C. K. Raju’s Blog

What did Einstein really say about gravitational waves?

First, the background. In almost twenty five years, no one has answered the objections I raised about Einstein. Namely that he did not fully understand the special theory of relativity invented by Poincare. Special relativity requires functional differential equations, as Poincare realised. But Einstein never understood that till the end of his life, and kept trying to approximate functional differential equations by ordinary differential equations which is manifestly a mistake. See my book Time: Towards a Consistent Theory (Kluwer Academic, 1994).

In the more recent series of articles on FDEs in Physics Education, the first article explains the mistake.

• “Functional differential equations.1: a new paradigm in physics”, Physics Education (India), 29(3), July-Sep 2013.

Sadly, though special relativity is a first year undergraduate subject, it continues to be taught incorrectly. Even at that elementary level, scientists go by the force of social authority, and just ignore the force of a scientific argument.

Further, even in the case of general relativity, it is known that Einstein had the wrong equations before Hilbert sent the right equations to him. Withing 5 days he then claimed he had suddenly and coincidentally arrived at the same equations independently of Hilbert, just as he claimed he suddenly and coincidentally arrived at the special theory of relativity shortly after Poincare’s article on it was published!

Now, the popular image of Einstein is as a great mathematician, but knowledgeable people understood that Einstein was ignorant of mathematics: as Hilbert said, “every boy in the streets of Goettingen knows more about 4-dimensional geometry than Einstein”. (more…)

A PhD student from IIT Madras asked me to comment on the reported discovery of gravitational waves in relation to my points about Einstein. My comments were as follows.

Any claim that the experiment has confirmed general relativity is wrong; scientific theories can only be refuted, never confirmed. It is faith which is confirmed.

My own theory of gravitation,  RGT (Retarded Gravitation Theory), was most recently explained in an expository paper.

• “Functional Differential Equations. 4: Retarded gravitation”, Physics Education (India) 31(2) April-June, 2015.

There is no fundamental competition between GRT (General Relativity Theory) and RGT any more than there is a fundamental competition between Lorentz covariance and general covariance. One may however speculate on the generally covariant theory which would result if the flat spacetime limit is RGT, not Newtonian gravity, and so on.

After the solar system the galaxy and its structure is the next big problem in gravitation, not gravitational waves. However, it remains a fact that GRT cannot be used to understand the galaxy, which requires that we solve a billion body problem. At any rate the billion body problem in GRT could not be solved in the last century. It does not matter if GRT is the ultimate theory, for it has little practical value in the context of the galaxy. (more…)