Dr. George J. Marklin

STANDARDS OF MEASUREMENT PART III

This article is adapted from material originally posted elsewhere
in response to questions from students critical of my views.
It examines how the Objectivist principle  requiring *all* of
your knowledge to be integrated can be used to uncover errors in
scientific theories:

   A pencil half submerged in a glass of water looks like it's
bent. Your eyes don't tell you that it actually is bent, only
that it looks bent. If you conclude that it actually is bent, you
have made an error which may be characterized as accepting a
mistaken premise. The identity of the mistaken premise is
something like: "the direction travelled by light rays is not
influenced by the medium that the light travels through". But
let's assume that you are not aware of the mistaken premise and
consider how you might be led to discover it. Upon concluding
that the pencil is actually bent you would immediately be faced
with contradictions when you try to integrate this conclusion
with the rest of your knowledge. For example, you know that
pencils are brittle. If you actually bend one it will break. But
the pencil in the water is not broken. Remove it and see. This is
a contradiction. You also know that force must be applied in
order to bend anything. But there is no force being applied to
the pencil. Another contradiction. Since your conclusion cannot
be integrated with the rest of your knowledge it must be false.
Therefore the pencil is not actually bent. But it still looks
bent. The direction in which the pencil is oriented below the
water appears to be different from the direction in which it is
oriented above the water. Information about the appearance of
objects is transmitted to your eyes by light rays. The
information transmitted by the light rays which emerged from the
water must have been altered. Therefore the properties of light
rays are altered when they travel from one medium to another.
This is a very highly simplified and incomplete outline of the
reasoning that led to the discovery of the laws of refraction.

   Take another example dealing with visual perception. Consider
a set of railroad tracks. As the tracks go off into the distance,
the rails appear to converge and the length of the ties appears
to grow shorter. Of course, the rails do not actually converge
and the ties do not actually get shorter, they just appear to
because our eyes perceive angular size (actual size divided by
the distance away). But let's assume again that you are unaware 
of this and have accepted the mistaken premise that your eyes
perceive actual size. You conclude that the ties actually become
shorter when they are farther away and then attempt to integrate
this with your previous knowledge. There is the immediate glaring
contradiction that railroad ties are not made of shrinkable
material, but let's look for something a little more challenging.
You see that the railroad ties down by the next train station are
shrunk. But then you think: to the people down there, their
railroad ties are the proper size, and it is the ties here by me
that are shrunk. Therefore, length must be a relational concept.
It can only be defined relative to each observer. There is no
such thing as absolute objective length. But the ordinary concept
of length that you formed when you were a child is not
relational. This is a contradiction. Though more subtle than the
previous one, it is still entirely adequate proof that you have
accepted a false premise. Then, once you realize that apparent
size is not the same as actual size, you would be in a position
to go on to discover the laws of perspective and the valid
relational concept of angular size.

   With these examples in mind, let's review the logic of my
argument against STR. It follows exactly the same pattern.
Experiments irrefutably show that the apparent speed of light is
constant relative to the observer. By apparent speed I mean the
speed measured by ordinary clocks and rulers. The relativists
assume without justification that ordinary clocks and rulers are
immutable standards and therefore conclude that the actual speed
of light is constant relative to the observer. But light is a
vibrating wave phenomenon, and vibrational waves always travel at
constant velocity relative to their medium, the material that is
doing the vibrating. This is a contradiction. The relativists 
then derive the Lorentz transformation formulas, which they must
interpret as showing how actual lengths and time intervals change
when seen by different observers in different states of motion.
This forces them to conclude that length and time are relational
concepts. But the previous concepts of length and time that have
been used successfully for ages are not relational. This is
another contradiction. There are more contradictions between STR
and the rest of our knowledge, but these two are sufficient to
show that it cannot be integrated and is therefore false. The
only unsubstantiated premise in the argument for STR is the
assumption that ordinary clocks and rulers are immutable. This
premise must therefore be false. Thus ordinary clocks and rulers
are mutable. One can then determine what kind of mutability would
be required to make the apparent speed of light constant, and to
obtain consistency with all other experiments. The answer is that
the rate and synchronization of ordinary clocks and the length of
ordinary rulers must vary as a function of velocity relative to
the ether in accordance with the Lorentz transformation formulas.
It is only the apparent speed of light that is constant relative
to the observer. The actual speed is constant relative to the
ether. And it is only apparent length and apparent time that is
relational. Actual length and actual time are the same concepts
that we were already familiar with. This is the Lorentz ether
theory (LET).

   A number of people have asked me for references on the LET.
Unfortunately, there aren't any really good ones, and probably
won't be until I publish my book. I don't think even Lorentz
himself ever had an explicit grasp of the philosophical issues he
was arguing for. Neither has anyone else. This is no doubt why
the relativists have prevailed (so far). But if you still want to
find more information, those of you with a technical background
can read H. A. Lorentz's book: "Theory of Electrons", Dover
(1952), and also E. T. Whittaker's "A History of the Theories of
Aether and Electricity", Dover (1989). I will also recommend a
fairly non-technical review paper comparing the LET and STR by
Herman Erlichson: "The Rod Contraction - Clock Retardation Ether
Theory and the Special Theory of Relativity", American Journal
of Physics, vol. 41, p. 1068, September (1973). This paper
contains an exhaustive list of references from which I also
recommend the papers by H. E. Ives and G. Builder.

Return to home page