Was Einstein wrong?

Associate Professor Reg Cahill from Flinders University in Australia is trying to demonstrate that Einstein was wrong.

He is well aware that his activities will not make him popular with the Establishment of physics - indeed, he believes that other experiments that have produced data that conflicts with Einstein’s theories have been deliberately ignored or, in some cases, suppressed.

Einstein’s “invention” of space-time merged the geometrical models of space and time, and was predicated on famous 19th century experiments by Michelson and Morley that purported to show that the speed of light was constant in any direction.

When a very small effect was recorded as opposed to the large one anticipated, the two physicists decided that the effect could be discounted as an artefact of the experiment. They declared the result to be null, and the constant speed of light became part of the theoretical basis for Einstein’s theories of special relativity and general relativity.

Associate Professor Cahill says they were wrong: “They threw the baby out with the bathwater,” he said. “The effect was real: the speed of light is different in different directions.”

He said that numerous sets of experimental data since that time have showed similar effects, only to be disregarded or set aside. But Cahill and PhD student Kirsty Kitto undertook an analysis of how these experiments actually worked.

Associate Professor Reg Cahill from Flinders University in Australia.

“In 2002, we showed that the calibration of the experimental apparatus had been very wrong, and the small effect seen by Michelson and Morley and others actually corresponded to the solar system moving through space at more than 400 kilometres per second, which is more than 1,000th of the speed of light,” Cahill said.

“So for over 100 years, the evidence for three-dimensional space existed, and the fact that we could measure the speed of the solar system through that space has been ignored.”

“The whole Einstein theory is based on the impossibility of making such experiments. Einstein himself was aware of these experiments, and admitted that were they proven to be correct, then his theory would collapse.”

“Contemporary attacks on the quality the experiments delayed the demise of spacetime, Cahill said, “but that demise is now here.”

“The evidence from 100 years of experiments is now conclusively demonstrating that Einstein’s most celebrated theory is simply wrong.”
Cahill describes the expensive and complicated experiments in Europe and the US to detect the gravitational waves of spacetime predicted by Einstein’s theory as “spurious”.

“Their failure is consistent with the collapse of the spacetime theory,” he said.

The problem for conventional physics is that if Cahill is right, the implications for the fundamental physical laws as currently accepted are catastrophic.

And this is exactly what he maintains: “The whole of physics has being going off on a tangent for the last hundred years,” he said.

While Einstein’s theories have mathematical elegance, Cahill says they have little basis in reality. In the case of Einstein’s theory of gravity, he points to the fact that corrections constantly have to be made to explain away inconsistent phenomena.

“The outer part of spiral galaxies go around about 10 times faster than Einstein’s theory permits, so people invented “dark matter” to account for extra gravitational pull,” he said. “They’ve spent years and millions of dollars looking for it everywhere, but it doesn’t exist.”

As part of what he calls as “a major rebuilding of the foundations of physics”, Cahill has developed an alternative theory of gravity, which, he says, not only accounts for the aspects of Einstein’s theory which do work, but also explains those experiments which produced anomalies that physicists have turned their backs on.

“Now every experiment is making sense; with Einstein, they had to be careful which data they looked at,” he said.

Some of Cahill’s ideas are set out in a newly published book, Process Physics: From information theory to quantum space and matter. The book also contains an overview of data from seven different 20th century experiments that Cahill says are linked by the coherence of their data and also by their rejection by orthodox physicists.

According to Cahill’s new theory, space is three-dimensional and structured, and not part of a constant geometrical space-time continuum postulated by Einstein.

Cahill said that in 1991, a Belgian telephone engineer who was synchronising two atomic clocks noticed travel-time variations in a radio signal being sent down a co-axial cable.

Cahill added that the six months worth of data he generated make it clear that the variations were due to the motion of the earth through space and fluctuations in the structure of space.

Armed with a $40,000 grant from the Australian Research Council and the donation of $100,00 worth of highly specialised optical fibres,  Cahill intends to repeat the Belgian experiment on a smaller scale in the Physical Sciences building at Flinders in coming months.

“It will be a gravitational wave detector operating out of my office,” he said, “but it will be detecting and studying those waves in space that already have been seen, and not Einstein’s ’spacetime waves’.”

The contrast with the huge facilities in America dedicated to the same task could not be more stark.

“They are worth $300 million each, and they see nothing: that is because their experiments are based on Einstein’s spacetime continuum, which is wrong,” he said.

“For a hundred years they’ve been burying the data which shows what is actually going on. If you keep suppressing all the clues, it comes back to bite you. Anomalies are the most valuable things in physics.”