Post by LaurenceClarkCrossen"'When the theories of relativity were experimentally confirmed, the red
carpet was rolled out despite (or perhaps because of) the fact that
almost no one understood them.'"
It's a bit true, and it's also a bit normal.
We give a calculation, an equation, a bit randomly (simply proposing the
invariance of the speed of light as a basis is good, but it doesn't
explain WHY) and we see that in some cases it works, so we're happy. We
have something fantastic and new.
All this is very normal.
Where it's no longer normal is when someone says: "Everything is
ultimately very simple, and I understood how it worked; neither Poincaré
nor Einstein could find the right explanation, and I'm going to give it to
you using a much simpler and more experimentally obvious basic
mathematical concept" and then, a real universal miracle occurs: "We spit
in his face".
Don't laugh, friends, it's not funny.
Once the principle is understood, everything is very simple.
And no more need to bother with hyperbolic geometry, ridiculous
considerations (the disk contracts at the periphery but not at the
radius), flagrant contradictions even at the base (in apparent speed the
measurements are no longer reciprocal), incomprehension of the notion of
causality, of the concreted and stupid Minkowskian block (as if space-time
were geometrically a concrete block).
No, no, the relativistic problem is not so much a scientific problem as a
human, moral, pathological problem. We have here thousands of men who see
clearly (if they look) that something is wrong, like small pebbles in an
immense grinder, but are very happy with their mathematical grinder. It
does not occur to them to change the nature of the olives (the basic
concepts), or to see if there are not pebbles in them. Pebbles made
lovable by psychological acceptance: "We do not want Doctor Hachel to give
us his opinion". We prefer to throw stones in the grinder rather than
admit that he is stronger than us on these very specific problems.
R.H.