Irrte Einstein? Skeptische Gedanken zur Relativitätstheorie - (fast immer) allgemeinverständlich formuliert

Irrte Einstein? Skeptische Gedanken zur Relativitätstheorie – (fast immer) allgemeinverständlich formuliert

File:Irrte Einstein? Skeptische Gedanken zur Relativitätstheorie - (fast immer) allgemeinverständlich formuliert 584.jpg
Author	Egbert Scheunemann
Published	2008
Publisher	Books on Demand, Hamburg-Norderstedt
Pages	248
ISBN	978-3837042498

Irrte Einstein? Skeptische Gedanken zur Relativitätstheorie – (fast immer) allgemeinverständlich formuliert — in English, Was Einstein Wrong? Sceptical Thoughts on the Theory of Relativity, Formulated (Almost Always) in Terms Anyone Can Understand — is a 2008 book by the German political scientist and natural philosopher Egbert Scheunemann. It is written in German and has not been translated.

The book is a critique of special relativity mounted from the side of logic and natural philosophy rather than of experiment or mathematics. Its central objection concerns the status of the rest frame: if the relativistic effects are defined relative to a frame chosen at rest, and no frame in the universe is at rest in any absolute sense, then the reality attributed to those effects rests on an arbitrary stipulation. As the subtitle indicates, it is addressed to the general reader.

The argument

Scheunemann's case is put in the publisher's description of the book, which opens by posing the standard claims as questions rather than as results:

Ein reisender Zwilling altert weniger schnell als sein unbewegter Bruder? Bewegte Uhren gehen relativ zu ruhenden langsamer? Wie aber in einem Universum, in dem sich alles relativ zu irgend etwas anderem permanent bewegt, eine nicht bewegte Uhr auszeichnen? Wenn „Zeitdilatation", also Zeitdehnung, von der willkürlichen Setzung eines ruhenden Bezugssystems abhängt, dann ist diese physisch so „real" wie die „Längenkontraktion" oder wie eine „relativistische Masse" schnell bewegter Körper relativ zu diesem Bezugssystem – zwei weiteren Behauptungen der Relativitätstheorie.

In diesem Buch werden eine Fülle von naturwissenschaftlichen und naturphilosophischen Argumenten angeführt, deren Quintessenz die generelle Frage erlaubt: Irrte Einstein?

In English:

A travelling twin ages more slowly than his unmoving brother? Moving clocks run slow relative to ones at rest? But in a universe in which everything is permanently in motion relative to something else, how is one to single out a clock that is not moving? If "time dilation" — the stretching of time — depends on the arbitrary designation of a reference frame at rest, then it is physically as "real" as "length contraction", or as the "relativistic mass" of rapidly moving bodies relative to that same frame — two further assertions of the theory of relativity.

This book adduces a wealth of scientific and natural-philosophical arguments whose upshot permits the general question: was Einstein wrong?

The structure of the objection is worth stating plainly, because it is not the usual one. Scheunemann does not argue that the relativistic effects fail to appear, nor that the mathematics is inconsistent. He argues that their claimed physical reality is parasitic on a choice. A frame is nominated as being at rest; the effects are then computed relative to it; and the results are reported as facts about the world rather than as facts about the relation between the world and a stipulation. Time dilation, length contraction and relativistic mass are treated together, as three consequences standing or falling on the same move.

This places the book alongside the philosophical rather than the experimental critiques collected on this wiki — closer to objections about reification and the status of theoretical constructs than to the interferometry and clock experiments that occupy much of the relativity literature here.

The author

Egbert Scheunemann (born 1 March 1958) is a freelance political scientist, natural philosopher, author, editor and drummer based in Hamburg. His published work is largely in political economy and the philosophy of science; this book is his principal contribution to physics. He publishes through Books on Demand and maintains an extensive bibliography on his own site.

Publication

Published in 2008 by Books on Demand (BoD) of Hamburg-Norderstedt; 248 pages; ISBN 978-3-8370-4249-8. In German; no English edition exists.

Links to Purchase Book

• Irrte Einstein? at elimbo.de

External links

• egbert-scheunemann.de — the author's website, with his complete bibliography

See also

• Special Relativity
• Relativity