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
Via e-mail
