Re: "In reality there is almost nothing to understand in the theory of relativity."

Le 09/01/2025 à 20:43, clzb93ynxj@att.net (LaurenceClarkCrossen) a écrit :

"'When the theories of relativity were experimentally confirmed, the red
carpet was rolled out despite (or perhaps because of) the fact that
almost no one understood them.'"
 

 It's a bit true, and it's also a bit normal.
We give a calculation, an equation, a bit randomly (simply proposing the invariance of the speed of light as a basis is good, but it doesn't explain WHY) and we see that in some cases it works, so we're happy. We have something fantastic and new.
All this is very normal.
Where it's no longer normal is when someone says: "Everything is ultimately very simple, and I understood how it worked; neither Poincaré nor Einstein could find the right explanation, and I'm going to give it to you using a much simpler and more experimentally obvious basic mathematical concept" and then, a real universal miracle occurs: "We spit in his face".
Don't laugh, friends, it's not funny.
Once the principle is understood, everything is very simple.
And no more need to bother with hyperbolic geometry, ridiculous considerations (the disk contracts at the periphery but not at the radius), flagrant contradictions even at the base (in apparent speed the measurements are no longer reciprocal), incomprehension of the notion of causality, of the concreted and stupid Minkowskian block (as if space-time were geometrically a concrete block).
No, no, the relativistic problem is not so much a scientific problem as a human, moral, pathological problem. We have here thousands of men who see clearly (if they look) that something is wrong, like small pebbles in an immense grinder, but are very happy with their mathematical grinder. It does not occur to them to change the nature of the olives (the basic concepts), or to see if there are not pebbles in them. Pebbles made lovable by psychological acceptance: "We do not want Doctor Hachel to give us his opinion". We prefer to throw stones in the grinder rather than admit that he is stronger than us on these very specific problems.
R.H.