IN PHYSICS and chemistry, like all other branches of science, there is never a sharp line separating pseudo-scientific speculation from the theories of competent men. One fades into the other and there are always borderline cases. The British physicist, Oliver Heaviside, for example, was a fascinating mixture of scientist and eccentric. He was the only physicist of eminence to denounce Einstein, when relativity was first announced, and many of his speculations were so absurd that no reputable journal would publish them. At the same time, he made a host of solid contributions to electrical theory. Nikola Tesla—inventor of alternating current motors, the transformer (Tesla coil), and many other electrical devices of great value—grew steadily more paranoid with advancing years. John H. O’Neill’s amusing biography, Prodigal Genius, discloses how Tesla spent the later years of his life—a lonely, uncommunicative egotist, intensely jealous of Edison, unwilling to shake hands for fear of germ contamination, frightened by round surfaces (like billiard balls and pearl necklaces), loving no one but the Manhattan pigeons he fed daily, and dissipating his great talent by trying to invent death rays, or devices for photographing thoughts on the retina of the eye.
Often, a theory of physics or chemistry will be unanimously rejected by the experts, but defended with such intelligence and restraint, and on such a technical level, that a layman is in no position to reach a firm conclusion about it. In the field of nuclear chemistry, for example, Dr. Albert Cushing Crehore has spent most of his life defending what he calls the “Crehore atom.” Briefly, Crehore rejects the accepted view that the electrons of an atom, in its stable state, have orbits about the nucleus. He thinks instead that the electrons are part of the nucleus itself. In his opinion, gravity is produced by the rotation of positive charges within the nucleus. Crehore’s books, the latest of which, A New Electrodynamics, appeared in 1950, are universally considered worthless by his colleagues. On the other hand, Crehore was formerly assistant professor of physics at Dartmouth, with a doctor’s degree from Cornell, and a distinguished record as a teacher and inventor. So, one hesitates to be dogmatic.
However, we do not have to be concerned with debatable cases of this sort. At the extreme end of the scale there is an abundance of physical and chemical literature so obviously balderdash that the label of pseudo-science can be applied without hesitation. No one but a theosophist, for example, would imagine that Occult Chemistry, 1908 (revised 1919), by Annie Besant and Charles W. Leadbeater, contained anything of value. The work is a study, by clairvoyance, of the structure of atoms, including the atoms of several elements not yet discovered by orthodox chemists. Unfortunately, most of this type of literature is extremely dull. We shall, therefore, limit our attention to only that small segment which is richest in interest and humor.
Any revolutionary scientific theory, once it has won acceptance by the majority of scientists, always finds itself under fire from cranks rebelling against the father-image of established authority. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the great symbol of authority was Isaac Newton. As one might expect, the crackpot literature attacking him ran into many hundreds of weighty volumes. Even the great Goethe produced a two-volume work on color, containing violent polemics against Newton’s theories of light. Since Goethe had no understanding of experimental methods, and even less of mathematics, his attack proved one of the most irrelevant in the history of physics.1
In America, vigorous opposition to Newton came from the pen of a Methodist minister in New York City. His name was Alexander Wilford Hall (1819-1902) and his major opus, which runs to 524 pages in the twentieth revised edition, is titled The Problem of Human Life. Most of the book is an assault on evolution, but Hall also defends at great length an original theory of physics called “substantialism.” According to this view, all so-called forces, including the force of gravity, are “substances.” Of course they are made of much smaller atoms than “material” substances, but nevertheless are composed of actual particles. Light, heat, electricity, magnetism, and even sounds, are “substantial”—like the particles which transmit odors. In the first edition of this book (1877) Hall had a curious propensity for arguing in a trochaic tetrameter similar to Longfellow’s Hiawatha. The following excerpt is representative:
I assert, without a question
That the chirping of a cricket
Or the twitter of a swallow
Scatters through the air around it
And through every object near it
Atoms real and substantial—
Matter of as true a nature
As the odoriferous granules
Issuing from the cryptic chambers
Of the rose or honeysuckle—
Reverend Hall was fond of pointing out that the sound of a locust could be heard for more than a mile. If the wave theory of sound were correct, he argued, it meant that a gigantic mass of air, weighing thousands of tons, had to be kept in constant agitation by a tiny insect. No sane person could believe this, he said, although he did not explain how the tiny locust could fill the gigantic space with a substance. Hall was very pugnacious about it all. For eleven years, he edited a monthly magazine called The Microcosm (and for two years another magazine, The Scientific Arena) in which he tried to prod contemporary scientists into debating with him. They refused. This of course convinced Hall that his theories were unanswerable.
The corpuscular theory of sound was also vigorously defended by another American, Joseph Battell (1839-1915), of Middlebury, Vermont. Battell was the owner of several farms and 20,000 acres of forest land in Vermont, a breeder of Morgan horses, and manager of the American Publishing Company. It was this firm which published his major work—three enormous volumes (each running more than 600 pages) titled Ellen—or the Whisperings of an Old Pine.
Few odder works than Ellen have ever appeared in the United States. All three volumes are in the form of a Platonic dialogue between a sixteen-year-old girl named Ellen and the narrator who happens to be an old Vermont Pine tree. It is not clear how either of the two managed to acquire their vast knowledge of science and mathematics. Like Hall, Battell is opposed to all wave theories, and especially the wave theory of sound which he brands a “monstrous lie.” You might suppose that the vibration of a tuning fork produces the sound, but Battell quickly sets you straight. It is the sound emerging from the fork which causes the prongs to vibrate. The work is also filled with lengthy attacks on orthodox algebra and geometry, and is illustrated with about 200 photographs of Vermont mountain scenery. Ellen herself appears in many of these scenes.
After Einstein, Newtonian theories of gravity and sound ceased to be the principal bugaboo of the crackpot. Since Einstein was responsible for the greatest revolution in physics since Newton, it is not surprising that the literature attacking him is as large and violent as the earlier diatribes against his eminent predecessor. Often the attacks are made in the name of Newton, who had become the symbol of an abandoned, and therefore heretical, point of view.
Naturally, many of the early attacks on Einstein (most of them in French or German) cannot be considered pseudo-scientific. Frequently they were by professional colleagues who had difficulty accepting the new and bizarre doctrines. For example, Charles L. Poor, professor of celestial mechanics at Columbia University, wrote a book titled Gravitation versus Relativity which was published by Putnam’s in 1922. The book was critical of the experimental evidence on which Einstein’s views rested at that time. It raised important objections and concludes undogmatically, “The relativity theory may be true, but no substantial proofs have yet been submitted.” A much less restrained work, but still one which cannot be labeled worthless, is Arthur Lynch’s The Case Against Einstein, 1932. Many other anti-relativity books of the twenties and thirties are less the work of cranks than of journalists or amateur scientists who rushed into print before they had a sound comprehension of what they were opposing. Even today, it should be pointed out, many reputable physicists hold views which depart radically from Einstein’s. The outstanding example is the “kinematic relativity” of the great British mathematician, Edward A. Milne.
Quite apart from all this critical literature, however, is another type of anti-relativity writing of entirely different tone and quality. Like similar literature opposing Newton and Darwin, it is the product of peevish, ignorant minds. It betrays no understanding of the views opposed, although the authors have had every opportunity for acquiring such knowledge. Even should Einstein later be found wrong in his major assertions, it would not elevate this literature into the realm of acceptable scientific controversy. At this stage in the history of physics, Einstein’s theories have introduced enormous simplifications (notably the reduction of gravity and inertia to an identical phenomenon), and are slowly being confirmed by mounting experimental evidence. Unless an opponent of Einstein takes these huge achievements into full account, his objections are as irrelevant as the attacks of Hall and Battell on the wave theory of sound.
An outstanding example in recent times of such a worthless attack is Back to Newton by the self-styled French physicist, Georges de Bothezat. It was published in the United States in 1936, a few years before the author’s death.
Although Bothezat considers his book a “rigorous refutation” of relativity, it consists less of relevant argument and evidence than of invective. Not only is Einstein accused of being “just unable to understand the great conception of Newton,” but Bothezat seriously wonders whether Einstein even understands himself. Scientists who accept relativity “by their general lack of any knowledge of physics are utterly unable to acquaint themselves with the subject.” To explain the widespread acceptance of Einstein’s views by the scientific world, the author suggests it may be due to “the weakening of the critical spirit in science produced by the Great War.”
It would be a tedious task to go into the details of this muddled, poorly written work, but one aspect deserves, perhaps, to be mentioned because it is common to so many attacks on the theory of relativity. This is Bothezat’s use of Dr. Dayton C. Miller’s experiments as a prop for anti-relativity views. Miller was a responsible physicist who repeated, in the twenties, the famous Michelson-Morley experiment, obtaining results unfavorable to relativity.
The Michelson-Morley experiment is one of the major, if not the major, experimental foundations of relativity. It had been known for some time that the velocity of light, sent out from a moving object, is constant regardless of how fast the light source is moving. This meant that if measurements of light were made in different directions on the earth’s surface, the speeds would be expected to vary because of the earth’s motion relative to the paths of light. When Michelson and Morley first made such a test in 1887, they found to their great surprise that the velocity of light did not show the anticipated variations. It was one of the most unexpected developments in the entire history of science. Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity was, in a sense, simply a way of explaining the Michelson-Morley experiment’s failure.
Forty years after this historic test, Dr. Miller decided to make the experiment once again. He did so, and obtained evidence of slight variations in the speed of light which he interpreted as a refutation of Einstein. He repeated the experiment many times, always with positive results. Dozens of articles were contributed by him to technical journals, and he remained convinced of the validity of his work until his death in 1941.
To this day, no physicist is sure just why Miller’s experiments turned out as they did. But what Bothezat and other irresponsible critics of relativity do not tell the reader is that out of thousands of repetitions which have been made of the Michelson-Morley experiment, only Dr. Miller’s gave positive results. The test has been performed in every scientifically advanced nation, at all altitudes, in all seasons, and with all types of equipment. In every case—except Dr. Miller’s—the results were negative. Today the consensus among physicists is that some local disturbance affected Miller’s apparatus, or perhaps he unconsciously made errors in recording his data.2
Frequently in the pseudo-scientific literature directed against Einstein, one meets with a violent prejudice against complex mathematical equations. The author, of course, does not understand them, so he rationalizes his ignorance by insisting that nature always obeys simple mathematical laws. A good example of this bias is the work of the American chemist, Thomas H. Graydon, of Santa Monica, California. In his New Laws for Natural Phenomena, published by a small press in 1938, he writes: “In that I go contrary to fixed methodical systems which seem to revel in the complex . . . my concepts may not be welcome by some intelligentsia whose positions of authority are sustained by the difficulties encountered in their orthodox methods. . . .” Graydon’s method of simplifying astronomy is to abandon the notion of a gravitational “pull” altogether. Instead, he postulates a “push” that moves outward from the sun—a common theme, incidentally, in earlier attacks on Newton.
A mimeographed work by Graydon titled Relativity’s Failure, issued by him in 1947, can be obtained from the Fortean Society. It finds Einstein’s theory of gravitation less plausible than the “push” theory. If gravity did not exist, a planet would fall into the sun—not because it is “Pulled,” but because “it finds the least strain or the least time in which it can make a revolution. . . .” Fortunately, gravity exerts enough of a shove outward to keep the planets in place. Why do objects fall to the earth? “. . . because there is insufficient radiation emanating from the earth to hold them on orbits above the earth’s surface.”
As one would expect, Graydon considers himself a modern Galileo. He quotes a letter from a prominent astronomer to a publisher, advising against the acceptance of one of Graydon’s manuscripts. Graydon’s theory is so simple, the astronomer reasoned, that if it had any merit it would have been established long ago, “The ingenuity displayed in this letter,” Graydon writes, “. . . is not a far cry from the rebuke Galileo received from Francesco Sizzi, a promiment astronomer of his day, when Galileo reported the seeing through his first telescope of four satellites revolving about the planet Jupiter.”
More amusing than Graydon is another eccentric also much admired by Tiffany Thayer and the Forteans—George Francis Gillette and his “spiral universe.” Biographical details on Gillette are scarce beyond the fact that he was born in 1875, attended the University of Michigan, and has held engineering posts with several large firms. But his four privately printed books are lasting monuments to his originality and ingenuity.
Relativity fares badly in all of Gillette’s writing. “Einstein a scientist?” he asks. “It were difficult to imagine anyone more contrary and opposite to what a scientist should be. . . . . As a rational physicist, Einstein is a fair violinist.” Relativity is given such labels as “moronic brain child of mental colic,” “cross-eyed physics,” “utterly mad,” “the nadir of pure drivel,” and “voodoo nonsense.” By 1940, he predicted (writing in 1929), “the relativity theory will be considered a joke.” “Einstein is already dead and buried, alongside Andersen, Grimm, and the Mad Hatter.”
Gillette has unbounded admiration for Newton, praising him as the greatest mental genius who ever lived. The “spiral universe” theory is, naturally, an improvement on Newton. As Gillette puts it, it “out-Newton’s Newton.”
Exactly what is the spiral universe? It is a little difficult to make out. The ultimate units—indivisible and unchanging—are called “unimotes.” Our universe is a “supraunimote” and the entire cosmos is the “maximote.” There is also an “ultimote” which is defined as the “Nth sub-universe plane.” Here is a sample of Gillette’s exposition:
Each ultimote is simultaneously an integral part of zillions of otherplane units and only thus is its infinite allplane velocity and energy subdivided into zillions of finite planar quotas of velocity and energy.
“Bumping” is an important Gillette concept. “All motions ever strive to go straight—until they bump.” In fact, everything in the cosmos finally reduces to motions bumping one another. “Nothing else ever happens at all. That’s all there is.” “In all the cosmos there is naught but straight-flying bumping, caroming and again straight flying. Phenomena are but lumps, jumps, and bumps. A mass unit’s career is but lumping, jumping, bumping, rejumping, rebumping, and finally unlumping.”
One of Gillette’s greatest contributions to physics is his famous “backscrewing theory of gravity.” It is difficult to do this concept justice, but perhaps these quotations will be helpful: “Gravitation is the kicked back nut of the screwing- bolt of radiation.” “Gravitation and backscrewing are synonymous. All mass units are solar systems . . . of interscrewed subunits.” And finally, “Gravitation is naught but that reaction in the form of subplanar solar systems screwing through higher plane masses.”
As might be anticipated, Gillette feels keenly the rejection of his views by what he calls the “orthodox oxen” of science. There is “no ox so dumb as the orthodox” he complains. They are the “would be scientists,” the “built up favorites of publishers.” They are “the reverse of true scientists. They are droll.” It is all due to “their being cramped within Homoplania, ignorant of ultimotically related sub and supraplanias.”
The fact that these “professors” with their “frozen beliefs” attack his theories he takes as a compliment. “The author would never have wasted his depleted resources,” he admits bitterly, “in printing at his own expense theories already granted.” But he is aware that working against him are “all the mighty resources of mysticism which control the press, politics, publishers, colleges, public libraries, and all such direct avenues. . . .” Like Columbus, Galileo, and Copernicus, he is persecuted and misunderstood. Yet he bears up under all this with good humor. “The truth seeker is never a fanatic. He has no fantasies to be fanatic about. So he is serene, and humane, civilized.”
Only one “professor,” Gillette writes sadly in one of his books, has ever offered him encouragement—“a noble, brave-minded Russian. To him, Salute!” To the rest of the scientific world: “Pooh! . . . It will soon attain oblivion by its own efforts.”
If the reader has failed to obtain a clear picture of Gillette’s revolutionary cosmology, I refer him to Gillette’s Rational, Non-Mystical Cosmos, revised third edition, 1933, in which he will find it carefully explained in 384 pages. If this proves too formidable, try the shorter work, Orthodox Oxen, 1929. According to the title page, it is entirely free of “Hi-de-hi mathematics,” and is “bristling with new axioms.” Moreover, there are innumerable diagrams of such impressive structures as “The all cosmos doughnut,” and a “Laminated solid, solid, solid, solid.” In some editions the pictures are hand-colored by the author.
A more dignified broadside against relativity was fired in 1931 by the Very Reverend Jeremiah J. Callahan. Rev. Callahan was at that time president of Duquesne University in Pittsburgh. To understand Father Callahan’s indictment, however, it will be necessary first to make a few comments about the nature of non-Euclidian geometry.
In Euclid’s classic Elements, all the proofs of his theorems rested on a set of assumptions called axioms and postulates. These assumptions were regarded as “self-evident” and impossible to prove. The Fifth Postulate, however, seemed more complicated than the others. It stated, in effect, that through a point outside a given line only one line can be drawn parallel to the given line. After Euclid, mathematicians regarded the postulate as a blot on Euclid’s system which might be removed if it could be proved on the basis of the other assumptions. Thousands of such proofs were attempted, many extremely ingenious, but all of them were later found fallacious. Finally, in the nineteenth century, a Russian mathematician named Lobatchevsky and others demonstrated conclusively that the famous parallel postulate was completely independent of the other assumptions, and could not be proved by them.
Once this independence of the postulate was fully understood, mathematicians made an even more astonishing discovery. They found that they could replace the postulate by something which contradicted it—such as the assumption that through a point outside a line more than one parallel can be drawn. The new postulate could then be combined with Euclid’s other assumptions to form a geometry that was logically consistent. These new geometries were called non-Euclidian. It was entirely out of mathematical curiosity and delight that the early work on non-Euclidian geometry was done, but when Einstein developed relativity, he discovered that a non-Euclidian approach to space led to enormous practical consequences. It was non-Euclidian geometry which provided the mathematical framework for his General Theory of Relativity.
One may say, therefore, that relativity and non-Euclidian geometry are inseparable. If non-Euclidian geometry can be found logically inconsistent, the framework of relativity collapses. And if one can prove the parallel postulate by means of Euclid’s other assumptions, non-Euclidian geometry collapses. A simple means, then, of overturning relativity would be to prove the parallel postulate.
Thoughts similar to the above were running through the mind of Father Callahan one day when he was riding the New York subway. Not long after, he stated in a press interview, he interrupted a meal with a friend by shouting, “That can be proved!” By the close of 1931, Father Callahan had completed his proof and announced to the world that relativity had been overthrown.
In the nineteenth century the famous French mathematician, Lagrange, once appeared before a learned society to explain a proof he had worked out for a previously unsolved problem. No sooner had he started to read his paper than he suddenly stopped talking, frowned, then folded his papers and remarked, “Gentlemen, I must think further about this.” Unfortunately, Father Callahan did not fold his papers. In 1931, he published his proof of the parallel postulate—a 310-page work titled Euclid or Einstein. Any competent geometer could have pointed out the error in this proof, but the amateur scientist is not noted for his willingness to seek helpful advice.
Einstein fares as badly under Father Callahan’s rhetoric as he does under the turgid prose of Gillette. “We certainly cannot consider Einstein as one who shines as a scientific discoverer in the domain of physics,” Callahan writes, “but rather as one who in a fuddled sort of way is merely trying to find some meaning for mathematical formulas in which he himself does not believe too strongly, but which he is hoping against hope somehow to establish. . . . Einstein has not a logical mind.”
Reverend Callahan finds unintended humor in the “mental fog” and “huddle of meaningless words” which make up Einstein’s geometry. “Sometimes one feels like laughing,” he declares, “and sometimes one feels a little irritated, that such a hodgepodge could be seriously accepted anywhere for thought. . . . But there is no use expecting Einstein to reason.”
Again: “His [Einstein’s] thought is but odds and ends, unconnected bits, incongruous, undigested, and contradictory. . . . Whatever he is as a pure mathematician . . . he becomes the most out-and-out careless thinker the moment he gets beyond his symbols and his equations. . . . His thought staggers, and reels, and stumbles, and falls, like a blind man rushing into unknown territory.”
I have quoted these remarks at length because, like similar remarks previously cited, they are typical of pseudo-scientific criticism of great scientists. Even though Father Callahan is a man of the cloth, his attacks descend to a level almost indistinguishable from personal character assassination. Surely there must be psychological motives operating here of which the Reverend can scarcely be aware.
A good indication of Father Callahan’s mathematical insight is the fact that in the same year he “proved” the parallel postulate, he also discovered a method of trisecting the angle!3 It was published as a pamphlet by Duquesne University. An announcement was made at the time that he was working on the duplication of the cube and the squaring of the circle, but apparently he has not succeeded in these two efforts. In 1940, at the age of 62, he retired as President of the University, and has since been living quietly in Isle Brevelle, Louisiana.
Among all the attackers of relativity, however, Fort—as so often is the case—seems to have the final word. In discussing the famed Michelson-Morley experiment, the cornerstone of relativity, he points out that the failure to find variations in the speed of light could lead to two conclusions. One—the conclusion of Einstein—that the velocity of light is an absolute regardless of the earth’s motion. The other —a simpler, “more graspable” conclusion—that the earth is not moving at all!
And then he adds, “Unfortunately for my own expression, I have to ask a third question: Who, except someone who was out to boost a theory, ever has demonstrated that light has any velocity?”