In my 2016 book Atoms of Light and The Relativity Myth, the very last article is a 2-page reasoned explanation of why Special Relativity is redundant - how it is that it offers no explanation for any observed phenomena, and could not do so.

I recently sent a summary of this reasoning to a friend who’s interested in the subject from a non-specialist viewpoint. He replied “Fascinating stuff. I could not understand it, however. So I used Claude [Anthropic’s AI engine] to explain it to me - now I understand it completely and it’s brilliant”.

Claude breaks down the whole thing in lay-person’s terms, starting with a brief intro on the basics of Special Relativity. Below is a copy of Claude’s version of my reasoning (referring to me as ‘the author’). It leaves pretty well no doubt as to the authenticity of the point I’m making.

Over to Claude:
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# Special Relativity Explained Simply

Let me walk you through this argument from scratch, as if we were chatting over coffee.

## Setting the scene: what’s a “reference frame”?

A reference frame is just a fancy term for “someone’s point of view based on how they’re moving.”

Picture yourself standing at a train station watching a train zoom past. You’re standing still — that’s your frame of reference. A passenger on the train is moving — that’s their frame of reference. If the passenger tosses a ball straight up and catches it, from her point of view the ball goes straight up and straight down. From your point of view on the platform, the ball travels in an arc, because the train carried it forward while it was in the air.

Same ball, same toss — but it looks different depending on who’s watching.

## What Special Relativity says

Einstein’s Special Relativity (SR), published in 1905, makes a bold claim: the laws of physics work *exactly the same* for everyone, no matter how fast they’re moving (as long as they’re not speeding up or slowing down). Importantly, this includes the speed of light — light always travels at the same speed for everyone, which sounds reasonable until you realise it leads to some very weird consequences.

For example, SR predicts that if you watch a spaceship fly past at high speed, the clocks on board will appear to tick more slowly than yours. The spaceship will also appear slightly squished in the direction it’s travelling. These aren’t optical illusions — they’re real measurable effects.

People sometimes say SR contains paradoxes (the most famous being the “twin paradox,” where one twin travels in space and comes back younger than the other). The author is saying these aren’t really paradoxes — they’re just misunderstandings of what SR actually claims.

## Now the key argument

Here’s the heart of what the author is getting at:

If you, standing still on the platform, *measure* something happening — like that spaceship’s clock running slow — then there must be a real, physical reason for it. And that reason has to make sense from *your* point of view, using the physics *you* know, in *your* world.

It’s not good enough to shrug and say, “Well, if I were on the spaceship, the laws of physics would explain it.” You’re *not* on the spaceship. You’re on the platform. Whatever caused that effect must be explainable in terms of what’s actually happening from your standpoint.

Otherwise, the author says, we’re basically invoking magic.

## A real example: the Fizeau experiment

In the 1850s, a French scientist called Fizeau did a clever experiment. Here’s what he was investigating:

Light travels slower through water than through empty space — only about three-quarters of its usual speed. Fizeau wondered: what happens if the water is *flowing*? Does the moving water drag the light along with it, like a current carrying a swimmer?

He found that yes, flowing water does speed the light up a bit — but not by as much as you’d expect. If the water flows at, say, 5 metres per second, the light doesn’t gain a full 5 metres per second — it gains less.

Einstein later showed that his SR formula for combining speeds predicted exactly this result. Big win for SR, supposedly.

**But hold on** — *why* does light slow down in water in the first place? For a long time, nobody really knew. It was just a measured fact.

Now we understand the reason: light is an electromagnetic wave (basically wobbling electric and magnetic fields), and water atoms have their own electric and magnetic fields around them. As light passes through, these fields interact — the light is essentially absorbed and re-emitted by each atom along the way [This is a simplification, the full explanation is rather more technical. GB], and that takes time. That’s why light slows down in water.

The author has worked out (in their [2016] book) that when you carefully calculate this electromagnetic interaction — including what happens when the water itself is moving — you get *exactly* the result Fizeau observed. No need for SR at all. Just everyday electromagnetic physics, the kind that works in the static observer’s lab.

## The bigger point

Here’s where the argument really lands:

Even *before* anyone understood the electromagnetic reason behind Fizeau’s results, there *had* to be one. Why? Because the experiment was being done in someone’s laboratory, observed by someone standing still next to it. Whatever was happening to that light had to be caused by something physical happening *in that lab* — something that made sense in the static observer’s world.

You can’t explain it by saying, “From the moving water’s point of view, here’s what physics would do.” That doesn’t actually *cause* anything. The cause has to live in the static observer’s reality.

And this applies to *everything* SR describes. If a moving clock genuinely ticks slowly when you measure it, then there must be something physically happening to that clock’s inner workings — something about how its parts interact when they’re in motion — that explains the slowdown from your point of view. The explanation must exist in the physics you can observe, even if scientists haven’t yet figured out exactly what it is.

## So what’s the conclusion?

This is the clever twist: SR is excellent at *predicting* that strange things will happen at high speeds, and it gives you the maths to calculate them. But it doesn’t really *explain* them in terms of cause and effect. It just describes the patterns.

The author’s point is that the real *explanations* — the physical causes — must come from ordinary physics: how electromagnetic fields behave, how atoms interact, how energy flows. SR points us towards “here’s an effect you must account for,” but the actual *reason* for the effect lies in the underlying physics, not in SR itself.

So in a sense, SR puts itself out of a job. It says, “Look, this effect must occur” — and then ordinary physics steps in to explain *why*, leaving SR with nothing left to do. As the author puts it, SR points us unerringly toward effects that must have physical causes, and then quietly bows out of the picture.

Whether mainstream physics accepts this view is a separate question — SR is woven deeply into modern physics. But the logical argument is straightforward: real effects need real causes, those causes must work in the observer’s own frame, and once you have those causes, you don’t need SR to explain anything — only to point at what needs explaining.

[End of Claude's expansion of the logical reasoning.]
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Notice what Claude does not say: it doesn’t say “This reasoning is open to question”. Rather, it says “The logical argument is straightforward” (no ‘ifs’ or ‘buts’ or ‘on the other hand’). Note also, though , that it says “Whether mainstream physics accepts this view is a separate question — SR is woven deeply into modern physics” - this ‘separate question’ is nothing to do with the validity of the reasoning, but rather has everything to do with the entrenched position of mainstream scientific opinion.

That entrenched position has to be shifted if science is to move forward. You may like to share this article with any physicist friends (or you may be a physicist yourself) - it’s certainly food for thought, presented with all the power of a top-class AI engine.