The Ideology of Relativity: The Case of the Clock Paradox

Abstract

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.

Keywords:

• Einstein
• Twin Paradox
• Antirelativism

Acknowledgement

The author thanks Sam Valentine for his valuable criticisms and suggestions.

Notes

[1] See Israel, Ruckhaber, and Weinmann (1931). A bibliography of German antirelativists, many whose works date from the interwar period, can be found online (http://www.datadiwan.de/netzwerk/index.htm?/moch/). For contemporary antirelativists, see the Natural Philosophy Alliance (http://www.worldnpa.org/main/index.php?&MMN_position=1:1) and its associated journal, pointedly called Galilean Electrodynamics (http://mywebpages.comcast.net/adring/).

[2] Herbert E. Ives and G. R. Stilwell (1938) “An experimental study of the rate of a moving atomic clock”, Journal of the Optical Society of America 28: 215–26, reprinted in Ives (1979). For the significance of the Ives–Stilwell experiment, see Miller (1981, 265–266).

[3] For the minority view, see Builder (1957), V. Allen White’s “Ray on the Twin Paradox” (http://www.uwmanitowoc.uwc.edu/staff/awhite/ray.htm), Miller (1981, 262–264) and Pesic (2003).

[4] Discussion with Chris Van Den Broeck of the Institute for Theoretical Physics, Leuven University, Belgium (Journal of Theroetics 1 (June 1999) [cited 6 March 2005]. Available at http://www.journaloftheoretics.com/Comments/1-2/c1-2.htm; INTERNET).

[5] See “What ideas does the NPA [National Philosophy Alliance] stand for?” (http://mywebpages.comcast.net/Deneb/Steps.htm).

[6] In a long scientific career Dingle became a well‐known exponent of Einstein’s “profound and far‐reaching achievement” in developing special relativity. However, after being slighted by Einstein, Dingle decided that he had been misled about the merits of special relativity and published a letter and then an article in Nature, contending that the clock paradox showed that the theory was, in fact, plainly wrong. When Dingle tried to follow this up with further journal articles and in letters to leading physicists, mathematicians and philosophers of science, he found that he was ignored or stonewalled—although in one or two instances his respondents rather engagingly confessed that they had never actually understood the theory. See Dingle (1949 1949, 554; 1972, 41–42, 99, 228–239) and Einstein (1949, 687).

[7] “About the Author” (2005), appended to Paul Marmet, “Big Bang Cosmology Meets an Astronomical Death”, excerpt, at http://www.newtonphysics.on.ca/BIGBANG/Bigbang.html; INTERNET

[8] Friedrich Herneck’s Einstein privat (Berlin, 1984, 349) in Brian (1996, 61).

[9] In later editions of The Logic of Scientific Discovery, Popper said he was wrong to call Lorentz’s theory untestable. Popper also claimed that Einstein accepted in conversation that his operational definition of simultaneity was mistaken. See Popper (1992, 96–97). This recantation does not appear in Einstein’s works, but is borne out by the recollections of Werner Heisenberg (1971, 63).