Arguments in the Guardian letters page

http://education.guardian.co.uk/higher/comment/story/0,,1751402,00.html

Tuesday April 11, 2006 - Dr Annie Seaton believes that "Derrida, Bataille, Baudrillard, Lacan..." are among the best French thinkers. (Recall that Lacan is the man who implied that the square root of minus one was equal to his penis.)

She also says "My apologies to Oxbridge, where conceptual advances seem less important than old school ties and reinforcing class distinctions".

http://www.guardian.co.uk/letters/story/0,,1751860,00.html

Wednesday April 12, 2006 - James Syme replies that Oxbridge is better than France in the sciences, and Cambridge alone has 56 Nobel Prize winners to its name compared to France's 11. Alas, he fails to mention that Trinity College alone also has more Nobel Prize winners than France.

http://education.guardian.co.uk/higher/comment/story/0,,1755146,00.html

Monday April 17, 2006 - Six more people respond to Seaton's letter. Prof Raymond points out that French universities have moved on from the worst of the postmodernist nonsense that Harvard is still fascinated by.

Seaton herself replies to Syme's letter, with the claim that "there is a reason why it is the sciences - and not difficult modernist fiction or books about the philosophy of freedom - which can still flourish in totalitarian societies". She then fails to mention what this reason is.

Relativity Challenge

A friend of mine emailed me a few days ago, and because she's doing a PhD at DAMTP (hello, bachlover! :) GMail came up with some physics-and-maths-related adverts. The one that caught my eye was RelativityChallenge, with the tag line "Did Einstein make a math mistake? You be the judge!"

I had a look. They do indeed think that he made a mistake, and yet don't pause to wonder why, if Einstein had made a fundamental mistake when deriving one relation from another, the people that read his paper when it was submitted to journals (his 1905 paper was in volume 17 of Annalen der Physik, and his other publications are listed with links on the Wikipedia page about Einstein) would not have spotted these mistakes. Particularly when the authors of this site say that the mistakes can be understood by anyone with "an understanding of basic Algebra".

Searching for "Relativity Challenge" on Google brought me a lot of results about a more respectable challenge by that name - the Pirelli Relativity Challenge, offering a reward for the best explanation of the theory of Special Relativity.

There were a few links to discussions of "RelativityChallenge". However, in many of them the site is used to complain about the 'Scientific Establishment' in general, or one of the people discussing rejects the theory because theirs is so much better.

In conclusion, you might like to use a version of the Crackpot Index to see how mad these people's theories are. Though they're probably not as mad as the writer who believes Einstein was a plagiarist who was only famous because of 'the Jew-controlled media'.