Many moons ago, just before I moved from Cardiff for my stint at Sussex University, I decided to ditch all the unsolicited letters and manuscripts I’ve accumulated over the years about “alternative” theories of relativity, cosmology, and whatnot. I don’t know why I had kept so many of them for so long, but I no longer have most of them. I did keep one or two of the best ones, however. Here’s an example:
I could never make head nor tail of this, but sometimes had a vague feeling that it might just be a sort of cosmic Rosetta Stone, offering up the Secrets of the Universe in diverse languages. Sadly, however, it’s more likely that the languages involved are Balderdash, Gibberish and Gobbledegook. At the time I wrote:
I regret to announce, therefore, that the plethora of papers telling me why Einstein was wrong, how the Universe is really in the shape of a spiral, how the Great Pyramid of Giza explains the Higgs Boson, and why the Big Bang couldn’t have happened, will have to go to the Great Shredder in the Sky (if that’s where it is).
Anyway, to all my correspondents all I can say is that I’ve enjoyed reading your letters – you must be very fond of your old typewriters – and I’m grateful for the time you took to draw the diagrams by hand in so many lovely colours. And I’m impressed by your qualifications as Electrical Engineers. Really. I’m sorry I didn’t reply to you all individually, but I just didn’t have the time. And now it pains me to realise I don’t have the space either…
I still get such things, of course, but they always come by email nowadays and usually end up in the spam folder, where I do not disturb them. I never reply, of course. Life’s too short.
I know I’m not the only one to have noticed the fact that many – indeed most – such correspondents are Electrical Engineers (usually retired). I was delighted therefore to see that there’s now a nice little paper on arXiv by David Garfinkle with the title Relativity for Retired Engineers and the abstract:
We provide some guidance and examples to clear up common misconceptions about special relativity. These misconceptions often come from trying to express the truths of special relativity in Newtonian terms rather than in terms more natural to special relativity itself. This conceptual stance can also help in attaining a better understanding of general relativity.
Readers may consider referring their correspondents to this source…
In the Dark 