Correspondence
Is It Unreal, Or hit Immunex? An article entitled "Another AIDS Scam" (by Byron York and Joe Johns) in your August 1993 issue discussed an experimental drug, alpha interferon, which was referred to...
...For all his sarcasm, Trowbridge has failed to understand the implications of special relativity in this instance, and has made an elementary mistake...
...Alpha interferon is not a product of Immunex Corporation, nor is it related to Immunex Corporation in any way...
...Since that time, the company has garnered substantial goodwill in its name and trademark...
...Art Robinson (whose writings I also enjoy very much), to suggest that no one else could provide Dr...
...Bethell is not much for experimental tests of relativity...
...On the return leg, Washington is moving away from the light...
...It would seem hard to believe Mr...
...Timothy L. Trowbridge Elbert, Colorado Tom Bethell replies: First of all, the sad news is that Petr Beckmann died on August 3, in Boulder...
...Physicists have better things to do with their time, like pursue more rigorous tests of general relativity...
...Aberration of light is not an issue...
...The simple rotation of the earth accounts for the difference...
...We can therefore predict that there will be a difference in the time it takes the light to travel each leg of its journey...
...Though my undergraduate degree in science is both too inadequate and too obsolete to enable me to understand Dr.Beckmann's discussions of Einstein's work, I have, for some fifteen years now, enjoyed reading Beckmann's environmental science newsletter, Access to Energy...
...The incident has been a great winnower of conservative men from conservative boys, the latter in general ignoring the incident (Rush Limbaugh) or even justifying the massacre (Oliver North...
...Bethell fails to even mention this once...
...As shown in the accompanying derivation the time difference is 37.25 nanoseconds...
...If he was wrong, he used to say, all (continued on page 95) he wanted to know was where and how he was wrong...
...For example, air, water, railroad tracks, etc...
...He seems to have no idea of what the unsolved problems in relativity are...
...Einstein's 1905 special relativity paper plainly argues that stellar aberration depends upon the relative velocity of earth and star...
...Since when does TAS cite "60 Minutes" or Hillary Rodham Clinton as an authority for anything...
...Petr Beckmann ("Doubting Dada Physics," TAS, August 1993...
...Immunex has been using the name IMMUNEX since at least as early as August 1981...
...This is wrong...
...Farrell says that the reward offer for an experimental finding that the velocity of light east to west is the same as it is west to east is a "red herring...
...are not moving in relation to one another at all...
...To compute the difference in travel time of the light pulse we must remember that as the light travels from Washington to Los Angeles that Los Angeles is moving toward the light...
...The Wattenberg article and Jeremy Rabkin's review of the gun control books were particularly insightful and interesting...
...Beckmann died knowing perfectly well that, even if he was right about relativity, it would take decades to overthrow the reigning orthodoxy...
...Perhaps Mr...
...Robert Pool's article in Science reported on an experiment that failed to test the implications of Beckmann's theory...
...Bethell can write an entire piece on twentieth-century physics and pretend that light is only a wave—and therefore needs a medium...
...The question is whether the lifespan of these particles is increasing because time itself changes in the accelerated frame, or "for cause," as Beckmann used to say...
...San Francisco, California It is of course a fair subject of commentary that a government agency is guilty of mismanagement...
...Mark S. Pulliam San Diego, California Hats off to Daniel Wattenberg for the story on Waco, ATF, and all that...
...You don't have to do the experiment, just find the paper and send the reference to Hayden...
...There is no doubt about the increased mass of moving particles, or that energy is released when matter is annihilated, as when a nuclear bomb goes off," he said...
...Herewith a few facts to set the poor man right: Sound waves and light waves: Mr...
...Police and law enforcement officers across the nation (this writer included) benefit from their training programs, especially in the area of bombs and explosives...
...An article entitled "Another AIDS Scam" (by Byron York and Joe Johns) in your August 1993 issue discussed an experimental drug, alpha interferon, which was referred to in the article several times as "Immunex...
...I wonder if Mr...
...Abdul Alim Muhammad and his followers in the Nation of Islam called it...
...Wattenberg writes that, if ATF fired first (as seems likely), then the Branch Davidians were acting within the law by returning fire...
...Light is a form of electromagnetic radiation, like radio waves, and behaves according to the equations developed by physicist James Clerk Maxwell...
...Dowell is right...
...If he is claiming that the "overwhelming majority of the physics community thinks there was something wrong with" Michelson-Gale, then he is sadly deluded...
...One of Einstein's leading disciples, Lincoln Barnett, admitted: "We cannot feel our motion through space...
...John Farrell Braintree, Massachusetts Further to the report on critics of Einstein, it should be noted that his 1905 Special Theory was in fact a desperate ad hoc attempt to get round the "perplexing" zero-velocity result of the famous 1887 Michelson-Morley experiment, because a return to the ancient geocentric paradigm was "unthinkable...
...An example is Pate's reliance on quotes provided by a former ATF agent who hires out to attorneys suing the bureau...
...The offer was made in Science magazine nearly three years ago...
...They will lead us to a more comprehensive theory of gravity, taking Einstein as a point of departure...
...Mr...
...Sound is a compression wave and must therefore have a medium to compress...
...Dr...
...But what Bethell has written not only does no honor to Beckmann, it is an embarrassment to The American Spectator in particular, and to conservative thought in general...
...Let us hope that it is done...
...Beckmann, I imagine...
...Of P.A.M...
...He seems to be almost totally unaware of the vast literature onrelativity, of the conferences, the books, the articles...
...Kudos to Beckmann for challenging the traditional, and Bethell for having the courage to report it...
...A common response when he did try to bring up the issue was precisely the scorn, arrogance, and misplaced self-confidence that are amply on display in the letters from Shipman, Farrell, and Trowbridge...
...Herculis binary, the precession of which, it has been said, cannot be accurately predicted by general relativity...
...Bethell cites the Michelson-Gale experiment as contradicting special relativity, and one supposes that if he knew about it, he would have cited Dayton C. Miller's claim in 1925 that he had found a positive result...
...Just basic algebra and three numbers...
...At one point, Muhammad took to calling the product Immuviron, but most of the time he has referred to it as Immunex...
...The 37 nanoseconds [difference between east-west and west-east light speeds]: No mystery or "embarrassment to Einstein" here...
...One brave man attempted to cite Einstein's relativity theory, which in turn, quickly moved us off the subject...
...So far, so good, but Wattenberg adds, "There is no law anywhere that requires someone to offer himself as target practice, to federal agents or anyone else...
...The real monument to Einstein's genius, his personal stamp on the twentieth century, is not special relativity but the inspiring edifice of generalrelativity, whose predictions on a wide variety of effects (including black holes and expanding space) are being confirmed all the time...
...In this, he errs...
...under another name...
...Beckmann's unique insights into our increasingly statist government regulations and the Kafkaesque environmentalist pressure groups that foster, draft, support, and, now, enforce those regulations...
...He has no idea of the extent of the debates and the discussions about Einstein's theories, of the challenges to the theories, of the alternate theories...
...Did an editor slip up somewhere...
...You do not even need a clock...
...To this day, not a smidgen of the earth's purported 67,000 mph velocity around the sun has ever been detected or measured: "Whether the earth rotates once a day from west to east as Copernicus taught, or the heavens revolve once a day from east to west as his predecessors held, the observable phenomena will be exactly the same: a metaphysical assumption has to be made" (Bertrand Russell...
...Jack Douglas Stecher Minneapolis, Minnesota Congratulations for having the guts to do a piece on the Waco fiasco...
...Bethell first offered his reward...
...So far as I know, Wattenberg would be correct to assert something like, "There is no federal law, nor one anywhere in Texas, that requires one to offer oneself as target practice...
...Bethell should know this...
...Bethell should confine his reporting to politics...
...Not only does he not have the foggiest idea about the mathematical structure of the theory, he doesn't seem to know much more about its history...
...Dirac's application of special relativity to quantum mechanics that led him to predict the existence of the positron, which of course was subsequently detected, bupkess...
...I look forward to reading the fuller memoir of him Bethell hopes to write...
...The geocentric model is also used as the truest possible one for artillery, satellites, navigation, weather forecasting, oceanography, gyroscopy, calendars, eclipses, etc...
...Of all of the other experiments of the Michelson-Morley type by all of the other experimenters with artificially generated light, with starlight, with radio frequency waves, on hilltops, and in basements that confirm Michelson and Morley's 1887 result, Bethell is silent...
...Daniel Wattenberg's paean to David Koresh (or, viewed differently, his diatribe against the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms) does not even make a convincing case of mismanagement...
...In the Hafele-Keating experiment, clocks were carried around the globe with the observers traveling along...
...The measurements, showing a small time difference east-west and west-east, were made on the earth's surface...
...Einstein's road to relativity was born out of a sense of simplicity, his belief that James Clerk Maxwell's electromagnetic equations (which first assumed the invariance of light) and Galilean mechanics should be reconciled mathematically...
...Nice try...
...Is it really beneath the dignity of every professor and grad student to go to the library for a $2,000 reward...
...What nonsense...
...But as Hayden goes on to say, this leads us to another intriguing challenge to Einstein...
...The eastbound clock ran slow [compared to thelab clock] while the west-bound clock did not slow down with respect to the lab clock, but rather sped up...
...Bethell states that "Sound needs air...
...Shipman, if you don't believe me...
...During my years at the University of Colorado, I would sit in class, or more commonly a local watering hole, discussing physics and the "magic" of the light waves and the electromagnetic spectrum with several physics students...
...There, it is illegal to wear body armor when the government decides to shoot you: P. L. 270.20(1)—A person is guilty of [a Class E Felony] of the unlawful wearing of a body vest [bullet-resistant soft body armor] when acting either alone or with one or more persons he commits any violent felony offense defined in section 70.02 while possessing a firearm [pistol, revolver, sawed-off shotgun/rifle] and in the course of and in furtherance of such a crime wears a body vest...
...Trowbridge attempts to explain the 37-nanosecond difference by "basic algebra," but I am afraid he makes an equally basic error...
...I confess that the Spectator is well-edited, well-written, consistently sprightly and informative and provocative, though much too ostentatiously conservative for my bent...
...More experiments are planned for the Space Shuttle...
...Time dilation is another subject that Mr...
...The only one that he seems to have heard of is the Michelson-Morley experiment and its kin, first conducted a scant century ago by Michelson in Potsdam, and reported on in 1881, and in its most famous instantiation by Michelson and Morley in 1887, in both cases confirming the assumption of the independence of the velocity of light from the motion of the light source...
...Their annual report on bomb and incendiary incidents is unparalleled...
...Using the common example of the shift in pitch of a train's whistle as it passes you on the tracks, I asked why this wasn't also true of light...
...Amnon Goldberg London, UK I kept looking for the punch line in Tom Bethell's foolish "Doubting Dada Physics...
...an oscillating medium, however rarified...
...Maybe Farrell is reluctant to look because he has an uneasy suspicion that the result isn't there...
...Edward Teller, in which he discussed Beckmann's theory, satellites used in high-accuracy navigation systems are probably not accurate enough yet to discriminate between the predictions of Beckmann and Einstein...
...It will not surprise readers of TAS that the law Wattenberg misses is found in the State of New York...
...However, his article on the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms truly disturbed me...
...All calculations for launching rockets into space are performed on the basis of a stationary, non-rotating earth...
...But in some parts of the black community, the drug is widely known as Immunex—because that is what Dr...
...Indeed, the Michelson-Morley experiments never even surfaced during our two years of after-class conversations...
...He conveniently locates the observer in a different reference frame, outside the earth...
...Don B. Kates, Jr...
...For all its humor and verbal uppercuts The American Spectator is grown-up conservatism after all...
...According to relativity theory, both clocks should have slowed down equally...
...Every day...
...But it is a reasonable supposition that Michelson-Morley was the trigger...
...That is why he's had no takers on the $2,000...
...But if the muon-clocks slowed down due to internal changes in the muon—caused by velocity through the field—then the observer on the muon would see lab clocks running faster than his...
...Beckmann's The Story of Pi, a lively exposition of a surprisingly interesting topic, which will surely appeal to any literate person regardless of his political persuasion or scientific training...
...As for P.A.M...
...Jerome Shipman falsely conflates the Michelson-Gale and Dayton Miller experiments...
...Granted, their training and tactics may need some fine tuning, but I don't think ATF agents deserve the cynical comments and sheer speculation contained in Wattenberg's investigative piece, or James Pate's accompanying sidebar...
...Bethell makes some vague references to what he calls the "aberration of light from binary stars...
...One such theory already being discussed is a "non-symmetric" version of gravity put forth by physicist John Moffat from the University of Toronto...
...The response was silence...
...The astronomical example of the spectral shift (to the red) of extremely distant quasars was offered up as evidence that this shift does indeed take place...
...Wrong...
...Explaining that "repeats" of the Michelson and Morley experiment had confirmed Einstein to within 2 percent accuracy, Pool describes new experiments using stable lasers that improved this confirmation by a factor of 4,000...
...He was 68 years old...
...Shipman failed to grasp Beckmann's most basic point: the fringe shift sought by Michelson-Morley was in fact present, but was only one ten-thousandth of what they expected to find...
...Farrell has failed to understand the implications of the fact that binary stars have the same aberration...
...For some binary stars, which circle one another at a high velocity, and yet are so close to one another that they constitute an unresolvable point in the sky, the relative velocity of the earth and star changes rapidly over a period of a few days...
...and L.A...
...Jerome S, Shipman Potomac, Maryland I read Tom Bethell's article with a great sense of déjà-vu...
...But getting back to . . . special relativity—and time dilation...
...But E=mc2 is easily derivable simply from the energy and momentum of a photon, as Einstein did in 1908 without reliance on his special relativity...
...Einstein did not cite sources and later gave conflicting answers when asked about it...
...I asked Howard Hayden to comment on the increase of particle mass with velocity...
...According to a speech recently given by Dr...
...If time itself is dilated," Hayden writes, "then an observer riding on the muon would see the lab clock ticking slowly...
...Even with today's instruments that would be difficult to detect...
...In the reference frame of the earth's surface, D.C...
...Like Shipman, he should go back and read Einstein...
...In other words, how do we know that rapid movement through the gravitational field doesn't change the internal processes of the particle in some way, so that it lives longer...
...We seek to avoid customer confusion, and we hope this letter clarifies this issue for you and your readers...
...Of the difference between the half-life of muons moving with respect to the laboratory and those at rest with respect to the laboratory, yet another prediction of special relativity confirmed by experiment, nada...
...Unfortunately, it appears he seriously believes the blather he wrote...
...Yet today, an increasing number of top-notch Ph.D...
...Her company doesn't have anything to do with the drug mentioned in the article...
...nor has any experiment ever proved that the earth actually is in motion...
...James J. Kouri, CPP National Vice President National Association of Chiefs of Police Miami, Florida (To be continued) Dada Physics Thanks for publishing Tom Bethell's remarks on Dr...
...The mature conservative will always be watchful for government abuses of its police power and appalled when American citizens are needlessly savaged by that power, even if the victims are not personally appealing...
...However, we do object to the use of our trademark and trade name with respect to such products...
...While much of the conversation was highly technical (mathematical) in nature, it was my layman's question that brought the indoctrinated back to reality...
...But Mr...
...Bethell carefully avoids by pretending that the only point of contention in the special theory is the invariance of the speed of some carefully chosen light beams, again failing to realize what the invariance really predicts: time dilation and mass increase according to Einstein's formula, published in his 1905 paper...
...Dirac's application of special relativity to quantum mechanics, leading him to predict the existence of the positron, Hayden says: "If you don't need special relativity to get the mass increase with velocity, then you don't need it to get the Klein-Gordon equations, hence to get positrons...
...Does time dilation happen...
...Write to Box 545, Storrs, CT 06268 for info, but be warned that the journal is highly technical...
...Yet these stars do not show differential aberration, as they should according to Einstein's theory...
...One who did take him seriously was Howard Hayden of the University of Connecticut physics department, and he will continue to publish the bimonthly journal that Beckmann founded, Galilean Electrodynamics...
...It seemed more fun to postulate further on relativity than to questions its basis...
...The most straightforward explanation of the less well-known 1924 Michelson-Gale experiment is that it's the latter that's doing the moving...
...Hayden has a paper on this in the next issue of Galilean Electrodynamics...
...Despite its faults, the ATF is one of the finest law-enforcement agencies in the world...
...Frankly, any future discrepancies with Einstein's theory will certainly not lead us back to the reductionist days of Newton in any case...
...That the overwhelming majority of the physics community thinks that there was something wrong with the experiments, not with Einstein's theory, means nothing to Bethell...
...Has he even heard of Planck's constant...
...Historians of science have drawn a linkage between the ideas of Copernicus, Galileo, and Einstein which dethroned the earth and mankind's centrality in the cosmos, and the English, French and American Revolutions, Darwin, Huxley, Evolution, moral relativity, atheistic existentialism, materialistic hedonism, despair, Nietzsche, and even Nazism and modern racism: "The difference in thinking between pre-and post-Copernican Man was so great, it was as if a newspecies of being had arisen on the globe...
...Immunex Corporation is a Seattle-based biopharmaceutical company developing treatments for cancer and autoimmune disease...
...With the substitution of "the Black Panthers" or some other subversive group for "Koresh," the rest of the article—an unconvincing apologia for the murder of four law enforcement officers and an armed standoff that lasted almost fifty days by a deranged and heavily armed cult leader—could have appeared in any number of leftist publications during the 1960s and 1970s...
...With all due respect, his offer of a reward for reports of east-to-west light measurements is a red herring...
...It was sold under that name in Africa, and Muhammad made a point of referring to it as Immunex because he claimed to be selling the genuine treatment developed by scientists there...
...Nobody doubts the universe is, expanding, not even Dr...
...The toughest challenge to the opponents of relativity theory may be the business about the half-life of accelerated particles or muon...
...Thus the light is traveling two different distances and not simply the geographic distance between the two cities...
...Bethell's comment that "most students of physics shrug and accept relativity theory—not theirs to quarrel with" was, quite sadly, spot on...
...In Beckmann's theory, the difference could be accounted for because the west-bound plane was traveling rapidly through the gravitational field, whereas the eastbound one was traveling around the globe with the gravitational field...
...Ross Nelson Milwaukee, Wisconsin I am a regular reader of The American Spectator and one of Daniel Wattenberg's many fans...
...Of the transverse Doppler effect, predicted by the special theory but unknown to classical physics, and confirmed with great accuracy by the 1938 and 1941 experiments of Ives and Stilwell, deponent sayeth not...
...In fact, he makes no mention of them in his letters of the period...
...Bethell seems to have no idea of how fruitful for physics the special theory and, in particular, the general theory have been...
...Other physicists were working toward the same theory independently—and would have come to the same conclusions about invariance without Einstein...
...The depth of his research and his mastery of the non-legal facts and their implications serve to make the article truly an outstanding effort on this subject, particularly in light of the sensationalism and credulity that have marked its treatment in the media generally...
...Of course, the most famous conclusion of Einstein's special theory of relativity is that energy and mass are equivalent, as expressed in the equation E=mc2...
...Such use has created confusion in the medical community and with our shareholders, and I would like to set the record straight...
...In his lifetime, unfortunately, very few physicists knew or bothered to find out what he was saying...
...I believe, however, that he is referring to the D.I...
...Beckmann's mastery of our language—including its capacity for puns and satire...
...It has not been experimentally contradicted, nor is it in doubt," writes Hayden...
...No mystery, no magic with relativity...
...I suggest Mr...
...Brewster M. Miner West Milford, New Jersey Bethell states too briefly that Einstein developed his E=mc2 equation independently of relativity, failing to realize that this doesn't mean it's unrelated to it...
...The use of the mark IMMUNEX with respect to this experimental product violates Immunex Corporation's trademark and trade name rights...
...Instead, Wattenberg offers up second-hand charges of "sexual harassment" at ATF and a half-hearted defense of Koresh's sexual intercourse with minors and possession of a cache of machine guns...
...Nobody has ever hitched a ride with a moving muon to see which of these two is correct...
...I asked innocently enough...
...Arthur Koestler...
...Here, Beckmann and Hayden claim that the evidence definitely contradicts special relativity...
...Beckmann's surpassing genius shines through his clear, concise, and convincing—yes, and humorous—writings, on subjects not always of a scientific nature, but invariably illuminated by the careful reasoning of a scientist...
...Because the speed of light is invariant, and all objects approaching the speed of light suffer contraction, mass increase and time dilation...
...This is the essential paradox of quantum physics, yet Mr...
...While fixating on the train passengers, clocks, and rulers of special relativity exercises that we all hated doing in college, Mr...
...This is an oversimplification...
...So does this mean the speed of light actually does change, just as sound waves do...
...By a heroic effort he managed to put out his final issue of Access to Energy, which will be continued by Art Robinson (Box 1279, Cave Junction, OR 97523...
...It can be, and has been, when the speed of the stars' rotation and the angle of axis is taken into consideration...
...It is no slight to the successor editor of that publication, Dr...
...The experiment has been conveniently excluded from the vast majority of physics textbooks, and most members of the "community" have never heard of it...
...Moreover, few could match Dr...
...The optical gyroscope uses the same principle...
...If the proposed Space Shuttle experiments mentioned by Farrell include an investigation of the speed of light in space shuttle coordinates, as opposed to sidereal coordinates, then it could confirm or falsify Beckmann...
...Valoree E. Dowell Vice President, Corporate Communications Immunex Corporation Seattle, Washington Byron York and Joe Johns reply: Ms...
...Bethell read up on PSR 1916+13, a binary system of neutron stars whose precession, much more dramatic, is accurately predicted by general relativity as well...
...What further proof do you need when people do this for a living...
...NASA, however, believes in it and routinely applies relativistic time corrections in its satellite computations, particularly those for the satellites used in high-accuracy navigation systems...
...Other importers of the drug, respecting Immunex Corporation's trademark, sold it in the U.S...
...He seems to know nothing about the crises in late-nineteenthcentury physics, the only partially successful attempts, notably by Lorentz and Poincare, to resolve them, and the resolution of the difficulties by Einstein's special theory of relativity...
...Synchrotrons, like the one at the CERN laboratory in Zurich, accelerate electrons to large fractions of the velocity of light, and the result is they suffer time dilation and mass increase in the exact proportions suggested by the special theory...
...Shipman didn't read my article carefully enough to see that I did mention the aberration of starlight...
...I have one minor correction to Wattenberg's otherwise thorough research...
...Bethell's ignorance of the theory of relativity, as displayed in "Doubting Dada Physics," is nothing short of breathtaking...
...No doubt Bethell's motives were good: he wanted to honor Petr Beckmann, no doubt a good and courageous man...
...light needs...
...Immunex Corporation takes no position on the efficacy or safety of alphainterferon products used in the treatment of AIDS patients...
...Of course, this is only the law for New York State...
...Bethell could have missed that article, but it's harder still to believe that Mr...
...As one who practices constitutional law for a living, I was impressed by Wattenberg's understanding of the relevant constitutional principles and his ability to present them in terms accessible to lay readers...
...scientists, such as the Tychonian Society in the USA, and the Cercle Scientifique et Historique in Europe, bring much recently discovered in quantum physics for the existence of the ether, and in astronomy that the earth is indeed located motionless at the center of the universe...
...It's a misnomer to cite Michelson and Morley (as so many pop science books do) as the main reason Einstein came forward...
...Bethell noticed an article by Robert Pool in the November '90 issue of Science, the same issue in which Mr...
...About the time dilation of special relativity, which has no counterpart in classical physics, Bethell maintains a dignified silence...
...One thing I like about conservatives (again this writer included) is that we attempt to refrain from and expose hypocrisy...
...A difference which makes no difference is no difference...
...The question whether Michelson-Morley gave rise to special relativity is the subject of legitimate controversy...
...Look it up, Mr...
...In that connection, your readers should be reminded of Dr...
...Politically Koresh As I am far to your left politically, I had never read The American Spectator until I picked up the August 1993 issue to read Daniel Wattenberg's article on the Koresh massacre ("Gunning for Koresh...
...In Michelson's day—whether on hilltops or in basements—it was impossible...
...Among the practical uses of time-dilated electrons: probing defects in metals...
...With regard to the prediction of the special theory, but not of classical physics, that a material particle becomes heavier as its speed increases, a prediction that is confirmed every time a high-velocity particle accelerator is turned on anywhere in the world, Bethell maintains a discreet silence...
...I've frequently read articles in your magazine, and other conservative journals, that condemn the media, especially shows like NBC's "Dateline," that use commentators with a vested interest in an issue (i.e., an automobile safety "expert" who represents claimants in legal actions...
...Light is both a wave and a particle...
...Of the Fizeau experiment, of the Trouton-Noble experiment, of the aberration of starlight, none of which classical physics could explain, but which special relativity accounted for, Bethell says nothing...
...Ralph D. Copeland Spring, Texas Tom Bethell doesn't know much about physics, but he knows what he likes...
...Comparisons were not made in flight, but when they got back...
...Bethell's most careless error occurs when he states that Einstein squeezed space and time for the convenience of a postulate...
...In view of what happened over Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, Bethell can't very well doubt its validity...
...Its most successful test is not the advance of the perihelion of Mercury as he suggests, but the expansion of the universe, a reality that, was confirmed by Edwin Hubble shortly after Einstein's tensor equations suggested it...
...Bethell doesn't even approach the theory of general relativity, a comprehensive view of gravity that builds on special relativity...
Vol. 26 • October 1993 • No. 10
