Conservapedia - User contributions [en]

Geocentric theory

2009-12-11T00:50:27Z

Mager:

[[Image:Ptolemaicsystem-small.png|right|thumb|Rendition of a geocentric system from the Middle Ages.]]

A '''Geocentric theory''' is a astronomical theory which describes the universe as a ''Geocentric system'', i.e., a system which put the Earth in the center of the universe, or at least in the center of the solar system. This is still just a theory though, and directly contradicts the word of God (Psalms 104:5).
The Greek philosophers Aristotle and Plato described such a theory wherein all celestial bodies move on spheres around the earth, the moon of the innermost one, the fix stars of the one most out.

==Ptolemy's system==
Ptolemy invented the most elaborated geocentrical system, allowing the planets not only to move on circles around the earth, but using epicycles. By adding further ideas, he was able to predict the motion of the planets quite well. Ptolemy's model was extremely popular from ancient times until the 1600s, as it had better agreement with observation than any alternative. His model was particularly effective at cosmological predictions.

However, during the 1500s and 1600s, it became clear that the theory had some serious flaws in it. The [[Denmark|Danish]] astronomer [[Tycho Brahe]] made the most accurate observations possible before the invention of the telescope. These showed discrepancies within Ptolemy's system.

With the invention of the [[telescope]], the observations became more precise, and new phenomena were discovered: In particular, [[Galileo]]'s use of the [[telescope]] to look at the skies revealed that [[Jupiter]] had at least four moons, and Venus had phases like the [[Moon]]: both phenomena were at odds with Ptolemy's model.

[[Johannes Kepler]] used Brahe's measurements to improve the [[Heliocentrism|heliocentric]] system Copernicus had proposed, showing that planets had elliptical orbits around the sun. When [[Isaac Newton]] applied his newly discovered [[gravitation|universal theory of gravitation]] to the data, he found that a heliocentric model was the only one that could explain all observed phenomena. By the 1800s, the spectacular successes of Newtonian theory and [[Maxwell's equations]] for electromagnetism had convinced practically everyone that the Sun is a preferred frame of reference, and that the laws of physics must be applied in that frame. The geocentric theory was finally considered to be profoundly mistaken.

Since the advent of relativity theory in the early 1900s, the laws of physics have been written in covariant equations, meaning that they are equally valid in any frame. Heliocentric and geocentric theories are both used today, depending on which allows more convenient calculations.

== Scripture Quoted to justify Geocentric Theory ==
A few [[Bible]] quotes use geocentric terms. While some attempt to use these quotes to discredit the Bible's hold on science, others dispute this usage, claiming that the usage of the terms is similar to the way people today use terms like "sunrise" and "sunset". In this account, the terminology is not wrong - merely reflects the observer's view.

*"He has fixed the earth firm, immovable." (1 Chronicles 16:30)
*"Thou hast fixed the earth immovable and firm ..." (Psalm 93:1)
*"Thou didst fix the earth on its foundation so that it never can be shaken." (Psalm 104:5)
*"...who made the earth and fashioned it, and himself fixed it fast..." (Isaiah 45:18)
*"The sun also ariseth, and the sun goeth down, and hasteth to his place where he arose." (Ecclesiastes 1:5)
*"Then spake Joshua to the LORD in the day when the LORD delivered up the Amorites before the children of Israel, and he said in the sight of Israel, Sun, stand thou still upon Gibeon; and thou, Moon, in the valley of Ajalon. And the sun stood still, and the moon stayed, until the people had avenged themselves upon their enemies. Is not this written in the book of Jasher? So the sun stood still in the midst of heaven, and hasted not to go down about a whole day." (Joshua 10, 12-13)

[[Category:Astronomy]]

Germ theory of disease

2009-12-11T00:39:00Z

Mager:

The '''Germ theory of disease''', developed in the 1860s and 1870s by [[Louis Pasteur]], states that [[microorganisms|tiny "living beings"]] are the cause of infectious diseases,<ref>[http://www.mansfield.ohio-state.edu/~sabedon/biol2007.htm#sta20005.htm#microorganism]</ref> But like [[Evolution]], it is still just a theory. The theory was developed to explain puerperal fever, or [[Child bed fever]].<ref>[http://www.harvestfields.ca/HerbBooks/01/12bk/01/170.htm]</ref> Beginning sometime in the nineteenth century, science began replacing the millennial old practice of midwifery, and physicians began delivering babies in hospitals. Puerperal fever was transmitted from patient to patient on the hands of the attending physician, and both women and the new born frequently died within days. Dr. Ignaz Semmelweis, using the controversial theory of microscopic organisms tinier than the eye could see was the first to insist that all practitioners must wash their hands before having contact with women in childbed, and Joseph Lister, who first introduced antisepsis into surgical practice.<ref>[http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3686/is_200304/ai_n9213545]</ref>

He showed that the theory of [[spontaneous generation]] was false, by placing one piece of meat under a glass jar and another in an open dish. He observed flies landing on the exposed meat, but of course flies could not penetrate the glass jar. Flies did not come out of nothing, but from eggs deposited by flies which he could easily see landing on the exposed meat.

The theory that bacteria (and later, viruses) cause disease eventually became a corner of modern medicine, but first it faced an uphill battle.
The idea that infection could be spread by invisible substances was opposed vigorously by doctors in Vienna when proposed by [[Ignaz Semmelweis]]. He reduced the incidence of mothers dying after childbirth from infection from 20% to near-zero, but other doctors resisted his efforts and got him fired.

Only after the germ theory was championed by Pasteur (see [[pasteurization]]) and Lister (namesake of [[Listerine]] mouthwash) did [[antiseptic medicine]] become popular.

Prior to germ theory, it was widely believed that disease was spread by noxious odors.<ref>Prevailing Theories of Cholera [http://www.ph.ucla.edu/epi/snow/1859map/cholera_prevailingtheories_a2.html School of Public health, UCLA]</ref> As disease-spreading conditions - rotting meat, open sewage, and such things - was often highly odorous, the smell and disease were associated. Disease was also often attributed to [[demon|demonic]] [[possession]] - although demonic possession must be possible as it it mentioned in Scripture,<ref>Mark 5:1-13</ref> it is a rare occurrence, and almost all disease attributed to it was a result of other causes.

The [[Christian Scientist]] sect, founded by [[Mary Baker Eddy]], believes that the Germ Theory of Disease is not true and that it is contradicted by Scripture.<ref>http://www.spirituality.com/tte/article_display.jhtml?ElementId=/repositories/shcomarticle/Feb2006/1140106869.xml</ref> God created all life, and so all life should reflect His glory and inherent goodness - God could not have created pathogenic organisms, as these are inherently contrary to His nature.

==Reference==

<references/>

==External links==
*[http://www.mansfield.ohio-state.edu/~sabedon/biol2007.htm#sta20005.htm#microorganism Lecture notes] for a course at Ohio State University

[[Category: Medicine]]
[[Category: Microbiology]]
[[Category: Viruses]]

Talk:Causes of atheism

2009-12-11T00:23:30Z

Mager:

It is morally superior to attempt to do the right thing from the begining rather than live with the assumption that your sins will be forgiven. {{unsigned|Anyprophet}}

Hmm... this article is better than it used to be, it's more readable and seems more relevant. Ok Conservative. [[User:Feebasfactor|Feebasfactor]] 14:39, 15 March 2008 (EDT)

== Surely there is one more reason? ==
There is one major (possible) cause of atheism missing from this page, and it is stated on the main page for atheism (under "Atheism and Why do Atheists State They Disbelieve?"), it goes like this:
The atheist has been either been presented with evidence against or no evidence for the existence of God.
Many prominent atheists (Richard Dawkins et al) claim this is why they don't believe, and is clearly a cause of atheism.

please unlock this page or add this reason.

== In Need of Editing ==
Moral depravity: Moral depravity has been demonstrated in the atheist community through history and through various studies. In addition, Bible exegesis points to the moral depravity of atheists. Therefore, moral depravity is certainly one of the prime causes of atheism.

This line strikes me as having multiple flaws. First of all, if you follow the link to the Atheism page, nowhere does it cite a 'demonstration' or 'study' that demonstrates moral depravity in the atheist community throughout history. As such, the only real 'support' here are Biblical quotes. These quotes should be cited here instead of linked externally. The last line is also laughable: Therefore, (what is there that's been shown? 3 Biblical quotes?) moral depravity is certainly (such a strong word) one of the prime causes of atheism. This entire sentence is inferred by the article writer with no external referencing and, frankly, doesn't make much sense.--[[User:Reasonless|Reasonless]] 18:51, 25 March 2008 (EDT)

== I feel like I need to say something ==
*The article seems to present only causes based on the assumption that atheism is an incorrect position. It should really present some more neutral causes as well. Usual disclaimers apply. -[[User:CSGuy|CSGuy]] 15:30, 29 April 2008 (EDT)

Yeah, really. Maybe some people just don't believe in God? Is that so unreasonable?

>> Yes, it's unreasonable to assume that atheism does not just happen. Scientific evidence and logical reasoning are not sufficient to give rise to atheism. Some event must have caused atheism such as; abusive upbringing, use of antidepressants, partial insanity, certain additives and toxins in food such at BT, ERDA, amoxicilin and other substances known to contribute to improper executive function of the human brain.

These are all neutral cases that show the causation of atheism and prove it is a consequence of mental deficiency.

:No, those are things you say cause atheism. Without documentation, they prove nothing. Why do you seem to have so much trouble accepting the idea that some people, as I do, honestly believe God does not exist? -[[User:CSGuy|CSGuy]] 20:10, 13 October 2008 (EDT)

== unlock this article ==

unlock this article so I can add a template to it -- [[Image:50 star flag.png|12px]] [[User:Deborah|Deborah]] [[Special:Contributions/Deborah|(contributions)]] [[User_talk:Deborah|(talk)]] 12:36, 16 May 2008 (EDT)

== Added another reason ==
Personal Tragedy. There are some who have forsaken, quit, or otherwise stopped believing in any religion due to the loss of a loved one, or being crippled or something equally bad.

The Concept. Some atheists believe the idea of a magic man in the sky to be silly.

== Section to add to entry ==

I request that the entry be unlocked to be able to add another section: "Acculturation". Clearly, acculturation is a major cause of atheism. For example, the overwhelming majority of Japanese people do not believe in Yahweh/Jehovah; instead, they believe in Kami, an animist pantheon. Likewise, many times more Indians than the entire population of the US, are atheistic in regards to Yahweh/Jehovah; instead, they believe in the Hindu pantheon. This is due to the culture within which these people were raised, more than any other factor. [[User:Bricology|Bricology]] 15:05, 5 July 2008 (EDT)

[[Logical Necessity]]

The question of what we might consider to be an adequate concept of God, whether or not we wish to argue for the existence of such a being. Some profound remarks were made on this by J. N. Findlay in his article (‘Can God's Existence be Disproved?’ (Findlay 1949). The heathen may worship stocks and stones but does not see them as merely stocks and stones. More and more adequate conceptions of God still portray God as limited in various respects. A fully adequate conception of God, Findlay said, would see God as not only unlimited in various admirable properties but also as a necessarily existing being. Thus ‘There is one and only one God’ would have to be a logically necessary truth. Now logic, he held, is tautologous and without ontological commitment. So God's necessary existence would have to be something different from logical necessity. The trouble is how to see what this could be.

It might be replied that there are non-trivial necessary existential propositions in mathematics, such as ‘There are infinitely many primes’ which implies of course ‘the number 7 exists’. (We can ignore the unhelpful ‘Something exists’ which is allowed by standard first order logic purely for convenience as few would need to apply logic to discourse about an empty universe for which in any case there are separate rules for determining validity or otherwise.) It is well known that Frege in his Foundations of Arithmetic claimed to reduce arithmetic to logic. However in effect he was using a free logic without ontological commitment. Claims to reduce set theory (and so analysis) to logic are of course even more problematic. Would it help towards an adequate conception of God if we said that God has the sort of existence or non-existence that prime numbers have? One might say ‘not much’. In any case it is dangerous to talk of types of existence because it treats existence as though it was a property. At the time that he wrote his article Findlay was following the logical positivist line that logic and mathematics are alike tautologous. In the case of mathematics this can be seriously questioned. Also most theists would say that prime numbers are too abstract to be compared to God, though perhaps not John Leslie who has argued that God is a principle that brings value into existence (Leslie 1979 and 1989). We are still left with Findlay's challenge as to what a conception of God as a necessary being could be.

One thing that will not differentiate the theist from the atheist is to say that God, if he exists, is necessary in the sense of not being dependent on anything else for his existence. The atheist will say that the universe fits this bill because the universe contains everything that there is and so is not caused by anything else. It is indeed hard to see what an adequate conception of God and his necessary existence could be. For the purposes of this article, let us explore what the relations and lack of relations between atheism and agnosticism could be. Here we shall neglect the requirement of necessary existence and in a later section we shall consider the case of a posteriori arguments for the existence of a mind-like creator of the universe. Of course without the requirement of necessity it raises the intelligent child's question ‘Who made God?’ Still, this might be regarded as inevitable but excusable in an a posteriori argument in which the hypothesis of a purposive creator is put forward and claimed to be justified much in the manner of any scientific hypothesis.

== Really? ==

I just finished reading this article and, really? I'm sorry, but I thought this was Conservapedia, not Encyclopedia Dramatica. I don't see the skeptic wiki calling us "morally depraved", or stupid for believing in God, so why should we do it to them? Also all the sources are biased, and based on personal opinion, making them utterly pointless.

Atheism and Mass Murder

2009-12-11T00:01:34Z

Mager: punctuation.

[[Image:Stalin.jpg‎ |right|200px|thumb|[[Joseph Stalin]]'s atheistic regime killed tens of millions of people.]]
In respect to '''atheism and mass murder''', [[Christian apologetics|Christian apologist]] Gregory Koukl wrote that "the assertion is that religion has caused most of the killing and bloodshed in the world.
There are people who make accusations and assertions that are empirically false. This is one of them."<ref name="Koukl">Koukl, Gregory, [http://www.str.org/site/News2?page=NewsArticle&id=5527 The Real Murderers: Atheism or Christianity?], 1994</ref>
Koukl details the number of people killed in various events involving theism and compares them to the much higher tens of millions of people killed under [[communism|communist]] [[Atheism|atheistic]] regimes.<ref name="Koukl" /> It has been estimated that in less than the past 100 years, governments under the banner of [[communism]] have caused the death of somewhere between 40,472,000 to 259,432,000 human lives.<ref>[http://dspace.dial.pipex.com/finalconflict/fcrevb102.html The Black Book of Communism]</ref><ref>[http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~hpcws/lelivrenoir.htm The Black Book of Communism]</ref><ref>http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/COM.ART.HTM</ref><ref>[http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/warstat1.htm Source List and Detailed Death Tolls for the Twentieth Century Hemoclysm]</ref><ref>[http://www.sarasotamagazine.com/blog/template_permalink.asp?id=365 Memory and Ideology]</ref><ref>[http://www.firstthings.com/article.php3?id_article=2526 The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression]</ref> Dr. R. J. Rummel, professor emeritus of political science at the University of Hawaii, is the scholar who first coined the term democide (death by government). Dr. R. J. Rummel's mid estimate regarding the loss of life due to communism is that communism caused the death of approximately 110,286,000 people between 1917 and 1987.<ref>http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/COM.ART.HTM</ref>

Koukl summarized by stating:
{{cquote|It is true that it's possible that religion can produce evil, and generally when we look closer at the detail it produces evil because the individual people are actually living in a rejection of the tenets of Christianity and a rejection of the God that they are supposed to be following. So it can produce it, but the historical fact is that outright rejection of God and institutionalizing of atheism actually does produce evil on incredible levels. We're talking about tens of millions of people as a result of the rejection of God.<ref name="Koukl" />}}
[[Image:Solzhenitsyn.jpg‎|thumb|150px|left|[[Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn]]]]
[[Nobel Prize]] winner [[Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn]] was asked to account for the great tragedies that occurred under the brutal communist regime he and fellow citizens suffered under.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn offered the following explanation:
{{cquote|Over a half century ago, while I was still a child, I recall hearing a number of old people offer the following explanation for the great disasters that had befallen [[Russia]]: 'Men have forgotten God; that's why all this has happened.'

Since then I have spend well-nigh 50 years working on the history of our revolution; in the process I have read hundreds of books, collected hundreds of personal testimonies, and have already contributed eight volumes of my own toward the effort of clearing away the rubble left by that upheaval. But if I were asked today to formulate as concisely as possible the main cause of the ruinous revolution that swallowed up some 60 million of our people, I could not put it more accurately than to repeat: 'Men have forgotten God; that's why all this has happened.' <ref>https://www.rbc.org/devotionals/our-daily-bread/2000/08/13/devotion.aspx</ref>}}

==Explanatory links between atheism and mass murders==

Christian philosophers and theologians explain that there are causal links between mass murder and atheism. Atheism, lack belief in God, have the following characteristics that can lend itself to mass murder and can explain why the greatest mass murderers were atheists:<ref>Peter Kreeft and Ronald Tacelli, Christian apologetics</ref><ref>Joseph de Torre, Christian philosophy</ref><ref>Contemporary Philosophical Issues in Historical Perspective, Manila: UA&P, 2000</ref>
*lack of recognition of an ultimate judge of moral actions and a judge who sets injustice aright in a last judgement, and thus do not recognize the immorality of murder.
*lack of seeing the importance of human beings as images of God and so easily discarding them as merely material things, products of mere chance.
*lack of acknowledging an external standard of moral perfection, thus ending up with self-created standards which can include killing for political survival.
*absence of guidance by divine revelation of the moral law, such as "Thou shalt not kill".
*following an ethic of atheistic evolutionism that is based on the survival and victory of the fittest, which is ultimately a "bloodthirsty ethic", the words of [[Joseph Ratzinger]], that is an ethic that is eager to kill and to maim. This ethic is about conquering others rather than self-conquest.<ref>[ Joseph Ratzinger, Truth and Tolerance http://www.zenit.org/article-13872?l=english]</ref>.

== China ==
The [[atheist]] [[Mao Zedong]] killed tens of millions during his [[Great Leap Forward]] and many more during the purges and slaughters of the [[Cultural revolution]].

==See Also==
*[[Atheism and Uncharitableness]]
*[[Atheism and deception]]
*[[Atheism and Morality]]
*[[Morality]]
{{Nb Atheism}}

== Notes ==
{{reflist|2}}

[[Category:Atheism]]

Theory of Gravity

2009-12-10T23:55:27Z

Mager: Considering this doubles the size of the article, it may not be "minor".

'''The Theory of Gravity''' is a [[physics]] theory concerned with [[gravitation]], and just like [[Evolution]], it is just a theory.
[[category:physics]]

Isaac Newton

2009-12-10T23:24:36Z

Mager: removed the hero worship.

[[Image:Newton.png|right|200px]]
'''Sir Isaac Newton''' (1643-1727) was a Englishman, [[physicist]], [[astronomer]], [[mathematician]], [[theologian]], [[alchemist]], and government official. He is one of the most well known [[scientist]]s in world history for his [[Theory of Universal Gravitation]], his Laws of Motion, and his theories in optics, as well as invention of [[calculus]].<ref>Newton's discovery of calculus was independent of, and likely before, a similar discovery of calculus by the German scientist [[Gottfried Leibniz]]. (Each accused the other of plagiarism, but neither could prove it. [http://scienceworld.wolfram.com/biography/Newton.html Newton Biography]).</ref> In addition, Newton invented the reflecting [[telescope]], and made numerous other contributions to his fields of study. His [[Classical mechanics]] comprises of the four main fields of modern physics (alongside the later fields of [[electricity]] and [[magnetism]], [[thermodynamics]], and quantum mechanics).

Newton attributed his insights to his efforts in translating the Bible: "Amongst the Interpreters of the last age there is scarce one of note who hath not made some discovery worth knowing; and thence seem to gather that God is about opening these mysteries."<ref>http://www.pretribulation.com/isaac-newton.htm</ref>

Newton's view of science was that far more remained undiscovered. "I do not know what I may appear to the world; but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me."<ref>[http://www.bartleby.com/100/195.1.html Bartlett's Quotations]</ref>

Newton rejected basing scientific theories on assumptions rather than observations. "Hypotheses non fingo," Newton famously declared, which is Latin for "I feign no hypotheses." This stands in contrast with the [[Theory of Relativity]] that is contrary to Newtonian physics.

In 1705, in recognition of Isaac Newton's role as master of the Mint, [[Queen Anne]] [[knighted]] him.<ref>Sir Isaac Newton (1642/3–1727): A Scientific Genius, by Ann Lamont[http://www.answersingenesis.org/creation/v12/i3/newton.asp]</ref> It was the first knighthood to be given for scientific achievement rather than prowess on the battlefield or work in government.<ref>Isaac Newton and God's Law of Gravity[http://www.doesgodexist.org/NovDec01/IsaacNewtonAndGodsLawOfGravity.html]</ref>

Newton is often seen as one of the most influential men in all of history and perhaps the greatest scientist ever. His work was influential in shaping the philosophical outlook of the entire [[Enlightenment]], especially after writers such as [[Voltaire]] published simplified versions comprehensible to the non-scientist.

==Life==
Newton was born on [[Christmas]] day December 25, 1642<ref> He was born a little more that a year after Galileo died. [[Italy]] and England used different calendars, however, so there is a mistake to the effect they died in the same year. Galileo died in 1641 by the English calendar.</ref> in Woolsthorpe, Lincolnshire; his father, also Isaac, died before his birth. The senior Isaac Newton (1606–1642) was a wealthy but illiterate farmer who left extensive lands as well as goods worth £459, including a flock of 235 sheep and a herd of 46 cattle. The annual income was about £150, and Newton drew on that income to supplement his college fellowship while at Cambridge. The Newtons were a well-to-do, upwardly mobile family of farmers, but never had a prominent member. When he was a little more than two years old, his mother Hannah (1610–1679), remarried, and his upbringing was taken over by his maternal grandmother. He began his schooling in neighboring villages, and, at ten, was sent to the grammar school at Grantham, the nearest town of any size. He boarded during terms at the house of an apothecary from whom he may have derived his lifelong interest in chemistry. The young Newton seems to have been a quiet, not particularly bookish, lad, but very ready with his hands; he made sun dials, model windmills, a water clock, a mechanical carriage, and flew kites with lanterns attached to their tails. Throughout his life he built mechanical devices and fashioned his own tools for high-precision work.

In 1656, Newton's mother, on the death of her second husband, returned to Woolsthorpe and took her son out of school with the idea of making him a farmer. He hated farming. His mother, after considerable persuasion by his teacher at Grantham, who had recognized his intellectual gifts, allowed him to prepare for entrance to [[Cambridge University]]. In June 1661, he was admitted to prestigious Trinity College as a lowly "sub-sizar" (a student required to do work-study). The main curriculum was the study of Aristotle, but early in 1664, as Newton's notebooks indicate, he began an intensive self-study of geometry, Copernican astronomy and optics. On his own he read Descartes, Pierre Gassendi, Galileo, Robert Boyle, Thomas Hobbes, Kenelm Digby, Joseph Glanville, and Henry More. He was a loner with only one friend, but he was stimulated by the distinguished mathematician and theologian Isaac Barrow, Lucasian Professor of Mathematics, who recognized Newton's genius and did all he could to foster it.

Newton took his bachelor's degree in January 1665 and was selected for a scholarship in 1664 and a fellowship in 1667. Upon taking his MA he became one of Trinity college's sixty fellows, with an income of £60, part of which came in the form of room and board. He had no duties at Trinity over the next 28 years; he did no teaching apart from a few lectures (to nearly empty halls) and tutoring an occasional student. At the urging of Isaac Barrow in 1669 he wrote out some of his findings, which circulated in manuscript. He invented the reflecting telescope, which caused a sensation in London in 1671 and his election to the Royal Society. Newton became Lucasian professor of mathematics in 1669 at £100 per annum. Added to his fellowship and family estate, Newton was well off. He spent most of his time with experiments in alchemy and speculations in Arian theology, which had no influence whatever at the time or later. Newton made enemies easily, with an almost paranoid style of [[disputation]]. Many scientists in the era were repeatedly charging each other with plagiarism, and sometimes hid their discoveries in code so that in future years they could decode the message and claim priority. In 1704 he published his great book on ''Opticks'', which had been mostly written three decades before.

After his death and burial, Newton was exhumed so he could be buried in a more prominent location in [[Westminster Abbey]]. During this exhumation process, it was discovered that Newton had large amounts of [[mercury (element) | mercury]] in his body, probably as a direct result of his [[alchemy|alchemical]] experiments. Exposure to large amounts of mercury may explain Newton’s eccentricity in his latter years, as well as his cause of death.<ref>Newton Biography[http://scienceworld.wolfram.com/biography/Newton.html]</ref>

==National affairs==
Publication in 1687 of the ''Principia'' made Newton one of the best known intellectual figures in Europe. At the same time Newton became a leader of the University against King [[James II]], who was promoting Catholicism there. When James was overthrown, Newton's political reputation soared. In 1694 he suffered an emotional breakdown and his intellectual productivity ended. In 1696 he left Cambridge for London, where he became Warden of the Royal Mint. The appointment was intended as an honorary sinecure for England's most famous intellectual, but Newton characteristically threw himself into a successful effort to reform the nation's coinage and crack down on counterfeiters. He became Master of the Mint in 1699; in 27 years as Master he averaged an income of about £1650 a year, one of the highest salaries in London. He was president of the Royal Society from 1703 to his death, turning that honorific position into an operational one that upgraded the Society's usefulness. In 1705 he became the first scientist in European history to be knighted.

Newton never married, but he brought his niece to London as his hostess and lived in upper class style.

==Year of great discovery==
The year 1666 is known as Newton's ''annus mirabilis'' (miraculous year--more precisely the two years 1665-1666), about twenty-four years of age. He later recalled, "For in those days I was in the prime of my age for invention & minded Mathematicks & Philosophy more than at any time since." (By "philosophy" he meant physics.)

===Calculus===
Newton broke ground with his innovative work founding the field of [[calculus]]. He had been motivated by the need for alternate ways to compute [[pi]]. He isolated a formulation of pi as the area under an [[arc]] of the unit circle; thus to calculate pi he would only have to compute this area. Whereas [[Pierre de Fermat]] had already worked out how to compute the areas under [[polynomial]] curves, Newton faced a curve given by a formula involving a [[square root]]. To solve this problem, he re-expressed the square root in terms of an infinite sum of polynomials--this was the motivating idea for his generalized binomial theorem. The standard binomial theorem gave an expansion for ''(x+y)n'' for any nonnegative [[integer]] ''n''. The resulting expression involves binomial [[coefficient]]s. Newton's work extended this theorem to all [[real]] values of ''n'', by using [[convergent]] [[infinite series]] and generalized binomial coefficients. Therefore, to compute the area under the arc, he simply had to use Fermat's theorem to compute the area under each of the polynomial terms of the infinite series and then add them together (proving along the way that this sum converges).

Proceeding from this method, Newton formulated the idea of [[integration]] -- a computation of the area under any curve by using infinite series of areas. He followed that with a method for [[differentiation]], and came upon the [[fundamental theorem of calculus]], which relates differentiation and integration. Having invented the calculus, he put aside mathematics for two years and turned to physics.

Although Newton had communicated his discoveries in the calculus privately, he did not publish anything formal about it until finally, in 1704, he published ''Opticks''. In the meantime the German mathematician [[Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz]] had developed his own very similar version of the calculus. Both mathematicians used similar ideas of infinitesimals to smooth out details of division by zero and other seeming mathematical obstacles.

Although Leibniz acknowledged that Newton was earlier, a nasty priority conflict broke out in the 1710s. Newton and his (mainly English) followers accused Leibniz of plagiarism, and the Germans retaliated in kind. The modern view is that both mathematicians discovered the calculus independently. The symbolism in modern use comes from Leibniz and 18th century French mathematicians.

===Optics===
While waiting out [[The Plague]] he began to investigate the nature of [[light]]. White light, according to the prevailing theories, was homogeneous. His first experiments with a [[prism]] provided the true explanation of color. Passing a beam of sunlight through a prism, he observed that the beam spread out into a colored band of light ([[spectrum]]) like a rainbow. While others had undoubtedly performed similar experiments, it was Newton who showed that the differences in color were caused by differing degrees of refrangibility. A ray of violet light, for example, when passed through a refracting medium, was refracted through a greater angle than a ray of red light. His conclusions, checked by ingenious experiments, were that sunlight was a combination of all the colors and that the colors themselves were monochromatic (his term was "homogeneal"), and separated merely because they were of differing refrangibility.

== Gravity ==
[[Image:Isaac Newton apple.JPG|right|230px]]
Newton developed the [[Theory of Universal Gravitation]], more commonly known as gravity, when, according to Newton himself, he was thinking about the moon and saw an apple fall one day. It fell straight down, and why was that? Then he had one of the most astonishing and brilliant thoughts in human history: the moon and the apple were just alike and both were being drawn straight toward the earth. What then kept the moon up there, or the four moons of Jupiter in their orbits? His theory stated that all matter is attracted to matter by a force, whose strength increases proportionally to the mass of the objects involved, and inversely proportional to the squared distance between them. The moons stayed in place because they had a momentum that offset gravity and forced them into elliptical orbits.

Newton's theory is based on action-at-a-distance which has always been opposed by some scientists, and now most physicists endorse the very different [[theory of relativity]]. Both theories predict identical results at small scales, similar results at the scale of the [[solar system]] and very different results at [[Cosmology|cosmological]] scales beyond the [[solar system]].

Newton had already made great progress in his devising "method of fluxions" (the infinitesimal calculus). During the plague years he recorded his first thoughts on gravitation, inspired by watching an apple fall. It fell straight down--why was that? He was trying at that time to determine what type of force could hold the moon in its path. The fall of the apple led him to think that it might be the same gravitational force, suitably diminished by distance, that had acted on the apple. Thereby he discovered the law of [[gravitation]] (attraction is proportional with inverse distance squared). He verified his conjecture approximately by a numerical calculation. He did not, at the time, pursue the matter, because the problem of calculating the combined attraction of the whole earth on a small body near its surface was obviously one of great difficulty.<ref> The problem was enormously simplified when he later used his calculus to prove that, for purposes of gravity, a uniform sphere of any size can be considered as a single mass located at one point, the center.</ref>

Newton struggled with how to conceptualize gravity. He had early rejected Descartes's vortex account of the cause of the motion of the planets. Descartes had argued that forces were transmitted through contact and that this required that matter be continuous and that hence there could be no vacuums. As early as 1665 Newton attempted to find a physical explanation of the cause of gravity but never found a suitable answer. As Newton said later in his ''Principia,'' "I have not as yet been able to deduce from phenomena the reason for these properties of gravity, and I do not feign hypotheses. For whatever is not deduced from the phenomena must be called hypothesis; and hypotheses, whether metaphysical or physical, or based on occult qualities, or mechanical, have no place in experimental philosophy". Thus Newton offers no explanation of gravity but shows through his mathematics that it "acts" in accordance to the mathematical laws he offers us in the ''Principia''. This was a difficult approach for his contemporaries to accept. [[Robert Hooke]], in particular, saw experimentation as the heart of science and disapproved of Newton's focus on theory and mathematics.

==Three laws==
See [[Classical mechanics]]

Later in life, as a holder of the Cambridge Lucasian chair of mathematics, Newton worked out his initial ideas into a set of mechanical laws, with his second and most important law: Force is mass times acceleration (<math>\scriptstyle F = m a~</math>). Newton was the first to understand the concept of inertial forces, notably the centrifugal force, although Christian Huyghens was close to understanding this effect. In 1684 Newton proved that [[Johannes Kepler|Kepler's laws]] follow from his own second law in conjunction with his gravitational law. This proof completed the astronomical revolution initiated by [[Nicolaus Copernicus]].

==Principia Mathematica==
Newton avoided publishing his results, preferring to communicate them to close colleagues. It took [[Edmond Halley]] great efforts to convince Newton to write his opus magnum ''Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica'' ("Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy" written in Latin, it was called the ''Principia'') that appeared in 1687. A second expanded edition appeared in 1713. It was a work on [[Classical mechanics|mechanics]] that used Newton's new principle of universal gravitation to explain falling bodies on the earth and the motions of planets and comets in the heavens. The first part covers dynamics and includes Newton’s three famous laws of motion. The second part concerns fluid motion; the third part deals with "the system of the world" ("De mundi systemate"), that is, the unification of terrestrial and celestial mechanics under the principle of gravitation and the explanation of Kepler’s laws of planetary motion. The material was very advanced and difficult, especially since the underlying calculus was deliberately hidden from view. Scientists across Europe immediately recognized its importance and tried to read it.

==Newtonianism==
Feingold (2004) explains the rapid dissemination of Newton's science came first via the members of the Royal Society, both British and Continental. The scientists, mathematicians, and philosophers of Germany, Holland, France, and Italy read the editions of the ''Principia'' and the ''Opticks'' and taught the ideas to their students. Newton's work was widely accepted, except in Italy, where the Catholic Church, having silenced Galileo, tried as well to suppress Newton's ideas. Despite the importance of Descartes to the French, Newton carried the day in France. [[Voltaire]] in particular made Newton the great hero of the modern world of ideas. Voltaire's ''Elemens de la philosophie de Neuton,'' (1737), was a success that rendered Newton intelligible and his work accessible, to the nonspecialists and amateurs who flourished in the [[Enlightenment]]. In Germany [[Leibniz]] praised Newton's ''Principia'', but was uncomfortable with Newton's position regarding gravity. It was philosophically untenable to merely dismiss the problem of its cause. French scientists, especially [[Pierre Simon Laplace]] (1749-1827) developed and systemized Newton's ideas into modern [[Classical mechanics]] in the late 18th century.<ref>Roger Hahn, ''Pierre Simon Laplace, 1749-1827: A Determined Scientist.'' (2005). 310 pp.</ref>

Newton's science dominated science and educated thought throughout the 18th century, being seen as the highest achievement of pure reason and classical culture.<ref>Feingold, ''The Newtonian Moment'' (2004); Larry Stewart, ''The Rise of Public Science: Rhetoric, Technology, and Natural Philosophy in Newtonian Britain, 1660-1750.'' (1992)</ref> In the 19th century, however, Romantic scientists went in entirely new directions, exploring non-Newtonian topics in electricity, magnetism and thermodynamics, and in mathematics turning to topics unrelated to calculus, like group theory. The leading German poet, [[Johann Wolfgang von Goethe]] - who was also a renowned Natural philosopher - even tried to challenge Newton's optics.

== Religious Beliefs ==
Newton was an [[Arian]] (Illegalized in Europe since the First Council of Nicaea) who rejected the Trinity and was ambiguous about the divinity of Christ. As his leading biographer concludes, "Well before 1675, Newton had become an Arian in the original sense of the term." That is, he emphasized the powers of God the father and deemphasized Jesus.<ref>Westfall, ''Never at Rest'' p. 103. Westfall notes, p. 350, "No evidence at all indicates that Newton ceased to be an Arian."</ref> He considered himself a [[Christian]] who accepted the [[Bible]] as the Word of [[God]],<ref>"I have a fundamental belief in the [[Bible]] as the Word of God, written by those who were inspired. I study the Bible daily." Tiner, J.H. (1975). Isaac Newton: Inventor, Scientist and Teacher. Milford, Michigan, U.S.: Mott Media.</ref> after the age of 25 he devoted much--perhaps most--of his thinking to religion. His unorthodox views violated the rules at Cambridge University, but his colleagues protected him. Newton wrote the book ''[http://books.google.com/books?id=cIoPAAAAQAAJ&pg=PA1&dq=%22An+Historical+Account+of+Two+Notable+Corruptions+of+Scripture%22#v=onepage&q=&f=false An Historical Account of Two Notable Corruptions of Scripture]'' and removed the parts of 1 John 5:7-8 and 1 Timothy 3:16 that do not appear in the earliest [[Koine Greek]] [[New Testament]] manuscripts. The first one is called the ''[[Johannine Comma]]'' in Latin. These passages in the KJV are (with the unoriginal parts added later in '''''red'''''):

:7 For there are three that bear record ['''''in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost: and these three are one. 8 And there are three that bear witness in earth,'''''] the Spirit, and the water, and the blood: and these three agree in one. (1 John 5:7-8)
:And without controversy great is the mystery of godliness: God ['''''was manifest in the flesh'''''], justified in the Spirit, seen of angels, preached unto the Gentiles, believed on in the world, received up into glory. (1 Timothy 3:16)

And in [[Koine Greek]]:

:7 ὅτι τρεῖς εἰσιν οἱ μαρτυροῦντες ['''''ἐν τῷ οὐρανῷ, ὁ Πατήρ, ὁ Λόγος, καὶ τὸ Ἅγιον Πνεῦμα· καὶ οὗτοι οἱ τρεῖς ἔν εἰσι. 8 καὶ τρεῖς εἰσιν οἱ μαρτυροῦντες ἐν τῇ γῇ'''''] τὸ πνεῦμα καὶ τὸ ὕδωρ καὶ τὸ αἷμα, καὶ οἱ τρεῖς εἰς τὸ ἕν εἰσιν. (1 John 5:7-8)
:και ομολογουμενως μεγα εστιν το της ευσεβειας μυστηριον θεος ['''''εφανερωθη εν σαρκι'''''] εδικαιωθη εν πνευματι ωφθη αγγελοις εκηρυχθη εν εθνεσιν επιστευθη εν κοσμω ανεληφθη εν δοξη. (1 Timothy 3:16)

Newton was a sincere religious believer, who said his discoveries were inspired by [[God]]. He devoted more time to the study of Scripture than to science. Newton wrote, "This most beautiful system of the sun, planets, and comets, could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent Being... All variety of created objects which represent order and life in the universe could happen only by the willful reasoning of its original Creator, Whom I call the Lord God."

Newton believed that God's creation of the universe was self evident given its grandeur.<ref>Webb, R.K. ed. Knud Haakonssen. “The emergence of Rational Dissent.” Enlightenment and Religion: Rational Dissent in eighteenth-century Britain. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge: 1996. p19.</ref> He also warned against using his laws to replace the creator. He said, "Gravity explains the motions of the planets, but it cannot explain who set the planets in motion. God governs all things and knows all that is or can be done."<ref>Tiner, J.H. (1975). Isaac Newton: Inventor, Scientist and Teacher. Milford, Michigan, U.S.: Mott Media.</ref>

Newton wrote over a million words on religion--nearly all in unpublished hand-written manuscripts and unavailable for research until the 20th century. Although older scholars did not have access to his writings, "Among contemporary scholars, the consensus is that Newton was an Arian," concludes Pfizenmaier (1997).<ref>Thomas C. Pfizenmaier, "Was Isaac Newton an Arian?," ''Journal of the History of Ideas,'' Vol. 58, No. 1 (Jan., 1997), pp. 57-80 [http://www.jstor.org/stable/3653988 in JSTOR]</ref> Arians were Christians but the Arian theology died out as an organized force a thousand years before; Newton read the old texts and identified himself with Arius and his beliefs.

In an effort to debunk widespread claims of his time that the world would be ending soon, Newton wrote a private manuscript estimating that the world would not end prior to the year A.D. 2060.<ref>http://www.isaac-newton.org/newton_2060.htm</ref>

==Reference==
<references/>
==Bibliography==
* Bardi, Jason Socrates. ''The Calculus Wars: Newton, Leibniz, and the Greatest Mathematical Clash of All Time.'' (2006). 277 pp. [http://www.amazon.com/Calculus-Wars-Leibniz-Greatest-Mathematical/dp/1560259922/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1196345258&sr=8-4 excerpt and text search]
* Bechler, Zev. ''Newton's Physics and the Conceptual Structure of the Scientific Revolution.'' (1991). 588 pp.
* Berlinski, David. ''Newton's Gift: How Sir Isaac Newton Unlocked the System of the World.'' (2000). 256 pp. [http://www.amazon.com/Newtons-Gift-Newton-Unlocked-System/dp/0743217764/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1196345336&sr=8-1 excerpt and text search]
* Buchwald, Jed Z. and Cohen, I. Bernard, eds. ''Isaac Newton's Natural Philosophy.'' MIT Press, 2001. 354 pp. [http://www.amazon.com/Newtons-Natural-Philosophy-Institute-Technology/dp/0262524252/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1196345369&sr=8-1 excerpt and text search]
* Casini, P. "Newton's Principia and the Philosophers of the Enlightenment." ''Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London'' 1988 42(1): 35-52. Issn: 0035-9149 Fulltext: [http://www.jstor.org/pss/531368 Jstor]
* Christianson, Gale E. ''Isaac Newton and the Scientific Revolution.'' Oxford U. Press, 1996. 160 pp. [http://www.amazon.com/Isaac-Newton-Lives-Legacies-Christianson/dp/019530070X/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1196337095&sr=1-2 excerpt and text search]
* Christianson, Gale E. ''In the Presence of the Creator: Isaac Newton and His Times.'' (1984). 608 pp.
* Cohen, I. Bernard and Smith, George E., ed. ''The Cambridge Companion to Newton.'' (2002). 500 pp. focuses on philosophical issues only; [http://www.amazon.com/Cambridge-Companion-Newton-Companions-Philosophy/dp/0521656966/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1196337095&sr=1-3 excerpt and text search]; [http://www.questia.com/read/105054986 complete edition online]
* Cohen, I. Bernard. ''The Newtonian Revolution with Illustrations of the Transformation of Scientific Ideas.'' Cambridge U. Press, 1981. 404 pp. [http://www.amazon.com/Newtonian-Revolution-I-Bernard-Cohen/dp/0521273803/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1196345406&sr=8-1 excerpt and text search]
* DeGandt, François. ''Force and Geometry in Newton's Principia.'' Princeton U. Press, 1995. 296 pp.
* Dobbs, Betty Jo Teeter. ''The Janus Faces of Genius: The Role of Alchemy in Newton's Thought.'' Cambridge U. Press, 1991. 359 pp.
* Fara, Patricia. ''Newton: The Making of a Genius.'' Columbia U. Press, 2003. 347 pp [http://www.amazon.com/Newton-Making-Genius-Patricia-Fara/dp/023112807X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1196345174&sr=8-1 excerpt and text search]
* Fauvel, John et al., ed. ''Let Newton Be!'' Oxford U. Press, (1989). 272 pp.
* Feingold, Mordechai. ''The Newtonian Moment: Isaac Newton and the Making of Modern Culture.'' (2004) 218 pp. catalog of exhibit at New York Public Library, 2004-5
* Force, James E. and Hutton, Sarah, ed. ''Newton and Newtonianism: New Studies.'' (2004). 246 pp. [http://www.amazon.com/Newton-Newtonianism-International-internationales-dhistoire/dp/1402019696/ref=sr_1_5?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1196345450&sr=8-5 excerpt and text search]
* Gjertsen, Derek. ''The Newton Handbook.'' (1987). 665 pp.
* Gleick, James. ''Isaac Newton.''(2003). 272 pp.
* Hall, A. Rupert. ''All Was Light: An Introduction to Newton's Opticks.'' Oxford U. Press, 1993. 252 pp.
* Hall, A. Rupert. ''Isaac Newton: Adventurer in Thought.'' (1992). 468 pp. [http://www.amazon.com/Isaac-Newton-Adventurer-Cambridge-Biographies/dp/052156669X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1196336989&sr=1-1 excerpt and text search]
* Hofmann, Joseph Ehrenfried. ''Classical Mathematics: A Concise History of the Classical Era in Mathematics.'' (1959) [http://www.questia.com/library/book/classical-mathematics-a-concise-history-of-the-classical-era-in-mathematics-by-joseph-ehrenfried-hofmann.jsp online edition]
* Hoskin, Michael. "Newton and Newtonianism" pp 130-67 in Hoskin, ed. ''The Cambridge Concise History of Astronomy'' (1999) [http://www.amazon.com/Cambridge-Concise-History-Astronomy/dp/0521576008/ref=si3_rdr_bb_product excerpt and text search]
* Kline, Morris. ''Mathematical Thought from Ancient to Modern Times''. Volume: 1. (1972).
* Mandelbrote, Scott. ''Footprints of the Lion: Isaac Newton at Work.'' Cambridge U. Press, (2001). 142 pp
* Olby, R.c. et al. ''Companion to the History of Modern Science.'' (1990) [http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=106933088 online edition], on the history of Newtonianism
* Park, Katharine, and Lorraine Daston, eds. ''The Cambridge History of Science, Volume 3: Early Modern Science'' (2006) [http://www.amazon.com/gp/reader/0521572444/ref=sib_dp_bod_toc?ie=UTF8&p=S008#reader-link excerpt and text search]
* Rankin, William. ''Introducing Newton'' (3rd ed. 2007) [http://www.amazon.com/Introducing-Newton-Introducing-William-Rankin/dp/1840468424/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1196345513&sr=1-2 excerpt and text search]
* Sepper, Dennis L. ''Newton's Optical Writings: A Guided Study.'' Rutgers U. Press, 1994. 224 pp. [http://www.amazon.com/Newtons-Optical-Writings-Masterworks-Discovery/dp/081352038X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1196337057&sr=1-1 excerpt and text search]
* Shapiro, Alan E. ''Fits, Passions, and Paroxysms: Physics, Method, and Chemistry and Newton's Theories of Colored Bodies and Fits of Easy Reflection.'' Cambridge U. Press, (1993). 400 pp.
* Thrower, Norman J. W., ed. ''Standing on the Shoulders of Giants: A Longer View of Newton and Halley: Essays Commemorating the Tercentenary of Newton's Principia and the 1985-1986 Return of Comet Halley.'' U. of California Press, 1990. 429 pp.
* Westfall, Richard S. ''Never at Rest: A Biography of Isaac Newton.'' 2 vol. Cambridge U. Press, 1981. 895 pp. the major scholarly biography [http://www.amazon.com/Never-Rest-Biography-Cambridge-Paperback/dp/0521274354/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1196337354&sr=1-1 excerpt and text search]
** Westfall, Richard S. ''The Life of Isaac Newton.'' Cambridge U. Press, (1993). 328 pp., short version [http://www.amazon.com/Life-Isaac-Newton-Canto-original/dp/0521477379/ref=sip_rech_dp_10 excerpt and text search]
* Westfall, Richard S. "Newton, Sir Isaac (1642–1727)", ''Oxford Dictionary of National Biography'' (2004); online edition
* White, Michael. ''Isaac Newton: The Last Sorcerer.'' (1998). 416 pp. Newton as alchemist [http://www.questia.com/read/9931462 online edition]
===Newton and religion===
* Dobbs, Betty Jo Tetter. ''The Janus Faces of Genius: The Role of Alchemy in Newton's Thought.'' (1991), links the alchemy to Arianism
* Force, James E., and Richard H. Popkin, eds. ''Newton and Religion: Context, Nature, and Influence.'' (1999), 342pp . Pp. xvii + 325. 13 papers by scholars using newly opened manuscripts
* Ramati, Ayval. "The Hidden Truth of Creation: Newton's Method of Fluxions" ''British Journal for the History of Science'' 34: 417-438. [http://www.jstor.org/stable/4028372 in JSTOR], argues that his calculus had a theological basis
* Snobelen, Stephen D. "'God of Gods, and Lord of Lords': The Theology of Isaac Newton's General Scholium to the Principia," ''Osiris,'' 2nd Series, Vol. 16, (2001), pp. 169-208 [http://www.jstor.org/stable/301985 in JSTOR]
* Snobelen, Stephen D. "Isaac Newton, Heretic: The Strategies of a Nicodemite," ''British Journal for the History of Science'' 32: 381-419. [http://www.jstor.org/stable/4027945 in JSTOR]
* Pfizenmaier, Thomas C. "Was Isaac Newton an Arian?," ''Journal of the History of Ideas,'' Vol. 58, No. 1 (Jan., 1997), pp. 57-80 [http://www.jstor.org/stable/3653988 in JSTOR]
* Westfall, Richard S. ''Never at Rest: A Biography of Isaac Newton.'' 2 vol. Cambridge U. Press, 1981. 895 pp. the major scholarly biography [http://www.amazon.com/Never-Rest-Biography-Cambridge-Paperback/dp/0521274354/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1196337354&sr=1-1 excerpt and text search]
* Wiles, Maurice. ''Archetypal Heresy. Arianism through the Centuries.'' (1996) 214pp, with chapter 4 on 18th century England; pp 77-93 on Newton [http://www.amazon.com/Archetypal-Heresy-Arianism-through-Centuries/dp/0199245916/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1221655973&sr=8-1 excerpt and text search],

===Primary sources===
* Newton, Isaac. ''The Principia: Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy.'' U. of California Press, (1999). 974 pp.
* Newton, Isaac. ''The Optical Papers of Isaac Newton. Vol. 1: The Optical Lectures, 1670-1672.'' Cambridge U. Press, 1984. 627 pp.
* Newton, Isaac. ''Opticks'' (4th ed. 1730) [http://books.google.com/books?id=GnAFAAAAQAAJ&dq=newton+opticks&pg=PP1&ots=Nnl345oqo_&sig=0mBTaXUI_K6w-JDEu_RvVq5TNqc&prev=http://www.google.com/search?q=newton+opticks&rls=com.microsoft:en-us:IE-SearchBox&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&sourceid=ie7&rlz=1I7GGLJ&sa=X&oi=print&ct=title&cad=one-book-with-thumbnail online edition]
* Newton, Isaac. ''The Mathematical Papers of Isaac Newton,'' 8 vols. (Cambridge University Press, 1967–81).
* Newton, Isaac. ''The correspondence of Isaac Newton,'' ed. H. W. Turnbull and others, 7 vols. (1959–77).
* Brackenridge, J. Bruce. ''The Key to Newton's Dynamics: The Kepler Problem and the Principia: Containing an English Translation of Sections 1, 2, and 3 of Book One from the First (1687) Edition of Newton's Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy.'' U. of California Press, 1996. 299 pp.
* ''Newton's Philosophy of Nature: Selections from His Writings'' edited by H. S. Thayer, (1953), [http://www.questia.com/read/5876270 online edition]

==External Links==
*[http://www.relativitycalculator.com/Newton_Axioms.shtml Isaac Newton's Laws of Motion]
*[http://www.college-optometrists.org/index.aspx/pcms/site.college.What_We_Do.museyeum.online_exhibitions.observatory.newton/ Newton & the Colour of Light]

====Notes====
<references/>

{{DEFAULTSORT:Newton, Isaac}}
[[Category:Physicists]]
[[Category:Astronomers]]
[[Category:Mathematicians]]
[[Category:Calculus]]
[[Category:Christians]]
[[Category:Enlightenment]]

Theory of relativity

2009-12-10T23:21:01Z

Mager: fixed sentence fragment.

''See also [[Counterexamples to Relativity]].''

'''Relativity''' refers to two closely-related mathematical theories in [[physics]]:

*'''[[Special theory of relativity|Special relativity]]''' (SR) is a theory which describes the laws of motion for non-accelerating bodies traveling at a significant fraction of the [[speed of light]]. As speeds approach zero, Special Relativity tends towards equivalence with [[Newton's Laws of Motion]]. Special Relativity was developed by [[Hendrik Lorentz]], [[Henri Poincaré]], and Hermann Minkowski<ref>"German mathematician who developed the geometrical theory of numbers and who made numerous contributions to number theory, mathematical physics, and the theory of relativity." [http://www.britannica.com/eb/article-9052860/Hermann-Minkowski Hermann Minkowski -- Britannica Online Encyclopedia]</ref><ref>[http://www-groups.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/Biographies/Minkowski.html Hermann Minkowski, Biography]</ref>, and [[Albert Einstein]].

*'''[[General theory of relativity|General Relativity]]''' (GR) is a theory which explains the laws of motion as viewed from accelerating reference frames and includes a geometric explanation for gravity. This theory was developed by [[David Hilbert]] and [[Albert Einstein]] as an extension of the postulates of Special Relativity.<ref>"[T]he German mathematician David Hilbert submitted an article containing the correct field equations for general relativity five days before Einstein."[http://nobelprize.org/educational_games/physics/relativity/history-1.html Nobel Prize historical account]</ref> A dramatic but later discredited claim by Sir [[Arthur Eddington]] of experimental proof of General Relativity in 1919 made Einstein a household name.

Unlike most of physics, the theories of relativity have discontinuities whereby the limit of a physical quantity as a variable (such as mass or velocity) approaches a fixed value is not the same as the physical quantity at the fixed value. For example, the limit of momentum as mass approaches 0 and velocity approaches the speed of light is not equal to the momentum of (massless) light.<ref>Discontinuities in General Relativity are also well-recognized. See, e.g., [http://www.springerlink.com/content/u47l341u2q555455/]</ref>

More generally, and also unlike most of physics, the theories of relativity consist of complex mathematical equations relying on several hypotheses. For example, at Hofstra University general relativity is taught as part of an upperclass math course on differential geometry, based on three stated assumptions.<ref>http://people.hofstra.edu/Stefan_Waner/diff_geom/tc.html</ref> The equations for special relativity assume that it is forever impossible to attain a velocity faster than the speed of light and that all inertial frames of reference are equivalent, hypotheses that can never be fully tested. Relativity rejects Newton's [[action at a distance]], which is basic to Newtonian gravity and [[quantum mechanics]]. The mathematics of relativity assume no exceptions, yet in the time period immediately following the origin of the universe the relativity equations could not possibly have been valid.

Relativity has been met with much resistance in the scientific world. To date, a Nobel Prize has never been awarded for relativity. Louis Essen, the man credited with determining the speed of light, wrote many fiery papers against it such as ''The Special Theory of Relativity: A Critical Analysis''.<ref>http://ephysics.fileave.com/physics/Essen/oxford5-essen.pdf</ref> Relativity also gravely conflicts with [[quantum mechanics]], and although theories like [[string theory]] and [[quantum field theory]] have attempted to unify relativity and quantum mechanics, neither has been entirely successful or proven.

Unlike [[Newton]]ian physics, in which space and time intervals are each invariant as seen by all observers, in SR the only invariant quantity is a quadratic combination of space and time intervals (x2 - c2 t2). The (assumed) instantaneous transmission of [[Newton]]ian gravitational effects also contradicts special relativity.

In quantum mechanics, the [[uncertainty principle]] suggests that virtual particles can sometimes travel faster than the speed of light which would violate causality, but "[t]he only known way to resolve this tension involves introducing the idea of antiparticles."<ref>http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/2004/wilczek-lecture.pdf (p. 102)</ref> Consequently, in 1928 Paul Dirac derived the Dirac equation, one of the first quantum mechanical equations compatible with special relativity, by which Dirac predicted the existence of antimatter. Four years later, antimatter (the positron) was discovered by Carl Anderson, as successfully predicted by relativistic quantum mechanics. [[Quantum field theory]], a generalization of quantum mechanics, is fully compatible with special relativity but not with general relativity, and still lacks a vital piece: evidence of the [[graviton]].

== Special Relativity ==
Lorentz and Poincare developed Special Relativity as way of understanding how Maxwell's equations for electromagnetism could be valid in different frames of reference. Einstein famously published an explanation of Poincare's theory in terms of two assumptions (postulates):

# ''The [[speed of light]] is constant for all (inertial) observers, regardless of their velocities relative to each other.''
# ''The laws of physics are identical in all inertial reference frames.''

In layman's terms, these two assumptions can be restated as:
# It is impossible ever to transmit information faster than the speed of light.<ref>This assumption is commonly restated in this manner. For example, a discussion of hypothetical [[tachyons]] talks "about using tachyons to transmit information faster than the speed of light, '''in violation of Special Relativity'''."[http://www.math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/ParticleAndNuclear/tachyons.html] However, there is some question whether the Theory of Special Relativity really restricts faster-than-light communication of information.</ref>
# The laws of physics are identical, without any variation, in every location throughout the universe.
# The laws of physics are identical, without any variation, no matter how fast something is traveling (in the absence of acceleration).

Or, in more concise, clearer terms, these assumptions are this:

#there is no [[action at a distance]] (because that would make observations dependent on the frame of reference)
#space and time are completely symmetric throughout the universe (because otherwise frames of reference would not be interchangeable)

When the assumptions are stated clearly as above, the weaknesses in the theory are more apparent. There ''is'' action at a distance in [[quantum entanglement]] and apparently also in gravity, as no gravitons can be found. However, no information has yet been transmitted via quantum entanglement, so while non-locality violates the spirit of relativity it is consistent with it if relativity is limited to the transmission of information. [[Quantum field theory]], an attempt to partially reconcile [[quantum mechanics]] with relativity, is incomplete at best. As to the second assumption, it is contrary to the [[arrow of time]], which illustrates the lack of symmetry in time. Logical defects include the incoherence of relativistic mass (see discussion below) and the lack of relativistic constraints near the beginning the universe (see above).

Special Relativity (SR) was initially developed by [[Henri Poincaré]] and [[Hendrik Lorentz]], working on problems in electrodynamics and the [[Michelson-Morley experiment]], which had not found any sign of [[aether (science)|luminiferous aether]], which was believed to be the substance which carried electromagnetic waves. Special relativity alters [[Isaac Newton]]'s laws of motion by assuming that the speed of light will be the same for all observers, despite their relative velocities and the source of the light. (Therefore, if A sends a beam of light to B, and both measure the speed, it will be the same for both, no matter what the relative velocity of A and B. In Newtonian/Galilean mechanics, If A sends a physical object at a particular velocity towards B, and nothing slows it, the velocity of the object relative to B depends on the velocities of the object and of B relative to A.)

At low speeds (relative to light-speed), the Lorentz-Poincare relativity equations are equivalent to Newton's equations. The famous equation ''E=mc2'', describes the relationship between energy and the rest mass of a body.

Under relativity, particles at low mass and low speed can be accurately approximated by [[classical mechanics]] (such as [[Isaac Newton]]'s laws of motion). At the two extremes, modeling the behavior of electrons requires that relativistic effects be taken into account (the chemically significant phenomenon of electron spin arises from relativity), and the course light passing through a region containing many massive bodies such as galaxies will be distorted ([[classical mechanics]], in which light travels in straight lines, does not predict this). These are both experimentally confirmed (electron spin was known before relativity arose, and telescopic observations confirm that galactic clusters distort the paths of the light passing through them).

== General Relativity ==

General Relativity is a theory of gravity that is compatible with Special Relativity. Einstein explains a thought experiment involving two elevators. The first elevator is stationary on the Earth, while the other is being pulled through space at a constant acceleration of g. Einstein realized that any physical experiment carried out in the elevators would give the same result. This realization is known as the equivalence principle and it states that accelerating frames of reference and gravitational fields are indistinguishable. General Relativity is the theory of gravity that incorporates Special Relativity and the equivalence principle.

General Relativity is a mathematical extension of Special Relativity. GR views space-time as a 4-dimensional [[manifold]], which looks locally like [[Minkowski space]], and which acquires [[curvature]] due to the presence of massive bodies. Thus, near massive bodies, the geometry of space-time differs to a large degree from [[Euclidean geometry]]: for example, the sum of the angles in a triangle is not exactly 180 degrees. Just as in classical physics, objects travel along [[geodesic]]s in the absence of external forces. Importantly though, near a massive body, geodesics are no longer straight lines. It is this phenomenon of objects traveling along geodesics in a curved spacetime that accounts for gravity.

General relativity provides one explanation for the seemingly anomalous precession of Mercury's perihelion. There are other explanations based in Newtonian gravity, such as factoring in the pull of the other planets on Mercury's orbit. One Newtonian explanation requires a slight alternation to the precise inverse-square relation of Newtonian gravity to distance, which is disfavored by mathematicians due to its inelegance in integrating.

British Historian Paul Johnson declares the turning point in 20th century to have been when fellow Briton Sir [[Arthur Eddington]], an esteemed English astronomer, ventured out on a boat off Africa in 1919 with a local Army unit to observe the bending of starlight around the sun during a total eclipse. Upon his return to England declared that his observations proven the theory of relativity. In fact recent analysis of Eddington's work revealed that he was biased in selecting his data, and that overall his data were inconclusive about the theory of relativity. The prediction was later confirmed by more rigorous experiments, such as those performed by the [[Hubble Space Telescope]] <ref>[http://www.spaceimages.com/gravlen.html Hubble Gravitational Lens Photo]</ref><ref> [http://csep10.phys.utk.edu/astr162/lect/galaxies/lensing.html Gravitational Lensing] </ref><ref>[http://www.iam.ubc.ca/~newbury/lenses/glgallery.html]</ref>. Lorentz has this to say on the discrepancies between the empirical eclipse data and Einstein's predictions.

::''It indeed seems that the discrepancies may be ascribed to faults in observations, which supposition is supported by the fact that the observations at Prince's Island, which, it is true, did not turn out quite as well as those mentioned above, gave the result, of 1.64, somewhat lower than Einstein's figure.''<ref>Lorentz, H.A. [http://ia331314.us.archive.org/2/items/theeinsteintheor11335gut/11335-h/11335-h.htm The Einstein Theory of Relativity]</ref>

The prediction that light is bent by gravity is predicted both by Newtonian physics and relativity, but relativity predicts a larger deflection.

Special relativity is the limiting case of general relativity where all gravitational fields are weak. Alternatively, special relativity is the limiting case of general relativity when all reference frames are inertial (non-accelerating and without gravity).

==Lack of evidence for Relativity==
The Theory of relativity assumes that time is symmetric just as space is, but the biggest early promoter of relativity, Arthur Eddington, coined the term "[[arrow of time]]" admitting how time is ''not'' symmetric but is directional. The passage of time is tied to an increase in disorder, or [[entropy]]. The Theory of relativity cannot explain this, and implicitly denies it, specifically allowing for theoretical time travel (e.g., [[wormholes]]) and different rates of passage of time based on velocity and acceleration.

Claims that relativity was used to develop the [[Global Positioning System]] ([[GPS]]) are false. A 1996 article explains:

:"The Operational Control System (OCS) of the Global Positioning System (GPS) does not include the rigorous transformations between coordinate systems that Einstein's general theory of relativity would seem to require - transformations to and from the individual space vehicles (SVs), the Monitor Stations (MSs), and the users on the surface of the rotating earth, and the geocentric Earth Centered Inertial System (ECI) in which the SV orbits are calculated. There is a very good reason for the omission: the effects of relativity, where they are different from the effects predicted by classical mechanics and electromagnetic theory, are too small to matter - less than one centimeter, for users on or near the earth."<ref>http://tycho.usno.navy.mil/ptti/1996/Vol%2028_16.pdf</ref><ref>Some do claim that relativity is "vital" to GPS even though GPS developed independently of theoretical predictions and theoreticians disagree about how the relativistic effects for GPS should be calculated. ''See id. See also'' [http://www.rand.org/pubs/monograph_reports/MR614/MR614.appb.pdf]</ref>

This article, which was published in 1996, goes on to propose relativistic corrections that might be used to design more accurate GPS systems. Clocks on board GPS satellites require adjustments to their clock frequencies if they are to be synchronized with those on the surface of the Earth.

Tom Van Flandern, an astronomer hired to work on GPS in the late 1990s, concluded that "[t]he GPS programmers don't need relativity." He was quoted as saying that the GPS programmers "have basically blown off Einstein."<ref>http://archive.salon.com/people/feature/2000/07/06/einstein/index.html See also [http://www.metaresearch.org/solar%20system/gps/absolute-gps-1meter-3.ASP], where Van Flandern discusses how relativistic corrections might improve GPS accuracy.</ref> Asynchronization can be easily addressed through communications between the satellites and ground stations, so it is unclear why any theory would be needed for GPS. But other obscure physicists having no connection with GPS design claim that Van Flandern is wrong about GPS, and insist that relativity provides the best explanation for its timing adjustments.<ref>''Ibid.''</ref>

Some internet articles claim that GPS timing differences ''confirm'' the Theory of Relativity or its Lorentzian counterpart (which uses a preferred frame of reference). GPS clocks run slower in the weaker gravitation field of the satellites than on ground stations on Earth, with the effects predicted by general relativity far outweighing the effects predicted by special relativity. However, the articles claiming that the slower GPS satellite clocks confirm relativity do not address the effect, if any, of the weaker gravitational force under Newton's theory on the GPS satellite clocks.

Currently, GPS satellites are synchronized to Coordinated Universal Time by radio signals from the ground; therefore, they cannot currently be used to test general relativity.<ref>[http://www.phys.lsu.edu/mog/mog9/node9.html "General Relativity in the Global Positioning System."] Neil Ashby, U. of Colorado</ref>

[[Image:Cassini-science-289.jpg|right|thumb|signal dipping into a gravity well around the [[sun]]]]
There are claims that the effects of relativity have been observed with the frequency shift of the signal being sent back to [[Earth]] several times as various spacecraft have dipped into the gravity wells around massive objects such as the [[sun]] (see image at right)<ref>[http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/news/press-releases-03/20031002-pr-a.cfm Saturn-Bound Spacecraft Tests Einstein's Theory]</ref> or Saturn<ref>[http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg12517102.600-science-encounter-with-saturn-confirms-relativity-theory.html Encounter with Saturn confirms relativity theory]</ref>. A satellite called [[Gravity Probe B]] was put in orbit about the Earth to examine the effects of frame dragging and geodetic warping of space<ref>[http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/gpb/index.html NASA Gravity Probe B mission page]</ref><ref>[http://einstein.stanford.edu/ Gravity Probe B project page]</ref>, but the results were inconclusive. Note, however, that Newtonian mechanics also predicts deflection of light by gravity, and in the initial theory of relativity it predicted the same amount of deflection.<ref>http://www.mathpages.com/rr/s6-03/6-03.htm</ref> Adjustments to the theory of relativity resulted in a prediction of a greater deflection of light than that predicated by Newtonian mechanics, though it is debatable how much deflection Newtonian mechanics should predict.

None of the NASA spacecraft incorporates predictions of relativity into their own timing mechanisms, as Newtonian mechanics is adequate even for probes sent deep into space.<ref>There is no reported reliance on relativity by any space probe.</ref>

A decade of observation of the [[pulsar]] pair [[PSR 1913 16|PSR B1913+16]] detected a decline in its orbital period, which was attributed to a loss in energy by the system. It is impossible to measure the masses of the pulsars, their accelerations relative to the observers, or other fundamental parameters. Professors Joseph Taylor and Russell Hulse, who discovered the binary pulsar, found that physical values could be assigned to the pulsars to make the observed decline in orbital period consistent with the Theory of General Relativity, and for this they were awarded the 1993 [[Nobel Prize]] for Physics, which is the only award ever given by the Nobel committee for the Theory of Relativity.<ref>http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/1993/press.html</ref> In 2004, Professor Taylor utilized a correction to the derivative of the orbital period to fit subsequent data better to the theory. At most, assumptions can be made and altered to fit the data to the theory, rather than the data confirming the theory.

The [[perihelion]] of Mercury's [[orbit]] [[precession|precesses]] at a measurable rate, but even after accounting for gravitational perturbations caused all other planets in the [[solar system]], Newton's theory (assuming a precise inverse-square relationship for distance) predicts a rate of precession that differs from the measured rate by approximately 43 [[arcsecond]]s per century. General relativity was developed in part to provide an estimate for this rate of precession that better matches observations.<ref>http://physics.ucr.edu/~wudka/Physics7/Notes_www/node98.html#SECTION032121000000000000000</ref> <ref> http://www.alberteinstein.info/gallery/pdf/CP6Doc30_English_pp146-200.pdf</ref> <ref> http://farside.ph.utexas.edu/teaching/336k/lectures/node117.html</ref> Newton's theory can also explain this perihelion by factoring in the gravitational pull due to other planets or making tiny adjustments to parameters in the gravitational equation.

General relativity predicts twice as much bending in light as it passes near massive objects than Newton's theory might predict.<ref>http://www.mathpages.com/rr/s6-03/6-03.htm</ref> This phenomenon is known as [[gravitational lens|gravitational lensing]]. A large number of instances of gravitational lensing have been observed, and it is now a standard astronomical tool.<ref> http://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/features/news/grav_lens.html</ref> <ref> http://astro.berkeley.edu/~jcohn/lens.html</ref> <ref> http://www.iam.ubc.ca/~newbury/lenses/glgallery.html</ref> Note, however, that the extent of bending of light predicted by Newton's theory is open to debate, and depends on assumptions about the nature of light for gravitational purposes.<ref>http://cosmictimes.gsfc.nasa.gov/1919/guide/gravity_bends_starlight.html</ref>

In 1972, scientists flew extremely accurate clocks ("atomic clocks") around the world in both directions on commercial airlines, and claimed to observe relativistic time dilation; the eastbound clock gained 273 ns and the westbound clock lost 59 ns, matching the predictions of general relativity to within experimental accuracy.<ref>[http://www.answers.com/topic/hafele-keating-experiment Hafele-Keating Experiment]</ref> However, the inventor of the atomic clock, Louis Essen, declared that the experiment was inaccurate.<ref>Louis Essen, Electron. Wireless World 94 (1988) 238.</ref> Dr A. G. Kelly examined the raw data from the experiment and declared it inconclusive.<ref>A. G. Kelly,Reliability of Relativistic Effect Tests on Airborne Clocks, Monograph No.3 Feb.1996, The Institution of Engineers of Ireland, ISBN 1-898012-22-9</ref> The Nobel Committee chose not to honor this experiment for the significance that was claimed.

Despite [[censorship]] of dissent about relativity, evidence contrary to the theory is discussed outside of [[liberal]] universities.<ref>http://scitizen.com/screens/blogPage/viewBlog/sw_viewBlog.php?idTheme=8&idContribution=922</ref>

==Predicted consequences of the Theories==
===Time dilation===

[[Image:Light cone.png|right|thumb|Light-cone diagram]]
One important consequence of SR's postulates is that an observer in one reference frame will observe a clock in another frame to be "ticking" more slowly than in the observer's own frame. This can be proven mathematically using basic geometry, if the postulates are physically true without exception.

The length of an event <math>t</math>, as seen by a (relative) stationary observer observing an event is given by:

<math> t = \frac{t_{0}} {\sqrt{1 - \frac{v^{2}}{c^{2}}}}</math>

Where
:<math>t_0</math> is the "proper time" or the length of the event in the observed frame of reference.
:<math>v</math> is the relative velocity between the reference frames.
:<math>c</math> is the speed of light (3x108 ms-1).

Evidence for time dilation was discovered by studying [[muon decay]]. [[Muons]] are [[subatomic]] [[particles]] with a very short [[halflife]] (1.53 microseconds at rest) and a very fast speed (0.994c). By putting muon detectors at the top (D1) and bottom (D2) of a mountain with a separation of 1900m, scientists could measure accurately the proportion of muons reaching the second detector in comparison to the first. The proportion found was different to the proportion that was calculated without taking into account relativistic effects.

Using the equation for [[exponential decay]], they could use this proportion to calculate the time taken for the muons to decay, relative to the muon. Then, using the time dilation equation they could then work out the dilated time. The dilated time showed a good correlation with the time it took the muons to reach the second sensor, thereby supporting the existence of time dilation.

The time taken for a muon to travel from D1 to D2 as measured by a stationary observer is:

<math> t = \frac{s}{v} = \frac{1900}{0.994\times(3\times10^{8})} = 6.37\mu\textrm{s} </math>

The fraction of muons arriving at D2 in comparison to D1 was 0.732. (Given by <math> \frac{N}{N_0} = 0.732 </math>)

Since (from the equation for exponential decay) <math> \frac{N}{N_{0}} = e^{-\lambda t_{0}} </math> then

<math> t_{0} = \frac {ln(0.732)}{ln (0.2)} \times 1.53\times 10^{-6} = 0.689\mu\textrm{s}</math>

This gives the time for the proportion of decay to occur for an observer who is stationary, relative to the muon.

Putting this into the time dilation equation gives:

<math> t = \frac{t_{0}}{\sqrt{1 - \frac{v^{2}}{c^{2}}}} = \frac{0.689 \times{10^{-6}}}{\sqrt{1 - \frac{0.994^{2}}{1^{2}}}} = 6.3\times 10^{-6}\textrm{s}</math>

This is in good agreement with the value calculated above, thereby providing evidence to support time dilation.

====Time Dilation and Creation Science====

{{main|Starlight problem#Humphreys.27_model}}

Creation scientists such as physicists Dr. [[Russell Humphreys]] and Dr. [[John Hartnett]] have used relativistic time dilation to explain how the earth can be only 6,000 years old even though cosmological data (background radiation, supernovae, etc.) set a much older age for the universe.

===Length contraction===
When two inertial reference frames move past each other in a straight line with constant relative velocity, an observer in one reference frame would observe a metre rule in the other frame to be shorter.

The length, <math>l</math>, of an object as seen by a (relative) stationary observer is given by:

<math> l = l_{0} \sqrt{1- \frac{v^{2}}{c^{2}}}</math>

Where
:<math>l_0</math> is the "proper length" or the length of the object in the observed frame of reference.
:<math>v</math> is the relative velocity between the reference frames.
:<math>c</math> is the speed of light (3x108 ms-1).

===Mass increase===

For decades the theory of relativity taught that as a body moves with increasing velocity its [[mass]] also increases.<ref>For example, this was taught as recently as in the 1991 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica.</ref>

Under this view, the mass, <math>m</math>, of an object as detected by a (relative) stationary observer is given by:

:<math> m = \frac{m_{0}} {\sqrt{1 - \frac{v^{2}}{c^{2}}}}</math>

Where
:<math>m_0</math> is the "rest mass" or the mass of the object when it is at rest.
:<math>v</math> is the relative velocity of the object.
:<math>c</math> is the speed of light (3x108 ms-1).

Since speed is relative, it follows that two observers in different inertial reference frames may disagree on the mass and kinetic energy of a body. Since all inertial reference frames are treated on an equal footing, it follows that mass and energy are interchangeable.

In recent years most physicists have shifted away from Einstein's original reliance on relativistic mass and his suggestion that mass increases. Instead, most physicists today teach that

:<math>F=\frac{d}{d\tau} p</math>

where <math>p</math> is the momentum defined by <math>\gamma m v</math>, <math>\gamma</math> is the standard Lorentz factor, and <math>\tau</math> is the proper time. Force F defined this way is a vector and thus can handle the directional aspect of the relativistic effects better than the concept of relativistic mass can.

The abandonment by physicists of the concept of relativistic mass, however, has the consequence of undermining the traditional claim under relativity that

:<math>m - m_0 = \frac{E}{c^2}</math>

also popularly known as

:<math>E = m c^2</math>

Now a concept of the 4-momentum <math>p</math> of a particle is taught, such that the square of the magnitude of <math>p</math> satisfies:

<math>||p||^2 = -p_x^2-p_y^2-p_z^2+E^2 = m_0^2c^4</math>

in any inertial reference frame. The magnitude of the 4-momentum, in any inertial frame, equals the rest mass <math>m_0</math> of the particle (in units where <math>c=1</math>).

== Variable Speed of Light ==

The Theory of Relativity implies that physical constants like the speed of light have remained constant. But at least one study suggests that physical constants, and possibly even the speed of light, have changed as the universe has aged.<ref>James Glanz and Dennis Overbye, "Cosmic Laws Like Speed of Light Might Be Changing, a Study Finds," August 15, 2001.[http://www.nytimes.com/2001/08/15/science/15PHYS.html?ex=1185076800&en=d6467b6e3e346796&ei=5070]</ref>

"For the first time, scientists have experimentally demonstrated that sound pulses can travel at velocities faster than the speed of light, c. William Robertson's team from Middle Tennessee State University also showed that the group velocity of sound waves can become infinite, and even negative. ... Although such results may at first appear to violate special relativity (Einstein's law that no material object can exceed the speed of light), the actual significance of these experiments is a little different. These types of superluminal phenomena, Robertson et al. explain, violate neither causality nor special relativity, nor do they enable information to travel faster than c. In fact, theoretical work had predicted that the superluminal speed of the group velocity of sound waves should exist. 'The key to understanding this seeming paradox is that no wave energy exceeded the speed of light,' said Robertson."<ref>http://www.physorg.com/news88249076.html</ref>

"A team of researchers from the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) has successfully demonstrated, for the first time, that it is possible to control the speed of light – both slowing it down and speeding it up – in an optical fiber, using off-the-shelf instrumentation in normal environmental conditions. Their results, to be published in the August 22 issue of Applied Physics Letters, could have implications that range from optical [[computing]] to the fiber-optic telecommunications industry."<ref>http://www.scienceblog.com/light.html</ref> Both slowing down and speeding up of light within a substance other than a vacuum is made possible, because the light travels through the material, and that material affects the speed of light, i.e. a photon hits an electron, which then exits and emits a slightly lower energy photon out in the direction that the original photon was traveling, thus maintaining conservation of momentum. No matter how transparent an object may appear, it radically impacts the speed of the light traveling through it, as demonstrated by the refractive production of a rainbow by a crystal, which Newton himself discovered.

"A pair of German physicists claim to have broken the speed of light - an achievement that would undermine our entire understanding of space and time. ... Dr Nimtz told New Scientist magazine: 'For the time being, this is the only violation of special relativity that I know of.'"<ref>http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/main.jhtml?xml=/earth/2007/08/16/scispeed116.xml</ref>

==Pending research==

Today some physicists are working on hypothesizing how general relativity might have related to the other three forces of nature during the first fraction of a second of the [[Big Bang]]. Two of the more commonly studied attempts are [[string theory]] and [[loop quantum gravity]], but they have failed to produce any evidence that science mandates a science must have, and both typically take large amounts of work to even conform to what scientists believe. Critics increasingly point out that string theory and loop quantum gravity are largely untestable and unfalsifiable, and thus potentially unscientific under the principles of science advanced by [[Karl Popper]].<ref>See, for example, ''Not Even Wrong'', by Peter Woit</ref>

Relativity continues to be tested and some physics professors remain skeptical of the theory, such as University of Maryland physics professor Carroll Alley, who served as the principle physicist on the Apollo lunar project.<ref>http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2004/21jul_llr.htm</ref>

== Political aspects of relativity ==

Some [[liberal]] politicians have extrapolated the theory of relativity to metaphorically justify their own political agendas. For example, [[Democratic]] presidential candidate [[Barack Obama]] helped publish an article by liberal law professor [[Laurence Tribe]] to apply the relativistic concept of "curvature of space" to promote a broad legal right to [[abortion]].<ref>Tribe and Obama argued that the [[Constitution]] should be interpreted to establish a right to federally funded [[abortion]] and that, more generally, ''[[Roe v. Wade]]'' does not go far enough. They insisted that a relativistic "curvature of space" could achieve this result by expanding application of the [[Constitution]] based on its impact on personal choice. "The ''[[Roe v. Wade]]'' opinion ignored the way in which laws regulating pregnant women may shape the entire pattern of relationships among men, women, and children. It conceptualized abortion not in terms of the intensely public question of the subordination of women to men through the exploitation of pregnancy, but in terms of the purportedly private question of how women might make intimately personal decisions about their bodies and their lives. That vision described a part of the truth, but only what might be called the Newtonian part. ... [A] change in the surrounding legal setting can constitute state action that most threatens the sphere of personal choice. And it is a 'curved space' perspective on how law operates that leads one to focus less on the visible lines of legal force and more on how those lines are bent and directed by the law's geometry." Laurence H. Tribe, The Curvature of Constitutional Space: What Lawyers Can Learn from Modern Physics, 103 Harv. L. Rev. 1, 16-17 (1989).</ref> As of June 2008, over 170 law review articles have cited this [[liberal]] application of the theory of relativity to legal arguments.<ref>Search conducted by [[User:Aschlafly]] in the LEXIS database "US Law Reviews and Journals, Combined," conducted June 1, 2008.</ref> Applications of the theory of relativity to change morality have also been common.<ref>"Mistakenly, in the minds of many, the theory of relativity became relativism."[http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=38081]</ref> Moreover, there is an unmistakable effort to censor or ostracize criticism of relativity.<ref>Although the [[Examples of Bias in Wikipedia|liberally biased Wikipedia]] contains lengthy criticisms of the subjects of many entries, and even though publications like ''The Economist'' recognize the lack of scientific satisfaction in the theory (see, e.g., "Weighing the Universe," The Economist (Jan. 25, 2007)), Wikipedia's entry on [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_Relativity Theory of Relativity] omits one word of criticism.</ref>

Physicist [[Robert Dicke]] of Princeton University was a prominent critic<ref>http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,943324,00.html</ref> of general relativity, and Dicke's alternative "has enjoyed a renaissance in connection with theories of higher dimensional space-time."<ref>"Initially a popular alternative to General Relativity, the Brans-Dicke theory lost favor as it became clear that omega must be very large-an artificial requirement in some views. Nevertheless, the theory has remained a paradigm for the introduction of scalar fields into gravitational theory, and as such has enjoyed a renaissance in connection with theories of higher dimensional space-time."[http://nedwww.ipac.caltech.edu/level5/Glossary/Essay_bekenstein.html] </ref> Despite being one of the most accomplished physicists in the 20th century, Dicke was repeatedly passed over for a Nobel Prize, and in at least one case Dicke was insulted by the award being granted to others for contributions more properly credited to Dicke.

There has been little recognition by the Nobel Prize committee of either theory of relativity, and particularly scant recognition of the Theory of General Relativity.

===Government Support for Relativistic research===
The Theory of Relativity enjoys a disproportionate share of [[federal funding]] of physics research today.<ref>The Democratic Congress insisted on the $250 million LIGO project despite substantial criticism by scientists that it was wasting scarce research dollars. John Travis, "LIGO: a $ 250 million gamble; Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory; includes related article," ''Science'' p. 612 (Apr. 30, 1993). "Adding to the acrimony is LIGO's $ 250 million price tag, which some hold responsible for NSF's recent funding woes." ''Id.''</ref> In at least one case that research has been unsuccessful. The $365 million dollar LIGO project has failed to detect the gravity waves predicted by relativity.<ref>http://www.npr.org/programs/atc/features/2002/sept/gravitywaves/index.html</ref>

{{Relativity}}

== References ==
{{reflist|2}}

[[Category:Physics]]

==External Links ==
*[http://ia331314.us.archive.org/2/items/theeinsteintheor11335gut/11335-h/11335-h.htm The Einstein Theory of Relativity, by H.A. Lorentz.]
*[http://www.relativitycalculator.com Relativity Calculator - Learn Special Relativity Mathematics ] The mathematics of special relativity presented in as simple and comprehensive manner possible within philosophical and historical contexts.

Theory of relativity

2009-12-10T23:18:29Z

Mager: Changed "relativity were(sic) used" to "relativity was used".

''See also [[Counterexamples to Relativity]].''

'''Relativity''' refers to two closely-related mathematical theories in [[physics]]:

*'''[[Special theory of relativity|Special relativity]]''' (SR) is a theory which describes the laws of motion for non-accelerating bodies traveling at a significant fraction of the [[speed of light]]. As speeds approach zero, Special Relativity tends towards equivalence with [[Newton's Laws of Motion]]. Special Relativity was developed by [[Hendrik Lorentz]], [[Henri Poincaré]], and Hermann Minkowski<ref>"German mathematician who developed the geometrical theory of numbers and who made numerous contributions to number theory, mathematical physics, and the theory of relativity." [http://www.britannica.com/eb/article-9052860/Hermann-Minkowski Hermann Minkowski -- Britannica Online Encyclopedia]</ref><ref>[http://www-groups.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/Biographies/Minkowski.html Hermann Minkowski, Biography]</ref>, and [[Albert Einstein]].

*'''[[General theory of relativity|General Relativity]]''' (GR) is a theory which explains the laws of motion as viewed from accelerating reference frames and includes a geometric explanation for gravity. This theory was developed by [[David Hilbert]] and [[Albert Einstein]] as an extension of the postulates of Special Relativity.<ref>"[T]he German mathematician David Hilbert submitted an article containing the correct field equations for general relativity five days before Einstein."[http://nobelprize.org/educational_games/physics/relativity/history-1.html Nobel Prize historical account]</ref> A dramatic but later discredited claim by Sir [[Arthur Eddington]] of experimental proof of General Relativity in 1919 made Einstein a household name.

Unlike most of physics, the theories of relativity have discontinuities whereby the limit of a physical quantity as a variable (such as mass or velocity) approaches a fixed value is not the same as the physical quantity at the fixed value. For example, the limit of momentum as mass approaches 0 and velocity approaches the speed of light is not equal to the momentum of (massless) light.<ref>Discontinuities in General Relativity are also well-recognized. See, e.g., [http://www.springerlink.com/content/u47l341u2q555455/]</ref>

More generally, and also unlike most of physics, the theories of relativity consist of complex mathematical equations relying on several hypotheses. For example, at Hofstra University general relativity is taught as part of an upperclass math course on differential geometry, based on three stated assumptions.<ref>http://people.hofstra.edu/Stefan_Waner/diff_geom/tc.html</ref> The equations for special relativity assume that it is forever impossible to attain a velocity faster than the speed of light and that all inertial frames of reference are equivalent, hypotheses that can never be fully tested. Relativity rejects Newton's [[action at a distance]], which is basic to Newtonian gravity and [[quantum mechanics]]. The mathematics of relativity assume no exceptions, yet in the time period immediately following the origin of the universe the relativity equations could not possibly have been valid.

Relativity has been met with much resistance in the scientific world. To date, a Nobel Prize has never been awarded for relativity. Louis Essen, the man credited with determining the speed of light, wrote many fiery papers against it such as ''The Special Theory of Relativity: A Critical Analysis''.<ref>http://ephysics.fileave.com/physics/Essen/oxford5-essen.pdf</ref> Relativity also gravely conflicts with [[quantum mechanics]], and although theories like [[string theory]] and [[quantum field theory]] have attempted to unify relativity and quantum mechanics, neither has been entirely successful or proven.

Unlike [[Newton]]ian physics, in which space and time intervals are each invariant as seen by all observers, in SR the only invariant quantity is a quadratic combination of space and time intervals (x2 - c2 t2). The (assumed) instantaneous transmission of [[Newton]]ian gravitational effects also contradicts special relativity.

In quantum mechanics, the [[uncertainty principle]] suggests that virtual particles can sometimes travel faster than the speed of light which would violate causality, but "[t]he only known way to resolve this tension involves introducing the idea of antiparticles."<ref>http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/2004/wilczek-lecture.pdf (p. 102)</ref> Consequently, in 1928 Paul Dirac derived the Dirac equation, one of the first quantum mechanical equations compatible with special relativity, by which Dirac predicted the existence of antimatter. Four years later, antimatter (the positron) was discovered by Carl Anderson, as successfully predicted by relativistic quantum mechanics. [[Quantum field theory]], a generalization of quantum mechanics, is fully compatible with special relativity but not with general relativity, and still lacks a vital piece: evidence of the [[graviton]].

== Special Relativity ==
Lorentz and Poincare developed Special Relativity as way of understanding how Maxwell's equations for electromagnetism could be valid in different frames of reference. Einstein famously published an explanation of Poincare's theory in terms of two assumptions (postulates):

# ''The [[speed of light]] is constant for all (inertial) observers, regardless of their velocities relative to each other.''
# ''The laws of physics are identical in all inertial reference frames.''

In layman's terms, these two assumptions can be restated as:
# It is impossible ever to transmit information faster than the speed of light.<ref>This assumption is commonly restated in this manner. For example, a discussion of hypothetical [[tachyons]] talks "about using tachyons to transmit information faster than the speed of light, '''in violation of Special Relativity'''."[http://www.math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/ParticleAndNuclear/tachyons.html] However, there is some question whether the Theory of Special Relativity really restricts faster-than-light communication of information.</ref>
# The laws of physics are identical, without any variation, in every location throughout the universe.
# The laws of physics are identical, without any variation, no matter how fast something is traveling (in the absence of acceleration).

Or, in more concise, clearer terms, these assumptions are this:

#there is no [[action at a distance]] (because that would make observations dependent on the frame of reference)
#space and time are completely symmetric throughout the universe (because otherwise frames of reference would not be interchangeable)

When the assumptions are stated clearly as above, the weaknesses in the theory are more apparent. There ''is'' action at a distance in [[quantum entanglement]] and apparently also in gravity, as no gravitons can be found. However, no information has yet been transmitted via quantum entanglement, so while non-locality violates the spirit of relativity it is consistent with it if relativity is limited to the transmission of information. [[Quantum field theory]], an attempt to partially reconcile [[quantum mechanics]] with relativity, is incomplete at best. As to the second assumption, it is contrary to the [[arrow of time]], which illustrates the lack of symmetry in time. Logical defects include the incoherence of relativistic mass (see discussion below) and the lack of relativistic constraints near the beginning the universe (see above).

Special Relativity (SR) was initially developed by [[Henri Poincaré]] and [[Hendrik Lorentz]], working on problems in electrodynamics and the [[Michelson-Morley experiment]], which had not found any sign of [[aether (science)|luminiferous aether]], which was believed to be the substance which carried electromagnetic waves. Special relativity alters [[Isaac Newton]]'s laws of motion by assuming that the speed of light will be the same for all observers, despite their relative velocities and the source of the light. (Therefore, if A sends a beam of light to B, and both measure the speed, it will be the same for both, no matter what the relative velocity of A and B. In Newtonian/Galilean mechanics, If A sends a physical object at a particular velocity towards B, and nothing slows it, the velocity of the object relative to B depends on the velocities of the object and of B relative to A.)

At low speeds (relative to light-speed), the Lorentz-Poincare relativity equations are equivalent to Newton's equations. The famous equation ''E=mc2'', describes the relationship between energy and the rest mass of a body.

Under relativity, particles at low mass and low speed can be accurately approximated by [[classical mechanics]] (such as [[Isaac Newton]]'s laws of motion). At the two extremes, modeling the behavior of electrons requires that relativistic effects be taken into account (the chemically significant phenomenon of electron spin arises from relativity), and the course light passing through a region containing many massive bodies such as galaxies will be distorted ([[classical mechanics]], in which light travels in straight lines, does not predict this). These are both experimentally confirmed (electron spin was known before relativity arose, and telescopic observations confirm that galactic clusters distort the paths of the light passing through them).

== General Relativity ==

General Relativity is a theory of gravity that is compatible with Special Relativity. Einstein explains a thought experiment involving two elevators. The first elevator is stationary on the Earth, while the other is being pulled through space at a constant acceleration of g. Einstein realized that any physical experiment carried out in the elevators would give the same result. This realization is known as the equivalence principle and it states that accelerating frames of reference and gravitational fields are indistinguishable. General Relativity is the theory of gravity that incorporates Special Relativity and the equivalence principle.

General Relativity is a mathematical extension of Special Relativity. GR views space-time as a 4-dimensional [[manifold]], which looks locally like [[Minkowski space]], and which acquires [[curvature]] due to the presence of massive bodies. Thus, near massive bodies, the geometry of space-time differs to a large degree from [[Euclidean geometry]]: for example, the sum of the angles in a triangle is not exactly 180 degrees. Just as in classical physics, objects travel along [[geodesic]]s in the absence of external forces. Importantly though, near a massive body, geodesics are no longer straight lines. It is this phenomenon of objects traveling along geodesics in a curved spacetime that accounts for gravity.

General relativity provides one explanation for the seemingly anomalous precession of Mercury's perihelion. There are other explanations based in Newtonian gravity, such as factoring in the pull of the other planets on Mercury's orbit. One Newtonian explanation requires a slight alternation to the precise inverse-square relation of Newtonian gravity to distance, which is disfavored by mathematicians due to its inelegance in integrating.

British Historian Paul Johnson declares the turning point in 20th century to have been when fellow Briton Sir [[Arthur Eddington]], an esteemed English astronomer, ventured out on a boat off Africa in 1919 with a local Army unit to observe the bending of starlight around the sun during a total eclipse. Upon his return to England declared that his observations proven the theory of relativity. In fact recent analysis of Eddington's work revealed that he was biased in selecting his data, and that overall his data were inconclusive about the theory of relativity. The prediction was later confirmed by more rigorous experiments, such as those performed by the [[Hubble Space Telescope]] <ref>[http://www.spaceimages.com/gravlen.html Hubble Gravitational Lens Photo]</ref><ref> [http://csep10.phys.utk.edu/astr162/lect/galaxies/lensing.html Gravitational Lensing] </ref><ref>[http://www.iam.ubc.ca/~newbury/lenses/glgallery.html]</ref>. Lorentz has this to say on the discrepancies between the empirical eclipse data and Einstein's predictions.

::''It indeed seems that the discrepancies may be ascribed to faults in observations, which supposition is supported by the fact that the observations at Prince's Island, which, it is true, did not turn out quite as well as those mentioned above, gave the result, of 1.64, somewhat lower than Einstein's figure.''<ref>Lorentz, H.A. [http://ia331314.us.archive.org/2/items/theeinsteintheor11335gut/11335-h/11335-h.htm The Einstein Theory of Relativity]</ref>

The prediction that light is bent by gravity is predicted both by Newtonian physics and relativity, but relativity predicts a larger deflection.

Special relativity is the limiting case of general relativity where all gravitational fields are weak. Alternatively, special relativity is the limiting case of general relativity when all reference frames are inertial (non-accelerating and without gravity).

==Lack of evidence for Relativity==
The Theory of relativity assumes that time is symmetric just as space is. But the biggest early promoter of relativity, Arthur Eddington, coined the term "[[arrow of time]]" admitting how time is ''not'' symmetric but is directional. The passage of time is tied to an increase in disorder, or [[entropy]]. The Theory of relativity cannot explain this, and implicitly denies it, specifically allowing for theoretical time travel (e.g., [[wormholes]]) and different rates of passage of time based on velocity and acceleration.

Claims that relativity was used to develop the [[Global Positioning System]] ([[GPS]]) are false. A 1996 article explains:

:"The Operational Control System (OCS) of the Global Positioning System (GPS) does not include the rigorous transformations between coordinate systems that Einstein's general theory of relativity would seem to require - transformations to and from the individual space vehicles (SVs), the Monitor Stations (MSs), and the users on the surface of the rotating earth, and the geocentric Earth Centered Inertial System (ECI) in which the SV orbits are calculated. There is a very good reason for the omission: the effects of relativity, where they are different from the effects predicted by classical mechanics and electromagnetic theory, are too small to matter - less than one centimeter, for users on or near the earth."<ref>http://tycho.usno.navy.mil/ptti/1996/Vol%2028_16.pdf</ref><ref>Some do claim that relativity is "vital" to GPS even though GPS developed independently of theoretical predictions and theoreticians disagree about how the relativistic effects for GPS should be calculated. ''See id. See also'' [http://www.rand.org/pubs/monograph_reports/MR614/MR614.appb.pdf]</ref>

This article, which was published in 1996, goes on to propose relativistic corrections that might be used to design more accurate GPS systems. Clocks on board GPS satellites require adjustments to their clock frequencies if they are to be synchronized with those on the surface of the Earth.

Tom Van Flandern, an astronomer hired to work on GPS in the late 1990s, concluded that "[t]he GPS programmers don't need relativity." He was quoted as saying that the GPS programmers "have basically blown off Einstein."<ref>http://archive.salon.com/people/feature/2000/07/06/einstein/index.html See also [http://www.metaresearch.org/solar%20system/gps/absolute-gps-1meter-3.ASP], where Van Flandern discusses how relativistic corrections might improve GPS accuracy.</ref> Asynchronization can be easily addressed through communications between the satellites and ground stations, so it is unclear why any theory would be needed for GPS. But other obscure physicists having no connection with GPS design claim that Van Flandern is wrong about GPS, and insist that relativity provides the best explanation for its timing adjustments.<ref>''Ibid.''</ref>

Some internet articles claim that GPS timing differences ''confirm'' the Theory of Relativity or its Lorentzian counterpart (which uses a preferred frame of reference). GPS clocks run slower in the weaker gravitation field of the satellites than on ground stations on Earth, with the effects predicted by general relativity far outweighing the effects predicted by special relativity. However, the articles claiming that the slower GPS satellite clocks confirm relativity do not address the effect, if any, of the weaker gravitational force under Newton's theory on the GPS satellite clocks.

Currently, GPS satellites are synchronized to Coordinated Universal Time by radio signals from the ground; therefore, they cannot currently be used to test general relativity.<ref>[http://www.phys.lsu.edu/mog/mog9/node9.html "General Relativity in the Global Positioning System."] Neil Ashby, U. of Colorado</ref>

[[Image:Cassini-science-289.jpg|right|thumb|signal dipping into a gravity well around the [[sun]]]]
There are claims that the effects of relativity have been observed with the frequency shift of the signal being sent back to [[Earth]] several times as various spacecraft have dipped into the gravity wells around massive objects such as the [[sun]] (see image at right)<ref>[http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/news/press-releases-03/20031002-pr-a.cfm Saturn-Bound Spacecraft Tests Einstein's Theory]</ref> or Saturn<ref>[http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg12517102.600-science-encounter-with-saturn-confirms-relativity-theory.html Encounter with Saturn confirms relativity theory]</ref>. A satellite called [[Gravity Probe B]] was put in orbit about the Earth to examine the effects of frame dragging and geodetic warping of space<ref>[http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/gpb/index.html NASA Gravity Probe B mission page]</ref><ref>[http://einstein.stanford.edu/ Gravity Probe B project page]</ref>, but the results were inconclusive. Note, however, that Newtonian mechanics also predicts deflection of light by gravity, and in the initial theory of relativity it predicted the same amount of deflection.<ref>http://www.mathpages.com/rr/s6-03/6-03.htm</ref> Adjustments to the theory of relativity resulted in a prediction of a greater deflection of light than that predicated by Newtonian mechanics, though it is debatable how much deflection Newtonian mechanics should predict.

None of the NASA spacecraft incorporates predictions of relativity into their own timing mechanisms, as Newtonian mechanics is adequate even for probes sent deep into space.<ref>There is no reported reliance on relativity by any space probe.</ref>

A decade of observation of the [[pulsar]] pair [[PSR 1913 16|PSR B1913+16]] detected a decline in its orbital period, which was attributed to a loss in energy by the system. It is impossible to measure the masses of the pulsars, their accelerations relative to the observers, or other fundamental parameters. Professors Joseph Taylor and Russell Hulse, who discovered the binary pulsar, found that physical values could be assigned to the pulsars to make the observed decline in orbital period consistent with the Theory of General Relativity, and for this they were awarded the 1993 [[Nobel Prize]] for Physics, which is the only award ever given by the Nobel committee for the Theory of Relativity.<ref>http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/1993/press.html</ref> In 2004, Professor Taylor utilized a correction to the derivative of the orbital period to fit subsequent data better to the theory. At most, assumptions can be made and altered to fit the data to the theory, rather than the data confirming the theory.

The [[perihelion]] of Mercury's [[orbit]] [[precession|precesses]] at a measurable rate, but even after accounting for gravitational perturbations caused all other planets in the [[solar system]], Newton's theory (assuming a precise inverse-square relationship for distance) predicts a rate of precession that differs from the measured rate by approximately 43 [[arcsecond]]s per century. General relativity was developed in part to provide an estimate for this rate of precession that better matches observations.<ref>http://physics.ucr.edu/~wudka/Physics7/Notes_www/node98.html#SECTION032121000000000000000</ref> <ref> http://www.alberteinstein.info/gallery/pdf/CP6Doc30_English_pp146-200.pdf</ref> <ref> http://farside.ph.utexas.edu/teaching/336k/lectures/node117.html</ref> Newton's theory can also explain this perihelion by factoring in the gravitational pull due to other planets or making tiny adjustments to parameters in the gravitational equation.

General relativity predicts twice as much bending in light as it passes near massive objects than Newton's theory might predict.<ref>http://www.mathpages.com/rr/s6-03/6-03.htm</ref> This phenomenon is known as [[gravitational lens|gravitational lensing]]. A large number of instances of gravitational lensing have been observed, and it is now a standard astronomical tool.<ref> http://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/features/news/grav_lens.html</ref> <ref> http://astro.berkeley.edu/~jcohn/lens.html</ref> <ref> http://www.iam.ubc.ca/~newbury/lenses/glgallery.html</ref> Note, however, that the extent of bending of light predicted by Newton's theory is open to debate, and depends on assumptions about the nature of light for gravitational purposes.<ref>http://cosmictimes.gsfc.nasa.gov/1919/guide/gravity_bends_starlight.html</ref>

In 1972, scientists flew extremely accurate clocks ("atomic clocks") around the world in both directions on commercial airlines, and claimed to observe relativistic time dilation; the eastbound clock gained 273 ns and the westbound clock lost 59 ns, matching the predictions of general relativity to within experimental accuracy.<ref>[http://www.answers.com/topic/hafele-keating-experiment Hafele-Keating Experiment]</ref> However, the inventor of the atomic clock, Louis Essen, declared that the experiment was inaccurate.<ref>Louis Essen, Electron. Wireless World 94 (1988) 238.</ref> Dr A. G. Kelly examined the raw data from the experiment and declared it inconclusive.<ref>A. G. Kelly,Reliability of Relativistic Effect Tests on Airborne Clocks, Monograph No.3 Feb.1996, The Institution of Engineers of Ireland, ISBN 1-898012-22-9</ref> The Nobel Committee chose not to honor this experiment for the significance that was claimed.

Despite [[censorship]] of dissent about relativity, evidence contrary to the theory is discussed outside of [[liberal]] universities.<ref>http://scitizen.com/screens/blogPage/viewBlog/sw_viewBlog.php?idTheme=8&idContribution=922</ref>

==Predicted consequences of the Theories==
===Time dilation===

[[Image:Light cone.png|right|thumb|Light-cone diagram]]
One important consequence of SR's postulates is that an observer in one reference frame will observe a clock in another frame to be "ticking" more slowly than in the observer's own frame. This can be proven mathematically using basic geometry, if the postulates are physically true without exception.

The length of an event <math>t</math>, as seen by a (relative) stationary observer observing an event is given by:

<math> t = \frac{t_{0}} {\sqrt{1 - \frac{v^{2}}{c^{2}}}}</math>

Where
:<math>t_0</math> is the "proper time" or the length of the event in the observed frame of reference.
:<math>v</math> is the relative velocity between the reference frames.
:<math>c</math> is the speed of light (3x108 ms-1).

Evidence for time dilation was discovered by studying [[muon decay]]. [[Muons]] are [[subatomic]] [[particles]] with a very short [[halflife]] (1.53 microseconds at rest) and a very fast speed (0.994c). By putting muon detectors at the top (D1) and bottom (D2) of a mountain with a separation of 1900m, scientists could measure accurately the proportion of muons reaching the second detector in comparison to the first. The proportion found was different to the proportion that was calculated without taking into account relativistic effects.

Using the equation for [[exponential decay]], they could use this proportion to calculate the time taken for the muons to decay, relative to the muon. Then, using the time dilation equation they could then work out the dilated time. The dilated time showed a good correlation with the time it took the muons to reach the second sensor, thereby supporting the existence of time dilation.

The time taken for a muon to travel from D1 to D2 as measured by a stationary observer is:

<math> t = \frac{s}{v} = \frac{1900}{0.994\times(3\times10^{8})} = 6.37\mu\textrm{s} </math>

The fraction of muons arriving at D2 in comparison to D1 was 0.732. (Given by <math> \frac{N}{N_0} = 0.732 </math>)

Since (from the equation for exponential decay) <math> \frac{N}{N_{0}} = e^{-\lambda t_{0}} </math> then

<math> t_{0} = \frac {ln(0.732)}{ln (0.2)} \times 1.53\times 10^{-6} = 0.689\mu\textrm{s}</math>

This gives the time for the proportion of decay to occur for an observer who is stationary, relative to the muon.

Putting this into the time dilation equation gives:

<math> t = \frac{t_{0}}{\sqrt{1 - \frac{v^{2}}{c^{2}}}} = \frac{0.689 \times{10^{-6}}}{\sqrt{1 - \frac{0.994^{2}}{1^{2}}}} = 6.3\times 10^{-6}\textrm{s}</math>

This is in good agreement with the value calculated above, thereby providing evidence to support time dilation.

====Time Dilation and Creation Science====

{{main|Starlight problem#Humphreys.27_model}}

Creation scientists such as physicists Dr. [[Russell Humphreys]] and Dr. [[John Hartnett]] have used relativistic time dilation to explain how the earth can be only 6,000 years old even though cosmological data (background radiation, supernovae, etc.) set a much older age for the universe.

===Length contraction===
When two inertial reference frames move past each other in a straight line with constant relative velocity, an observer in one reference frame would observe a metre rule in the other frame to be shorter.

The length, <math>l</math>, of an object as seen by a (relative) stationary observer is given by:

<math> l = l_{0} \sqrt{1- \frac{v^{2}}{c^{2}}}</math>

Where
:<math>l_0</math> is the "proper length" or the length of the object in the observed frame of reference.
:<math>v</math> is the relative velocity between the reference frames.
:<math>c</math> is the speed of light (3x108 ms-1).

===Mass increase===

For decades the theory of relativity taught that as a body moves with increasing velocity its [[mass]] also increases.<ref>For example, this was taught as recently as in the 1991 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica.</ref>

Under this view, the mass, <math>m</math>, of an object as detected by a (relative) stationary observer is given by:

:<math> m = \frac{m_{0}} {\sqrt{1 - \frac{v^{2}}{c^{2}}}}</math>

Where
:<math>m_0</math> is the "rest mass" or the mass of the object when it is at rest.
:<math>v</math> is the relative velocity of the object.
:<math>c</math> is the speed of light (3x108 ms-1).

Since speed is relative, it follows that two observers in different inertial reference frames may disagree on the mass and kinetic energy of a body. Since all inertial reference frames are treated on an equal footing, it follows that mass and energy are interchangeable.

In recent years most physicists have shifted away from Einstein's original reliance on relativistic mass and his suggestion that mass increases. Instead, most physicists today teach that

:<math>F=\frac{d}{d\tau} p</math>

where <math>p</math> is the momentum defined by <math>\gamma m v</math>, <math>\gamma</math> is the standard Lorentz factor, and <math>\tau</math> is the proper time. Force F defined this way is a vector and thus can handle the directional aspect of the relativistic effects better than the concept of relativistic mass can.

The abandonment by physicists of the concept of relativistic mass, however, has the consequence of undermining the traditional claim under relativity that

:<math>m - m_0 = \frac{E}{c^2}</math>

also popularly known as

:<math>E = m c^2</math>

Now a concept of the 4-momentum <math>p</math> of a particle is taught, such that the square of the magnitude of <math>p</math> satisfies:

<math>||p||^2 = -p_x^2-p_y^2-p_z^2+E^2 = m_0^2c^4</math>

in any inertial reference frame. The magnitude of the 4-momentum, in any inertial frame, equals the rest mass <math>m_0</math> of the particle (in units where <math>c=1</math>).

== Variable Speed of Light ==

The Theory of Relativity implies that physical constants like the speed of light have remained constant. But at least one study suggests that physical constants, and possibly even the speed of light, have changed as the universe has aged.<ref>James Glanz and Dennis Overbye, "Cosmic Laws Like Speed of Light Might Be Changing, a Study Finds," August 15, 2001.[http://www.nytimes.com/2001/08/15/science/15PHYS.html?ex=1185076800&en=d6467b6e3e346796&ei=5070]</ref>

"For the first time, scientists have experimentally demonstrated that sound pulses can travel at velocities faster than the speed of light, c. William Robertson's team from Middle Tennessee State University also showed that the group velocity of sound waves can become infinite, and even negative. ... Although such results may at first appear to violate special relativity (Einstein's law that no material object can exceed the speed of light), the actual significance of these experiments is a little different. These types of superluminal phenomena, Robertson et al. explain, violate neither causality nor special relativity, nor do they enable information to travel faster than c. In fact, theoretical work had predicted that the superluminal speed of the group velocity of sound waves should exist. 'The key to understanding this seeming paradox is that no wave energy exceeded the speed of light,' said Robertson."<ref>http://www.physorg.com/news88249076.html</ref>

"A team of researchers from the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) has successfully demonstrated, for the first time, that it is possible to control the speed of light – both slowing it down and speeding it up – in an optical fiber, using off-the-shelf instrumentation in normal environmental conditions. Their results, to be published in the August 22 issue of Applied Physics Letters, could have implications that range from optical [[computing]] to the fiber-optic telecommunications industry."<ref>http://www.scienceblog.com/light.html</ref> Both slowing down and speeding up of light within a substance other than a vacuum is made possible, because the light travels through the material, and that material affects the speed of light, i.e. a photon hits an electron, which then exits and emits a slightly lower energy photon out in the direction that the original photon was traveling, thus maintaining conservation of momentum. No matter how transparent an object may appear, it radically impacts the speed of the light traveling through it, as demonstrated by the refractive production of a rainbow by a crystal, which Newton himself discovered.

"A pair of German physicists claim to have broken the speed of light - an achievement that would undermine our entire understanding of space and time. ... Dr Nimtz told New Scientist magazine: 'For the time being, this is the only violation of special relativity that I know of.'"<ref>http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/main.jhtml?xml=/earth/2007/08/16/scispeed116.xml</ref>

==Pending research==

Today some physicists are working on hypothesizing how general relativity might have related to the other three forces of nature during the first fraction of a second of the [[Big Bang]]. Two of the more commonly studied attempts are [[string theory]] and [[loop quantum gravity]], but they have failed to produce any evidence that science mandates a science must have, and both typically take large amounts of work to even conform to what scientists believe. Critics increasingly point out that string theory and loop quantum gravity are largely untestable and unfalsifiable, and thus potentially unscientific under the principles of science advanced by [[Karl Popper]].<ref>See, for example, ''Not Even Wrong'', by Peter Woit</ref>

Relativity continues to be tested and some physics professors remain skeptical of the theory, such as University of Maryland physics professor Carroll Alley, who served as the principle physicist on the Apollo lunar project.<ref>http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2004/21jul_llr.htm</ref>

== Political aspects of relativity ==

Some [[liberal]] politicians have extrapolated the theory of relativity to metaphorically justify their own political agendas. For example, [[Democratic]] presidential candidate [[Barack Obama]] helped publish an article by liberal law professor [[Laurence Tribe]] to apply the relativistic concept of "curvature of space" to promote a broad legal right to [[abortion]].<ref>Tribe and Obama argued that the [[Constitution]] should be interpreted to establish a right to federally funded [[abortion]] and that, more generally, ''[[Roe v. Wade]]'' does not go far enough. They insisted that a relativistic "curvature of space" could achieve this result by expanding application of the [[Constitution]] based on its impact on personal choice. "The ''[[Roe v. Wade]]'' opinion ignored the way in which laws regulating pregnant women may shape the entire pattern of relationships among men, women, and children. It conceptualized abortion not in terms of the intensely public question of the subordination of women to men through the exploitation of pregnancy, but in terms of the purportedly private question of how women might make intimately personal decisions about their bodies and their lives. That vision described a part of the truth, but only what might be called the Newtonian part. ... [A] change in the surrounding legal setting can constitute state action that most threatens the sphere of personal choice. And it is a 'curved space' perspective on how law operates that leads one to focus less on the visible lines of legal force and more on how those lines are bent and directed by the law's geometry." Laurence H. Tribe, The Curvature of Constitutional Space: What Lawyers Can Learn from Modern Physics, 103 Harv. L. Rev. 1, 16-17 (1989).</ref> As of June 2008, over 170 law review articles have cited this [[liberal]] application of the theory of relativity to legal arguments.<ref>Search conducted by [[User:Aschlafly]] in the LEXIS database "US Law Reviews and Journals, Combined," conducted June 1, 2008.</ref> Applications of the theory of relativity to change morality have also been common.<ref>"Mistakenly, in the minds of many, the theory of relativity became relativism."[http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=38081]</ref> Moreover, there is an unmistakable effort to censor or ostracize criticism of relativity.<ref>Although the [[Examples of Bias in Wikipedia|liberally biased Wikipedia]] contains lengthy criticisms of the subjects of many entries, and even though publications like ''The Economist'' recognize the lack of scientific satisfaction in the theory (see, e.g., "Weighing the Universe," The Economist (Jan. 25, 2007)), Wikipedia's entry on [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_Relativity Theory of Relativity] omits one word of criticism.</ref>

Physicist [[Robert Dicke]] of Princeton University was a prominent critic<ref>http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,943324,00.html</ref> of general relativity, and Dicke's alternative "has enjoyed a renaissance in connection with theories of higher dimensional space-time."<ref>"Initially a popular alternative to General Relativity, the Brans-Dicke theory lost favor as it became clear that omega must be very large-an artificial requirement in some views. Nevertheless, the theory has remained a paradigm for the introduction of scalar fields into gravitational theory, and as such has enjoyed a renaissance in connection with theories of higher dimensional space-time."[http://nedwww.ipac.caltech.edu/level5/Glossary/Essay_bekenstein.html] </ref> Despite being one of the most accomplished physicists in the 20th century, Dicke was repeatedly passed over for a Nobel Prize, and in at least one case Dicke was insulted by the award being granted to others for contributions more properly credited to Dicke.

There has been little recognition by the Nobel Prize committee of either theory of relativity, and particularly scant recognition of the Theory of General Relativity.

===Government Support for Relativistic research===
The Theory of Relativity enjoys a disproportionate share of [[federal funding]] of physics research today.<ref>The Democratic Congress insisted on the $250 million LIGO project despite substantial criticism by scientists that it was wasting scarce research dollars. John Travis, "LIGO: a $ 250 million gamble; Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory; includes related article," ''Science'' p. 612 (Apr. 30, 1993). "Adding to the acrimony is LIGO's $ 250 million price tag, which some hold responsible for NSF's recent funding woes." ''Id.''</ref> In at least one case that research has been unsuccessful. The $365 million dollar LIGO project has failed to detect the gravity waves predicted by relativity.<ref>http://www.npr.org/programs/atc/features/2002/sept/gravitywaves/index.html</ref>

{{Relativity}}

== References ==
{{reflist|2}}

[[Category:Physics]]

==External Links ==
*[http://ia331314.us.archive.org/2/items/theeinsteintheor11335gut/11335-h/11335-h.htm The Einstein Theory of Relativity, by H.A. Lorentz.]
*[http://www.relativitycalculator.com Relativity Calculator - Learn Special Relativity Mathematics ] The mathematics of special relativity presented in as simple and comprehensive manner possible within philosophical and historical contexts.

Wormhole

2009-12-10T23:12:33Z

Mager: a.) what? b.) source?

A '''wormhole''', in [[science fiction]], is a passage from one location in three-dimensional space to another. It is based on the concept that space has more than three dimensions, and that 3D space can be "folded" within 4D space much as a 2D piece of cloth can be folded within 3D space. The [[General Theory of Relativity]] says that wormholes may exist.

The significance of a wormhole is that it would allow a trip through it to take much less time than a journey between the same two points in conventional space. The mouths of a wormhole may be at any two points in [[spacetime]], including at different times; this would allow time travel by going through the wormhole.<ref>[http://www.npl.washington.edu/AV/altvw33.html "Wormholes and Time Machines"], John G. Cramer</ref>

Some scientists speculate that [[black holes]] might be entrance portals to wormholes, leading to hypothetical [[white holes]].

The first prediction of a wormhole was made by physicist Hermann Weyl in 1921, and physicist John Wheeler coined the term “wormhole” in 1957.<ref>http://www.astronomyexpert.co.uk/Wormholes.html</ref>

== References ==

<references/>
[[Category:physics]]
[[Category:Science fiction]]
[[Category:Relativity]]

Old Earth

2009-12-10T22:57:59Z

Mager: corrected sentence fragment.

'''Old Earth''' theories propose that the Earth has existed for billions of years. These theories developed in connection with the [[theory of evolution]], which would could not have possibly occurred in the thousands of years that people had previously estimated the age of the Earth to be.

Old Earth theories struggle to explain youthful characteristics of the earth, such as the massive fresh water Great Lakes. Over long periods of time fresh water reservoirs would inevitably dissipate. Theories of [[Ice Age]]s developed as a way to explain fresh water reservoirs. Underground wells provide a similar challenge for Old Earth advocates.

Flooding is another challenge for Old Earth advocates, as it would wipe out any evolutionary path, particularly among mammals. The likelihood of a massive flood increases with the period of time, and an older Earth means more disruptive flooding.

The principle basis for Old Earth is [[radiometric dating]], but it is a logical tautology to assume that [[radioactive decay]] rates have always been constant, even at higher energy levels. Such assumption is identical to assuming that the Earth is old, and hence that argument is circular.

The discipline of [[uniformitarianism]] is also a basis for assuming an old Earth. Extrapolating the rate of geologic processes backwards in time yields an Earth substantially older than the Biblical 6,000 years. Uniformitarianism is also based on assumptions, however; namely, that all geologic processes were acting at the same or similar rates for the whole history of the Earth.

== Contradiction in Old Earth Theory ==

The fundamental contradiction in the belief in an Old Earth is this:

*physical laws, such as rates of decay, must have been different at higher energies and times closer to the origin of the universe
*yet physical rates, such as rates of decay, must somehow have been constant since the origin of the universe, in order to use extrapolation to date it

==Physical origin of the Earth==
Those who accept an old Earth generally believe that natural processes formed the Earth and solar system over a long period of time. This is as opposed to the Young-Earth creationist belief in an essentially instantaneous creation.

[[Category:Creationism]]
[[Category:Evolution]]
[[Category:Geology]]