The State of Physics Today

It is 105 years since Einstein published his "Special Theory of Relativity".  He didn't give it that name at the start, it developed that name in the years following.  By the time he began publishing his first papers on general Relativity (Entwurf 1912) he had already begun to accept that title rather than "Mach's Principle" which he thought at first was identical to his ideas about general relativity.  Mach's Principle has to do with the clasic spinning bucket.  Mach contended that the water shaped itself like that at the bottom because of the action on it of all of the other matter in the universe and that it didn't make any difference whether you spun the bucket or spun the universe around it.  The Entwurf equations didn't support Mach's Principal however and Einstein went with perfecting the equations over finding math to suppert Mach.  The math and what the math is said to predict has ruled Physics with  more and more of an "Iron Hand" ever since.  Today's Physicists, for the most part) seem to know nothing that their computers and the math equations don't tell them.  They seem to be unwilling to trust anything like abstract reasoning that leads one to conclusions that differ from accepted dogma.  Perhaps most of you who come across this are too young to remember when Physics Theories were routinely presented as theories and were never given laws of science status unless they passed all scrutany and overcame all objections, Lick the fact that the Big Bang theory is based on conjecture about what some unexplained phenomena means and little else.  Yet we constantly hear it stated in absolute terms along with the latest best guess estimate about the know age of the universe.  These things are all determined on evidence so shaky that it would have barely been credited as a 'theory' in Einstein's time let alone peddled as "Laws of Physics" decided and approved by majority rule.