Here's a New Scientist article that some may be interested in...quite lengthy but since one needs to log in, I'll reproduce it all here.......
https://www.newscientist.com/articl...cs-who-were-the-relativity-deniers/?full=true
When people don't like what science tells them, they resort to conspiracy theories, mud-slinging and plausible pseudoscience – as Einstein discovered
"THIS world is a strange madhouse," remarked Albert Einstein in 1920 in a letter to his close friend, the mathematician Marcel Grossmann.
"Every coachman and every waiter is debating whether relativity theory is correct. Belief in this matter depends on political affiliation."
Einstein's general theory of relativity, published in 1915, received an overwhelming public response - not all of it positive. Numerous accounts which appeared during the 1920s claimed to show relativity was wrong, and Einstein received many letters from laypeople who claimed to have found the ultimate refutation of his theory.
Many of today's physicists and astronomers (not to mention science journalists) continue to receive this kind of mail. On densely written pages - and, increasingly, in rambling emails, blog posts and online comments - self-proclaimed scientists keep trying to foist their astonishingly simple solutions to much-discussed problems upon genuine academics. Yet what flourishes today on the fringes of the internet was much more prominent in the 1920s, in the activities of a movement that included physics professors and even Nobel laureates.
Who were Einstein's opponents? Why did they oppose one of the most important scientific theories of the 20th century? And was Einstein right in saying "political affiliation" was responsible for the fierce opposition to relativity theory?
A few years ago, I had the opportunity to access papers belonging to the physicist Ernst Gehrcke, one of the most outspoken critics of Einstein in Germany. As I delved into the material he had neatly collected in banana boxes, a whole world of anti-relativity emerged from hundreds of pamphlets, thousands of newspaper clippings, and piles of letters from Einstein's opponents across Europe and the US.
I discovered that the group opposing relativity was much broader than many historians believed till now, and that their tactics had much in common with those used by creationists and climate-change deniers today. Their reasons for countering relativity were also more complex and varied than is usually thought. Even Einstein misjudged the motivations of many of his opponents.
Don't mess with time
Gehrcke was an experimental physicist at the Imperial Technical Institute in Berlin. Like many experimentalists of that era, he felt uncomfortable with the rise of a theory that demanded a reformulation of the fundamental concepts of space and time. Relativity messes with these to the extent that events which one observer deems simultaneous are no longer simultaneous as viewed by observers moving in different frames of reference.
Gehrcke could not imagine such a scenario. In 1921 he argued that giving up the idea of absolute time threatened to confuse the basis of cause and effect in natural phenomena.
What's more, the theory of relativity abandoned one of the most important concepts of 19th-century physics: that light waves and electric and magnetic forces were carried in a medium called the ether. For a classical physicist like Gehrcke, giving up this notion was akin to someone today claiming that sound waves travel in a vacuum.
These objections were first raised in scholarly journals, with discussion restricted to academia. But after a key prediction of general relativity was confirmed during an eclipse in 1919, Einstein was transformed into a media star and the debate acquired a much broader public impact. In 1919, The New York Times published an article headlined "Lights all askew in the heavens. Men of science more or less agog over results of eclipse observations", while a German magazine celebrated Einstein as "A new giant of world history". In the years that followed, the newspapers reported on everything from his clothing and Jewish background to his affection for music.
People were also troubled by more fundamental questions. In December 1921, the letters pages of The Times of London carried a lively discussion of whether space is actually endowed with physical qualities as general relativity required. Opinion was clearly divided.
The controversy in Germany intensified in August 1920 with the launch of a series of public lectures against Einstein at the Berlin Philharmonic hall. The event included a lecture by Gehrcke, who repeated the arguments he had been raising unsuccessfully for years, as well as an impassioned speech by the anti-Semitic activist Paul Weyland, who had organised the series. The event made a clear impact, prompting Einstein to think seriously about leaving Germany.
Gehrcke's papers show that opposition to Einstein extended well beyond a handful of sidelined physicists and politically motivated troublemakers. Gehrcke was in touch with physics Nobel laureates Johannes Stark and Philipp Lenard, and an international network comprising not just physicists, astronomers and philosophers, but also engineers, physicians and schoolmasters.
One of Gehrcke's boxes contained documents from a mysterious organisation called the Academy of Nations, whose title and letter-headed paper contrived to give it the aura of a scholarly academy. In fact, it served as a home for an international network of Einstein's opponents. Its founder was Arvid Reuterdahl, then dean of the faculty of engineering and architecture at the University of St Thomas in St Paul, Minnesota. He was also a devoted theist who attempted to reconcile religion and science in what he termed "new science".
Concerned that science was becoming ever more specialised, the Academy of Nations aimed to reconnect different branches of knowledge by integrating scientific findings into a unified, religious account of nature. To Reuterdahl, nothing better symbolised the modern specialisation and incomprehensibility of science than relativity. Almost half the Academy of Nations' founding declaration consisted of polemics against Einstein's theory. "We are emerging from a period of material and intellectual chaos. Nations have clashed in war. The intellectual world is still in conflict on the fields of knowledge. Never before has the demarcation between intellectual camps been so clearly defined... Einstein has served as a chemical reagent which has precipitated relativity from the present content of knowledge as a mass insoluble to the average man."
Reuterdahl was eager to establish contact with Einstein's opponents all over the world, and the American section of the academy united some prominent anti-Einstein figures. One of these was the astronomer Thomas J. J. See of the US Naval Observatory at Mare Island, California, who in the early 1920s published several harsh articles in which he accused Einstein of plagiarism and denounced his theory as "a crazy vagary". Though popular with the broader public, See was largely isolated from his colleagues because of the eccentric theories he advanced on the evolution of the solar system and almost every phenomenon in the universe.
Other members included Charles Lane Poor, professor of celestial mechanics at Columbia University, New York, who published several articles discounting the experimental confirmation of general relativity, and the inventor Charles Francis Brush, a pioneer of the commercial development of electricity, who espoused a kinetic theory of gravitation that stood in opposition to general relativity.
When Reuterdahl approached Gehrcke in 1921 with the idea of setting up a German branch of the Academy of Nations, Gehrcke immediately welcomed this new forum for activities against Einstein. His first recruits were German physicists who argued that there was no need for relativity because classical physics could explain all astronomical observations. Philosophers, engineers, physicians and even a retired major general joined too. A partial membership list from 1921 included 30 members from 10 countries.
But why did this ramshackle alliance between laymen and scientists emerge? What did it take to get a conservative physicist like Gehrcke involved with American theists?
The chance to cooperate with allies in the fight against relativity was obviously one reason. Einstein's opponents found themselves in the unenviable position of outsider, their arguments dismissed as "old crop" by most physicists. Scholarly journals and scientific associations closed their doors to them. The establishment of a self-governing academy and journal must have come as a welcome opportunity to break out of this marginalised position.
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