EINSTEIN was wrong, not once but twice, according to an Irish engineer, Dr Alphonsus Kelly.
In a lecture in Trinity College, Dublin last night, the retired ESB engineer outlined the year's research that he believes disproves a second principle of the 90 year old theory of special relativity.
Last January, he claimed to prove that Einstein was wrong about the twins. Time was not relative, he said, so the idea that it travel led more slowly in a moving object was simply untrue.
The pet theory had it that if one twin was sent into orbit at the speed of light he would come back younger than his brother.
Dr Kelly spent four years debunking that one and in the last year has found further evidence to disclaim it, he says.
Dr Kelly described the last year's work in the latest paper, "A New Theory on the Behaviour of Light", as a detective story spanning 270 years.
One of his searches took him to the US Naval Observatory, where in 1972 they put four atomic clocks on planes travelling in opposite directions. If Einstein was right, then the clock travelling west should have gained time while the one travelling east should have been slow. At the time the researchers said the clocks proved the theory.
So he telephoned the US Naval Observatory. They sent him a copy of an internal document from the time. A quote from it shows that scientists felt the results did not back up the old theory and some of the clocks had gained time where they should have lost it.
The second plank of the theory was that light travelled independently of the motion of its source. This, Dr Kelly said last night, was also untrue. Light took account of the orbit of the earth around the sun (30 kilometres a second) but not the spin on its axis (350 kilometres a second), he said.
So time and space are absolute, Dr Kelly said. Forget relativity and forgive Newton.
His latest paper will be published as a monograph by the Institution of Engineers in Ireland.
Asked about the implications of his research Dr Kelly said he didn't know. "I showed it to one scientist and he was gob smacked."
