Einstein’s Trick—Now I Know It! (2004)

What kind of knowledge do you have about Einstein? Is he, to you, the scientist who designed the atomic bomb, or the genius who proposed the theory that would one day become the basis for a time machine?

We often judge his greatness not only from the atomic bomb or time machines, but also from topics such as black holes and the Big Bang. Today, many people would name Einstein as the very symbol of genius. Yet, if someone asked you to explain the theories he published, you would probably answer, “I don’t really understand them.” Strangely enough, most people acknowledge Einstein as a genius despite not knowing his theories at all.

This clearly shows our tendency to trust information without examining it carefully. When enormous sums of tax money are spent to build gigantic facilities, or when something appears in academic textbooks, we simply assume the theory has been proven. In reality, the theories Einstein published have not been fully verified even today, and none of their fundamental contradictions have been resolved. Ordinary people are never informed of this fact—they merely provide the funding.

Every explanatory book published so far rephrases the mathematical contradictions as “paradoxes” and treats them as features of the theory. If someone truly understood Einstein’s theory, they should be able to explain the mathematical causes of these many paradoxes. But doing so would prove that his theory is flawed. And that would overturn the massive projects and verification experiments of modern physics from the ground up.

Where contradictions exist, there must be an underlying error. Yet, for reasons convenient to scholars, this “highly suspicious theory” has been left unexamined. The purpose of this book is to show that anyone can verify it easily—without expensive equipment—using nothing more than paper and a pencil.

Years ago, while working on an unsolved mathematical problem, I discovered that a single mental calculation could create a powerful mathematical trick. Because I had incorporated mental arithmetic into the development of the theory, it merely appeared as though the unsolved problem had been solved. It was nothing more than a misunderstanding, and completely useless.

Some time later, I encountered a book praising a strange theory that used exactly the same trick—celebrating it as a great revolution in physics. That theory was none other than Einstein’s “Theory of Relativity,” said to be the foundation of modern physics and the key to unlocking the mysteries of space-time.

The greatest problem with this theory is that it begins by forcing us to accept two mutually contradictory principles. To turn mathematically inconsistent conditions into equations, everyone performs mental adjustments before writing the formulas. The unrecorded calculations then become the core of the theory, and the entire framework evolves into a historic mathematical trick.

In educational settings, questioning relativity is considered taboo, so students are made to study a fictional theory. They only begin to raise doubts when they finally admit to themselves that they had merely been pretending to understand it.

For about seventeen years, I urged physicists to reexamine relativity, but it seems the task was a bit too heavy for Japanese physicists. With no other choice, I decided to make public both the trick Einstein created and the hints needed to uncover it.

I hope that the points raised in this book will prevent readers from being misled by a fictional theory. And if it allows you to enjoy the feeling of having a century’s worth of scales fall from your eyes, then I will consider my goal accomplished.