Criticism of the theory of relativity: Difference between revisions - Wikipedia

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For example, an american astrophysicist, Dr Edward Dowdie, who was employed by NASA, analysed Eddington's solar eclipse experiment which tested Einstein's prediction that light is bend by the curvature of space-time, and found that the bending of light was caused by the sun's corona, which refracts the light, and that light did not bend at all outside the solar corona, a fact that clearly contradicts the main prediction of the theory.

More recently, romanian author and science blogger Marius L. Vasile (known as Vasile Effect) has published a paper in 2023 named 'An Introduction to refractional redshift, and how it was confused with gravitational redshift', in which he criticises the Pound and Rebka gravitational redshift experiment for the use of helium, which he claims and, more importantly, proves, was responsable for the redshiftshift, that was caused by refraction. He claims that was a refractional redshift/blueshift, not a gravitational one, as the gamma ray was refracted from helium, in which the gamma ray emmitter was placed, into air, where the detector was placed, which decreased its speed and also its wavelength. He further claims that the experiment should have been performed in the same medium, or in a vacuum, to avoid refraction, and that the very fact that they needed a helium bag in order to shift the gammaray proves that there was no redshift from gravitational potential, and therefore that general relativity was falsified because its prediction could not be verified in the absence of helium refraction- which he claims has nothing to do with gravity and general relativity.

The same author then goes to analise the fourth test of general relativity, the Shapiro gravitational time delay, which he claims is also caused by refraction, as the radio wave is slowed down when it refracts into the atmosphere of massive objects such as the sun or planets, at speed v=c/n, something which Shapiro completelly neglected, as he used the speed of light in a vacuum c throughout his calculations, ignoring the index of refraction of the atmospheres of the sun and planets.