I re­spond to Pro­fes­sor Stephan Gift's let­ter on the pos­si­ble in­va­lid­i­ty of Ein­stein's The­o­ry of Rel­a­tiv­i­ty ("Physi­cists deal an­oth­er blow to rel­a­tiv­i­ty the­o­ry"), not as a sci­en­tist which I am not, but as one en­gaged in crit­i­cal think­ing at the ter­tiary lev­el, with fo­cus on the de­vel­op­ment of greater "open-mind­ed­ness" in the use of lan­guage. The learned pro­fes­sor's po­si­tion seems to sug­gest that the the­o­ry is "wrong" in con­cur­rence with an­oth­er physi­cist from UC Lon­don who al­so feels that the the­o­ry is "wrong" since Ein­stein's idea that noth­ing can ex­ceed the speed of light is in dan­ger of "fal­si­fi­ca­tion" by CERN's claim, the Eu­ro­pean or­gan­i­sa­tion for nu­clear re­search, that sub­atom­ic par­ti­cles called neu­tri­nos have been made to trav­el from Switzer­land to Italy faster than the speed of light.

The claim that Ein­stein may be "wrong" is lan­guage at its ab­solute best and is a de­nial of the evo­lu­tion of sci­en­tif­ic "truth" ever since the dawn of his­to­ry in which a sci­en­tif­ic "fact" will have been seen as such at a cer­tain point in time un­til new ways of see­ing it will have emerged or it will have been over­turned al­to­geth­er.

I am sub­ject to cor­rec­tion here, but a for­mer­ly earth-cen­tred uni­verse will be­come sun-cen­tred, the mat­ter which could nei­ther be cre­at­ed nor de­stroyed would sub­se­quent­ly be con­vert­ed to en­er­gy, and the once "in­di­vis­i­ble" atom would give way to neu­trons, pro­tons etc. The point of all of this is that no sci­en­tif­ic claim, as in this in­stance with the speed of light, can ever be con­sid­ered "wrong," but part of an evolv­ing process, a "truth" which is ac­cept­ed at the point in time from the avail­able da­ta and is open to ad­just­ment and change as re­search con­tin­ues.

In short, "truth" is rel­a­tive and can nev­er be "wrong" in any ab­solute sense at any giv­en point in time. I write not to dis­pel what the learned pro­fes­sor has said for much can be ar­gued in terms of ob­jec­tive and em­pir­i­cal truth to jus­ti­fy his claim but I write in the hope that the "open-mind­ed­ness" I call for even in sci­ence and which is the essence of crit­i­cal think­ing, can be­come part of our in­tel­lec­tu­al cul­ture as a peo­ple and that it would be our nat­ur­al propen­si­ty not to see any is­sue or per­son­al­i­ty in ab­solute terms but en­dowed with the ca­pac­i­ty for mean­ing­ful change for the fu­ture.

Dr Er­rol Ben­jamin

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