Talk:Criticism of the theory of relativity

Bias in this article

... The thrust of such allegations was to promote more traditional alternatives to Einstein's abstract hypothetico-deductive approach to physics, while Einstein himself was to be personally discredited. ...

This section does not have a neutral point of view at all. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 91.49.204.54 (talk • contribs) 00:56, 9 August 2014‎ (UTC)

Status of criticism

The "Status of criticism" section cites

• Mansuripur, M. (2012), "Trouble with the Lorentz Law of Force: Incompatibility with Special Relativity and Momentum Conservation", Physical Review Letters, 108 (19) 193901, arXiv:1205.0096, Bibcode:2012PhRvL.108s3901M, doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.108.193901, PMID 23003039.

Published in a highly regarded (though also sometimes hasty) venue, the source has 158 citations on Google Scholar and the author is a widely published professor at Univ. Arizona. The source is reliable and should not be removed. A second source

• Javanshiry, M. (2021), "The Mechanical Behavior of a Multispring System Revealing Absurdity in the Relativistic Force Transformation", International Journal of Mathematics and Mathematical Sciences, 2021: 1–8, doi:10.1155/2021/2706705.

is in an obscure journal and by an independent researcher with no other publications. Google Scholar shows only one other person citing the work. This work is a fringe work and I agree with @Sławomir Biały that it should be removed. Johnjbarton (talk) 17:12, 25 February 2026 (UTC)

Ah! So the Mansuripur work is 1) not about relativity and 2) subject to considerable controversy

• Saldanha, P. L. (2013). Comment on “Trouble with the Lorentz law of force: Incompatibility with special relativity and momentum conservation”. Physical review letters, 110(8), 089403.
• Vanzella, D. A. (2013). Comment on “Trouble with the Lorentz law of force: incompatibility with special relativity and momentum conservation”. Physical review letters, 110(8), 089401.
• Griffiths, D. J., & Hnizdo, V. (2013). Mansuripur's paradox. American Journal of Physics, 81(8), 570-574.

Out it goes Johnjbarton (talk) 19:28, 25 February 2026 (UTC)

I agree with removing this. The topic appears to be one of those things that could eventually become a fiendishly difficult homework problem to challenge the conceptual mastery of students taking advanced electrodynamics, but it is not a criticism of special relativity that we need to spend time on here. Stepwise Continuous Dysfunction (talk) 02:32, 28 February 2026 (UTC)

I disagree with @Johnjbarton. This is not fringe work, and it is not fair either to judge the scientific deepness of an article by counting its citations. The author has other publications in reputable journals such as the Journal of Superconductivity and Novel Magnetism and the Journal of Experimental and Theoretical Physics. Please, do not tend to pollute reality with lies!

• Javanshiry, M. (2023), "On the Origin of the Lorentz Force: The Second Term of "qv × B" in the Formulation of the Lorentz Force is due to a "Local" Electric Field Predicted by Maxwell's Equations", Journal of Superconductivity and Novel Magnetism, 36: 769–775, doi:10.1007/s10948-023-06525-4.
• Javanshiry, M. (2025), "A Possible Resolution to the Modified Version of the Multispring System Paradox", Journal of Experimental and Theoretical Physics, 141: 1–7, doi:10.1134/S1063776125601260.

Mohammad Javanshiry (talk) 08:55, 27 February 2026 (UTC)

Scientific "deepness" is not relevant to Wikipedia. Wikipedia summarizes mainstream reliable sources. Citation counts are one of the key ways we judge sources. See What Wikipedia is not and Primary, secondary and tertiary sources. Promoting one's own work on Wikipedia is also against conflict of interest policy. Johnjbarton (talk) 15:49, 27 February 2026 (UTC)

It is widely considered unethical academic misconduct to buy citations to artificially increase an article's visibility, and regrettably, this practice has become increasingly common in recent times. Does your keyway automatically exclude any citation manipulation, or is it you who verifies the relevance of every single citation among hundreds?! Mohammad Javanshiry (talk) 21:18, 27 February 2026 (UTC)

The main way to avoid bias by citation manipulation on Wikipedia is use secondary references. A highly cited article is not automatically reliable, but a primary source by an author with few other published works and with few citations is generally not considered reliable. Yes I check hundreds of citations.

Another concept in Wikipedia is to require extraordinary sourcing for extraordinary claims. Thus a claim against one of the fundamental concepts in physics like relativity would require much more than a primary source. There are thousands of experimental verifications of relativity. Johnjbarton (talk) 23:55, 27 February 2026 (UTC)

I agree with all of Johnjbarton's points here. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary references, and using Wikipedia to promote one's own work is poor form. Stepwise Continuous Dysfunction (talk) 03:04, 28 February 2026 (UTC)