The piece on gravitational waves (The Sunday Times of Malta, January 14) is a fine article and it is wonderful to read that scientists will be congregating in Malta for relevant discussions.

Unfortunately, like so many scientific pieces today, the article does not give the full picture. There are several areas of uncertainty and even outright doubt in the fields of cosmology and gravity (as well as other areas in Einstein’s theories of relativity).

Gravity, like light, is an enigma that is not yet fully solved. Einstein’s equations reveal his belief that gravity is a combination of pressure and attraction but how this works is unclear. Atomic power and the atom bomb have proved that Einstein’s E=mc² equation is at least a good approximation but we do not yet know why.

Einstein’s equations make a momentous statement but E=mc² is just a ‘construct’ since there is no known real connection between the basic properties of velocity, energy and mass. E=mc² only seems to work because the figure we use for the velocity of light (c) is so large. If one were to substitute the speed of light in light years per year (1) for the speed of light in metres per second (299,792,458), neither of which is physically tied to any measure of mass or energy, then the true nonsense of an equation without appropriate units is revealed.

Throughout history many scientific advances have been made despite incomplete appreciation of all of the relevant fundamental factors and realities. One instance is particularly pertinent – some 350 years before the birth of Christ the Aristotelian model of the heavens first found preference to the contemporary, and somewhat more accurate, ideas of Heraklides of Pontus. But Aristotle’s model kept diverging from the calendar as the years went by.

Over the years many very clever people tried, because Aristotle was deemed such an ‘impeccable’ source and unquestionable ‘giant’, to adjust the Aristotelian model to help it accommodate both the calendar and new stellar observations, until Copernicus showed, in the 16th century, that there was a far better, but we now know still faulted, model. It would seem that modern scientists are already doing the same thing with Einstein by ignoring several new discoveries, such as the existence of dark matter and dark energy, and serious problems, such as the divergence of the Pioneer probes from their calculated path and the way in which cosmic rays have been found to alter the, supposedly unalterable, rate of radioactive decay.

Surely when any relevant new discovery is made scientists should review the basic facts and observations and ask appropriate new questions. In Aristotle’s case they did not do the right thing simply because they were so sure that Aristotle had to be correct. Instead they used imaginative maths and epicycles to explain the various anomalies and we can now see how far from reality these exercises took us!