Wikipedia talk:Requests for comment/Rod Ball

Comments on Rod
Noting Rod's recent response to CH, I find his claims to be quite odd and disingenuous. The basic problem with Rod Ball is that he does not understand SR, and is especially thrown by the relativity of simultaneity. As proof of this I point to these recent edits at talk:Bell's spaceship paradox. Note that Rod is denying that synchronized clocks become desynchonized due to a change in their frame of reference caused by an acceleration in the direction of separation of the clocks! Yet such an effect is the essense of the relativity of simultaneity and fundamental to SR. (Without it, SR fails to be self-consistent.)

Rod keeps accusing others of using "Lorentz's theory". Yet in truth Rod himself is clinging to the Newtonian notion of universal simultaneity, and is constantly imposing it on several relativity paradoxes. The result is a set of consistently wrong answers. For a long time thought of Rod as someone who can advocate an alternate view and therefore is a potentially valuable editor. However, as I have grown more and more familiar with his viewpoint my opinion has gone from Rod as someone who does not understand a few subtle points about SR to someone who has a fixed and totally falacious POV and is interfering with the development of the Wikipedia relativity articles as a result. --EMS | Talk 18:21, 28 August 2006 (UTC)