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Could Einstein's Theory of Relativity be a few mathematical equations away from being disproved? Jacob Barnett of Hamilton County, Ind., who is just weeks shy of his 13th birthday, thinks so. And, he's got the solutions to prove it. Barnett, who has an IQ of 170, explained his expanded theory of relativity — in a YouTube video. His mother Kristine Barnett, who admittedly flunked math, did what every other mother would do if her genius son started talking mathematical gibberish. She told him to explain the whole thing slowly while she taped her son explaining his take on the theory....

According to the Washington Post, David Axelrod, Barack Obama’s senior advisor, said that the president worked with “[Harvard professor] Laurence Tribe on a paper on the legal implications of Einstein’s theory of relativity.” I’ve read that paper, “The Curvature of Constitutional Space.” It’s complete nonsense. It shows no understanding of Einstein’s theory of relativity, or of the relationship between relativity theory and Newton’s theory. I — to use Obama’s favorite word — do understand relativity theory. I was trained in relativity theory by the best. I was the post-doc of the late Princeton professor John A. Wheeler, who was himself...

People who think science is dull are wrong. Here are 10 reasons why.Physics is weird. There is no denying that. Particles that don’t exist except as probabilities; time that changes according to how fast you’re moving; cats that are both alive and dead until you open a box. We’ve put together a collection of 10 of the strangest facts we can find, with the kind help of cosmologist and writer Marcus Chown, author of We Need To Talk About Kelvin, and an assortment of Twitter users. The humanities-graduate writer of this piece would like to stress that this is...

Can we calculate the gravitational field of a mass moving close to the speed of light? Franklin Felber (Starmark Inc) believes he can, with implications for propulsion. Back in 2006 we looked briefly at Felber’s work, describing what the physicist believes to be a repulsive gravitational field that emerges from his results. Felber discussed the matter at the Space Technology and Applications International meeting that year, where he presented his calculations of the ‘relativistically exact motion of a payload in the gravitational field of a source moving with constant velocity.’ Above a certain critical velocity, Felber believes, any mass...

God’s mighty expanse by D. Russell HumphreysPublished: 26 February 2009(GMT+10) Psalm 150:1, the first verse of the last psalm, contains a phrase that has always intrigued me: … Praise Him in his mighty expanse. (NAS), or… praise him in the firmament of his power. (KJV) God made the expanse (firmament) on the second day and called it “heavens” (Genesis 1:8, plural from literal Hebrew). Later, on the fourth day, He populated the expanse with the sun, moon and stars (Genesis 1:14-19). So the expanse is not the heavenly bodies, but rather the space that contains the heavenly bodies. Normally people...

Enlarge ImageIt's relative. Astronomers have been measuring spin precession in an eclipsing pair of pulsars.Credit: Daniel Cantin/McGill University As if his reputation needed cementing, astronomers have confirmed Albert Einstein's status as a supergenius once more. Studying a unique pair of pulsars--small and extremely dense leftovers from supernova explosions--researchers have measured an effect that was predicted by Einstein's 92-year-old general theory of relativity. The result, they report tomorrow in Science, is almost exactly what the famous physicist had foreseen. In Einstein's relativistic universe, matter curves space and slows down time, and the speed of light remains the only constant. But...

Einstein's self-proclaimed "biggest blunder" -- his postulation of a cosmological constant (a force that opposes gravity and keeps the universe from collapsing) -- may not be such a blunder after all, according to the research of an international team of scientists that includes two Texas A&M University researchers. The team is working on a project called ESSENCE that studies supernovae (exploding stars) to figure out if dark energy – the accelerating force of the universe – is consistent with Einstein’s cosmological constant. Texas A&M researchers Nicholas Suntzeff and Kevin Krisciunas are part of the project, which began in October of...

A surfer dude with no fixed address may be this century's Einstein. A. Garrett Lisi, a physicist who divides his time between surfing in Maui and teaching snowboarding in Lake Tahoe, has come up with what may be the Grand Unified Theory. That's the "holy grail" of physics that scientists have been searching for ever since Albert Einstein presented his General Theory of Relativity nearly 100 years ago. Even more remarkable is that Lisi, who has a Ph.D. but no permanent university affiliation, solves the problem without resorting to exotic dimensions, string theory or exceptionally complex mathematics. A successful Grand...

Another Theory of Relativity by: Malcolm A. Kline, November 06, 2007 Relativists, beware. The professors who tell you that “Everything is relative” probably fail to relate how destructive an idea that is. In an interview with Hillsdale College’s Imprimis magazine, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas noted “the connection between relativism, nihilism, and Naziism.” “The common idea that you can do whatever you want to do, because truth and morality are relative, leads to the idea that if you are powerful enough, you can kill people because of their race or faith,” Justice Thomas explains. “So ask your relativist friends sometime:...

A pair of German physicists claim to have broken the speed of light - an achievement that would undermine our entire understanding of space and time. According to Einstein's special theory of relativity, it would require an infinite amount of energy to propel an object at more than 186,000 miles per second. However, Dr Gunter Nimtz and Dr Alfons Stahlhofen, of the University of Koblenz, say they may have breached a key tenet of that theory. The pair say they have conducted an experiment in which microwave photons - energetic packets of light - travelled "instantaneously" between a pair of...

How Do We Think About What Is Human? A talk on C S Lewis view on the humanist future Tonight on O Riley was this video and the indifference this father had towards his Baby daughter I thought this observation of C S Lewis was chilling and we know in the News we are hearing more deprave interference taking place in the world in which we are living! To think these people get to vote and this is why it is important the Real America wakes up and votes in 2008! Landlord and teaching a baby to about stress and...

AFTER more than 90 years, scientists believe they may have found experimental proof for general relativity, one of Albert Einstein’s greatest theories. Scientists announced yesterday that early results from Gravity Probe B (GP-B), the £400m space mission carrying the first experiments capable of testing the theory, suggested that Einstein was right. The researchers cautioned that they still had several months of work to confirm the result. However, the announcement, made at the annual meeting of the American Physical Society, is seen as highly significant. Since its launch by Nasa in April 2004, GP-B has been using four ultra-precise gyroscopes to...

What do Volvo, Ericsson, Saab and IKEA have in common? The people of Sweden have more faith in them than in the church. Perhaps the news shouldn't come as much of a surprise, coming as it does from a country best known for its meatballs and the bright blue and yellow warehouses selling cheap and cheerful furniture around the globe. Still, preacher men the world over must be reeling. A new poll taken of Swedes indicates that more people trust IKEA than the church in the largely Protestant country. According to the poll, taken by the business weekly Dagens Industri,...

September 14, 2006 - An international research team led by Prof. Michael Kramer of the University of Manchester’s Jodrell Bank Observatory, UK, has used three years of observations of the “double pulsar”, a unique pair of natural stellar clocks which they discovered in 2003, to prove that Einstein’s theory of general relativity–the theory of gravity that displaced Newton’s–is correct to within a staggering 0.05%. Their results are published on the14th September in the journal Science and are based on measurements of an effect called the Shapiro Delay. The double pulsar system, PSR J0737-3039A and B, is 2000 light-years away in...

An international research team led by Prof. Michael Kramer of the University of Manchester's Jodrell Bank Observatory, UK, has used three years of observations of the "double pulsar", a unique pair of natural stellar clocks which they discovered in 2003, to prove that Einstein's theory of general relativity - the theory of gravity that displaced Newton's - is correct to within a staggering 0.05%. Their results are published on the14th September in the journal Science and are based on measurements of an effect called the Shapiro Delay. The double pulsar system, PSR J0737-3039A and B, is 2000 light-years away in...

One of the brightest and furthest known objects in the universe might not be a black hole as traditionally believed, but rather an exotic new type of object, a new study suggests. (snip)

  "Whoever undertakes to set himself up as a judge in the field of truth and knowledge is shipwrecked by the laughter of the Gods." —Albert Einstein  The general, historical dialogue between religion and science goes back a long way—at least to Plato, Aristotle, and Leibniz. Before the 17th century, the goals of science were wisdom, understanding the natural order, and living in harmony with it. Ever since the "quantum revolution" of about 70 years ago, various scientists have been finding the intriguing parallels between their results and certain mystical-transcendental religions. Heisenberg, Bohr, Schroedinger, Eddington, Einstein—all held a mystical, spiritual...

SYDNEY (Reuters) - A team of Australian scientists has proposed that the speed of light may not be a constant, a revolutionary idea that could unseat one of the most cherished laws of modern physics -- Einstein's theory of relativity. The team, led by theoretical physicist Paul Davies of Sydney's Macquarie University, say it is possible that the speed of light has slowed over billions of years. If so, physicists will have to rethink many of their basic ideas about the laws of the universe. "That means giving up the theory of relativity and E=mc squared and all that sort...

The proof that faster-than-light (FTL) propagation is not allowed by nature is simple. Special relativity (SR) forbids it because, in that theory, time slows and approaches a cessation of flow for any material entity approaching the speed of light. So no matter how much energy is brought to bear, the entity cannot be propelled all the way to, much less beyond, the point where time ceases. The entity’s inertia simply increases towards infinity as the speed barrier is approached.[*] But most importantly, relativists are confident that SR is a valid theory because it has passed eleven independent experiments confirming most...

Lorentz invariance says that the laws of physics are the same for an observer at rest on the Earth or one who is rotated through some angle or traveling at a constant speed relative to the observer at rest. Looking for a crack in the universe in the form of a very faint field pervading the Cosmos, one that exerts a force on electron spin, would mean the end of Lorentz invariance. An important ingredient in Einstein's theory of special relativity, Lorentz invariance has been borne out in numerous experiments. A new experiment conducted at the University of Washington, in...