Kritische Stimmen
zur Relativitätstheorie

von Peter Hayes

Has Einstein failed physics?
Peter Hayes
University of Sunderland,12 May 2009 (www.sunderland.ac.uk): newsrelease

In: AlphaGalileo. Europe’s leading source of research news (= www.alphagalileo.org). Full bibliographic information: Social Epistemology, January 2009.

Die Forschungsgruppe G.O. Mueller referiert in der Ergänzung des Kapitels 4 ihrer Dokumentation diese Arbeit von Peter Hayes:

Auszüge: „The £3.6bn Large Hadron Collider is one of world’s most advanced scientific experiments, built to smash protons together at huge speeds, recreating conditions moments after the Big Bang. Unfortunately it doesn’t work. Now a new paper by a North East academic presents the intriguing possibility that the Large Hadron Collider didn’t work not because of mechanical failure, but because basic theories of physics may be wrong.

Dr Peter Hayes says: „Theoretical physicists have been barking up the wrong tree for the last hundred years – because Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity is inconsistent. „Over the years many people have pointed out that there are logical flaws in the theory. Back in the 1960s Professor Herbert Dingle warned that large scale experiments drawing on relativity theory might end by destroying the world. Perhaps we are lucky that the Large Hadron Collider merely broke down!“

Dr Peter Hayes is senior lecturer in politics at the University of Sunderland. In his latest paper ‚The Ideology of Relativity‘ Dr Hayes argues that Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity – perhaps the most famous scientific theory in history – should be viewed as an ideology, not as a science. He argues that its impact on popular culture and science has been so influential precisely because as a scientific theory it doesn’t actually make sense. – Dr Hayes says: „Einstein’s theory of relativity contained elementary inconsistencies, but in 1919 when the theory became popularly known, the world had come through a terrible war followed by a flu pandemic. Einstein’s ideas were the tonic they needed. In the rush to celebrate them few people stopped to question the obvious logical flaws in the theory.“ […]

A famous flaw in Einstein’s theory is the Clock Paradox. This states that if one clock travels in a spaceship, while the other stays on earth, when the clock in the spaceship returns it will show that less time has elapsed than the clock on earth. This prediction violates Einstein’s own ‚principle of relativity‘, which states that if you are on the spaceship it should be the clock back on earth that slows down. This is a criticism that science has never been able to satisfactorily resolve.“

The ideology of relativity: the case of the clock paradox
Peter Hayes

In: Social epistemology. 23. 2009, Issue 1, January, S. 57-78.
Referat unter URL: http://philpapers.org/rec/HAYTIO-2

„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 rightwing 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.“