Instigator / Pro
8
1500
rating
13
debates
42.31%
won
Topic
#3097

Einstein is Overrated

Status
Finished

The debate is finished. The distribution of the voting points and the winner are presented below.

Winner & statistics
Winner
8
2

After 8 votes and with 6 points ahead, the winner is...

Puachu
Parameters
Publication date
Last updated date
Type
Standard
Number of rounds
5
Time for argument
Two weeks
Max argument characters
30,000
Voting period
Six months
Point system
Winner selection
Voting system
Open
Contender / Con
2
1470
rating
2
debates
0.0%
won
Description

Einstein is overrated. He's overhyped in the media. "Was Einstein wrong?" as a headline in pop-sci publications induces mass hysteria for literally no reason. Why couldn't Einstein be wrong? He wasn't smarter than my high school math teachers. I should know, because I failed and dropped out multiples times, providing me with ample opportunity to judge these people first-hand. That makes me as smart as Einstein, at least according to stuff I read on the internet. Pigs can fly, and you must concede this in your first round or automatically forfeit the entire debate. I will argue that the theories of Special and General Relativity do not prove Einstein was a smarter theoretical physicist than his contemporaries. In support of this assertion I shall use both the content of the theories themselves as well as the circumstances surrounding their evolution.

By "contemporaries" I mean other theoretical physicisists famous enough to have their own Wikipedia articles.

My opponent's only task is to refute my arguments. If they like, they may present evidence of their own in favor of their position; namely, that Einstein's relativity theories do prove that Einstein was a genius compared to his contemporaries.

Please keep with the spirit of this debate and do not try to win by any loopholes or underhanded means.

Round 1
Pro
#1
If you've ever looked down out the car window at the road whizzing past and thought, "Wow, it looks like the road is zooming by and I'm staying still", you were a normal child. 

If you thought, "How can I prove that it's actually me that's zooming over the road, and not the road moving under me?" then you were a child prodigy.

If you thought, "Am I really moving, or is it the road moving under me?" then you were a budding philosopher.

If instead you thought, "These are trick questions without an answer because they wrongly assume the existence of objective reality, time, and space", then you were probably an idiot.  Or the reincarnation of Albert Einstein.

Einstein's Special Relativity is just an interpretation of Lorentz and Fitzgerald's formula which describes how much an object will appear to contract based on its speed:

(1−v²/c²)^½
So why does Einstein get all the credit instead of Lorentz and Fitzgerald, the real geniuses?

Or Michelson and Morley, who performed the experiment which discovered the contraction?

Special Relativity says that objects don't contract, it's just the space they're in that contracts, along with some other nonsense about their time slowing down but not ours, as if their time was a special sort of time and there is no real, objective Time or even Space.

It gets worse.  Einstein said that when you swerve in a car and feel a strong force pulling you to the opposite side, it's equally true that you did not swerve, and in fact, the force you feel pulling you to the side is not the childlike fantasies of Isaac Newton or Galileo Galilei which state that it was your momentum and inertia.  Rather, Einstein Slimestein says, a sudden distortion in the "fabric" of space-time caused a gravity-well to appear and suck on you.  This delusion he calls "General Relativity," and I am not exaggerating in the least.  If it sounds ridiculous, it's because it is.

I don't know about you, but I prefer the simple, straight-forward ideas of Galileo and Newton.  I am not fond of any 4-dimensional holes trying to suck on me while I'm driving in traffic.

I am aware of other charges levied against Einstein, such as plagiarism.  Out of curiosity, I just googled Albert Einstein and the first image is somehow a photo of me right after I woke up this morning.  So not only was Einstein a plagiarist who stole other people's work and misrepresented it as his own, he was also a depraved, imbecilic impostor who tried to masquerade as other people living decades into the future.
Con
#2
Forfeited
Round 2
Pro
#3
Forfeited
Con
#4
Forfeited
Round 3
Pro
#5
Blue roses harp hearth to green before all.
Con
#6
Forfeited
Round 4
Pro
#7
Περὶ θεῶν γάρ, ὦ Τίμαιε, λέγοντά τι πρὸς ἀνθρώπους δοκεῖν ἱκανῶς λέγειν ῥᾷον ἢ περὶ θνητῶν πρὸς ἡμᾶς. Ἡ γὰρ ἀπειρία καὶ σφόδρα ἄγνοια τῶν ἀκουόντων περὶ ὧν ἂν οὕτως ἔχωσιν πολλὴν εὐπορίαν παρέχεσθον τῷ μέλλοντι λέγειν τι περὶ αὐτῶν: περὶ δὲ δὴ θεῶν ἴσμεν ὡς ἔχομεν.
Con
#8
Forfeited
Round 5
Pro
#9
δοκεῖν ἱκανῶς λέγειν ῥᾷον τι περὶ αὐτῶν: περὶ δὲ δὴ.
Con
#10
Forfeited