Some special relativity and a battle cry for science.
This is an expansion of a post that I made in reply to:
Apparently the fools at Conservapedia consider Special Relativity to be a liberal plot.
It took me a moment to process the level of stupidity, ignorance, malice and arrogance involved in such a stance.
The theory of relativity is possibly the most consistently demonstrated theory of modern physics.
Every single time you turn on a light switch, or anything that is powered via AC, you instantly verify it. How is this?
It turns out that a magnetic field is an electric field that has been relativistically shifted in your reference frame. That may sound odd or bizarre, but the consequence is that all electrical power generation happens because relativity is true.
Of course, there are also direct measurements of time dilation in terms of particle lifetimes and even atomic clocks placed on aircraft. Under graduates across the nation, do muon counting experiments that repeat this observation thousands of times every year.
The Compton effect could not exist without it.
All modern particle physics - which has certainly produced results from the events in particle colliders to nuclear power - would not work they way it does if relativity were not true.
Thousands of examples exist.
Relativity - particularly special relativity - is as established a fact as the notion that the Earth is round or that the Earth orbits the sun.
It is something that is true in the Cartesian limit. What I mean by that, is that for special relativity to be incorrect, everything else we know about the universe would cease to be true to such an extent, that the only way this could happen would be if all data were false, and “reality” was that everyone were being fooled by an evil genius. In less philosophical terms, if relativity were not true, so much else which is known would have to be untrue, that the only way such a thing could be possible, would be that all of us were a disembodied consciousness, that inhabited a much different universe than the one we seem to live in. In other words, being fooled about reality in a way akin to the Matrix.
So why would these loons from the far right attack Einstein?
The insanity and rejection of science by the wingnut types is something that runs beyond madness or simple ignorance. They fixate on misunderstood pieces of things they know nothing of with complete arrogance that somehow their ignorant rantings are equivalent to knowledge. It is not just that they do not know. It is that they are certain they do know, and what their delusional fever dreams imagine to be true, actually is.
In this case, they are fixating on the notion that “relative” in relativity has something to do with human perception of social norms. From there, they spin conspiracies and imaginative, yet ill- conceived and intensely stupid ways that this supposedly interacts with their ignorant and narrow views of scripture.
In reality, the “relative” in relativity, refers to different reference frames as defined by relative motion. In other words, someone going past you in a car, is in motion relative to you, and his car represents a different reference frame.
The idea that something might be different in a different reference frame
should not be too hard to understand. If you get a car caught in your car with you, it flies around normally (this is because the air in your car is moving along with the car). Yet clearly house flies don’t normally fly around at highway speeds. For the cognoscenti, this is obviously a Galilean transformation. The point is to illustrate that different reference frames exist in reality with a familiar example.
When the relative motion between frames approaches the speed of light, very interesting things happen. That gets back to the list at the beginning of this post, of verifications of relativity.
Some quibbles as a bridge before returning to the main points:
It isn’t E =mc^2.
That is a limited statement which is only true in the rest frame.
In grown up units, where c=1, the proper statement is:
E^2 - p^2 = m^2.
I suppose that early newsies decided that remembering the momentum term was just too hard. In the rest frame , p=0.
Also, yes it means that energy is bound up in matter and that the two are interchangeable, but that is a kiddie way of looking at things.
If you are ever asked what that statement means, the grown up answer is that the laws of physics obey Poincaré-Lorentz invariance. That is to say, that space and time coordinates have an invariant measure under Lorentz transformations.
If you know what that means, and can do the math, you actually know what Special Relativity is all about. If you don’t, you have no business pontificating anything about it.
That was not written to put anyone down. Not everyone needs to know physics at that level. That was written to demonstrate what actually understanding the topic means. There is actually a core, and testable idea to get right. I point it out, because in this day and age, real expertise is given equal time with morons who arrogantly assume that their ignorant imaginings are the equal of actual understanding. People need to be able to tell the difference. Some people even need to understand that a difference exists in the first place.
These fools and twits need to be booted out of all forms of education. There is a difference between matters of opinion, and matters of simply teaching falsehoods that are demonstrably wrong. Just as one should never permit anyone to teach children that two and two sum to five, no one has the right to so utterly bungle relativity.
It is incumbent on the average person to have the respect and humility to be able to tell the difference between an idiot shooting his mouth off and an expert. We can not know everything. No one can. Second best to that is to be able to tell who knows what they are talking about.
This is the thing that has not only been damaged in America, but frankly nearly replaced, with the notion that made up crap has as much right to be to be respected as real understanding.
At some point these blow hards just simply need to be told to shut up. They contribute nothing other than the decay of education and the spread of ignorance. This is true in medicine with the anti-vaxers. This is true in biology with anti-evolution. This is true in AGW, when dealing with idiots who deny what thermometers are saying.
Eventually, this harmful, medieval crap needs to be stopped and cast aside as what it is - the delusional ramblings and open falsehoods of self important lesser intellects who somehow feel entitled to be taken seriously. But, that can not happen as long as the much vaunted average American is so ignorant himself, that he can’t tell the difference.
