An anti-Einstein sentiment (Image: Alex Williamson

When people don’t like what science tells them, they resort to conspiracy theories, mud-slinging and plausible pseudoscience – as Einstein discovered

“THIS world is a strange madhouse,” remarked Albert Einstein in 1920 in a letter to his close friend, the mathematician Marcel Grossmann. “Every coachman and every waiter is debating whether relativity theory is correct. Belief in this matter depends on political affiliation.”

Einstein’s general theory of relativity, published in 1915, received an overwhelming public response – not all of it positive. Numerous accounts which appeared during the 1920s claimed to show relativity was wrong, and Einstein received many letters from laypeople who claimed to have found the ultimate refutation of his theory.

Many of today’s physicists and astronomers (not to mention science journalists) continue to receive this kind of mail. On densely written pages – and, increasingly, in rambling emails, blog posts and online comments – self-proclaimed scientists keep trying to foist their astonishingly simple solutions to much-discussed problems upon genuine academics. Yet what flourishes today on the fringes of the internet was much more prominent in the 1920s, in the activities of a movement that included physics professors and even Nobel laureates.

Who were Einstein’s opponents? Why did they oppose one of the most important scientific theories of the 20th century? And was Einstein right in saying “political affiliation” was responsible for the fierce opposition to relativity theory?

A few years ago, I had the opportunity to access papers belonging to the physicist Ernst Gehrcke, one of the most outspoken critics of Einstein in Germany. As I delved into the material he had neatly collected in …