How many people understand Relativity?
Many say they do, but how do they explain the paradoxes of Special Relativity (SR)?
Do they know that Einstein changed his mind about his own SR in 1916? They should know that he abandoned the equality of reference frames already in 1916, solving the twin paradox. Then Einstein replaced the Lorentz transformation of SR by the Minkowski formula, solving the Ehrenfest paradox.
Users of Einstein’s outdated SR of 1905 are still puzzled about the paradoxes, introducing all kind of mystic explanations. Einstein himself admitted: clocks cannot tick both faster and slower in real physics.
This article describes some of Einstein’s changes of mind in Relativity.
In 1916 he changed his mind about an important property of his theory of General Relativity (GR), namely g = –1, which Karl Schwarzschild then used to get to an exact solution.
Amazingly, most people didn’t notice Einstein’s correction, leading to mythical statements of authors over the last 100 years, like Eddington’s “dropping the suffix” etc. It is high time that physicists accept Einstein’s changes.
When they do and incorporate the consequences, mysticism disappears and Relativity becomes realistic again, in line with experiments, observations, and common sense.
