CLIMATE-GATE, RELATIVITY-GATE, ENTROPY-GATE

COLLIDER-GATE:

http://www.trinitynews.ie/index.php/...-clock-blocked
"The alternative explanation for the series of unfortunate events that
have befallen the LHC is hardly less bizarre. Two otherwise respected
physicists are now claiming that the much hypothesized Higgs Boson
particle might have a "backward causation" effect to stop itself being
discovered. In other words, the particle does not wish to be created,
or its creation would have such cataclysmic results that the actual
universe itself does not wish for it to be created. Thus, at the
moment that it is created in the future, forces travel back in time to
sabotage the collider before it gets the chance to be made. In pop
culture terms, this is basically what happens in Back to the Future,
when Marty McFly travels back in time and accidentally erases his
future self by stopping his parents from falling in love. (...) The
only problem is that the future has cursed the project. The hypothesis
seems so bizarre as to be laughable, but for the fact that it is
supported by two leading physicists, Holger Bech Nielsen, of the Niels
Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, and Masao Ninomiya of the Yukawa
Institute for Theoretical Physics in Kyoto, Japan. They have
postulated this idea over the last two years, publishing it in a
series of scientific papers with titles such as "Test of Effect From
Future in Large Hadron Collider: a Proposal". (...) But perhaps we
should not mock these theories. After all, Einstein himself wrote,
"for those of us who believe in physics, this separation between past,
present and future is only an illusion"."

http://consideronline.org/2010/03/10...aste-of-money/
"The Large Hadron Collider Is Still a Fantastic Waste of Money...."The
Large Hadron Collider (LHC) must close at the end of 2011 for up to a
year to address design issues, according to an LHC director. Dr Steve
Myers told BBC News the faults will delay the machine reaching its
full potential for two years." Basically, the LHC is still probably an
egregiously bad investment. Dr. Myers does caution that the LHC is
"its own prototype," and while its shutdowns get huge press coverage,
"you don't hear about the thousands or hundreds of thousands of other
areas that have gone incredibly well." Fair enough. But these
shutdowns are still hugely expensive, and they push any benefits the
LHC may yield to humankind back into an increasingly distant future.
The scientists at CERN have yet to convince me that the LHC is a good
idea."

Pentcho Valev wrote:

http://communities.canada.com/calgar...?postid=542737
"Real scientists would care about Climategate fraud. The Climategate e-
mails are the proverbial smoking gun, but it's curious so few
scientists cared about the bleeding scientific body lying at their
feet. The word fraud and climate science are being used a lot in the
same sentence lately - and, frankly, it's about time. After all,
what's astonishing about what has now been dubbed Climategate is
myriad, but the most important aspect is that evidence of scientific
fraud with regard to global warming science has existed for a very
long time, and yet prior to these bombshell e-mails it was just
shrugged off by scientists who have become advocates for the theory of
man-made global warming. This should always have been troubling. As
French philosopher Claude Levi-Strauss wrote: "The scientific mind
does not so much provide the right answers as ask the right
questions." When it comes to climate science however, those who ask
the questions are treated as heretics and called deniers."

http://exilestreet.com/?p=1337
"In the most notorious trial in the history of science, the
Inquisition condemned Galileo in 1633. The aged scientist was forced
to recant his lifes work. The fact that the earth revolves around the
sun threatened the church establishment's doctrine. Galileo was worse
than right - he was inconvenient. Since his trial, scientists have
mythologized him as their secular saint. How times have changed: With
the Climategate scandal, we now find scientists in the role of
inquisitors - suppressing inconvenient facts and persecuting
researchers who challenge the doctrine decreed by the Global Warming
clergy."

http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/con...ent=a909857880
Peter Hayes "The Ideology of Relativity: The Case of the Clock
Paradox" : Social Epistemology, Volume 23, Issue 1 January 2009, pages
57-78
"The gatekeepers of professional physics in the universities and
research institutes are disinclined to support or employ anyone who
raises problems over the elementary inconsistencies of relativity. A
winnowing out process has made it very difficult for critics of
Einstein to achieve or maintain professional status. Relativists are
then able to use the argument of authority to discredit these critics.
Were relativists to admit that Einstein may have made a series of
elementary logical errors, they would be faced with the embarrassing
question of why this had not been noticed earlier. Under these
circumstances the marginalisation of antirelativists, unjustified on
scientific grounds, is eminently justifiable on grounds of
realpolitik. Supporters of relativity theory have protected both the
theory and their own reputations by shutting their opponents out of
professional discourse."

http://www.renewamerica.us/columns/hutchison/080616
"Like bronze idols that are hollow inside, Einstein built a cluster of
"Potemkin villages," which are false fronts with nothing behind them.
Grigori Potemkin (17391791) was a general-field marshal, Russian
statesman, and favorite of Empress Catherine the Great. He is alleged
to have built facades of non-existent villages along desolate
stretches of the Dnieper River to impress Catherine as she sailed to
the Crimea in 1787. Actors posing as happy peasants stood in front of
these pretty stage sets and waved to the pleased Empress. This
incident reminds me of the story of Eleanor Roosevelt's Moscow tour
guide who showed her the living quarters of communist party bosses and
claimed that these were the apartments of the average Russian worker.
The incredibly gullible first lady was delighted. Like Catherine, the
sentimental Eleanor was prone to wishful thinking and was easily
deceived. What has all this to do with Einstein? The science
establishment has a powerful romantic desire to believe in Einstein.
Therefore, they are not only fooled by Einstein's tricks, they are
prepared to defend his Potemkin villages."

http://www.perimeterinstitute.ca/ind...ecture_id=3576
John Stachel: "Einstein discussed the other side of the particle-field
dualism - get rid of fields and just have particles."
Albert Einstein 1954: "I consider it entirely possible that physics
cannot be based upon the field concept, that is on continuous
structures. Then nothing will remain of my whole castle in the air,
including the theory of gravitation, but also nothing of the rest of
contemporary physics."
John Stachel's comment: "If I go down, everything goes down, ha ha,
hm, ha ha ha."

http://www.ekkehard-friebe.de/wallace.htm
Bryan Wallace: "Einstein's special relativity theory with his second
postulate that the speed of light in space is constant is the linchpin
that holds the whole range of modern physics theories together.
Shatter this postulate, and modern physics becomes an elaborate
farce!....The speed of light is c+v."

http://web.mit.edu/keenansymposium/o...und/index.html
Arthur Eddington: "The law that entropy always increases, holds, I
think, the supreme position among the laws of Nature. If someone
points out to you that your pet theory of the universe is in
disagreement with Maxwell's equations - then so much the worse for
Maxwell's equations. If it is found to be contradicted by observation
- well, these experimentalists do bungle things sometimes. But if your
theory is found to be against the second law of thermodynamics, I can
give you no hope; there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest
humiliation."

http://www.beilstein-institut.de/boz...nishBowden.htm
ATHEL CORNISH-BOWDEN: "The concept of entropy was introduced to
thermodynamics by Clausius, who deliberately chose an obscure term for
it, wanting a word based on Greek roots that would sound similar to
"energy". In this way he hoped to have a word that would mean the same
to everyone regardless of their language, and, as Cooper [2] remarked,
he succeeded in this way in finding a word that meant the same to
everyone: NOTHING. From the beginning it proved a very difficult
concept for other thermodynamicists, even including such accomplished
mathematicians as Kelvin and Maxwell; Kelvin, indeed, despite his own
major contributions to the subject, never appreciated the idea of
entropy [3]. The difficulties that Clausius created have continued to
the present day, with the result that a fundamental idea that is
absolutely necessary for understanding the theory of chemical
equilibria continues to give trouble, not only to students but also to
scientists who need the concept for their work."

http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/archive/00000313/
Jos Uffink: "This summary leads to the question whether it is fruitful
to see irreversibility or time-asymmetry as the essence of the second
law. Is it not more straightforward, in view of the unargued
statements of Kelvin, the bold claims of Clausius and the strained
attempts of Planck, to give up this idea? I believe that Ehrenfest-
Afanassjewa was right in her verdict that the discussion about the
arrow of time as expressed in the second law of the thermodynamics is
actually a RED HERRING."

ftp://ftp.esat.kuleuven.ac.be/pub/SI...orts/06-46.pdf
"From the pedagogical point of view, thermodynamics is a disaster. As
the authors rightly state in the introduction, many aspects are
"riddled with inconsistencies". They quote V.I. Arnold, who concedes
that "every mathematician knows it is impossible to understand an
elementary course in thermodynamics". Nobody has eulogized this
confusion more colorfully than the late Clifford Truesdell. On page 6
of his book "The Tragicomical History of Thermodynamics" 1822-1854
(Springer Verlag, 1980), he calls thermodynamics "a dismal swamp of
obscurity". Elsewhere, in despair of trying to make sense of the
writings of some local heros as De Groot, Mazur, Casimir, and
Prigogine, Truesdell suspects that there is "something rotten in the
(thermodynamic) state of the Low Countries" (see page 134 of Rational
Thermodynamics, McGraw-Hill, 1969)."

Pentcho Valev

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/worl..._down_for.html
"Scientists have made a major discovery using the Large Hadron
Collider, the world's largest atom-smasher, a $5 billion feat of
engineering built to re-create conditions in the universe just after
the big bang:

That it needs to be shut down for repairs."

Pentcho Valev wrote:

COLLIDER-GATE:

http://www.trinitynews.ie/index.php/...-clock-blocked
"The alternative explanation for the series of unfortunate events that
have befallen the LHC is hardly less bizarre. Two otherwise respected
physicists are now claiming that the much hypothesized Higgs Boson
particle might have a "backward causation" effect to stop itself being
discovered. In other words, the particle does not wish to be created,
or its creation would have such cataclysmic results that the actual
universe itself does not wish for it to be created. Thus, at the
moment that it is created in the future, forces travel back in time to
sabotage the collider before it gets the chance to be made. In pop
culture terms, this is basically what happens in Back to the Future,
when Marty McFly travels back in time and accidentally erases his
future self by stopping his parents from falling in love. (...) The
only problem is that the future has cursed the project. The hypothesis
seems so bizarre as to be laughable, but for the fact that it is
supported by two leading physicists, Holger Bech Nielsen, of the Niels
Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, and Masao Ninomiya of the Yukawa
Institute for Theoretical Physics in Kyoto, Japan. They have
postulated this idea over the last two years, publishing it in a
series of scientific papers with titles such as "Test of Effect From
Future in Large Hadron Collider: a Proposal". (...) But perhaps we
should not mock these theories. After all, Einstein himself wrote,
"for those of us who believe in physics, this separation between past,
present and future is only an illusion"."

http://consideronline.org/2010/03/10...aste-of-money/
"The Large Hadron Collider Is Still a Fantastic Waste of Money...."The
Large Hadron Collider (LHC) must close at the end of 2011 for up to a
year to address design issues, according to an LHC director. Dr Steve
Myers told BBC News the faults will delay the machine reaching its
full potential for two years." Basically, the LHC is still probably an
egregiously bad investment. Dr. Myers does caution that the LHC is
"its own prototype," and while its shutdowns get huge press coverage,
"you don't hear about the thousands or hundreds of thousands of other
areas that have gone incredibly well." Fair enough. But these
shutdowns are still hugely expensive, and they push any benefits the
LHC may yield to humankind back into an increasingly distant future.
The scientists at CERN have yet to convince me that the LHC is a good
idea."

Pentcho Valev

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/...k/6909341.html
"As the 2006 recipient of the American Society of Engineering Award
for Computer Engineering and author of 10 books dealing mostly with
computer simulation, I feel qualified to challenge the hypothesis of
the authors of the article on global warming that appeared in the
Chronicle. Let me also point out that I have never received a penny of
federal funds to shill cap and trade, or government subsidies to
promote global warming scenarios. The scientists try to justify that
the global climate is changing and that this is the result of human
activities that produce heat-trapping gases. They base these
conclusions on computer models that are highly speculative and
incomplete, including some that are notoriously inaccurate and should
not be put to the use of linking greenhouse gases and temperature
change. Most scientists support this hypothesis. Astrophysicists are
unable to predict the movement of celestial bodies using Newtonian
physics even with relativistic corrections. In the science of
cosmology, only 30 percent of celestial masses can be accounted for,
and it requires a mass correction of 70 percent to calculate planetary
trajectories. YOU CAN GET ANY ANSWER YOU WANT BY MANIPULATING
CONSTANTS."
ERNEST J. HENLEY
professor emeritus, University of Houston

Pentcho Valev wrote:

More CLIMATE-GATE:

http://www.canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/17641
"A science mafia? In November somebody illegally hacked into the
University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit (CRU) in the UK,
subsequently publishing 1079 emails and 72 documents on the Internet.
However reprehensible an act of cyber-pilfering, the contents of the
authenticated emails were both decidedly in the 'public interest', and
carried within them the seeds of a major science scandal; a scandal
Andrew Bolt rightly sees as the "greatest in modern science". What was
particularly explosive was the unheralded insight it gave us into the
scientific 'mafia' world of some of the leading promoters of man-made
Global Warming (GW) theory. A theory that is about to divert massive
global economic resources into a science 'consensus' black hole.
Reading the emails is a chilling experience when one realizes that
some of these same individuals gave the UN IPCC 'the spine' to declare
the climate science 'settled'. The UK Daily Telegraph's James
Delingpole sums up the contents: "Conspiracy, collusion in
exaggerating warming data, possibly illegal destruction of
embarrassing information, organised resistance to disclosure,
manipulation of data, private admissions of flaws in their public
claims and much more." (...) Britain's Viscount Monckton, a leading
climate sceptic, has denounced the CRU and its partners as "not merely
bad scientists - they are crooks. And crooks who have perpetrated
their crimes at the expense of British and US taxpayers."

How Einstein procrusteanized his equations into conformity with the
Mercury precession anomaly (RELATIVITY-GATE):

http://alasource.blogs.nouvelobs.com...-deuxieme.html
"D'abord il [Einstein] fait une hypothèse fausse (facile à dire
aujourd'hui !) dans son équation de départ qui décrit les relations
étroites entre géométrie de l'espace et contenu de matière de cet
espace. Avec cette hypothèse il tente de calculer l'avance du
périhélie de Mercure. Cette petite anomalie (à l'époque) du mouvement
de la planète était un mystère. Einstein et Besso aboutissent
finalement sur un nombre aberrant et s'aperçoivent qu'en fait le
résultat est cent fois trop grand à cause d'une erreur dans la masse
du soleil... Mais, même corrigé, le résultat reste loin des
observations. Pourtant le physicien ne rejeta pas son idée. "Nous
voyons là que si les critères de Popper étaient toujours respectés, la
théorie aurait dû être abandonnée", constate, ironique, Etienne Klein.
Un coup de main d'un autre ami, Grossmann, sortira Einstein de la
difficulté et sa nouvelle équation s'avéra bonne. En quelques jours,
il trouve la bonne réponse pour l'avance du périhélie de Mercure..."

COSMOLOGY-GATE:

http://www.physorg.com/news179508040.html
"More than a dozen ground-based Dark Energy projects are proposed or
under way, and at least four space-based missions, each of the order
of a BILLION DOLLARS, are at the design concept stage."

http://cosmologystatement.org/
An Open Letter to the Scientific Community
(Published in New Scientist, May 22, 2004)
"The big bang today relies on a growing number of hypothetical
entities, things that we have never observed-- inflation, dark matter
and dark energy are the most prominent examples. Without them, there
would be a fatal contradiction between the observations made by
astronomers and the predictions of the big bang theory. In no other
field of physics would this continual recourse to new hypothetical
objects be accepted as a way of bridging the gap between theory and
observation. It would, at the least, raise serious questions about the
validity of the underlying theory."

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/6...-be-wrong.html
Martin Rees: "Over the past week, two stories in the press have
suggested that scientists have been very wrong about some very big
issues. First, a new paper seemed to suggest that dark energy the
mysterious force that makes up three quarters of the universe, and is
pushing the galaxies further apart might not even exist."

http://www.springerlink.com/content/...0/fulltext.pdf
Misconceptions about the Hubble recession law
Wilfred H. Sorrell, Astrophys Space Sci
"Reber (1982) pointed out that Hubble himself was never an advocate
for the expanding universe idea. Indeed, it was Hubble who personally
thought that a model universe based on the tired-light hypothesis is
more simple and less irrational than a model universe based on an
expanding spacetime geometry (...) ...any photon gradually loses its
energy while traveling over a large distance in the vast space of the
universe."

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/ar...757145,00.html
"Other causes for the redshift were suggested, such as cosmic dust or
a change in the nature of light over great stretches of space. Two
years ago Dr. Hubble admitted that the expanding universe might be an
illusion, but implied that this was a cautious and colorless view.
Last week it was apparent that he had shifted his position even
further away from a literal interpretation of the redshift, that he
now regards the expanding universe as more improbable than a non-
expanding one."

http://www.sciscoop.com/story/2008/10/30/41323/484
"Does the apparently constant speed of light change over the vast
stretches of the universe? Would our understanding of black holes,
ancient supernovae, dark matter, dark energy, the origins of the
universe and its ultimate fate be different if the speed of light were
not constant?.....Couldn't it be that the supposed vacuum of space is
acting as an interstellar medium to lower the speed of light like some
cosmic swimming pool? If so, wouldn't a stick plunged into the pool
appear bent as the light is refracted and won't that affect all our
observations about the universe. I asked theoretical physicist Leonard
Susskind, author of The Black Hole War, recently reviewed in Science
Books to explain this apparent anomaly....."You are entirely right,"
he told me, "there are all sorts of effects on the propagation of
light that astronomers and astrophysicists must account for. The point
of course is that they (not me) do take these effects into account and
correct for them." "In a way this work is very heroic but unheralded,"
adds Susskind, "An immense amount of extremely brilliant analysis has
gone into the detailed corrections that are needed to eliminate these
'spurious' effects so that people like me can just say 'light travels
with the speed of light.' So, there you have it. My concern about
cosmic swimming pools and bent sticks does indeed apply, but
physicists have taken the deviations into account so that other
physicists, such as Susskind, who once proved Stephen Hawking wrong,
can battle their way to a better understanding of the universe."

http://www.amazon.fr/bang-nest-th%C3.../dp/2360120026
"Le big bang n'est pas une théorie comme les autres. Ce n'est
d'ailleurs pas une théorie physique au sens propre du terme, mais un
scénario cosmologique issu des équations de la relativité générale. Il
est le modèle qui s'ajuste le mieux aux observations actuelles, mais à
quel prix ? Il nous livre un Univers composé à 96 % de matière et
d'énergie noires inconnues. C'est donc un euphémisme que de dire que
le big bang semble poser autant - sinon plus - de questions qu'il n'en
résout. En ce sens, le big bang apparaît davantage comme une
paramétrisation de notre ignorance plutôt que comme une modélisation
d'un phénomène. Pourtant, le succès du big bang et l'adhésion qu'il
suscite, tant dans la sphère scientifique que dans la sphère
médiatique, ne se démentent pas. Surmédiatisé, son statut dépasse
celui de modèle théorique, et la simple évocation de son nom suffit
pour justifier des opérations de marketing scientifique ou rejeter des
cosmologies alternatives. Pour éclaircir les problématiques -
scientifiques, médiatiques, économiques ou politiques - liées à la
cosmologie d'aujourd'hui, il est nécessaire de multiplier les angles
de vue et de distinguer, selon leur registre, les différents enjeux.
C'est le but que se sont fixés les auteurs de cet ouvrage. Pour chaque
point soulevé, leurs regards croisés contribuent à favoriser
l'émergence citoyenne d'un esprit éclairé et critique."

http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig10/bauer1.1.1.html
Suppression of Science Within Science
by Henry Bauer
"I wasn't as surprised as many others were, when it was revealed that
climate-change "researchers" had discussed in private e-mails how to
keep important data from public view lest it shake public belief in
the dogma that human activities are contributing significantly to
global warming. (...) Take cosmology and the Big-Bang theory of the
origin of the universe. Halton Arp was a respected, senior American
observational astronomer. He noticed that some pairs of quasars that
are physically close together nevertheless have very different
redshifts. How exciting! Evidently some redshifts are not Doppler
effects, in other words, not owing to rapid relative motion away from
us. That means the universe-expansion calculations have to be revised.
It may not have started as a Big Bang! That's just the sort of major
potential discovery that scientists are always hoping for, isn't it?
Certainly not in this case. Arp was granted no more telescope time to
continue his observations. At age 56, Halton Arp emigrated to Germany
to continue his work at the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics. But
Arp was not alone in his views. Thirty-four senior astronomers from 10
countries, including such stellar figures as Hermann Bondi, Thomas
Gold, Amitabha Ghosh, and Jayant Narlikar, sent a letter to Nature
pointing out that Big Bang theory:
*relies on a growing number of hypothetical . . . things . . . never
observed;
*that alternative theories can also explain all the basic phenomena of
the cosmos
*and yet virtually all financial and experimental resources in
cosmology go to Big-Bang studies.
Just the sort of discussion that goes on in science all the time,
arguing pros and cons of competing ideas. Except that Nature refused
to publish the letter. It was posted on the Internet, and by now
hundreds of additional signatures have been added... (...) Then
there's that most abstract of fundamental sciences, theoretical
physics. The problem has long been, How to unify relativity and
quantum mechanics? Quantum mechanics regards the world as made up of
discrete bits whereas relativity regards the world as governed by
continuous, not discrete, fields. Since the mid-1970s, there has been
no real progress. Everyone has been working on so-called "string
theory," which has delivered no testable conclusions and remains a
hope, a speculation, not a real theory. Nevertheless, theoretical
physicists who want to look at other approaches can't find jobs, can't
get grants, can't get published. (...) You begin to wonder, don't you,
how many other cases there could be in science, where a single theory
has somehow captured all the resources? And where competent scientists
who want to try something different are not only blocked but
personally insulted?"

Pentcho Valev

http://www.spiegel.de/international/...686697,00.html
"Plagued by reports of sloppy work, falsifications and exaggerations,
climate research is facing a crisis of confidence. How reliable are
the predictions about global warming and its consequences? (...) On
balance, the entire profession has been seriously harmed by the
scandal. "We are currently suffering a massive erosion of trust,"
concludes German climatologist Hans von Storch. "Climate research has
been corrupted by politicization, just as nuclear physics was in the
pre-Chernobyl days, when we were led to believe that nuclear power
plants were completely safe." (...) An Entire Branch of Science in
Crisis (...) No other branch of science is as politically charged. A
religious war is raging between alarmists and skeptics, and it
threatens to consume levelheaded climatologists. But it is a critical
conflict, because it revolves around something as massive as the total
restructuring of industrial society, a venture that will cost
trillions of euros. Powerful economic interests and unshakeable
fundamental beliefs come into play."

Compare with this:

http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/con...ent=a909857880
Peter Hayes "The Ideology of Relativity: The Case of the Clock
Paradox" : Social Epistemology, Volume 23, Issue 1 January 2009, pages
57-78
"In the interwar period there was a significant school of thought that
repudiated Einstein's theory of relativity on the grounds that it
contained elementary inconsistencies. Some of these critics held
extreme right-wing and anti-Semitic views, and this has tended to
discredit their technical objections to relativity as being
scientifically shallow. This paper investigates an alternative
possibility: that the critics were right and that the success of
Einstein's theory in overcoming them was due to its strengths as an
ideology rather than as a science. The clock paradox illustrates how
relativity theory does indeed contain inconsistencies that make it
scientifically problematic. These same inconsistencies, however, make
the theory ideologically powerful. The implications of this argument
are examined with respect to Thomas Kuhn and Karl Popper's accounts of
the philosophy of science. (...) The gatekeepers of professional
physics in the universities and research institutes are disinclined to
support or employ anyone who raises problems over the elementary
inconsistencies of relativity. A winnowing out process has made it
very difficult for critics of Einstein to achieve or maintain
professional status. Relativists are then able to use the argument of
authority to discredit these critics. Were relativists to admit that
Einstein may have made a series of elementary logical errors, they
would be faced with the embarrassing question of why this had not been
noticed earlier. Under these circumstances the marginalisation of
antirelativists, unjustified on scientific grounds, is eminently
justifiable on grounds of realpolitik. Supporters of relativity theory
have protected both the theory and their own reputations by shutting
their opponents out of professional discourse. (...) If relativity
theory is an ideology, then its illusory explanatory power enhances
the real power and authority of theoretical physicists. Precisely
because Einstein's theory is inconsistent, its exponents can draw on
contradictory principles in a way that greatly extends the apparent
explanatory scope of the theory. Inconsistency may be a disadvantage
in a scientific theory but it can be a decisive advantage in an
ideology. The inconsistency of relativity theory - to borrow the
language of the early Marx - gives relativity its apparent universal
content. This seeming power of explanation functions to enhance the
status of the group, giving them power over others through the
enhanced control over resources, and a greater power to direct
research and to exclude and marginalise dissent. (...) The argument
that Einstein fomented an ideological rather than a scientific
revolution helps to explain of one of the features of this revolution
that puzzled Kuhn: despite the apparent scope of the general theory,
very little has come out of it. Viewing relativity theory as an
ideology also helps to account for Popper's doubts over whether
special theory can be retained, given experimental results in quantum
mechanics and Einstein's questionable approach to defining
simultaneity. Both Kuhn and Popper have looked to the other branch of
the theory - Popper to the general and Kuhn to the special - to try
and retain their view of Einstein as a revolutionary scientist.
According to the view proposed here, this only indicates how special
and general theories function together as an ideology, as when one
side of the theory is called into question, the other can be called
upon to rescue it. The triumph of relativity theory represents the
triumph of ideology not only in the profession of physics bur also in
the philosophy of science. These conclusions are of considerable
interest to both theoretical physics and to social epistemology. It
would, however, be naïve to think that theoretical physicists will
take the slightest notice of them."

Pentcho Valev

P