Enter Einstein who proposed that Gravitation arises not from an unexplained mysterious “force,” but that instead, it is an epiphenomenon of bent space arising from a space-bending property inherent in matter. Many observations have confirmed this hypothesis. Indeed the bending of spacetime through gravitational lensing has found confirmation through astronomical observations of galaxies through powerful telescopes. Despite its being a crazy idea, no better explanation to my knowledge has been forthcoming. In what sense is the idea of bent space kind of kooky? As Newton had warned in his Principia:
those violate the accuracy of language, which ought to be kept precise, who interpret these words [time, space, place, and motion] for the measured quantities. Nor do those less defile the purity of mathematical and philosophical truths, who confound real quantities with their relations [analogies] and sensible measures.1
In other words, we do not know true realities or even true measures because all we have at hand are expedients and heuristics, and we must therefore be careful not to confuse any clock with real Time, or any measure with real Space, or shape with real Place—all terms Newton discusses in his definitions (and first principles) at the start of the Principia. Space, to Newton, and really to anyone who thinks about it, is something we expect to have no substance; and having no substance, how can it bend or be bent? What is being bent?
As mathematician and molecular biologist David Berlinski puts it:
In most mathematical theories a natural distinction is drawn between a figure and its background: a curve arcs within the broader ambit of an enveloping space, a mapping is easily distinguished from the spaces it connects. Typically, it is the figure that admits of a singularity: the curve changes its direction or the mapping breaks down, while the background stays the same. But in general relativity, it is the background that suffers a singularity, the very fabric of space and time giving way with a rip as curvature zooms off to infinity and space and time contort themselves.2
Berlinski’s point comes to rest on the limits of mathematical insight, pointing out that such insights are essentially abstract and not necessarily indications of underlying realities. In “Was There a Big Bang?” Berlinski’s discussion focuses on the unreliability of the Penrose-Hawking theorems surrounding black hole theory. He laments that
the light thrown by the Penrose-Hawking theorems flickers over a mathematical theory and so a mathematical universe. The universe that we inhabit is a physical system. Nothing but grief can come of confusing the one for the other. . .Mathematical concepts achieve physical significance only when the theories in which they are embedded are confirmed by experience. . .it follows that if these mathematical theories are not confirmed by experience, then neither have they achieved any physical significance.3
In other words Berlinski’s trouble with the Penrose-Hawking theorems is that they are at least two removes from the phenomena.
Perhaps the most common popular defence of Einstein’s ideas lies in Arthur Eddington’s 1919 observations, confirming that starlight bends around the sun. Here’s a short blurb from Peter Coles writing for Nature:
Einstein’s theory, eight years in the making, sprang from insights he had developed after he published his theory of special relativity in 1905. One of the effects predicted by the new theory was that light rays passing close to a massive body, such as a star, should be bent by its gravitational field. This effect had been predicted qualitatively using Newton’s theory of gravity. Tantalizingly, Newton himself had written in his 1704 opus Opticks: “Do not Bodies act upon Light at a distance, and by their action bend its Rays…?”
. . .
Newton’s theory of gravity did not, of course, formulate gravity as a consequence of curved space. That was Einstein’s innovation.4
Coles reviews three books on Einstein and one in particular on the Eddington observations entitled No Shadow of a Doubt—the object of which is to dispel any doubts about Eddington’s observations despite detractors who claimed he fudged his numbers. We are assured that more sophisticated observations have since been able to confirm the gravitational lensing effect, and the by now familiar sensibility comes into play that even if he did cook the books, he is vindicated by having been right. Nowhere are we made aware of the idea that alternative conclusions might account for light displacement of stars around our sun during eclipse conditions. There is Einstein and he settled the matter for all eternity.
I am not arguing that because Newton said so, space has no properties. Nor am I arguing that space must have no properties, as some critics of Einstein propose. It is perfectly reasonable for instance to suppose that galactic space has an elasticity and fabric quality about it that perhaps intergalactic space does not: that in fact the former has properties whereas the latter does not, and that intergalactic space is the background to which Newton and Berlinski refer. Indeed galactic space may have certain properties we are now designating “dark matter” and “dark energy” for lack of a better understanding. What I am arguing is that we’re grappling with absurdities and groping in the dark while claiming that it’s all settled, and no one dare pry who has not mastered the calculus.
Popular-science writers throw dark matter at us while they’re on the topic of gravitational lensing, discussing the issue as though it were settled instead of speculative. Same goes for black holes. Where does the absolute certainty come from? Why relate to science in this manner? What kinds of personalities does that sort of rhetoric attract? and what sort does it alienate?
Meanwhile popular science tells us that experiments have confirmed Einstein’s postulation that faster-moving clocks are slower than slower-moving clocks. Critics however have pointed out a flaw in the thinking. If any given frame perceives itself to be at rest while other frames seem to be in motion, how do we decide which frame is in motion and which is at rest? We take an atomic clock into orbit, let it ride a while and bring it back down to find that it indeed lags relative to a twin, synchronised clock that remained grounded. The moving clock however has experienced various accelerations (and extensive jostling) on its journey and the lag is miniscule. Interesting experiment but hard to determine exactly the cause of the lag. Einstein’s equations are used in GPS to coordinate satellite data with the data of the traveller is the retort. That’s all fine, but this would not be the first time a heuristic worked without reflecting the actual realities—a problem we’ve already seen in reference to Ptolemaic astronomy.
A more exciting confirmation relies on observations of muons, electron-like subatomic particles released in the upper atmosphere when bombarded by protons from the sun and other cosmic sources. Unlike electrons, muons have a very short half-life, quickly decaying into other particles. Since more muons than should make their way to the surface of our planet in fact do make it to the surface, we may conclude Einstein’s postulation confirmed. And perhaps this is the case. Since muons travel close to light speed, we can expect them to oscillate more slowly and therefore to decay slower than under lab conditions. But how does the muon know it’s travelling at all. Remember: in the muon’s frame, it’s not moving; the planet is racing toward it! In other words, from the muon’s relative frame, it’s the Earth’s clock that’s moving slower. But there’s more here.
Upon examination of the experiments done to verify special relativity (SR) using muons, some trouble arises. First of all, we can’t measure atmospheric muon velocity directly, so experimenters have come up with an ingenious workaround. Without getting caught up in the details, experimental physicists face a choice of potentially applicable equations, and the one they use to confirm SR suffers from confirmation bias. This is the sort of questionable mathematics Berlinski laments.5
Whatever the truth of these matters may be, Einstein is not only a genius: anecdotes I grew up with presented him as a man of humility, one who when presented with a position at Princeton University and asked what salary he expected, purportedly did a back-of-the-envelope calculation and asked for a meagre sum. His wardrobe, we are told, held iterations of the same shirts and trousers so that he wouldn’t be distracted from his brilliance by the burden of having to make a daily fashion choice. Genius indeed, he whose mind collapses at the prospect of sartorial choice. And most humble. This quality of character fits the heroic image of the stoic who rejects all qualia as secondary and a distraction from pure science. Meanwhile we are spared the bigotry expressed in his travel diaries and his vicious attacks against critics like Henri Bergson. If one searches online “Einstein racism”—one witnesses the need to “save” our cultural hero from criticism. One remarkable piece runs with the headline “Einstein’s racist views reflect cultural bias, not bigotry, China’s social media users insist.”
After the diaries were published in May 2018, a Washington Post article from June of that year came to save Einstein by extolling his work with the NAACP and his public statements against racism. No doubt their conclusions are right that he was a complex person. Similar arguments for complexity of character however have failed to salvage Christopher Columbus, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and Robert A. Millikan during the 2020 scourge of reputations that resulted in the statue toppling and name erasures of these and many other major historical personages. The ensuing illusion is that there are indeed flawless and pure types who were always right about everything. These acts of toppling some and leaving others standing betrays the idol worship to which I keep pointing.
Equally lauded is quantum physicist Richard Feynman who is famous for his statement, “I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics.” The internet abounds in excuses for why this is a statement of genuine genius. In one example of this approach to our modern day hero of atomism, journalist Javier Yanes furnishes another sage statement for the ages: upon being asked how magnets work, Feynman replied in a BBC interview, “I can’t explain that attraction in terms of anything else that’s familiar to you.” (Analogical mind vacant.) Yanes feels this sort of rhetoric is an attempt “to transmit that vision of pure knowledge” only geniuses like Feynman possess to mere mortals like ourselves. His failure to transmit anything but what can only be described as nonsense (denotatively) doesn’t seem to strike believers as essentially problematic. We are in the realm of Lewis Carroll and Douglas Adams, not in the sphere of science.
Berlinski remarks: “Even quantum electrodynamics, the most successful theory ever devised, was described honestly by its founder, Richard Feynman, as resting on a number of unwholesome mathematical tricks.”6 Berlinski’s assessment of the state of physics at the tail end of the twentieth century (1998) was that
Until recently, the great physicists have been scrupulous about honoring the terms of their contract. They have attempted with dignity to respect the distinction between what is known and what is not. . . .
This scrupulousness has lately been compromised. The result has been the calculated or careless erasure of the line separating disciplined physical inquiry from speculative metaphysics. Contemporary cosmologists feel free to say anything that pops into their heads. Unhappy examples are everywhere: absurd schemes to model time on the basis of the complex numbers, as in Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time; bizarre and ugly contraptions for cosmic inflation; universes multiplying beyond the reach of observation; white holes, black holes, worm holes, and naked singularities; theories of every stripe and variety, all of them uncorrected by any criticism beyond the trivial.
The physicists carry on endlessly because they can.7
Berlinski concludes succinctly, “Like Darwin’s theory of evolution, Big Bang cosmology has undergone that curious social process in which a scientific theory is promoted to a secular myth.”8
Asa Boxer’s poetry has garnered several prizes and is included in various anthologies around the world. His books are The Mechanical Bird (Signal, 2007), Skullduggery (Signal, 2011), Friar Biard’s Primer to the New World (Frog Hollow Press, 2013), Etymologies(Anstruther Press, 2016), Field Notes from the Undead (Interludes Press, 2018), and The Narrow Cabinet: A Zombie Chronicle (Guernica, 2022). Boxer is also a founder of and editor at analogy magazine.
Newton, Sir Isaac. Sir Isaac Newton’s Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy and His System of the World: Volume One: The Motion of Bodies. Transl. Andrew Motte (1729) revised by Florian Cajori. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1962. p.11.
Berlinski, David. The Deniable Darwin & Other Essays. Ed. David Klinghoffer. Seattle: Discovery Institute Press, 2009. p. 227.
Ibid. p. 228.
See https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-01172-z (Accessed Sept 2022).
For more specifics see: http://alternativephysics.org/book/MuonRelativity.htm (Accessed Oct 2022).
Berlinski op. cit. p. 231.
Ibid. p. 231.
Ibid. p. 232.
"I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics."
A worthy epitaph for Doc Feynman and all the mystagoguery enshrouding current science!
PS This humble subscriber hopes that one day you'll write about the Einstein-Bergson debate, and perhaps delve into some ideas of Bergson, one of the great unsung geniuses of the 20th century.