Einstein’s Opponents: The Public Controversy about the Theory of Relativity in the 1920s
Einstein’s Opponents: The Public Controversy about the Theory of Relativity in the 1920s
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爱因斯坦的反对者：20 年代关于相对论的公众争议
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发表时间：
2015
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通讯作者：
A. Leggett
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作者：
A. Leggett
人们可能会惊讶地发现在一本涡轮机工程期刊上对相对论进行了长时间的反驳。米莱娜·瓦泽克说我们不应该这样做。她认为，一旦我们掌握了 20 年代反相对论活动家的共同点，就会清楚为什么涡轮机工程是此类想法的天然发源地。爱因斯坦的反对者认为，历史学家目前对反相对论运动的理解被纳粹的巨大阴影所掩盖。它没有回到 1930 年代来解释 20 年代的冲突，而是让我们回到漫长的 19 世纪。在那里，我们找到了名字美妙的“世界谜语解答者”。他们是一群自视为创造新知识的科学家的人，尽管他们的活动几乎完全在学术科学圈子之外。他们经常在精神或整体背景下工作，并根据神秘主义、生机论和一元论等核心思想建立复杂的理论。这些理论的标题是“普遍统一理论及其对真正洞察万物的意义”，其特点是要求绝对真理和洞察现实的基本实质。真正的科学解释应该是统一和普遍的。一个自然的举动是简单地将世界谜语解答者标记为业余爱好者（或者不太友善地称为怪人）。瓦泽克敦促我们抵制这种冲动，提醒我们他们认为自己是真正的科学家，进行真正的研究。她建议最好将他们称为“非学术人士”，这正确地描述了他们的机构立场，没有贬义标签。他们认为学术科学已经偏离了真正科学的目标，陷入了专业化、理论和数学的迷宫。也就是说，学者们不再真正从事“科学”。世界谜语解答者通常是在大学学习过一些科学的工人中产阶级的成员。由于缺乏完整的资质，他们
One might be surprised at finding a protracted refutation of the theory of relativity in a turbine engineering journal. Milena Wazeck says we should not. Once we grasp the common threads among anti-relativity activists in the 1920s, she argues, it becomes clear why turbine engineering was a natural home for such ideas. Einstein’s Opponents contends that historians’ current understanding of the antirelativity movement is obscured by the enormous shadow of the Nazis. Instead of reaching forward to the 1930s to explain the clash of the 20s, it instead points us back to the long nineteenth century. There we find the wonderfully named ‘‘world riddle solvers.’’ They were a group who saw themselves as scientists generating new knowledge, although they functioned almost completely outside the circles of academic science. They often worked in spiritual or holistic contexts and built elaborate theories based on core ideas such as occultism, vitalism, and monism. These theories carried titles such as ‘‘Universal Unified Theory and its Significance for True Insight into All Things,’’ and were marked by demands for absolute truth and insight into the foundational substance of reality. True scientific explanations were expected to be uniform and universal. A natural move would be to simply label the world riddle solvers as amateurs (or less kindly, cranks). Wazeck urges us to resist this impulse, reminding us that they thought of themselves as true scientists producing genuine research. She suggests that it is better to refer to them as ‘‘non-academics,’’ which correctly describes their institutional positions without a pejorative label. They saw academic science as having wandered from the goals of true science into a maze of specialization, theory, and mathematics. That is, the academics were no longer really doing ‘‘science.’’ The world riddle solvers were usually members of the working middle class who had studied some science at a university. Lacking full credentials, they