I had a very fascinating read this morning. Someone shared this with me, which is a timeline showing the discoveries of various scientists and engineers over the course of the last four hundred years. It strikes that after Otto Hahn discovered nuclear fission reactions, something interesting happened. This was the first time in the history of science when the alchemists' dreams started coming true - finally you could transmute elements from one to the other (Of course, no one to this day has figured out how to transmute lead into gold!), With transmutation, of course, you lose mass. This was kind of a startling thing, because the cardinal rule had always been that no matter what chemical reaction took place, the mass is preserved exactly as it was. If you measure the weight of the gas, and the smoke, and the remaining embers - you have the same weight on the scale. So E=MC² became an equation that was meant to measure that change in mass that happened during the trasmutation. Equations to measure the patterns that you find when you experiment are very good. This is what scientists have always done. There were people spending months and years hovering over Leyden jars measuring how much electricity was stored and then retrieved from them - drawing up complex charts of data with their pencil and paper. It's fascinating that Einstein chose to throw in the speed of light there. The number 186,000x186,000 is a constant which is about 35 trillion. And perhaps that constant just coincidentally happened to be the square of the speed of light.

People who are protégés of Einstein seem to be unaware of the fact that every famous scientist throughout history who made discoveries, also was egregiously in error in various ways. In the 1600s and 1700s, it didn't take more than a couple years - or at most ten - for another scientist to come along and challenge those former models. They would have done more experiments in their own workshop thousands of miles away. And they then proferred a different set of models. This is how scientific ideas are revised over time.

Einstein seems to have been the first big scientist dude to convey his ideas in an era where the world had become smaller because of radio, and the telephone and television. Maybe that made a difference. Somehow, we've experienced a hundred years of people studying his ideas, and no one has dared to challenge him, yet. Einstein drew up a cosmology using thought experiments. His models were not established like Isaac Newton's models were - through a copious amount of experimentation and observation. Religions, remember, are also cosmologies and are designed through thought experiments.

I know people will throw out the canard that global positioning systems prove Einstein's Theory of Relativity. However, what I've heard is that other models would explain that phenomenon equally well. Yes, it's interesting to think about the idea that gravity affects light. Black holes are a demonstration of this - and prove the concept. So if, as we see, gravity affects light - lets do what Isaac Newton did, and sit down and study the matter. Let's not do thought experiments about the matter, and daydream up a frame of reference.

TL;DR The way Einstein developed his ideas about "General Relativity" mark a significant departure from the ethic of observation, and data collection. Shouldn't we question his ideas and challenge them? And reasoning from there: isn't Einstein's thought experiment kind of like a religion, in that it reads more like science fiction, than anything else? It proffers a view of how the world exists, which was not established in the way Newton designed his laws of physics - that is through observation and data collection.