the contention that a plot was at play... Sounds familiar? A new theory by a scientist overturns conventional thinking, and rightly predicts what never would have been guessed before. In Einsteins time, that was the concept that gravity could bend light; in our time, this is the concept that invisible amounts of trace gases will force climate change.
Posted on: Thu, 23 Oct 2014 06:01:53 +0000
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