Comment and Opinion

Dr David Corbett
(In early 2022 this site started redirecting to a legitimate IT support business which appears to be Corbettless. The link shows what it used to look like.)

A challenge (25/6/2011)
This advertisement appeared in my local paper:

One of the hallmarks of kookdom is claiming that famous people got it wrong. Sometimes this takes the form of declaring that someone made a death bed recantation of their life's works, as has happened with Pasteur and Darwin. Mathematicians, however, (and I include physicists) seem to hold a special attraction for amateurs who like to whip up a few equations to show that these fancy-pants professors with their blackboards and fluffy hairstyles have got it all wrong. After all, if they hadn't got it wrong we would have free energy and limitless food. And if you are going to show that someone's maths are all wrong then what better place to start than with possibly the most famous scientist of the twentieth century, Albert Einstein.

I had a look at Dr Corbett's web site and I have to admit that I ran out of my mathematical ability just after I read "Einstein's Relativistic Equations (relating to contraction of rods and dilatation of time with increasing speed) are derived from the Lorentz Transform. Unfortunately, the Lorentz Transform itself is derived on the basis of a number of fundamental mathematical blunders". I could probably understand it if he just told me where Einstein was wrong, but once he headed back to the Lorentz Transform I was really out of my depth.

I wondered for a moment at Dr Corbett's confidence in offering a reward for proving him wrong, but I can only assume that he has the money to spare. After all, anyone who has completely refuted relativity must surely have won a Nobel Prize at some time, although there appears to be some oversight as he is not mentioned on the Nobel Prize web site.

Did I mention that Dr Corbett has also refuted all those scientists who claim that the climate is changing? The man is a polymath.