I got up this morning, checked my feeds, and found that ScienceDaily has a new article up. They claim that Einstein was wrong, and that his theory of relativity (the first clue that there’s a problem should come from the fact that they don’t differentiate between special and general) is inconsistent. Their source? A professor of politics. Through most of the article, I found myself wondering if they would ever actually give an example. They finally do, the so-called “Clock Paradox”. What they call the clock paradox is actually just a restatement of the Twin Paradox, which was long ago resolved in both special and general relativities (actually, it was never a problem in general relativity, because GR can use non-inertial frames).
This “paradox” can, in fact, be tested yourself. Just take a really accurate clock with you to the top of a mountain, leave one at home, and when you get back, the one you took with you will be behind the one you left home. Rank him on the crackpot index, and post your results in the comments.
It appears that they took the article down. Your link now brings me to the main page. I wonder how that one got by them?
You’re right Steven. As near as I can tell the article is completely gone.
When I suspect that something like this might get taken down or edited, I use an archiver like WebCitation to grab a snapshot of the page. Like any archiver (read: the Wayback Machine) it can be blocked with robots.txt, but barring that you can grab an unalterable copy of the page.
This service was naturally developed for academics, but we’ve found it to be useful in grabbing blog posts or think tank pages that are prone to being edited or deleted without recourse. (For instance, see here, which shows the Heartland Institute being punked.)
Thanks for the advice Brian. I’ll do that from now on.
Live and learn!