General Relativity Works...Change My Mind

A popular meme has comedian Steven Crowder sitting behind a table with some statement on a piece of poster board in front of him. Underneath the statement is the phrase "Change my mind." It comes from a segment Crowder does on his Louder with Crowder program. The meme offers users the chance to insert their own opinion phrase and some clever folks will Photoshop new faces onto Crowder's body or just an entirely new person behind the table.

In a recent Back ReAction blog entry, physics professor Sabine Hossenfelder notes that Albert Einstein's what seem to be absolutely correct formulations of special and general relativity have been proven correct with many experiments -- dating back to just after he published the papers containing them through today. But, Dr. Hossenfelder notes, many physicists spend a great deal of time and energy trying to prove both theories wrong. Why?

Well, she notes, both theories deal with what is called classical or Newtonian physics. Such a study rests on Isaac Newton's famous laws of motion which describe the behavior of moving and stationary objects we might encounter in daily life. But when the objects of study are incredibly small or incredibly fast, Newtonian physics do not apply and researchers turn to the fields of quantum physics and quantum mechanics. Not unexpectedly, theories based on Newtonian physics also do not work well when applied to quantum studies, and that includes both theories of relativity.

Hossenfelder sums up several different areas of inquiry that have proving Einstein wrong as their ultimate goal. The problem is that he was indeed brilliant and his theories have a way of showing true during experiment after experiment -- we lack the ability to make the kind of observations and measurements of quantum phenomena that would show where he erred.

It is as though Einstein himself responds to the efforts to show him wrong with a frequently repeated, "I may not be right, but I'm still closer to it than you are."

This kind of thing interests me because it shows that self-examination is always a part of science and the idea of "settled science" is not a particularly serious one. And it highlights a very important aspect of my day job as a clergy person. Questions designed to investigate and uncover the truth ought never be unwelcome, especially when one claims to be following a God who claims to be in all things exactly that: True.