It is important to note here that Andrew Schlafly, founder of Conservapedia and author of most of these articles, has a degree in electrical engineering and worked as an engineer for several years before becoming a lawyer. He would not only be capable of understanding the mathematics, he would have used concepts from the theory in his professional work. At least most engineer cranks aren’t this bad.
It is important to note here that Andrew Schlafly, founder of Conservapedia and author of most of these articles, has a degree in electrical engineering and worked as an engineer for several years before becoming a lawyer. He would not only be capable of understanding the mathematics, he would have used concepts from the theory in his professional work.
In fairness to relativity crackpots, unless things have changed since my freshman days, the way special relativity is commonly taught in introductory physics courses is practically an invitation for the students to form crackpot ideas. Instead of immediately explaining the idea of the Minkowski spacetime, which reduces the whole theory almost trivially to some basic analytic geometry and calculus and makes all those so-called “paradoxes” disappear easily in a flash of insight, physics courses often take the godawful approach of grafting a mishmash of weird “effects” (like “length contraction” and “time dilatation”) onto a Newtonian intuition and then discussing the resulting “paradoxes” one by one. This approach is clearly great for pop-science writers trying to dazzle and amaze their lay audiences, but I’m at a loss to understand why it’s foisted onto students who are supposed to learn real physics.
Ouch. I’ve never read more than one or two Conservapedia articles before, and I didn’t know it was that bad.
Conservapedia is so gibberingly insane it inspired the creation of RationalWiki. (Which has its bouts of reversed stupidity.)
http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Conservapedia:Conservapedian_relativity came to some prominence last year when Prof Brian Cox discovered the Conservapedia article, then getting some blogosphere interest.
It is important to note here that Andrew Schlafly, founder of Conservapedia and author of most of these articles, has a degree in electrical engineering and worked as an engineer for several years before becoming a lawyer. He would not only be capable of understanding the mathematics, he would have used concepts from the theory in his professional work. At least most engineer cranks aren’t this bad.
David_Gerard:
In fairness to relativity crackpots, unless things have changed since my freshman days, the way special relativity is commonly taught in introductory physics courses is practically an invitation for the students to form crackpot ideas. Instead of immediately explaining the idea of the Minkowski spacetime, which reduces the whole theory almost trivially to some basic analytic geometry and calculus and makes all those so-called “paradoxes” disappear easily in a flash of insight, physics courses often take the godawful approach of grafting a mishmash of weird “effects” (like “length contraction” and “time dilatation”) onto a Newtonian intuition and then discussing the resulting “paradoxes” one by one. This approach is clearly great for pop-science writers trying to dazzle and amaze their lay audiences, but I’m at a loss to understand why it’s foisted onto students who are supposed to learn real physics.