luke vs einstein

In February of 1997, C.J.Luke posted the first entry of the extremely long-running thread entitled "A Rebuttal of the Relativity of Simultaneity" in which he purported to point out where Einstein went wrong. In particular, he argued in that posting (copied here for reference) that Einstein's reasoning about the relativity of simultaneity was flawed. He concluded his posting with the challenge: "What is wrong with the above analysis???".

Well, lots of folks pointed out what was wrong with cj's analysis. He was confusing the difference of two velocities in one frame of reference with a single velocity in another. In 4d cartesian cordinates, this simply doesn't hold true, as Einstein realized full well.

After some dozens of "tis so", "tis not" exchanges between C.J. Luke and myself, and the passage of about a month of time, I've finally dimly started to realize he probably never will figure out just what his error was, despite vasty effort to make it clear.

"If seven relativists, with seven blackboards,
explained for half a year,"
do you suppose" the Walrus said
"cj would get it clear?"

"I doubt it." said the Carpenter,
and shed a bitter tear.

But enough gratuitous insults; rather than have all that effort totally wasted, I'll do what every frustrated poster does these days: I'll make it into a web page. This web page. Which has links to

C.J. Luke's first posting in the thread
My summary posting enumerating the various ways I've explained the problem over the course of the ... "discussion" shall we say. Please excuse the embittered tone of that posting, and this web page; I can only hang my head and say "I was provoked".

There. I feel better now.