More than a half-century ago, the Nazis dismissed Albert Einstein’s groundbreaking theories as “Jewish science.” In recent years, Holocaust revisionists have taken up the anti-Einstein cause. Now, the legendary physicist is facing a new wave of attacks — this time from conservative bloggers who say that his theory of relativity and its iconic formula, E=mc2, are part of a “liberal conspiracy.”
The latest debate erupted when Conservapedia.com posted a definition of relativity charging that it was part of an ideological plot, and then added a list of counterexamples it says disprove Einstein’s theories. The postings were picked up by the liberal blog TPMMukraker (tpmmuckraker.com) and then went viral.
Conservapedia is the creation of Andrew Schlafly, the 49-year-old lawyer son of Phyllis Schlafly, the anti-abortion activist. He has a degree in engineering physics from Princeton University and a law degree from Harvard Law School. Schlafly, who did not respond to repeated attempts to interview him, founded Conservapedia three years ago — reportedly because he feels that Wikipedia (the dominant online encyclopedia and one of the most visited websites in the world) has a liberal, anti-Christian, anti-American bias.
Schlafly’s argument against Einstein appears to conflate relativity (a theory in physics about time, space and gravity) with relativism (a philosophical argument about morality and human experience having nothing to do with physics). He points to a 1989 article by liberal law professor Lawrence Tribe in the Harvard Law Review. Now widely disseminated on the Internet, Tribe’s article uses relativity as a metaphor for understanding constitutional law. In the footnotes, Tribe thanks the man who was then the editor of the review: a law student named Barack Obama.
Hence, a liberal conspiracy.
Schlafly further claims that “virtually no one who is taught and believes relativity continues to read the Bible,” but he doesn’t say how he knows that. He also cites passages in the Christian Bible to disprove Einstein’s theories.
While there is no overt anti-Semitism in the Conservapedia entries on Einstein, the ones on relativity are redolent with the old arguments. Attacks on relativity have long come from anti-Semites apparently upset that a Jew is credited with producing something that important. They have called it “Jewish science.” Nazis, believing that Germans should do better, came up with an alternative — totally incoherent — concept they called Deutsche Physik, which set back physics in Germany until after World War II.
Now, a new generation of Einstein deniers, including some Holo-caust revisionists, are simultaneously rejecting Einstein’s science and claiming he stole ideas.
They point to the published work of French physicist Jules Henri Poincaré and Dutch physicist Hendrik Ant-oon Lorentz, which preceded Einstein’s publication by several years. These men were superb physicists (Lorentz won a Nobel Prize) and they had thought about relativity, but neither made the huge leap Einstein did, although Poincaré came close.
Another claim is that the theories originated with Einstein’s first wife, the Serbian physics student Mileva Mari´c. She may have served as a sounding board, but respected physicists and historians say there is no evidence that she made any contribution.
In an effort to discredit Einstein, Schlafly provides a list of about two dozen counterexamples. Scientists looking at the list say many are irrelevant, some misinterpret the science and many are flat wrong. The latter category, they say, includes Schlafly’s claim that no useful devices have been “developed based on any insights provided by the theory; no lives have been saved or helped, and the theory has not led to other useful theories and may have interfered with scientific progress.”
Almost everyone who has had a PET (positron emission tomography) scan in a hospital, or who has undergone radiation therapy for cancer or who has turned on a particle accelerator has used the theory of special relativity, said historian and physicist Michael Riordan, adjunct professor of physics at U.C. Santa Cruz. If you have a GPS navigation system in your car, Einstein is guiding you, Riordan said. That E=mc2 is wrong surely would have surprised the physicists at the Manhattan Project who used it to develop the atomic bombs.
Greg Gbur, assistant professor of physics at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, said that Schlafly uses a technique known in rhetoric as the “Gish Gallop” (named for biochemist Duane Tolbert Gish, a creationist debater who employed it), which Gbur defines as “throw as many claims out there as possible, regardless of the validity, with the realization that most people will be swayed by the amount of evidence and not look too closely at the details.” Schlafly piles on statement after statement, footnote after footnote, and even stacks impressive mathematical formulas and jargon for his claims.
“The Internet world is full of kooks and crackpots who put out all kinds of drivel. It is pointless to attempt to refute these people with evidence, because they don’t believe in evidence,” Clifford Will, professor of physics at Washington University in St. Louis, wrote in an e-mail. “People may not like relativity, but the experimental and observational evidence that supports it is so overwhelming that it is now a fact of the universe.”