1. The Need of New Approaches - Kritische Stimmen zur ...

Chapter 9: The Thought Experiment
778 / 2005-02-02 - DEUTSCHER BUNDESTAG, Committee for Culture and the Media. Berlin.
CD-ROM 1.2 with printout of 93 sample pages, 2nd Progress Report.
Extract:
“Should the committee prefer not to take a stand against the problems uncovered by our documentation because
“one can’t do anything about it”, because everything must remain as it is - which we, however, do not believe - we
would at least like to have one of our questions responded to publicly:
Why may 95 years of criticism of the special theory of relativity (1908-2003) be suppressed?
For the sake of simplicity, the question can be also be subdivided into two question subsections:
May 95 years of criticism of the special theory of relativity (1908-2003) be suppressed? And if so: For how
long?
(...)
Appendix: Short Discussion of the Standard Presentation of the Relativists
According to the conviction of the relativists, their creed can be stated roughly as it was again recently
formulated in a large German newspaper (29.9.02), and as one finds it in all presentations of the theory (newspaper
title and author therefore play no role):
“An important experiment of the modern age was, for example, the attempt to prove the existence of the ether.
This was conceived by physicists as being an ideal substance that served as a carrier medium for the spreading of
light waves. Towards the end of the 19th century the physicist Albert Michelson and the chemist Edward Morley
designed an arrangement of mirrors that reflected beams of light in various directions. In the ether these should
have propagated differently. But regardless of the path travelled by the light - the time difference between them was
always zero. Nor could this be altered, despite the precision of the measurements.
The Michelson-Morley experiment at that time shocked the foundations of physics. Thereafter there was no
longer an ether, no absolute space and, as Albert Einstein later added, not even an absolute time. In his famous
formula e=mc² there is now only one constant: the speed of light.”
Everything in this description - except for the name of the researchers involved - is incorrect. The false claims as
to the interferometry experiment undertaken by Michelson and Morley are particularly grotesque:
(1) The experiment was carried out incompletely in 1881 and 1887, which is why it could not give the findings
sought.
(2) The supposed null result was never obtained. Already with the first experiment in 1881 with a first-time (!)
development, i.e. with a technically still fully undeveloped instrument, the minor fluctuations showed no statistically
uniform distribution of the deviations, but a clear periodicity. During the first repetition in 1887, with a technically
improved device in an improved arrangement, differences in running times were measured that gave an ether drift
of about 8.8 km/sec. Later repetition in 1902, 1904 and 1905 gave values of around 8.7 km/sec, whereas 1921,
1924, 1925 and 1927 gave values of between 9.3 and 11.2 km/sec.
(3) These results, which can be read in the source texts, did not devastate any foundations of physics, but have
only been denied through the spreading of the claim of the “eternal null result”. Since then the denial has hindered
research. Furthermore, the following is incorrect:
(4) The assumption of an ether was regarded by Albert Einstein in 1905, according to his own statement, as not
needed. In 1920 the same Albert Einstein, in his lecture in Leiden, declared the existence of an ether as again being
essential. No reason has ever been given for a rejection of the ether, and thereby of absolute space.
(5) The relativity of time claimed by Albert Einstein was given up by the astronomers around 1930. In 1969 P.
Janich showed that the concept of time was something normative, given by man, and this proto-physical setting
cannot logically be subsequently altered by pace disturbances or the hand settings of clocks constructed on the basis
of this normative setting.
(6) The famous formula e=mc² does not describe any mass transformation into energy, or any relativistic
procedure and was not discovered by Albert Einstein, but by other scientists before him. Moreover, Albert
Einstein’s own derivation of the formula is circular, i.e. it has no proof quality.
The detailed justification of the criticism and the proof of the sources can be found in Chapter 2 of our documentation / text
version 1.2: the error groups A (ether) on pp 41-48, D (time) on pp 61-75, K (mass-energy designation) on pp 109-112.
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G. O. Mueller: STR