Apathy Sketchpad

While reading something more sensible on the internet, I was directed, by a Google ad, to a website called “Relativity Challenge”. The author describes himself thus:

Steven Bryant began studying Einstein’s theory of relativity in the mid 90’s with the intent of returning to graduate school to pursue a PhD in physics. During the process, he identified mathematical inconsistencies in each of Einstein’s derivations of the Special Relativity transformation equations. Correcting the problems has led him to produce the model of Complete and Incomplete Coordinate Systems, offering an alternative view of space and time. … Steven has a Bachelor of Science and a Masters degree.

Steven seems unaware that someone with a Bachelor’s degree is a bachelor — that’s why they have a bachelor’s degree. They do not have a bachelor. That would be crazy, but then, there’s a very good chance that Bryant is crazy.

His main thesis is that the derivation of ξ in Einstein’s 1905 relativity paper is wrong. It’s not wrong. I’ve checked it myself, and I also have a Master’s degree (and the knowledge required to correctly apostrophise it) so I must be right. I did it literally on the back of an envelope. It was an envelope from The Cooperative Bank, who will doubtless be pleased at my recycling it so. But wait, Bryant has proof that the derivation I just did was wrong. He invites us to substitute numbers into the various forms of the equation. If they are all equivalent, he reasons, then the answer should be the same every time which, he imagines that he demonstrates, it isn’t:

You can try it. All the answers in the results column are correct for the given values. What he’s done, either cunningly or stupidly, is to use values that don’t correspond to any possible physical universe. The derivation of ξ is done using other equations which state that x′ = x − vt and t = x′v ÷ (c − v), and his values of x, v and t don’t satisfy those equations. It’s like saying “Newton says that F = ma, but given that F = 5, m = 2 and a = David Duchovny, we can plainly see that Newton’s law is flawed.” You can’t make something true using only the word “given”.

So we’ve established that Bryant can’t do maths, punctuation or semantics. He also can’t do physics. As well as the imaginary maths error, he also says that the Michelson-Morley experiment was wrong. The experiment, done in 1887, was designed to measure the absolute speed of the Earth, and the result was that it didn’t have one. Bryant says that this analysis was done wrong, because he’s redefined frequency to include an extra, redundant length term. Then he’s incorrectly added this term into the equations and discovered that now the Earth is going about 30km/s, and therefore relativity is wrong.

He also doesn’t understand that Special Relativity only holds when things aren’t accelerating. He claims that an advantage of his idea is that “the twin paradox goes away”, but it also goes away under General Relativity. His proof appears to involve a lot of talking about cats and birds in cages on trucks. I honestly don’t understand it well enough to find specific errors. It would be like looking for continuity errors in Jabberwocky.

The upshot of all of this is that the universe is broken and E no longer equals mc². It now equals mw², where w is defined as “the speed of the phenomenon in question”. Presumably, therefore, we should put nuclear power stations on trucks and drive them around so they make more power. This also implies that nuclear power should produce a hundred million times less energy than we expect (and observe) it to. You would think that someone would have noticed that.

Bryant has not noticed that.