The Dexter Sauerheber Syndrom

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Introduction

Welcome to the World of Richard Dexter Sauerheber, where scientific reasoning is unknown!

Meet Richard Dexter Sauerheber, a man whose scientific curiosity knows no bounds, or peer-reviewed journals. With the enthusiasm of a child armed with a chemistry set and the credentials of... well, let’s just say he’s self-certified. Sauerheber boldly goes where no credible scientist has gone before, taking on fluoride, water chemistry, and occasionally common sense, all with a level of confidence that only true pseudo-science can provide. Buckle up, and prepare to question everything (except his theories, of course, they’re rock solid in the world of Richard)!

Rumor has it that Richard Dexter Sauerheber holds a Ph.D. from the prestigious University of California, San Diego. Impressive, right? The only catch: No one seems to know exactly what it's in. Physics? Chemistry? Underwater basket weaving? The truth is shrouded in more mystery than his scientific claims. But hey, when you're this confident, who needs specifics?

The character's claims

In the world of Richard Dexter Sauerheber, Einstein’s Special Relativity gets a bit of a remix! Apparently, Richard believes that the first postulate of Special Relativity is the constancy of the speed of light. Even better, in Richard's universe, the speed of objects doesn’t depend on the observer, because, why let centuries of physics get in the way of a perfectly good theory? Somewhere, Einstein is scratching his head, wondering if he's being punked.

In Richard Dexter Sauerheber’s wacky world of physics, timekeeping takes a strange twist. He believes that even though a moving person’s wristwatch ticks slower when seen by an observer at rest (so far, so good!), the person wearing the watch magically stays perfectly synchronized with that observer. That’s right, Richard's got a theory where the watch and its wearer, both supposedly in the same frame, decide to part ways when both are in motion (staying together) with respect to the observer! In his universe, watches are rebellious like that. This mind-boggling idea not only defies common sense but also subtly declares that the actual first postulate of Relativity (you know, Galileo's principle of relativity) is just a suggestion. Somewhere, Galileo is rolling in his grave... at relativistic speeds, of course.

The character won't hesitate to make use of the argument of authority (authority that he doesn't even have) in order to support his claims that contradict 120 years of sucessful tests of Special Relativity, as shown in this conversation:

The “cartoon” he's referring to is my video tutorial that shows how to rigorously derive the Lorentz transformation from the two postulates of Special Relativity:

But that's not all! Richard also invented a new way of proving his point. We are all familiar with the usual pseudo-scientific arguments, such as:

• The proof by authority: “Don Knuth says it's true, so it must be.”
• The proof by lost reference: “I saw the proof somewhere.”
• The proof by obviousness: “The proof is so obvious that it doesn't need to be mentioned.”
• The proof by intimidation: “Don't be stupid, of course it is true.”
• The proof by terror: “When the proof by intimidation fails...”
• The proof by poor analogy: “The running horse is analogous to ball rolling without friction.”
• The proof by stubborness: “I don't care what you say, it is true.”
• ...

Well, Richard Dexter Sauerheber invented a new one, the proof by religion. See the screenshot below:

So, according to Richard, the fact that he is a Christian is the “proof” that he is not lying... Let us see! Some context is needed here. Consider an object that has a velocity u with respect to an inertial frame F, and suppose that this frame is moving at velocity v (parallel to u for simplicity) with respect to another inertial frame F'. According to Galilean Relativity, the velocity u' of the object with respect to F' is given by the velocity addition formula:

But according to Einstein's Relativity, the correct velocity is given by the relativistic velocity formula:

This, of course, has been peer-reviewed and published many times. But our friend Richard doesn't hesitate to claim that the following equation that he totally made up appears in several peer-reviewed texts:

So, he claims that (real) physicists all make the mistake of equating Galileo's formula with the relativistic formula. Well, he is actually the only one doing that. He then substitutes u=c for the case of light, and his made up equation reduces to c+v=c, which is total nonsense. The character claims that this equation has been peer-reviewed and published in several texts. This is obviously a lie, and the proof is that he keeps fleeing everytime I ask him to give a reference of a text where that equation appears. See the conversation below:



But Richard won't stop there in his madness. He claims that speed does not depend on the observer. In other words, he claims that speed is absolute. I know, this is hard to believe, so let me drop a proof that this is what he said:



Want another proof? There you go:

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