The Clarke Syndrom

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Introduction

Meet Ira Clarke, the Maverick of Misunderstanding! When it comes to dismantling physics with pure audacity and zero relevance, no one does it quite like Ira Clarke. This self-styled anti-relativist has made it his moto to challenge my rigorous derivation of the Lorentz transformation and resolution of the Twin Paradox, but not with facts, mind you, just with whatever he finds lying around! His favorite weapon of choice? Gravitational redshift! Because why stick to Special Relativity when you can throw in gravitation, even if it’s completely unrelated?

But Ira doesn’t stop there. His true genius lies in the art of creative misrepresentation. He watches tutorials like yours, then proceeds to invent his own version of what you said, just so he can expose a contradiction... that never actually existed! It's a bold strategy, one that takes misunderstanding to a whole new level.

So sit back and enjoy as Ira Clarke attempts to unravel the mysteries of the universe using tools like red herrings, circular reasoning, and the occasional gravitational redshift, inviting a few lies here and there. Science may be hard, but for Ira, getting it wrong is a breeze!

Armed with his “discovery”, Ira is on a mission to correct what doesn’t need correcting, all while invoking his favorite irrelevant principles (looking at you, gravitational redshift). If you're ever in need of a pseudo-scientific deep dive into contradictions that don’t exist, or just want to witness the birth of new physics... look no further than Ira Clarke!

The character's claims

In the fascinating world of anti-relativism, Ira Clarke reigns supreme as the fearless inventor of new irrelevant principles. His latest breakthrough? The infamous “2^nd order Lorentz factor”, a concept so groundbreaking that it... doesn’t actually exist. Sure, you can Taylor expand the Lorentz factor at 2^nd order, but why would you want to replace the exact Lorentz factor by an approximation that obviously fails at speeds close to the speed of light when it is actually much simpler to perform the exact calculation? But that minor detail won’t stop Ira! Despite my rigorous and extremely simple (no more than 8^th grade math required) derivation of the well-known Lorentz factor, Ira insists my work is deeply flawed, not because of any mathematical error, but simply because he's incapable of grasping one simple fact: When a photon moves vertically in some reference frame, a horizontally moving observer will see it take an oblique path. Too hard for him, as it is for his friend Anthony Stern.

It is not that hard to understand, though. Consider an experiment where Alice and her light clock (a photon bounces up and down onto parallel mirrors) are both at rest with respect to the Earth. Bob is moving to the right at velocity v. The image below shows the situation from Alice's point of view:



Note that at all times the photon remains horizontally centered with respect to the mirrors. Now, consider the same experiment, but from Bob's point of view. It should be clear that Bob sees Alice and her clock moving to the left at velocity -v. But there is no reason for the photon to suddenly decide to move out of the light clock, it must still remain horizontally centered with respect to the mirrors. As a result, Bob must see something like this:



Clearly, he must see the photon following an oblique path! But not for Ira Clarke! The poor guy claims that the photon magically decides to move out of the clock in order to follow a perfectly vertical path for Bob, just because Bob decided to look at it! That's right, in Ira's universe, photons are rebelious like that! If you want to hear a lot of nonsense, ask him what happens if both Alice and Bob look at the photon... Would the photon cease to exist in order to avoid having to make the hard choice on whether it should appear moving vertically for Alice or for Bob?

Ira Clarke won't stop there with his insanity. Take a look for example at one of his numerous comments on my YouTube tutorial about the Twin Paradox:



You can see that he agrees with the formula that I circled and which appears around 15'45''. Then, at 16'16'', I integrate that formula and obtain the relationship between the time t experienced by the stay-at-home twin and the time t' experienced by the traveler. The result is:

He seems to agree with this too (at least, he didn't complain about it). But then, what does his comment “applied at about minute 16.5 but in reverse” mean? Here is what my tutorial shows at that time:



The formula that I circled was obtained in a completely different part of the tutorial (at about 11'50'') that he totally dismissed, a part that describes the situation from the point of view of the stay-at-home twin. So, I did not apply the formula he's talking about “in reverse” as he claims, it was a totally independent derivation. And this is precisely what proves that there is no paradox because this formula agrees with the one that we obtain if we invert the formula that resulted from the point of view of the traveler. In other words, he just accidentally proved himself wrong.

It is funny to see that he insists on the formula being supposedly wrong because he thinks that the inverse formula should be obtained simply by switching t and t' and switching the direction of the velocity. See the discussion he had with someone on Quora about it:



We can certainly do that in the case of the Lorentz transformation which is between inertial frames, for which the situation is symmetrical. But the equation he is criticizing is for a situation where one observer is in an inertial frame while the other is accelerated. There is no symmetry. She correctly pointed out his mistake:

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