Editors Note:
Before reading the below response issued by one of our contributors to Christopher Jon Bjerknes: it should be noted by readers that Bjerknes has not actually answered our contributor's critique of him. Bjerknes in his response attempts to deflect the critique by maintaining that he had been ’misrepresented’/'misinterpreted': however Bjerknes has not, as is the custom when making an assertion of misrepresentation, given specifics as to what our contributor has ’misrepresented’, but has rather given wide generalities and even when he has asserted that ’Winterberg referenced him in a published piece of work’ (to paraphrase). We can ask perhaps the more pertinent question of where has he done this and in what context (Bjerknes doesn’t cite the published piece he mentions). Also we can ask more pointedly: how does this make Bjerknes’ arguments accurate? If Winterberg has indeed cited Bjerknes in a published piece of work then it doesn’t mean that Bjerknes or Winterberg are correct. Since what Bjerknes is doing here is trying to play the logical fallacy of an appeal to authority[1] to suggest his arguments are accurate without having to go en pointe with a response to defend them (especially since his arguments are contrary to general expert opinion on Einstein: i.e that Einstein was not a plagiarist).
Bjerknes also questions the contributor’s conversation with Winterberg and suggests that because he didn’t quote it that it didn’t happen. Bjerknes forgets that it is the academic custom not to quote private correspondance. Unless explicit permission has been granted and that the contributor didn’t feel that it was necessary to seek such permission, but merely to do as is common in academic work to summarise the outcome (while citing with whom the private correspondence was with). It is disingenuous for Bjerknes to imply that it simply ’did not happen’, because our contributor has obeyed the nicities of academic discourse. If Bjerknes wanted to clarify his claim that Winterberg ’relied on his research’ then it is up to him to prove it, but it doesn’t, as I have stated above, indicate that either Winterberg is correct and nor does, even if Winterberg was correct, demonstate that Bjerknes is correct. However Bjerknes is not free to simply assert it didn’t happen or infer that it was a lie: since that is simply ad hominem unless Bjerknes has some proof to back up his claim (which I doubt given that I’ve seen the correspondance in question).
We would suggest that either Bjerknes gets down to pointing out specific assertions regarding ’misinterpretations’/'misrepresentations' and how our contributor’s arguments are wrong or he concedes that he is in error. It is not fitting for someone who maintains themself as a ’researcher’ and has obvious pretensions to scholarship that he doesn’t answer critique en pointe and on the basis on which the critique is made. In essence: Bjerknes needs to stop beating around the bush and to start making clear responses to the critique of his claims.
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Recently, Christopher J. Bjerknes (author of the blog ”Jewish Racism”) replied[2] to my latest response, on his arguments pertaining to Einstein's plagiarism, and my alleged ”misrepresentation” of them. I had hoped, against my better judgement, to recieve a detailed and specific counter-critique. However, as it turns out, my hopes were in vain, while my fears were confirmed.
Characteristically for Bjerknes’ responses, as the reader will note for him themselves along the way, they carry with them the elements of bewildered reaction at the mere sight of criticism, with little idea what to do with it except to habitually complain, and berate the opposing writer who dared to make such an unforgivable act as to criticize his beliefs.
Bjerknes’ recent response begins:
”This sophist, calling itself "LionAxe", has responded to my article on its blog, and yet again misrepresented what I have said, and the history of the theory of relativity:”
On ”its” blog?
Well, instead of actually providing an en pointe critique to my previous critical retort[3] unto some of his fundamental arguments and claims, the reader will observe the customary trend of Bjerknes to utter unevidenced complaints without on-point retorts to the actual arguments made. I was quite clear, specific and left few rocks unturned in my previous response to Bjerknes’ given arguments: where I quoted what he had stated following it with clarification of where he had erred in deriving the charge of plagiarism. I further explained how Bjerknes, picking from many works relating to relativity prior to Einstein, basically strives to equate the existence of such papers and thoughts as proof of plagiarism on Einstein's part, and I also explained thoroughly on several key points, purported by Bjerknes, where and why this is incorrect.
Of course, we will not find any critique of what I actually countered Bjerknes previous reply with, but we will find much whining and complaining about being ”misrepresented” ad nausem.
”"LionAxe" then proceeds to misrepresent my arguments regarding Einstein's plagiarism of Johann Georg von Soldner's prediction of the doubled Newtonian value of the deflection of a light ray grazing the limb of the Sun, and Newton's prediction that gravitation should deflect the path of a light corpuscle according to the law of universal attraction. Though I have not confused these separate issues of Newton's theory and Soldner's prediction, "LionAxe" has confused them, and "LionAxe" has failed to acknowledge that I accuse Einstein of plagiarizing the work of both Newton and Soldner, among many others.”
No: I didn't misrepresent you Bjerknes. Since you argued that Einstein plagiarised the both of them and after having read your previous comments and also the parts in your latest convergent Einstein-bashing book, which dealt with the Soldner issue. I attacked your given arguments thereof and thoroughly explained why they were wrong: yet I cannot see, nor will the reader see, Bjerknes directly countering them. On the contrary, we will see him continue to whine about me, ignoring my critique and sticking with his incorrect views as if they weren't directly challenged.
”"LionAxe" repeatedly misrepresents my statements regarding Einstein's two different predictions for the deflection of a light ray grazing the limb of the Sun and thereby ignores, and in effect confuses, the separate charges I make of Einstein's having plagiarized the Newtonian prediction in 1911 and the Soldnerian prediction in 1915.”
No: I didn't misrepresent you. I factored in both cases and how they were equally in error. If you were arguing that Einstein was plagiarising the Newtonian prediction in that instance, by using his two quotes, cited in your chapter on Soldner, that I addressed in my previous critique, where Einstein mentions Newton in both of them. But instead of me repeating what I had just countered your work with, please go back and comment on the clarifications I actually debunked you with. If you can do that, excellent, then we can continue, but do not ignore my specific counter-arguments by slithering away and repeating that which I have already critiqued. Reply to the retort instead of repeating that which was already retorted on-point.
”"LionAxe" next accuses me of confusing "priority" with "plagiarism", when in fact, that is what "LionAxe" is doing in order to raise a straw man of his own manufacture which he deceptively attributes to me. I correctly point out the obvious fact that one of the elements of plagiarism is the priority of the work of the man or woman whose work is copied by another. It is necessary to establish that priority in order to establish plagiarism. "LionAxe" deliberately misrepresents my statements of isolated facts of priority as if they exist in a vacuum and then picks upon my representations of factual issues of priority of a given element of RT to next address a separate element of RT to falsely claim both that there was no priority and that priority is not the same as plagiarism.”
Yes: I did indeed accuse you of confusing the two and using any hint of relativistic priority with plagiarism, and the existence of preceeding work relating to science that was continued through the 19th century and culminating in part with Einstein's work. This is what you do. You do not ”correctly point out the obvious facts”, but bandy about someone elses work with little to no knowledge of the physics involved, and this shows, as if you were trapped in a freudian argument of projecting your argumentative short-comings unto Einstein.
I retorted to your fundamental arguments, notably those you brought up in your previous reply, by a point for point, paragraph by paragraph routine, explaining how Einstein's work differed from Poincaré, how and why it is complete nonsense to claim Einstein didn't add anything to the work of Lorentz et al, to the conundrum of those days which was approached and written about by several leading scientists before Einstein and ultimately how and why the charge of plagiarism is dependant upon ignoring all of the glaringly obvious facts of differences, which made Einstein’s imprint on theoretical physics significant in light of other at the time existing work.
Alas no: Bjerknes doesn't want to engage my actual critique on point, but rather to casually ignore it, claim it is wrong and repeat over and over how he had been misrepresented.
”"LionAxe" ignores the fact that I have established the several elements of Einstein's plagiarism, including, but not limited to: priority, knowledge, failure to acknowledge prior works, and claims of originality--in some cases even after publicly acknowledging knowledge of the original work in question. "LionAxe" confuses these sometimes separate issues, while falsely accusing me of doing the same.”
Poor defensive comments like these really take the cake, especially considering my entire critique of Bjerknes was based on his fundamental arguments of Einstein's alleged plagiarism. Of course, since Bjerknes has compiled thousands of pages repeating a variety of stuff on the matter, (as I stated in my previous critique) I decided to address the bigger and culminative ones, which the arguments boil down to. These would be those concerning the plagiarism of Poincaré, relativity work and others like Lorentz et al that Bjerknes jumps back and forth between in his work. I issued detailed and specific counter-arguments to these and we do not get a single on-point refutation by Bjerknes after having been debunked six-ways-to-sunday, instead one is left with the lamentively polemic, wailing sounds of someone playing the abused and misrepresented victim who's been far too insulted to actually do anything else (like providing an on-point critique in turn).
”"LionAxe" then makes a lengthy presentation of the falsehoods Jews have been pitching for quite some time in a desperate effort to conceal Einstein's obvious plagiarism of the works of Henri Poincare.”
As we can see: Bjerknes should have had a golden opportunity of directly ripping my arguments (where I prove how the claim of plagiarism concerning Poincaré’s work is simply wrong) apart on point if I was incorrect. Yet instead we get the aforementioned whining and the expected dismissal of my critique without even bothering to counter the arguments.
”"LionAxe" would presume to lecture me on the fact that others stated the PoR before Poincare, when I have given the most thorough proof of same in all the literature on the subject. "LionAxe" ignores the fact that Poincare applies the PoR to electrodynamics, which Newton and Galileo did not do. He was not the first to do so, but he did do so.”
No: Bjerknes was the one who argued that PoR belonged to Poincaré and that he was the first to state it/formulate it, which was wrong and I explained why. However as usual Bjerknes does not provide a critique of my retort, but rather casual complaints with additional straw-men arguments on material other than the given argument. I didn't ignore the fact of Poincaré’s application of PoR, it would be rather hard to claim I did since I retorted at length with clarifications of it, especially in its differentiation from Einstein's work, which Bjerknes erronously stated were the same as Einstein's and I called him on that as well.
”"LionAxe" is either ignorant of the commonly known facts, or pretends to ignorance of the commonly known facts, that Poincare dismissed the Ether as a metaphysical concept in the 1800's, and that Einstein declared the necessity of the Ether in 1920.”
Either Bjerknes did not read my critique to him or he's deliberately throwing another straw-man into the mix. Poincaré maintained a preferred inertial frame, which simply didn't go along with the relativity principle. Even if he dismissed some other specific characteristics of it that failed to be validated by experiments: it is not as if he had dismissed the concept of said preferred frame, aether, since he never managed to exclude it. As I said before, although Poincaré did equations to explain why the Michelson-Morley experiment hadn't yielded proof for aether: he continued to base his predictions and assumptions that there was an aether. In my previous direct critique: I showed the error of such arguments oft made by Bjerknes and I further clarified why he was and is wrong on these notes in detail. Such as how Poincaré formulated the principle differently, because according to Poincaré’s relativity principle: it would be impossible by means of an experiment internal to a given inertial frame to know whether this frame is in motion or at rest with respect to the aether frame. Hence: Poincaré's approach to extended space time transformations, unlike Einstein's approach, assumes an aether frame.
One of the many aspects of my previous critique, with which Bjerknes has been handsomely debunked already, is the following quote from Poincaré himself on the aether (from a text he wrote in 1902):
”Does an aether exist, the reason why we believe in an aether is simple. If light comes from a distant star and takes many years to reach us, it is during its travel no longer near the star, but not yet near the Earth, nevertheless, it must be somewhere and supported by a material medium.”[4]
Again, as I brought this to Bjerknes’ attention in my previous critique, Poincaré’s work was more an intermediate, or transitional step between the prior standard of electrodynamics and the more complete and defined theory formulated by Einstein. Besides the aether problem persisting within Poincaré’s explorative works: he also persisted with holding a difference between the effect of contraction of moving bodies, along the direction of relative motion, and the notion of relativity of simultaneity, which follows from the idea of a local time.
And concerning the ”necessity of the Ether” argument above, Bjerknes sidesteps the entire problematic features of preferred inertial frames during the Poincaré/Lorentz era (and all of the given arguments demonstrating Bjerknes claims to be incorrect) with something completely different and having an equally different domain of application when Einstein later used the word ”ether”. It was indeed around 1920, presumably in response to his personal friendship and admiration for Lorentz, where Einstein began to use the word "ether" in his writings. But it referred to the metric field of general relativity. There was no preferred state of rest attached to it.
One of Einstein’s key contributions was to recognize and provide the correct encompassing work showing that there was no essential difference between a resting and a moving frame of reference. In other words, Einstein was indeed the first one to give up the idea, and proving it to be correct, of singling out a reference frame at rest relative to the ether completely and scientifically.
Yet: why do we bother with clarifications of physics when it is so much easier to act like Bjerknes who just found the word “ether” and didn't think of its contextual meaning beyond what he had read relating to Michelson-Morley experiments? Well, because it further demonstrates his next to non-existent understanding of not only the scientific complexity and differences inherent with the aforementioned works on relativity, but also of basic theoretical physics in general and its history. That is a necessary demonstration as it shows how Bjerknes manages to make a pig's breakfast of the history of science.
“The fact that Poincare eventually developed a more comprehensive theory than Einstein, which sought to include the Ether as a physical basis for observed phenomenon, does not refute the fact that Einstein's theory is a lesser subset of Poincare's more broad and comprehensive theory. Poincare sought a physical theory in addition to the metaphysical and numerological theory which Einstein plagiarized. As Prof. Logunov has stated, Poincare's theory is far more advanced and encompasses more detail than Einstein's parroted copy, which is a mere subset of Poincare's theories.”
You see, Bjerknes, while Poincaré’s memoirs on the dynamics of the electron were, at that time, more sophisticated from a mathematical standpoint, you miss one of the many actual facts I've already retorted with in my previous critique. For example: that while Einstein ignored gravitation until 1907. He did however (from 1905) apply his theory to the problem of the intensity of radiation reflected from a moving mirror. Poincaré did not apply his 1905 theory to this problem. As I see it, the question of which paper is more detailed or comprehensive is somewhat of a toss-up, there is no clear answer, but this should not be translated to mean the works are the same or equally valid.
Again, in my previous critique I responded to your claims on this very matter, where the very notable differences between the two were explained and clarified. The similar basis of both were mostly the mathematical foundations, which are equivalent and consequently it is nonsense to claim that one theory is a “subset'” of the other or “encompasses more “detail”". More generally they just disagree, e.g. Poincare must hold that the geometry of space (and time) does not provide for moving bodies to contract. All such contractions are dynamical effects resulting from physical interactions among the parts of the bodies. Einstein, however, does say that space and time themselves provide directly for that contraction without need to consider particular theories of the dynamics of matter.
“I will add in passing, that, as I have repeatedly stated in the past, Isaac Newton was a plagiarist and a Cabalistic Jew. He was often accused of plagiarism and he conjured up lame excuses to account for his plagiarism. He also set Physics back by introducing the pantheistic mythologies and dogmatic absolutes of the Jewish Cabalah into the more advanced Physics of Christiaan Huygens and others. Leibniz accused Newton of these occult beliefs and practices, and John Maynard Keynes has proven that Leibniz was correct, as I have repeatedly demonstrated in the past.”
The above is nothing short of an intellectually barren description of Newton, applying direct, yet equally wayward, character assassination in an attempt to belittle his scientific contributions and accuse him of plagiarism. Further added by the jew (Bjerknes has claimed to be jewish in the past unless I am much mistaken) is that Newton was a Cabalistic Jew, as if Isaac's interest of jewish mysticism (he was overall interested in scriptural mythologies) has anything to do with whether his Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica is a great work of science or not.
This latest response by Bjerknes is a disappointment, for he does not move to counter the lengthy arguments I made in my previous reply to him. Instead he ignores them and mentions some light hints of the content's tone in passing, while telling the readers of his blog how he was being ‘misrepresented’ and how his “proof” was ignored: the irony is, of course, bitter sweet. Not only did I tackle the proverbial groundhogs of Bjerknes’ thesis, I also elaborated upon other aspects, which went from covering the arguments of his past reply to claims hailing from his work he so often likes to cite. Therefore, I can not think of an excuse why Bjerknes insists on whining like a school-boy, dismissing my critique, instead of correctly addressing the points of the critique where I countered his arguments with his own point-by-point refutation.
While polemics and fly-by-night dismissal is the easy way to go, it is clear Bjerknes didn't take my points of critique seriously, because he doesn’t appear to have actually read them, and if he read it he didn't really understand them, and despite which of aforementioned scenarios is the true one. In light if this latest response: he didn't address them at all.
[1] http://www.fallacyfiles.org/authorit.html
[2] http://jewishracism.blogspot.com/2009/02/lionaxe-has-responded-with-more.html
[3] http://semiticcontroversies.blogspot.com/2009/01/christopher-jon-bjerknes-debacle.html
[4] H. Poincaré, 1968, “La science et l’hypothèse”, chapter 10 of the french edition, “Les théories de la physique moderne”, Champs, Flammarion.
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