Where the 20th century lost its way. Time is not a dimension

LaurenceClarkCrossen

2024-09-15 17:36:10 UTC

"Where the 20th century lost its way. Time is not a dimension"

"Letter from Heaviside to V. Bjerknes, 8. 3. 1920

From O. heaviside WORM.
To prof. Bjerknes, Bergen.
Homefield, Torquay, england 8/3/20
Private
Dear Bjerknes,
...
I don’t find Einstein’s Relatiivity agrees with me. It is the most
unnatural & difficult to understand way of representing facts that could
be thought up. His distorted space is chaos …. Moreover, it is no new
discovery that the state of things at a point depends upon the state of
things at a previous moment on a sphere surrounding the point. Poisson
did that a long time ago …. The Einstein enthusiasts are very
patronising about the “classical” electromagnetics & its ether which
they have abolished. But they will come back to it by and by. Though it
leaves gravity out in the cold, as I remarked about 1901 (I think),
gravity may be brought back in by changes in the circuital laws, of
practically no significance save in some very minute effects. of
doubtful interpretation (so far)
[“When a pulse attempts to exit …. ] But you must work fairly, with the
Ether, and Power & Momentum etc. They are the realities, without
Einsteins distorted nothingness. What is the value of Newtons
space/Einsteins space. Is it 0 or infinity? And I really think that
Einstein is a practical joker, pulling the legs of his enthusiastic
followers, more Einsteinisch than he. He knows the weakness of his 2nd
Theory. He only does it to annoy.

I can’t get away from Einstein the Joker. His followers admit the great
difficulty in making people understand the property of equal speed in
all directions when done in terms of Einstein, by means of clocks and
yard sticks. Poisson would smile at them, and say “Whether a receiver is
at rest or moving, the light it receiving comes from a sphere centred on
the receiving point, backwards at a previous time, or with a fourth
(imaginary) dimension, or metaphysics, or clocks, going differently, or
hard measures contracting or expanding.
But how is it that electromagnetics is supposed to be in it, interpreted
in an incomprehensible way? Well, it is not in it necessarily at all.
But as I have insisted with emphasis, Maxwell’s electromagnetics is
dynamical all the way through, on Newton’s x. y. z. and t. So it being
involved in light, makes no difference to Poisson.

Dear Bjerknes,

I have recd yr paper and letter of Dec. 25 with pleasure. I understand
now the meaning of a quotation from my letter to you I saw in The Times
some time ago, referring to Einstein’s great joke. He is an
international Bolshevist, and a Jew. I was informed by a follower of his
doctrine. I never see any scientific journals now. I don’t think you
quite hit the mark in your Relativity remarks. It is not a question of
logic, I believe, but of physical reality. That 4th dim. Is surreal. The
trouble is, and always has been with time. Even the great Thomson and
Tait, who brought out the proper meaning of Newton’s laws of Motion,
muddled themselves a little over the measure of time. Mathematicians can
imagine or think they imagine all sorts of spaces to fill up the natural
space, real or imaginary, and make the most fearful transformations.
They may be useful sometimes to pure mathematicising and if they take
into account the finite speed of light, there is the opportunity for
Einstein and his followers, the delight of metaphyhsicians who know
nothing about physics.

The way the old boys at the Roy. Soc. abased themselves before the
“Revolution in Physical Ideas” and “Newton overturned” etc. etc. was
rather comical. https://www.ivorcatt.com/roysoc.pdf . I may have said
this in my last letter. As for logic, Lord Rayleigh (late) agreed with
me that “logic is the very last thing”. So if Oseens criticism is only
logical, it might not go very far. As far as I know, experiment has not
gone deep enough yet to determine the electromagnetic meaning of
gravitation. http://www.ivorcatt.co.uk/2_1.htm ., introducing a very
small correction to Newtons calculations – That’s enough about
Relativity at present …"

https://www.oliver-heaviside.com/oliver-heaviside/letters-from-heaviside-to-bjerknes/