I would find it extremely difficult to explain the muon lifetime in cosmic ray showers, the clock adjustments needed by the GPS satellites, the tower redshift experiments, and numerous other experimental observations of differences in measured time elapse in different (inertial or gravitational) frames of reference without an effect like "time dilation" in one's theory.Quote:
Originally posted by oktronic
And as for the time dilation nonsense, that's just silly. Einstein's theories and the various others are speculation about things that he and others couldn't possibly understand. Unfortunately, this is one of those cases where science and religion intersect. When people follow blindly just so they can be closer to 'god'.... or in science's case, follow blindly cause they can feel they are smarter...write a pile of dribble down on a piece of paper to confuse the **** out of everybody ( or in my case post it on the internet ) and they call you smart....I think thats sad....
But I don't think anyone introduced the notions of relativity to sound smart. They were introduced to explain actual observations being made. Lorentz and Poincare were trying to solve the transformation equations between reference frames that would make Maxwell's equations obey the proper covariance being observed. Einstein tidied up the philosophy behind their work and axiomatised. Special relativity is not really that difficult if you have a background in matrices and linear algebra. And general relativity is rather simple to most algebraic geometrist, differential topologists, etc. They are all just getting familiar with the language used, and there are certainly thousands if not tens or hundreds of thousands (I'm tryin' to picture the number of working scientists and mathematicians in all the fields that require knowledge of these fields, and from journal article volumes and the number of non-related-professionally human beings who are just interested in their reality -- and I see something like a couple hundred thousand out of the 6? billion people on this planet) who understand the basic structure of these theories. That is not the type of knowledge I would say no one could possibly understand.
However, there are certainly strong cases of scientism out there, where people accept something because science says it is so without inspection of the details. A classic example is Lord Kelvin, a pompous man who really made no great scientific achievements in his life (most of his stuff was basic algebraic manipulations of other's equations and simple experiments to verify his conclusions that were easily seen to be mostly equivalent to earlier experiments) and made many false predictions in his life (for example, the age of the Earth was horribly miscalculated). Somehow, he was able to proclaim that science was nearly finished and that we just needed to measure more decimal places and fill in some loose ends. Of course, quantum mechanics and relativity smacked down that attitude with a vengeance. Science still has infinite ground to grow upon, but the preferred approch is to offer alternate models of reality with predictive power that can be falsified. Ad hominems and mystically vague references to religion are more likely to be ignored as researche programmes.
