Relativity is correct, and besides, this post isn't really about Einstein, but about crackpots. Before I quote this article, you should know that the answer is "No": Was Einstein a fake?
"In most cases it is a sad story," says Smolin. "Sometimes someone has been working for many years on an idea, and has clearly a huge investment in it. Sometimes it literally comes from someone living on a park bench in Rio or in a homeless shelter in New York.
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In the end, Gaensler says, "I feel sorry for these people — because, after all, there might be someone out there now like Einstein, working in obscurity, who does have some truly new insight, but scientists just won't take him seriously because of all these other crackpots we've had to deal with."
With my limited experience, it seems that there are two main aspects of theoretical physics. The first involves knowing what the answer is (a hypothesis), and trying to find the proper math to specify or prove it. The second involves having the proper math, and trying to figure out what it means, which gives you a hypothesis. The process is iterative. You don't get the right answer or the right math from nowhere, but each iteration gives you a few more clues that lead to what's right.
In purely theoretical physics, imagination is the laboratory, and math is the apparatus.
There's a certain element of "making it up as you go along", but I don't think there's anything fake about that. If it were, then the only science that isn't fake is the description of things that are already known. Then we might as well merge science and history.
But I don't think that an idea on its own has some absolute value. The idea can change and so does its value, as it is developed. Showing that an idea is right or wrong changes its value. Even how easy it is to investigate the correctness of the idea affects its value. If for example you have an earth-shaking new idea that is correct, but it will take 200 years before anyone is able to show that it is correct or to use the idea in developing any other work, then that correct idea may have a low value for its first 200 years. And so I think it's up to us crackpots to express ideas in a valuable way... simply, clearly, unambiguously, backed up with math and logic, even empirical observations if possible, and most of all comprehensibly.
At that point, is it possible for a crackpot to get anyone capable of understanding it, to try? Presumably, the more important an idea is, the farther it is from accepted mainstream science, thus the more it will incline people to ignore it. For now I will say that the failing is on part of the crackpots, and not the rest of the world. Eventually I hope to have some evidence to evaluate the latter.
The first version of the paper on time relativity was an incomprehensible mess. Will the next version be good enough to convince anyone of anything?
