Conservapedia talk:Conservapedian relativity

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Has anyone written about this BS from CP?

From the CP Universe article: "Young-Earth creationists have developed a number of models which explain the age of the universe as being affected by the time-warping effects of gravity as predicted by Einstein's General Theory of Relativity, so that the age of the universe as measured by a hypothetical observer at the edge of the universe might be 14 billion years, but as measured by an observer on Earth is only 6,000 years."

Changes to the CP article

The Conservapedia article has been cleaned up a bit, with some of these issues being resolved. In particular, most references to moral relativism have been removed. However, a new section, "Political aspects of relativity," has been added, making the claim that Barak Obama helped publish an article using Einstein's relativity to argue for abortion rights(!). Someone who can stomach such BS should probably revise this article.

E.E. and freshman physics

Regarding Schlafly's physics education, as currently stated: "It is important to note that Schlafly has a degree in electrical engineering and would have studied relativity in first-year physics courses required for the degree."

That is not necessarily true. In fact, to the best of my knowledge (as a college ChemE major), the full year of 1st year physics for tech majors does not include relativity. There's a lot of college-level math and physics one has to study before anyone gets to the point where he can study relativity, so that has to wait until after freshman year. 148.75.221.72 (talk) 16:52, 6 September 2016 (UTC)S. Nassi, MD, PhD

Perhaps this was just Australia then. Will definitely be in by second year though - David Gerard (talk) 11:42, 7 September 2016 (UTC)

I don't know how much curricula have changed since Schlafly was at Princeton, but having checked the Princeton EE undergraduate curriculum, it looks like Princeton only requires EE students to take Mechanics and Electromagnetism. Most American Universities structure their physics curriculum similarly, where Mechanics and E&M are taught individually (with perhaps some thermodynamics taught in the former, but it's just as often its own class), and there's a second year "Modern Physics" class that introduces special relativity and quantum mechanics (General relativity is, at every US University I've looked at, and that's quite a lot of them, a senior Physics major elective which is never required for the degree). It's possible that Schlafly may actually have never been taught even the basics of SR (not that it would matter, since he would have had to use complex numbers in his circuits and upper division electronics classes, and we all know how he feels about complex numbers).ChrisB (talk) 10:11, 25 December 2016 (UTC)

BON addition

For once 'vaguely funny' vandalism. Anna Livia (talk) 16:29, 6 November 2017 (UTC)

Minor misconception in the article

"It should be noted, though, that the differences observed in the speed of light as it passes through different materials are only differences in the speed on average. When light comes into contact with matter, it strikes electrons which are then raised to a higher energy state. The electrons subsequently emit a new photon and return to ground state. Until this new photon strikes something else, it will continue to move at the speed of light in a vacuum. The apparent reduction in the speed of light doesn't mean that the photons themselves are traveling more slowly but that the emission of a new photon from the excited electron is not instantaneous. The average speed of light in a material decreases as the time required for the new photon to be emitted increases"

This is a misconception that should be corrected. It is easy to show this isn't the correct explanation: when the electron absorbs a photon, it has no way to remember where it came from. In fact, when it emits a photon, it can do so in any direction. The photon would have a random path and the light wouldn't keep its direction, so we wouldn't have things like lasers going through glass and stuff in a coherent way.

What happens actually is that the electron emits its own light in response to the light from the laser. The waves add together and their resulting velocity is slower than c. There is no easy way to show this using particles.

--Maria Wilson (talk) 18:02, 4 August 2021 (UTC)