Phillips to Hall regarding Einstein
Richard Phillips
A short time ago I expressed doubt that Einstein truly
deserves the credit for those three equations that describe
how length, mass, and time are affected as one gets close to
the speed of light. Let us be clear as to which equations we
are talking about. In all three cases the quantity in
question is modified by the factor (call it F)
F = sqrt[1 - (v/c)sq]
In some caes this factor is a multiplier; in other cases, it
is a divisor.
But THESE are the three equations we are talking about.
Mr. Hall chooses to imply that my motives are dubious. I
quote:
"No, that's not the problem. Mr. Phillips *isn't* talking
about science! He's made it clear that he doesn't even have
a basic understanding of the equations, and that he's
criticising the late Dr. Einstein out of jealousy.
Do you have a different hypothesis you'd like to share with
us? Remember that your hypothesis has to fit all of the
existing evidence."
My reply is this: There are today, it is true, certain
persons who very much want to shoot down Einstein for no
reason other than that of the pure hell of shooting him
down. I am not one of them. I do not have any passionate
wish to see the credit for Relativity given to Einstein or
to Lorenz or to anyone else. I do, however, strongly believe
that the credit should go to the man (or men) who most
deserve it. Based upon what I have seen, I do not believe
Einstein is that man.
I now quote another passage from one of Mr Hall's posts:
"No, Lorentz published a slightly different set of
equations.
==============================
Would you please tell us just what WERE those "different"
equations?
================================================
One important difference is that the Lorentz equations only
talked about
distortions of length, not mass or time.
========================================
I don't believe this is so. The three equations (including
the effect on time) are spoken of as the LORENZ
Transformation. I shall say more about this later.
=====================================
Remember that the time distortions
are what's important with GPS satellites.
(Basically, Lorentz made certain assumptions about the
nature of light, and
those assumptions turned out to be wrong. Under Lorentz's
assumptions, time
distortions would have been impossible.)"
==========================================
We can only base our judgements on what these men published.
We CANNOT base them on what you tell us about their
assumptions.
=================================
I am going to wrap up my post by quoting a portion of an
article that appeared in the May/June 2001 issue of Barnes
Review and written by a Dr V.S. Herrell, B.S., M.E., cH.D.
Now I have no hesitation in admitting that (a) Barnes
Review is a VERY right-wing publicataion and (b) the article
is frankly polemical. However. it cannot be denied that the
man HAS visible credentials and that he has done his
homework.
The partial quote is as follows:
"Let us first look at the last of these theories, the theory
of relativity. This is perhaps the most famous idea falsely
attributed to Einstein. Specifically, this 1905 paper dealt
with what Einstein called the Special Theory of Relativity
(the general theory would come in 1915). This theory
contradicted the traditional Newtonian mechanics and was
based upon two premises: (1) in the absence of acceleration,
the laws of nature are the same for all observers; and (2)
since the speed of light is independent of the motion of its
source, then the time interval between two events is longer
for an observer in whose frame of reference the events occur
at different places than for an observer in whose frame of
reference the events occur in the same place. This is
basically the idea that time passes more slowly as one's
velocity approaches the speed of light, relative to slower
velocities where time would pass faster.
This theory has been validated by modern experiments and is
the basis for modern physics. But these two premises are far
from being originally Einstein's. First of all, the idea
that the speed of light was a constant and was independent
of the motion of its source was not Einstein's at all, but
was proposed by the Scottish scientist James Maxwell.
Maxwell studied the phenomenon of light extensively and
first proposed that it was electromagnetic in nature. He
wrote an article to this effect for the 1878 edition of the
Encyclopedia Britannica. His ideas prompted much debate, and
by 1887, as a result of his work and the ensuing debate, the
scientific community, particularly Hendrik Antoon Lorentz
(1853-1928), Albert Abraham Michelson (1852-1931) and Edward
Williams Morley (1838-1923), reached the conclusion that the
velocity of light was independent of the velocity of the
observer. Thus, this piece of the special theory of
relativity was known 27 years before Einstein wrote his
paper.
This debate over the nature of light also led Michelson and
Morley to conduct an important experiment, the results of
which could not be explained by Newtonian mechanics. They
observed a phenomenon caused by relativity but they did not
understand relativity. They had attempted to detect the
motion of the earth through ether, which was a medium
thought to be necessary for the propagation of light. In
response to this problem, in 1889, the Irish physicist
George Francis FitzGerald (1851-1901), who had also first
proposed a mechanism for producing radio waves, wrote a
paper which stated that the results of the Michelson-Morley
experiment could be explained if "the length of material
bodies changes, according as they are moving through the
ether or across it, by an amount depending on the square of
the ratio of their velocities to that of light." This is the
theory of relativity, 13 years before Einstein's paper.
Furthermore, in 1892, Lorentz, from the Netherlands,
proposed the same solution and began to greatly expand the
idea. All throughout the 1890s, both Lorentz and FitzGerald
worked on these ideas and wrote articles strangely similar
to Einstein's special theory detailing what is now known as
the Lorentz-FitzGerald contraction. In 1898, the Irishman
Joseph Larmor wrote down equations explaining the
Lorentz-FitzGerald contraction and its relativistic
consequences, seven years before Einstein's paper. By 1904,
Lorentz transformations, the series of equations explaining
relativity, were published by Lorentz. They describe the
INCREASE OF MASS, THE SHORTENING OF LENGTH, AND THE TIME
DILATION OF A BODY MOVING AT SPEEDS CLOSE TO THE VELOCITY OF
LIGHT. (caps mine) In short, by 1904, everything in
Einstein's paper regarding the special theory of relativity
had already been published.
The French mathematician and physicist Jules Henri Poincare
(April 29, 1854July 12, 1912) had, in 1898, written a paper
unifying many of these ideas. He stated, seven years before
Einstein's paper, that: "[W]e have no direct intuition about
the equality of two time intervals. The simultaneity of two
events or the order of their succession, as well as the
equality of two time intervals, must be defined in such a
way that the statements of the natural laws be as simple as
possible."
THis wraps up my case against Einstein.
Andrew
> A short time ago I expressed doubt that Einstein truly
> deserves the credit for those three equations that describe
> how length, mass, and time are affected as one gets close to
> the speed of light. Let us be clear as to which equations we
> are talking about. In all three cases the quantity in
> question is modified by the factor (call it F)
If you insist, but it's usually called "gamma."
>
> F = sqrt[1 - (v/c)sq]
>
> In some caes this factor is a multiplier; in other cases, it
> is a divisor.
>
> But THESE are the three equations we are talking about.
So what?
What Einstein is credited with is developing the physical principles
of relativity. Fitzgerald had no understanding of these physical
principles. He came up with one equation, but for him, it had no
physical significance. He was attempting to explain the null result
of the Michelson-Morley experiment. He succeeded in providing an
explanation, but he failed to explain _why_ his explantion worked.
His explanation had no physical basis, only a mathamatical one.
He suggested (with no justification whatsoever) that the null result
of the M-M experiment could be explained if the length of the bars of
the Michelson Interferometer were shortened by a the factor you call
F.
One man managed to start from a fundamental assumption (two observers
one in motion relative to the other will both measure exactly the same
speed of light), and derived it all the way to the Lorentz transform.
Care to guess who it was?
I'll give you a hint: his last name starts with an "E-" and ends with
an "-instein."
>
> One important difference is that the Lorentz equations only
> talked about
> distortions of length, not mass or time.
> ========================================
> I don't believe this is so. The three equations (including
> the effect on time) are spoken of as the LORENZ
> Transformation. I shall say more about this later.
> =====================================
The math may have been developed by Lorentz, but not the physics.
In short, he found exactly one piece of the puzzle. Einstein, using
the same analogy, drew the picture on the front of the box, including
Lorentz' piece.
>
> Remember that the time distortions
> are what's important with GPS satellites.
>
> (Basically, Lorentz made certain assumptions about the
> nature of light, and
> those assumptions turned out to be wrong. Under Lorentz's
> assumptions, time
> distortions would have been impossible.)"
>
> ==========================================
> We can only base our judgements on what these men published.
> We CANNOT base them on what you tell us about their
> assumptions.
> =================================
We're not. This _is_ what Lorentz publshed.
>
> I am going to wrap up my post by quoting a portion of an
> article that appeared in the May/June 2001 issue of Barnes
> Review and written by a Dr V.S. Herrell, B.S., M.E., cH.D.
Actually, the passage you're about to quote, I've seen posted at least
a dozen times, under a dozen different authors, but I'm not going to
go into that.
> Now I have no hesitation in admitting that (a) Barnes
> Review is a VERY right-wing publicataion and (b) the article
> is frankly polemical. However. it cannot be denied that the
> man HAS visible credentials and that he has done his
> homework.
Really? If he did his homework so well, why does he (among other
things):
a) claim that Einstein won the Nobel prize a year later than he did
b) claim that Einstein was somehow able to plifer the works of the
most prominent physicists of the pre-Einstein era without anyone so
much as batting an eyelash (Including the scientists Einstein
supposedly plagiarized).
c) claim that J.J. Thompson had studied the equation E=mc^2 when he,
in fact, had not
d) suggest that Special Relativity contradicts Newtonian Mechanics
e) forget to mention that Einstein had a PhD.
f) Imply that Einstein had no education, in spite of having a PhD.
(most of these are not in the passage you quote, but I can provide
them if you want)
This doesn't seem to be the work of someone who has done their
homework very carefully.
>
> The partial quote is as follows:
>
> "Let us first look at the last of these theories, the theory
> of relativity. This is perhaps the most famous idea falsely
> attributed to Einstein. Specifically, this 1905 paper dealt
> with what Einstein called the Special Theory of Relativity
> (the general theory would come in 1915). This theory
> contradicted the traditional Newtonian mechanics
Wrong already: Special relativity does not contradict Newtonian
mechanics. It merely generalizes it to all inertial reference frames
including those approaching the speed of light. At speeds v<<c,
special relativity *must* reduce to Newtonian mechanics (if not, the
universe would be a really screwy place), which it does.
Still think your Dr V.S. Herrell has done his homework?
>and was
> based upon two premises: (1) in the absence of acceleration,
> the laws of nature are the same for all observers; and (2)
> since the speed of light is independent of the motion of its
> source, then the time interval between two events is longer
> for an observer in whose frame of reference the events occur
> at different places than for an observer in whose frame of
> reference the events occur in the same place. This is
> basically the idea that time passes more slowly as one's
> velocity approaches the speed of light, relative to slower
> velocities where time would pass faster.
Close enough to correct that I'm not going to argue the point.
These two points are really what we credit Einstein with. He took
these two points, and derived them all the way to Special Relativity,
including Lorentz' Equations.
>
> This theory has been validated by modern experiments and is
> the basis for modern physics. But these two premises are far
> from being originally Einstein's. First of all, the idea
> that the speed of light was a constant and was independent
> of the motion of its source was not Einstein's at all, but
> was proposed by the Scottish scientist James Maxwell.
Note: If Einstein does not deserve credit for relativity because
Lorentz came up with the equation, then by the same logic, Maxwell
does not deserve credit for the equations that bear his name... They
are based upon vector calculus developed before he was born.
> Maxwell studied the phenomenon of light extensively and
> first proposed that it was electromagnetic in nature.
Indeed he did, he was the first to suggest this, and is duly credited
for the infamous "Maxwell Equations."
So what?
Maxwell's equations do not have any bearing on relativity, simply
because Maxwell's work does not involve inertial reference frames, the
central point of Relativity.
Special Relativity was titled "The Electrodynamics of ***Moving***
bodies" (emphasis mine) for a reason.
>He
> wrote an article to this effect for the 1878 edition of the
> Encyclopedia Britannica. His ideas prompted much debate, and
> by 1887, as a result of his work and the ensuing debate, the
> scientific community, particularly Hendrik Antoon Lorentz
> (1853-1928), Albert Abraham Michelson (1852-1931) and Edward
> Williams Morley (1838-1923), reached the conclusion that the
> velocity of light was independent of the velocity of the
> observer.
No, what the M-M experiment established was the absence of a medium
through which light had to propagate (although it took physicists
quite some time to accept that. Lorentz and Fitzgerald were among
those trying valiantly to keep the Ether around).
The experiment employed a Michelson Interferometer, to measure the
velocity of the earth relative to that of the Ether. It arrived at
what was (at the time) a shocking discovery: There _is_ no Ether.
This, again, has no bearing on Relativity, simply because M & M's work
did not involve inertial reference frames, the central point of
Special Relativity.
>Thus, this piece of the special theory of
> relativity was known 27 years before Einstein wrote his
> paper.
Critical word here: "this ****PIECE**** of the special theory of
relativity" (emphasis mine).
What is happening here is that Dr V.S. Herrell (or whoever the
original author is), is mistaking the parts for the whole, and he will
do it again, and again and again, and again.....
>
> This debate over the nature of light also led Michelson and
> Morley to conduct an important experiment, the results of
> which could not be explained by Newtonian mechanics.
Actually, they performed the experiment before there was a lot of
debate over the nature of light. The M-M experiment was performed to
study the direction and magnitude of the velocity of the Ether wind.
> They
> observed a phenomenon caused by relativity
No, they observed a consequence of the absence of the Ether.
>but they did not
> understand relativity.
They didn't undersand relativity, and Einstein hadn't published it
yet... There could be a connection there.
>They had attempted to detect the
> motion of the earth through ether, which was a medium
> thought to be necessary for the propagation of light. In
> response to this problem, in 1889, the Irish physicist
> George Francis FitzGerald (1851-1901), who had also first
> proposed a mechanism for producing radio waves, wrote a
> paper which stated that the results of the Michelson-Morley
> experiment could be explained if "the length of material
> bodies changes, according as they are moving through the
> ether or across it, by an amount depending on the square of
> the ratio of their velocities to that of light."
Critical phrase here: "as they are moving through the ether or across
it"
Basically, Fitzgerald suggested this formula as an explanation for an
unexpected result. What he does not do, is explain why this
contraction occurs.
One man did. Care to guess who?
> This is the
> theory of relativity, 13 years before Einstein's paper.
No, this is one of the *consequences* of relativity, again Dr V.S.
Herrell (or whoever the original author is) is mistaking the parts for
the whole.
>
> Furthermore, in 1892, Lorentz, from the Netherlands,
> proposed the same solution and began to greatly expand the
> idea. All throughout the 1890s, both Lorentz and FitzGerald
> worked on these ideas and wrote articles strangely similar
> to Einstein's special theory detailing what is now known as
> the Lorentz-FitzGerald contraction.
First, their ideas were not "strangely similar to Einstein's special
theory." They were (still) attempting to explain away the null result
of the Michelson-Morley Experiment.
For them, the Lorentz Transform had no physical significance, it was a
mathematical trick which happened to fit the facts. Einstein was the
one who gave the Lorentz-Fitzgerald transform physical meaning, and
that is what he is credited for.
>In 1898, the Irishman
> Joseph Larmor wrote down equations explaining the
> Lorentz-FitzGerald contraction and its relativistic
> consequences, seven years before Einstein's paper.
All of these scientists were still dealing with the propagation of a
wave across or through the Ether. None had a grasp of the underlying
physical principles.
>By 1904,
> Lorentz transformations, the series of equations explaining
> relativity, were published by Lorentz. They describe the
> INCREASE OF MASS, THE SHORTENING OF LENGTH, AND THE TIME
> DILATION OF A BODY MOVING AT SPEEDS CLOSE TO THE VELOCITY OF
> LIGHT.
Meaningless. They were still dealing with light traveling through or
across the Ether.
For Lorentz, his transform was merely a mathematical trick, a formula
who's only quality was the fact that it fit the facts. Lorentz made
no attempt to explain the physical significance of his transform. As
a consequence, it wasn't until Einstein derived the Lorentz Transforms
in his "Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies" from first principles that
they were accepted as accurate.
What Einstein did, and what he is credited for, is starting from the
fundamental assumption that the speed of light is invariant in all
frames of reference (something Lorentz did not do), derived it all the
way to Lorentz' equations.
>(caps mine) In short, by 1904, everything in
> Einstein's paper regarding the special theory of relativity
> had already been published.
Pieces existed before Einstein published, of course. But it was
Einstein who assembled the puzzle.
What the author of this piece (and, apparently, you) fail to realize
is that science is, practically by definition, a process built upon
the work of others. That's why every scientific paper has a reference
section.
> The French mathematician and physicist Jules Henri Poincare
> (April 29, 1854July 12, 1912) had, in 1898, written a paper
> unifying many of these ideas. He stated, seven years before
> Einstein's paper, that: "[W]e have no direct intuition about
> the equality of two time intervals. The simultaneity of two
> events or the order of their succession, as well as the
> equality of two time intervals, must be defined in such a
> way that the statements of the natural laws be as simple as
> possible."
So what? Poincare had struck upon one of the consequences of
relativity. Poincare, however, failed to formulate it. The
derivations were performed by none other than Einstein himself.
Again, mistaking the parts for the whole.
>
> THis wraps up my case against Einstein.
But all you've shown is that Lorentz had an equation, which is not
being debated. What you have not shown is that Lorentz had any
understanding of the physics underlying relativity.
Oh, you've also shown that a few other physicists had what at the time
were some crackpot ideas. Einstein was the one who managed to
establish the physics which bound all these apparently conflicting
crackpot ideas together, and showed that they weren't so
crackpot-esque after all.
This is what Einstein deserves the credit for.
Actually, the fact that Lorentz' Transforms are accepted is largely
because of Einstein's work, not in spite of it. At the time that
Lorentz published his transforms, few scientists accepted them, simply
because they had no physical basis. Einstein started from first
principles, and derived his way all the way to the Lorentz Transforms,
giving them physical meaning. This is why Einstein's name is
attributed to Special Relativity. Einstein took all the pieces, and
tied them nicely together with a single, brilliant insight.
So, answer me one question: if everything Einstein did had been done
before, if he did nothing new or creative, why is it that not one
scientist ever came forward to claim that Einstein stole their work.
Every one of them (with the exception of Fitzgerald and Maxwell) was
still alive when Special Relativity was published. Lorentz (who was
alive and well when SR was published) never came forward to say that
he deserved all the credit for SR. Larmor never said: "Hey, Al,
that's my work you're profiting off of." Poincare never announced to
the world that Einstein had pilfered his ideas. This is the
equivalent of my publishing Hawking's work on Radiating Black Holes as
my own, and nobody catching on to the fact. Even if the scientific
community at large never found out, you can be damn sure that Hawking
would, and would raise holy hell for it.
--Drew
Daniel Keren
[good stuff deleted]
One may add that Einstein, in his book about special
relativity, fully references the previous work by
Lorentz, Fitzgerald, and Michelson-Morely, and
explains how their work differs from his. It's a
very nice little book - but don't expect kooks like
Phillips to read it.
-Danny Keren.
Eugene Holman
<rgp...@mbay.net> wrote:
> I am going to wrap up my post by quoting a portion of an
> article that appeared in the May/June 2001 issue of Barnes
> Review and written by a Dr V.S. Herrell, B.S., M.E., cH.D.
> Now I have no hesitation in admitting that (a) Barnes
> Review is a VERY right-wing publicataion and (b) the article
> is frankly polemical. However. it cannot be denied that the
> man HAS visible credentials and that he has done his
> homework.
Why do you continue to trust what you read in the Barnes Review? As you
have seen in our discussion of the Holocaust, it is poorly edited and
evidently publishes articles that cannot stand up to even superficial
scrutiny. Dr. Herrell's article seems to be another piece of polemics,
and it is sloppily edited enough to have gotten so basic a fact as the
year of Einstein's Nobel Prize wrong.
Regards,
Eugene Holman
Andrew
Sadly, I've given up on the possibility of Phillips actually paying
any attention to the facts. Most of my postings of late are sent out
"for the record," as it were, not necessarily for Mr. Phillips'
benefit.
I must say, though, the "Albert Einstein: a Jewish Myth" piece is by
far my all time favorite work posted in this forum; partly because of
my background, but mostly because it's so easy to refute. Practically
every statement which isn't blantantly false is pure propaganda, and
it took me all of 20 minutes with a physics text to come up with a
full refutation.
As I mentioned before, I've seen the full piece posted several times,
each time the author's name has changed. Lately, it's been posted
without crediting an author. I guess nobody wants to take the credit
(or the blame) for it anymore.
--Drew
Richard Phillips
Eugene Holman wrote:
>
> In article <3E1C6DB6...@mbay.net>, Richard Phillips
> <rgp...@mbay.net> wrote:
>
> > I am going to wrap up my post by quoting a portion of an
> > article that appeared in the May/June 2001 issue of Barnes
> > Review and written by a Dr V.S. Herrell, B.S., M.E., cH.D.
> > Now I have no hesitation in admitting that (a) Barnes
> > Review is a VERY right-wing publicataion and (b) the article
> > is frankly polemical. However. it cannot be denied that the
> > man HAS visible credentials and that he has done his
> > homework.
>
> Why do you continue to trust what you read in the Barnes Review?
============================================
Phillips
Because I have never been given any solid reason to DIStrust
it.
==============================================================
As you
> have seen in our discussion of the Holocaust, it is poorly edited and
> evidently publishes articles that cannot stand up to even superficial
> scrutiny.
=============================================
Phillips
Your pardon, but I have NOT seen this.
==========================================
Dr. Herrell's article seems to be another piece of
polemics,
==========================================
Phillips
True but so was the Declaration of Independence.
====================================================
> and it is sloppily edited enough to have gotten so basic a fact as the
> year of Einstein's Nobel Prize wrong.
===========================================
Phillips
When better nits become available, Eugene will pick them.
==============================================
Richard Phillips
==============================================================================
Phillips
There is no question but that your qualifications to engage
in a discussion on this subject are much better than my own.
Nonetheless, I would like to get in a few final squeaks on
the matter.
(1) Please recall what the original issue was: Can those
three equations involving the gamma factor be properly
called Einstein' equations? Thanks to the most worthwhile
input from yourself, we are obliged to conclude that they
cannot be.
Possibly Einstein had a broader and firmer grasp of just
what they meant and what they implied but he was NOT the
first to publish them.
(2) The thrust of your posting is that, of all the parties
involved, only Einstein fully understood the meaning,
breadth, and implications of the three equations. You may be
right; it is not a matter I am qualified to delve into.
(3) I quote your statement:
"Special relativity does not contradict Newtonian
mechanics. It merely generalizes it to all inertial
reference frames including those approaching the speed of
light."
I'd say it does. Newtonian mechanics holds that length,
mass, and time are fixed quantities independent of the
conditions under which they are measured. Relativity says it
ain't so.
(4) "Understanding" is the booby prize. Of precisely what
PRACTICAL value were Einstein's insights? Were they a sine
qua non for
--The atomic bomb
--The nuclear sub
--Nuclear power plants?
If the answer is "yes" try to give me some reasons why.
(5) I quoted only a part of the article in Barnes Review. In
an unquoted part, the writer pointed out that all four of
Einstein's "contributions" were plagiarized:
(a) Foundation of photon theory of light
(b) Equivalence of energy and mass
(c) Explanation of Brownian motion in liquids
(d) special theory of relativity
I admit these citations influenced me profoundly.
You asked why he was never denouncd for his alleged thefts.
I have no answer to that except to surmise that, among his
contemporaries, he just was not even taken seriously.
(6) Another point against Einstein the author made was his
bitter opposition to quantum mechanics, even after it had
been accepted by other scientists.
=====================================
Andrew
But, by the same logic, the equations that bear Maxwell's name, the
foundations for electrodynamics cannot be attributed to him either,
for they are based upon vector calculus which he did not develop,
merely applied.
Science is a journey. Your measure as a scientist lies in how far you
are able to carry that journey. Einstein was able to move from first
principles to an observed experimental result. He was able to start
from, in essence, nothing, and arrive at an equation Lorentz had found
which fit the experimental facts.
Given this, crediting Einstein with these equations is perfectly
acceptable.
>
> Possibly Einstein had a broader and firmer grasp of just
> what they meant and what they implied but he was NOT the
> first to publish them.
But he _was_ the first to derive them from first principles. Lorentz
merely slapped a bandaid on an unexpected observation. Einstein
actually explained that observation with a theory nobody had even
considered up to that point.
>
> (2) The thrust of your posting is that, of all the parties
> involved, only Einstein fully understood the meaning,
> breadth, and implications of the three equations. You may be
> right; it is not a matter I am qualified to delve into.
>
> (3) I quote your statement:
> "Special relativity does not contradict Newtonian
> mechanics. It merely generalizes it to all inertial
> reference frames including those approaching the speed of
> light."
>
> I'd say it does.
You're wrong.
>Newtonian mechanics holds that length,
> mass, and time are fixed quantities independent of the
> conditions under which they are measured. Relativity says it
> ain't so.
Only because Newton never considered the importance of the Speed of
Light in his studies.
Again, I repeat that according to the equivalence principle, at v<<c,
all of the equations of special relativity must reduce to Newtonian
mechanics. If they don't, then Newton was completely wrong, and
considering that Newtonian Mechanics works nicely at v<<c, it would be
difficult to convince anyone of that.
>
> (4) "Understanding" is the booby prize. Of precisely what
> PRACTICAL value were Einstein's insights? Were they a sine
> qua non for
>
> --The atomic bomb
> --The nuclear sub
> --Nuclear power plants?
>
> If the answer is "yes" try to give me some reasons why.
Einstein was the first to obtain the equation E=mc^2. This is the
fundamental equation upon which all three are based. Namely, that the
amount of energy released by a nuclear reaction (basically, what
happens in all three cases) is proportional to the change in mass.
Given that the constant of proportionality is the square of the speed
of light (on the order of 10^16 m^2/s^2), this is a huge amount of
energy. For a more concrete example, the amount of mass transformed
into energy in Fat Man and Little Boy were on the order of about a
gram.
Einstein was the first to arrive at the conclusion that E=mc^2. He
was the first to suggest that energy and matter are interchangeable
quantities. You destroy matter and get energy, you concentrate enough
energy and you get matter. Without this principle, none of your three
examples work. Considering that since Einstein died, we have yet to
improve upon his E=mc^2 equation, it seems quite likely that had
Einstein not come up with it, we would not have considered the
possibility that matter and energy are synonymous.
>
> (5) I quoted only a part of the article in Barnes Review. In
> an unquoted part, the writer pointed out that all four of
> Einstein's "contributions" were plagiarized:
>
> (a) Foundation of photon theory of light
> (b) Equivalence of energy and mass
> (c) Explanation of Brownian motion in liquids
> (d) special theory of relativity
>
> I admit these citations influenced me profoundly.
I can refute the entire article, if you're interested in hearing it.
>
> You asked why he was never denouncd for his alleged thefts.
> I have no answer to that except to surmise that, among his
> contemporaries, he just was not even taken seriously.
Regardless of how seriously a scientist is taken (or not taken, as the
case may be), no scientist would accept what the author insists is a
blatant plagiarism of their work. Even when direct observation
substantiated Einstein's results and he earned no small degree of fame
for them, not one scientist came forward to say that he had copied
them, when it would have been in their best interest to do so. Even
when he died, none of the scientists who outlived him, from whom he
supposedly plagiarized his results, came forward to claim that he'd
stolen their work.
Scientists are human beings, and I find it difficult to concieve of
any human being sitting back and watching while someone else got
credit for their work.
>
> (6) Another point against Einstein the author made was his
> bitter opposition to quantum mechanics, even after it had
> been accepted by other scientists.
>
Einstein is famous for his statement: "God Does not play dice."
Basically, Einstein's opposition wasn't of Quantum Mechanics per se
(actually, he was a strong advocate of it), but the orthodox view of
quantum mechanics.
Let me explain that.
Suppose, in a time-independent system (and before you ask: yes, there
are such systems that exist in Quantum Mechanics), we measure the
position of a particle, and we find that it is at position b.
The positions on Quantum Mechanics can be neatly summarized by one
question: where was the particle just before you measured it? There
are, in essence three different viewpoints.
1) The particle really wasn't anywhere. By making the measurement, we
forced the particle to "take a stand" (why and how it settled on
position b, we dare not ask). Therefore, the best we can do is
determine what the probability distribution of the particle's position
is. Basically, playing dice. This is known as the orthodox
viewpoint.
2) The particle was at position b, we just didn't know it. This is
the position that Einstein advocated. It should be mentioned that if
this is correct, then Quantum Mechanics is incomplete, because the
particle really was at b, but QM was unable to tell us so. So,
corrections are necessary to QM before it is a complete theory. This
is what Einstein called "the hidden variable."
3) Refuse to answer. This was Planck's view on things, and it's not
as silly as it sounds. The argument is that it's utterly pointless to
guess where the particle was if the only way to find out is to measure
it. You may as well wonder how many angels can dance on the head of a
pin.
For a long time, the most common procedure among Quantum-Mechanics was
to adopt position #1, then when that started faltering, switch to
position #3, then change the subject.
What led Einstein to adopt his position on Quantum Mechanics was a
thought experiment which found what appeared for almost 30 years to be
a paradox in QM, which most physicists admit has yet to be adequately
explained. It's called the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen, or EPR paradox.
The argument goes something like this:
1. all particles have a property called "spin."
2. electrons can "spin up" or "spin down."
3. in Quantum Mechnics, it is always possible to couple two electrons
together so that one spins up and one spins down.
4. according to Quantum Mechanics, as long as these two electrons are
isolated from all other particles in the universe, the distance
between them does not matter (it can be two feet, to yards, or two
light years, and it would not change the Quantum Mechanical properties
of the coupling).
5. according to Quantum Mechanics, as long as we have not measured the
spin of a electron after they are coupled, the neither particle has
"selected" a spin direction.
6. suppose we now measure the spin of electron #1, and we find it to
spin up.
7. I reiterate: by the orthodox viewpoint of QM, the electron wasn't
spinning up _or_ down before now, it was spinning up _and_ down with
equal probabilities. It wasn't until you measured it that you made
the electron spin up.
8. by Quantum Mechanics, electron #2 (which may be light years from
electron #1, as long as the two electrons remain isolated from all
particles in the universe) must now spin down.
9. by Quantum Mechanics, if there is any time lag between the
measurement of the spin of electron #1, and electron #2 spinning down,
conservation of angular momentum is violated.
10. Therefore, somehow information was passed from electron #1 to
electron #2 faster than the speed of light (electron #1 had to "tell"
electron #2 to start spinning down).
11. This is a direct violation of relativity.
12. Therefore, he concluded, the orthodox position cannot be correct,
because it is inconsistent with relativity. Electron #2 must have
_already_ been spinning down, but we simply did know enough about the
system to determine that it was spinning down. He called this unknown
information "the hidden variable."
Now, experimental evidence which was unavailable until almost 20 years
after Einstein died is suggesting that there is no paradox here, but
nobody's entirely certain why he's wrong. To the best of my
knowledge, nobody's ever managed to argue the EPR paradox in terms of
a violation of relativity.
Hope this helps clear things up.
--Drew
Daniel Keren
[...]
# Again, I repeat that according to the equivalence principle, at v<<c,
# all of the equations of special relativity must reduce to Newtonian
# mechanics. If they don't, then Newton was completely wrong, and
# considering that Newtonian Mechanics works nicely at v<<c, it would be
# difficult to convince anyone of that.
It is a nice little exercise to calculate the kinetic energy using
relativity (take the portion of mass that was added, and multiply
it by c^2). If you expand the square root as a Taylor series, you
get an infinite expansion which starts with m*v^2/2 (Newton), with
the rest of the series consisting of terms whose sum is negligible
when v<<c.
In my (admittedly limited) view, this is a very nice demonstration
of how relativity "corrects" Newtonian mechanics when the speed
increases.
Thanks for your input on EPR - this is fascinating stuff.
-Danny Keren.
David Gehrig
> (5) I quoted only a part of the article in Barnes Review. In
> an unquoted part, the writer pointed out that all four of
> Einstein's "contributions" were plagiarized:
>
> (a) Foundation of photon theory of light
> (b) Equivalence of energy and mass
> (c) Explanation of Brownian motion in liquids
> (d) special theory of relativity
Ah, in that case, the Barnes article might have been the original
source on an article I tore to shreds a year or two ago. See
below.
> I admit these citations influenced me profoundly.
Which, given your earlier confessions of lack of qualifications,
means exactly zilch to anyone but you.
> You asked why he was never denouncd for his alleged thefts.
> I have no answer to that except to surmise that, among his
> contemporaries, he just was not even taken seriously.
No, Einstein was clearly taken quite seriously. The Center
for Advanced Studies was not a handout program. It's _you_
who is not even taken seriously, and posts like yours on
Einstein are a perfect reason why.
Sure. Happy to. Let me repost something I wrote in April 2000.
Please feel free to point out my scientific errors.
---- begin repost from April 2000:
From: David Gehrig (zem...@earthlink.net)
Subject: Re: No Jew but @%< can refute this about Einstein
Newsgroups: soc.culture.jewish, alt.revisionism
View: Complete Thread (4 articles) | Original Format Date: 2000/04/05
kcl...@my-deja.com wrote:
>
> There's nothing to retract. My piece stands on its own. So far
> unrefuted, I might add. You may be able to attack me--the messenger--
> but my message stands true!
>
> -KCloud
>
> > >
> > > -K-Cloud
> > >
> > > Einstein the FRAUD
> > > By K-Cloud
> >
> > Actually, yes, having looked it over, I probably could
> > refute it in its entirety. But I'm feeling charitable and
> > will give you a chance to retract it before I address it.
> >
> > @%<
Well, you can't say that I didn't give you a chance.
------ Begin the demolition of K-Cloud's narrischkeit
> Knowing how you Jews are, you'll probably pick a sentence
> or two out of this 10 pages single-spaced I had on MS
> Word. So I dare any of you to refute my article in its
> entirety!
>
> -K-Cloud
>
>
> Einstein the FRAUD
> By K-Cloud
Well, I did offer you a chance to retract before I took a look at it,
but you decided to bluster on. So here is my response.
I'm going to pay you the favor -- completely undeserved and obviously
wrong -- of treating this as if you wrote it. There's nothing in any of
your posts which suggest you have the depth (the very modest depth,
given all the errors and omissions) to do so.
The obvious first thing that needs to be said here is that -- on the
assumption that you actually wrote this, to any particular degree,
yourself -- that your "I-looked-it-up-in-Brittanica" level of
understanding shows through again and again, leading you to a number of
fundamental errors, which I will list below.
I mention this up front, because your attempt to distort the history
of science for your racist and antisemitic ends is just plain
immoral.
Worse, you start out by declaring your unabashed antisemitism. As has
already been pointed out to you, your explanation of the context of
Hitler's "Big Lie" is wrong. The rest is just boilerplate neo-Nazi
rah-rah of the shoot-yourself-in-the-foot kind, and I have snipped it.
> Albert Einstein is held up by the Jewish liars as a rare
> genius who drastically changed the field of theoretical
> physics. As such, he is made an idol to young people and
> his very name has become synonymous with genius. The truth,
> however, is very different. The reality is that Einstein
> was an inept, moronic Jew who could not even tie his own
> shoelaces; he contributed nothing original to the field of
> quantum mechanics or any other science, but on the contrary
> he stole the ideas of other men and the Jewish media made
> him a hero.
Einstein's impact on modern physics is unmatched by that of any other
single individual, with the possible exception of Neils Bohr. Anyone who
has studied it -- even on an undergrad level, as I have -- will probably
come to the same conclusion. But that annoys the hell out of toy-Nazis
like you, so you have to do what toy-Nazis always do when reality gets
uncomfortable: cobble up a fantasy alternative history and pretend that
it's the _real_ truth.
> When we actually examine the life of Albert Einstein, we
> find that his only brilliance lies in his ability to
> plagiarize and steal other people's ideas, passing them off
> as his own.
A thesis statement. Unfortunately, your thesis falls apart on
examination, as I show below.
> Einstein's education, or lack thereof, is an important part
> of this story. The Encyclopedia Britannica says of
> Einstein's early education that he "showed little
> scholastic ability." It also says that at the age of
> 15, "with poor grades in history, geography, and languages,
> he left school with no diploma." Einstein himself wrote in
> a school paper of his "lack of imagination and practical
> ability."
This probably says more about the conventional teaching methods
than it does about Einstein's aptitude. Notice that you make no
further reference to his education, intentionally implying that
he was merely a high school dropout.
Let's look at that letter a little more:
"I imagine myself becoming a teacher in those branches of the natural
sciences, choosing the theoretical part of them. Here are the reasons
which lead me to this plan. Above all, it is my disposition for abstract
and mathematical thought, and my lack of imagination and practical
ability."
So, far from portraying himself as inept mathematically, he records
that he actually has a mathematical, abstract predisposition. He's
ruling out, in other words, engineering and the arts, leaving
the theoretical natural sciences such as physics.
> In 1895, Einstein failed a simple entrance exam to an
> engineering school in Zurich. This exam consisted mainly of
> mathematical problems, and Einstein showed himself to be
> mathematically inept in this exam. He then entered a lesser
> school hoping to use it as a stepping stone to the
> engineering school he could not get into, but after
> graduating in 1900, he still could not get a position at
> the engineering school!
But in the meantime, he graduated from a secondary school in Aarau as a
teacher of mathematics and physics, another significant fact you omit,
presumably intentionally. Apparently Einstein was so inept at
mathematics that he was qualified to teach it.
> Unable to go to the school as he had wanted, he got a job
> (with the help of a friend) at the patent office in Bern.
> He was to be a technical expert third class, which meant
> that he was too incompetent for a higher qualified
> position. ...
... or that these positions were seniority based and he was
low man on the totem pole.
> ... Even after publishing his so-called
> groundbreaking papers of 1905 and after working in the
> patent office for six years, he was only elevated to a
> second class standing. Remember, the work he was doing at
> the patent office, for which he was only rated third class,
> was not quantum mechanics or theoretical physics, but was
> reviewing technical documents for patents of every day
> things; yet he was barely qualified. ...
But he was not barely qualified. In fact, he would become a
patented inventor himself, co-inventing an electric
refrigerator woth Leo Szilard.
> ... He would work at the
> patent office until 1909, all the while continuously trying
> to get a position at a university, but without success.
... until 1908, two years after getting his doctorate.
> All
> of these facts are true,
... except for the ones that I showed were lies. And other
significant true facts have mysteriously been left out of your
version.
> but now begins the Jewish myth.
> Supposedly, while working a full time job, without the aid
> of university colleagues, a staff of graduate students, a
> laboratory, or any of the things normally associated with
> an academic setting, Einstein in his spare time wrote four
> ground-breaking essays in the field of theoretical physics
> and quantum mechanics that were published in 1905.
"Supposedly" because it's true. How do we know it's true? Well, just to
idly give an example, the paper on Brownian motion, how was it received
in the community of professional physicists? Some indication of its
reception can be found in this fact: on the strength of the paper, the
University of Bern gave Einstein a doctorate in physics. Obviously, the
physics faculty at Bern was in a position to determine whether or not it
was plagiarism; obviously they determined it was not, and stuck the
little letters PhD after Einstein's name to prove it.
Surely, if Einstein was a high-school drop-out trying to swap a plagiarized
paper for a doctorate, the hardest people to hide that from would be
university physics faculty, right? But the faculty didn't say, "This
is stolen, Al." They said, "Congratulations, Dr. Einstein."
Funny how your little essay never bothers to mention that Einstein had a
doctorate in physics. You leave your readers with the impression that he
barely escaped high school. But lying to your readers is part of what
being a toy-Nazi is all about, right?
> Many people have recognized the impossibility of such a
> feat, including Einstein himself, and therefore Einstein
> has led people to believe that many of these ideas came to
> him in his sleep, out of the blue, because indeed that is
> the only logical explanation of how an admittedly inept
> moron could have written such documents at the age of 26
> without any real education. However, a simpler explanation
> exists: he stole the ideas and plagiarized the papers.
You're busily jamming words into Einstein's mouth here. Einstein was
aware -- of course -- that he was building on the work of others. Any
anybody who reads Einstein's papers is aware that he was building on the
work of others, so it's not like Einstein tried to somehow disguise it.
But building on the work of others is how science works, and your
stature as a scientist is determined by what you have _added_ to the
structure. And even a quick look at the history of science shows that
Einstein added many new and innovative ideas.
It's also simply wrong, as I have shown above, to argue that Einstein
had "no real education."
> Therefore, we will look at each of these ideas and discover
> the source of each. ...
... in each of which case we will discover that the source is
Einstein.
> ... It should be remembered that these
> ideas are presented by Einstein's worshippers as totally
> new and completely different, each of which would change
> the landscape of science. These four papers dealt with the
> following four ideas, respectively:
> 1. The foundation of the photon theory of light;
> 2. The equivalence of energy and mass;
> 3. The explanation of Brownian motion in liquids;
> 4. The special theory of relativity.
Here you're simply hoping that your audience is as inept in
the history of science as you are. The founding of a completely
new science is an incredibly rare thing. Einstein was addressing
problems others before him had tried with varying degrees of
success, and like other scientists before him, used the work
of scientists still earlier. The reputation of any scientist
is measured, not by the mass of knowledge in his field, but by
what he has added to that pre-existing mass of knowledge.
> Let us first look at the last of these theories, the theory
> of relativity. This is perhaps the most famous idea falsely
> attributed to Einstein. Specifically, this 1905 paper dealt
> with what Einstein called the Special Theory of Relativity
> (the General Theory would come in 1915).
This is perhaps Einstein's greatest contribution to science, one that
almost a hundred years later, mingy little antisemites and neo-Nazis
would try to deny but the rest of the world justly celebrate.
> This theory contradicted the traditional Newtonian
> mechanics ...
... actually, no, because by the equivalence principle it had to reduce
to Newtonian physics under nonrelativistic conditions. What it did was
extend Newton's laws of motion to take into consideration laboratory
results Newton's laws alone couldn't handle.
Didn't take you long to crash and burn, did it.
> ... and was based upon two premises: 1) in the
> absence of acceleration, the laws of nature are the same
> for all observers; and 2) since the speed of light is
> independent of the motion of its source, then the time
> interval between two events is longer for an observer in
> whose frame of reference the events occur at different
> places than for an observer in whose frame of reference the
> events occur in the same place. This is basically the idea
> that time passes more slowly as one's velocity approaches
> the speed of light, relative to slower velocities where
> time would pass faster.
>
> This theory has been validated by modern experiments and is
> the basis for modern physics. But these two premises are
> far from being originally Einstein's. First of all, the
> idea that the speed of light was a constant and was
> independent of the motion of its source was not Einstein's
> at all, but was proposed by the Scottish scientist James
> Maxwell.
And "The Raven," of course, was written by Edgar Poe. Unless you
have a clue, of course, and know that he went by the name Edgar
Allan Poe. Just like James Clerk Maxwell went by the name James
Clerk Maxwell, and only idiots don't know it.
Maxwell's 1873 calculations of the speed of propagation of
electromagnetic waves didn't address the idea of inertial frames at all.
It described the behavior of light in a stationary inertial frame. He
did not predict the constant speed of light independent of the motion of
the inertial frame -- in other words, you're taking attributing the
wrong result to Maxwell.
> Maxwell studied the phenomenon of light extensively and
> first proposed that it was electromagnetic in nature. He
> wrote an article to this effect for the 1878 edition of the
> Encyclopedia Britannica. His ideas prompted much debate,
> and by 1887, as a result of his work and the ensuing
> debate, the scientific community, particularly Lorentz,
> Michelson, and Morley reached the conclusion that the
> velocity of light was independent of the velocity of the
> observer.
You get the sequence on Michelson-Morley a bit mixed up here. The reason
that Michelson and Morely had "reached the conclusion" that c was
invariant was because they had done an experiment which had demonstrated
it. They weren't working from theory but from experimental data. They
were hoping to find a universal coordinate system -- a universial "up"
and "down" -- relative to which the earth was moving. Instead they found
a result which was utterly inexplicable to them, which is that there
_is_ no universal "up."
What it was up to Einstein to do was take a system of physics which
seemed to pretty much have everything solved and correlate it with this
one, singular, inexplicable but undeniable result.
> Thus, this piece of the Special Theory of Relativity was
> known 27 years before Einstein wrote his paper.
But this is what prompted the paper in the first place -- trying to
explain this bizarre result without throwing out the rest of physics.
The effect may have been noted 27 years before, but an explanation was
not. See the difference? Rainbows were known for millenia before Snell's
laws of refraction explained how they were made. The bizarre motion of
the planets in the sky was known for millenia before Kepler figured out
how it all worked with elliptical orbits and all. And so on.
> This debate over the nature of light also led Michelson and
> Morley to conduct an important experiment, the results of
> which could not be explained by Newtonian mechanics. ...
And only now do you get to the M-M experiment. As I noted before,
the experiment came first, then the conclusion about the invariance
of c. If you had more of a clue of what you're talking about, you
might have spotted that.
> ... They
> observed a phenomenon caused by relativity but they did not
> understand relativity. ...
... because Einstein had not yet formulated it.
> ... They had attempted to detect the
> motion of the earth through ether, which was a medium
> thought to be necessary for the propagation of light.
>
> In response to this problem, in 1889, the Irish physicist
> George FitzGerald, who had also first proposed a mechanism
> for producing radio waves, wrote a paper which stated that
> the results of the Michelson-Morley experiment could be
> explained if,
>
> "... the length of material bodies changes, according as
> they are moving through the ether or across it, by an
> amount depending on the square of the ratio of their
> velocities to that of light."
>
> This is the theory of relativity, 13 years before
> Einstein's paper!
No, this is not the theory of relativity, if it's still referring to the
motion of bodies in "the ether," or "through the ether or across it."
FitzGerald had found another puzzle piece -- and is honored for it in
every modern physics text as co-creator of the "Lorentz-FitzGerald
contraction -- but it was still up to Einstein to put all the pieces in
place.
Here's how one of my physics textbooks puts it (Sears, Zemansky, and
Young, fifth edition, chapter 14, "Relativistic Mechanics"):
"Newton's laws of motion are valid only in inertial frames, but they are
valid in _all_ inertial frames. Any frame moving with constant velocity
with respect to an inertial frame is itself an inertial frame, and all
such frames are equivalent to expressing the basic principles of
mechanics [i.e. Newton's laws of motion]. The laws of mechanics are the
same in every inertial frame of reference.
"Einstein proposed in 1905 that this principle should be extended to
include _all_ the basic laws of physics. This innocent-sounding
proposition has far-reaching and startling consequences, a few of which
have already been mentioned. If the principle of conservation of
momentum is to be valid in all inertial systems, for example, the
definition of momentum, for particles moving at speeds comparable to the
speed of light, must be changed from mv to mv/(1-v^2/c^2)^(1/2). Even
more fundamental are the modifications needed in the kinematic aspects
of motion, as we shall see. Nevertheless, Einstein's _principle of
relativity_, as it has come to be called, is now accepted as an
essential requirement for a physical theory. The principle of relativity
states that _the laws of physics are the same in every inertial frame of
reference._"
Note particularly that last sentence. The Lorentz-FitzGerald
contraction, otherwise called the Lorentz transformations, are _part_ of
relativity theory, because they describe relativistic mechanics, but
they are not relativity theory itself. You confuse the part for the
whole.
> Furthermore, in 1892, Hendrik Lorentz, from The
> Netherlands, proposed the same solution and began to
> greatly expand the idea. All throughout the 1890's, both
> Lorentz and FitzGerald worked on these ideas and wrote
> articles strangely similar to Einstein's Special Theory
> detailing what is now known as the Lorentz-FitzGerald
> Contraction.
But again, they were studying something specific, the propagation of
light waves through the ether. Einstein recognized that the equations
described much, much more than just what Lorentz and FitzGerald thought
they did.
> In 1898, the Irishman Joseph Larmor wrote down equations
> explaining the Lorentz-FitzGerald contraction and its
> relativistic consequences, 7 years before Einstein's paper.
> By 1904, Lorentz transformations, the series of equations
> explaining relativity, were published by Lorentz. They
> describe the increase of mass, the shortening of length,
> and the time dilation of a body moving at speeds close to
> the velocity of light.
As I mentioned above, Lorentz was treating electromagnetic waves, which
he regarded as massless. When you're taking relativity and mass or
momentum, you're talking Einstein, not Lorentz. But since the idea used
Lorentz work as a starting point, the equations describing spacial
relativistic coordinates are still called the Lorentz transformation --
Einstein clearly giving credit where it's due.
> In short, by 1904, everything in Einstein's paper regarding
> the Special Theory of Relativity had already been published.
Except for the main revolutionary idea itself, the invariance
of all the basic laws of physics regardless of the inertial
frame chosen.
> The Frenchman PoincarÈ had, in 1898, written a paper
> unifying many of these ideas. He stated seven years before
> Einstein's paper that,
>
> "... we have no direct intuition about the equality of two
> time intervals. The simultaneity of two events or the order
> of their succession, as well as the equality of two time
> intervals, must be defined in such a way that the
> statements of the natural laws be as simple as possible."
Again, another piece of the puzzle, a puzzle which it still fell
to Einstein to put together into one coherent whole, thanks to
his central insight.
Now you try the "everybody knows I'm right" rhetorical trope.
> Anyone who has read Einstein's 1905 paper will ....
... obviously be half a mile beyond KCloudd.
> immediately
> recognize the similarity and the lack of originality on the
> part of Einstein. Thus we see that the only thing original
> about the paper was the term 'Special Theory of
> Relativity.' Everything else was plagiarized.
And, as I have shown, KCloudd is talking through his hat.
> Over the next few years, PoincarÈ became one of the most
> important lecturers and writers regarding relativity, but
> he never, in any of his papers or speeches, mentioned
> Albert Einstein. Thus, while PoincarÈ was busy bringing the
> rest of the academic world up to speed regarding
> relativity, Einstein was still working in the patent office
> in Bern ...
... for three more years, until he was appointed a professor
of physics at Bern -- and, given the glacial pace of physics
"revolutions," this was an very quick turnaround.
> ... and no one in the academic community thought it
> necessary to give much credence or mention to Einstein's
> work. Most of these early physicists knew that he was a
> fraud.
Except, of course, that he wasn't. Your basic argument is just
nonsensical. You're arguing that the works of the world's leading
pre-Einstein physicists were so unknown that Einstein could pilfer them
at will. Then how did they get to be the world's leading pre-Einstein
physicists in the first place, if nobody knew what they wrote?
> This brings us to the explanation of Brownian motion, the
> subject of another of Einstein's 1905 papers. Brownian
> motion describes the irregular motion of a body arising
> from the thermal energy of the molecules of the material in
> which the body is immersed.
>
> The movement had first been observed by the Scottish
> botanist Robert Brown in 1827. The explanation of this
> phenomenon has to do with the Kinetic Theory of Matter, and
> it was the American Josiah Gibbs and the Austrian Ludwig
> Boltzmann who first explained this occurrence, not Albert
> Einstein. In fact, the mathematical equation describing the
> motion contains the famous Boltzmann constant, k. Between
> these two men, they had explained by the 1890s everything
> in Einstein's 1905 paper regarding Brownian motion.
Except, again, that they hadn't. And I think you know it, which is why
you keep your discussion of Brownian motion down to a single paragraph.
Because if you went into much more detail than that, you'd have to
describe what Einstein's doctorate-deserving breakthrough was.
The Boltzmann constant related the average kinetic energy of a molecule
in a gas to the temperature of the gas. Since Einstein's analysis of
Brownian motion involves a statistical analysis of the motion of gas
particles as _part_ of his result, it's no surprise that the Boltzmann
constant shows up, despite all your efforts to make it look like
Einstein is plagiarizing. (By that standard, since Newton came up with
the gravitational constant G, any calculation using G must be suspected
of having been plagiarized from Newton.)
Einstein's work was to analyze the "random walk" a barely visible
particle of soot makes ("Brownian motion") as it is buffeted from all
sides by molecules of air. By statistically analyzing the motion, he
could draw conclusions about the momenta of the molecules hitting the
soot particle. In effect, Einstein had provided the first experimentally
verifiable observation of the existence of molecules which also allowed
some determination of their scale. Hence the title of his doctoral
dissertation, _On a new determination of molecular dimensions_.
Neither Brown, Gibbs, nor Boltzmann tried to do this analysis. It is
original with Einstein.
> The subject of the equivalence of mass and energy was
> contained in a third paper published by Einstein in 1905.
> This concept is expressed by the famous equation E=mc*.
> Einstein's biographers categorize this as "his most famous
> and most spectacular conclusion."
And probably second only to F=ma in its amazing brevity for such a
powerful concept. Flip through a physics book some time and you'll see
that things rarely work out that neatly.
> Even though this idea is an obvious conclusion of
> Einstein's earlier relativity paper, it was not included in
> that paper but was published as an afterthought later in
> the year. Still, the idea of energy-mass equivalence was
> not original with Einstein.
But the formula was, and the way that it fit into the revolutionary
insight I mentioned above was too.
> That there was an equivalence between mass and energy had
> been shown in the laboratory in the 1890s by both J.J.
> Thomsom ...
... Thompson, discoverer of the electron. And it's quite true that
Thompson was famous for measuring the ratio e/m of the electron.
Unfortunately for you, in this case e means electric charge, not
energy. These are two different concepts measured in two completely
different units. The fact that both are abbreviated as e seems to have
made you pull another dope-osity.
> ... of Cambridge and by W. Kaufmann in Goettingen. ...
who I couldn't turn up in a quick check of my physics books. But if you
can bobble something as basic as Thompson on the electron (!) then
there's no reason to believe the comparatively less known will suffer a
better fate at your hands.
> In
> 1900, PoincarÈ had shown that there was a mass relationship
> for all forms of energy, not just electromagnetic energy. ...
... and by this time it's hard not to reach the conclusion that you're
just throwing words around that you don't understand. "A mass
relationship" -- what was the one Poincare postulated, and where did he
publish it? Just saying there is a relationship doesn't cut the mustard
among physicists -- you also need to define what the relationship is.
> Yet, the most probable source of Einstein's plagiarism was
> Friedrich Hasen?hrl, ...
I assume you mean Fritz Hasenoehrl, whose main claim to fame was having
Schroedinger as a pupil.
> one of the most brilliant, yet
> unappreciated physicists of the era.
>
> Hasen?hrl was the teacher of many of the German scientists
> who would later become famous for a variety of topics. He
> had worked on the idea of the equivalence of mass and
> energy for many years and had published a paper on the
> topic in 1904 in the very same journal which Einstein would
> publish his plagiarized version in 1905. For his brilliant
> work in this area, Hasen?rhl had received in 1904 a prize
> from the prestigious Vienna Academy of Sciences.
But you are being so amazingly vague that I can no longer tell if you're
simply trying to cover things up -- like you did with Einstein's
doctorate -- or simply haven't the foggiest of what you're talking
about. _What_, specifically, was Hasenhoehrl's "idea of the equivalence
of mass and energy"? Did he predict a linear relationship? An
exponential one? A quartic or cubic or x^pi or any of a zillion other
incorrect solutions?
> Furthermore, the mathematical relationship of mass and
> energy was a simple deduction from the already well-known
> equations of Scottish physicist James Maxwell. ....
... or even of James Clerk Maxwell...
> Scientists
> long understood that the mathematical relationship
> expressed by the equation E=mc* was the logical result of
> Maxwell's work, they just did not believe it.
Ah, if it's so simple, then maybe you could derive it for us.
Take a few minutes for it, if you'd like.
> Thus, the experiments of Thomson, Kaufmann, and finally,
> and most importantly, Hasen?rhl, confirmed Maxwell's work.
... except of course that Maxwell hadn't done a damned thing dealing
with mass/energy equivalence.
> It is ludicrous to believe that Einstein developed this
> postulate, particularly in light of the fact that Einstein
> did not have the laboratory necessary to conduct the
> appropriate experiments.
He had a brain. That was his laboratory. That's the interesting thing
about theoretical physics -- in some cases a brain is all you need.
Especially if it's an Einsteinian brain.
> In this same plagiarized article of Einstein's, he
> suggested to the scientific community, "Perhaps it will
> prove possible to test this theory using bodies whose
> energy content is variable to a high degree (e.g., salts of
> radium)." This remark demonstrates how little Einstein
> understood about science, for this was truly an outlandish
> remark.
What's outlandish about it? In 1905 almost nothing was known about
radioactivity except that it existed. In 1905 they hadn't even
postulated the atomic nucleus yet, let alone protons and neutrons -- the
neutrons wouldn't show up in Cavendish's lab for another quarter
century. So what exactly is the point of your mockery?
> By saying this, Einstein showed that he really did not
> understand basic scientific principles and that he was
> writing about a topic that he did not understand. ...
Again, you don't explain why, you just mock.
> In fact,
> in response to this article, J. Precht remarked that such
> an experiment "lies beyond the realm of possible
> experience."
Which it would be -- in this form, trying to measure the change
in weight of some radium and correlate it with the cast-off
radiation, since the difference in mass would be too small to
measure by any means available. Which is why, I gather,
Einstein says uses a subjunctive future tense -- perhaps it
will someday be possible to measure the difference.
> The last subject dealt with in Einstein's 1905 papers was
> the foundation of the photon theory of light. Einstein
> wrote about the photoelectric effect. ...
... and gathered a Nobel Prize for it in 1921. Are you now
going to argue that the Nobel Committee was unable to spot
what you seem to consider obvious plagiarism?
> The photoelectric
> effect is the release of electrons from certain metals or
> semiconductors by the action of light. This area of
> research is particularly important to the Einstein myth
> because it was for this topic that he unjustly received his
> 1922 Nobel Prize.
If he received the 1922 Nobel prize, it was indeed unjust, because
it was 1921 when he won it.
> But again, it is not Einstein, but Wilhelm Wien and Max
> Planck who deserve the credit. The main point of Einstein's
> paper, and the point for which he is given credit, is that
> light is emitted and absorbed in finite packets called
> quanta. This was the explanation for the photoelectric
> effect.
But Planck had postulated quanta to explain a completely different
phenomenon, the black-body radiation paradox. Although Planck had
postulated the photon, it was up to Einstein to formulate its behavior
in relation to the photoelectric effect. There's a reason the Einstein
photoelectric equation is called the Einstein photoelectric equation.
But what level of scientific understanding can we expect from a neo-Nazi
who thinks a black body is what you have left after a lynching?
> The photoelectric effect had been explained by Heinrich
> Hertz in 1888. Hertz and others, including Philipp Lenard,
> worked on understanding this phenomenon. Lenard was the
> first to show that the energy of the electrons released in
> the photoelectric effect was not governed by the intensity
> of the light but by the frequency of the light. This was an
> important breakthrough.
But it was not a complete formulation.
> Wien and Planck were colleagues and they were the fathers
> of modern day quantum theory. By 1900, Max Planck, based
> upon his and Wien's work, had shown that radiated energy
> was absorbed and emitted in finite units called quanta. The
> only difference in his work of 1900 and Einstein's work of
> 1905 was that Einstein limited himself to talking about one
> particular type of energy - light energy.
Because he was trying to explain one particular effect -- the
photoelectric effect -- which was otherwise inexplicable, and it just
happened to involve light energy. And it just happened to be confirmed
by experiment, and it just happened to be right, and it just happpened
to earn Einstein a Nobel.
> But the principles and equations governing the process in
> general had been deduced by Planck in 1900. ...
... not for the photoelectric effect, no. For blackbody
radiation. Different matter completely.
> ... Einstein
> himself admitted that the obvious conclusion of Planck's
> work was that light also existed in discrete packets of
> energy. Thus, nothing in this paper of Einstein's was
> original.
And again your case dissolves under you. That makes four out of four you
lost.
> After the 1905 papers of Einstein were published, the
> scientific community took little notice and Einstein
> continued his job at the patent office until 1909 when it
> was arranged for him to take a position at a school by
> World Jewry. ....
... guffaw! Tell me, do you goosestep when you say that?
> Still, it was not until a 1919 newspaper
> headline that he gained any notoriety. ...
... because his strange theories had been spectacularly
vindicated by experiment, and he became the first and only
person to touch up Newton's laws of motion. Not for nothing
is "Einstein" synonymous with genius.
> With Einstein's academic appointment in 1909, he was placed
> in a position where he could begin to use other people's
> work as his own more openly. He engaged many of his
> students to look for ways to prove the theories he had
> supposedly developed, or ways to apply those theories, and
> then he could present the research as his own or at least
> take partial credit.
>
> In this vein, in 1912, he began to try and express his
> gravitational research in terms of a new, recently
> developed calculus,
... the tensor calculus of Levi-Civita...
> which was conducive to understanding
> relativity. This was the beginning of his General Theory of
> Relativity, which he would publish in 1915. But the
> mathematical work was not done by Einstein - he was
> incapable of it.
As were all but a handful of mathematicians in the world, since it was
so new. Keep in mind that Einstein was so highly regarded by this time
by his peers that in 1914 the Germans -- remember them? -- offered him a
research position at the Prussian Academy of the Sciences _along with_ a
position (without teaching duties) at the University of Berlin. What
else did they offer him? The Kaiser was establishing research institutes
around the country. Guess who they asked to direct the Kaiser Wilhelm
Institute of Physics in Berlin?
> Instead, it was performed by the mathematician Marcel
> Grossmann, who in turn used the mathematical principles
> developed by Berhard Riemann, who was the first to develop
> a sound non-Euclidean geometry, which is the basis of all
> mathematics used to describe relativity.
Out of sheer pity, I won't put the previous paragraph through the
grinder, other than to note that they show all the signs of Deep
Clueless. You're clearly in way over your head, and it shows.
> The General Theory of Relativity applied the principles of
> relativity to the universe; that is, to the gravitational
> pull of planets and their orbits, and the general principle
> that light rays bend as they pass by a massive object.
> Einstein published an initial paper in 1913 based upon the
> work which Grossmann did, adapting the math of Riemann to
> Relativity. But this paper was filled with errors and the
> conclusions were incorrect.
... demonstrating that not even Einstein gets everything right the first
time.
> It appears that Grossmann was not smart enough to figure it
> out for Einstein. So Einstein was forced to look elsewhere
> to plagiarize his General Theory.
He looked inside his own brain and worked it out. Your claims
to the opposite are unsubstantiated below.
> Einstein published his
> correct General Theory of Relativity in 1915, and said
> prior to its publication that he, "...completely succeeded
> in convincing Hilbert and Klein." He is referring to David
> Hilbert, perhaps the most brilliant mathematician of the
> 20th century, and Felix Klein, another mathematician who
> had been instrumental in the development of the area of
> calculus that Grossmann had used to develop the General
> Theory of Relativity for Einstein.
>
> Einstein's statement regarding the two men would lead the
> reader to believe that Einstein had changed Hilbert's and
> Klein's opinions regarding General Relativity, and that he
> had influenced them in their thinking. However, the exact
> opposite is true. Einstein stole the majority of his
> General Relativity work from these two men, the rest being
> taken from Grossmann.
So you say but do not prove. The closest you come to providing
even a shred of evidence is to repeat the not-at-all-secret
fact that Hilbert anticipated once facet of general relativity.
> Hilbert submitted for publication, a week before Einstein
> completed his work, a paper which contained the correct
> field equations of General Relativity. ...
True.
> What this means is
> that Hilbert wrote basically the exact same paper, with the
> same conclusions, before Einstein did. ...
False. But nice try. There's more to general relativity than
the field equations Hilbert anticipated. Anyway, the next bit
of stunning deduction is too priceless to snip.
> Einstein would have
> had an opportunity to know of Hilbert's work all along,
> because there were Jewish friends of his working for
> Hilbert.
.... oooh, look out, it's the great Jooooish conspiracy.
> Yet, even this was not necessary, for Einstein had seen
> Hilbert's paper in advance of publishing his own. Both of
> these papers were, before being printed, delivered in the
> form of a lecture.
>
> Einstein presented his paper on November 25, 1915 in Berlin
> and Hilbert had presented his paper on November 20 in
> G?ttingen. On November 18, Hilbert received a letter from
> Einstein thanking him for sending him a draft of the
> treatise Hilbert was to deliver on the 20th.
>
> So, in fact, Hilbert had sent a copy of his work at least
> two weeks in advance to Einstein before either of the two
> men delivered their lectures, but Einstein did not send
> Hilbert an advance copy of his.
But, uh, you already said that Einstein had published earlier
forms of the work, right? Or did you forget?
> Therefore, this serves as
> incontrovertible proof that Einstein quickly plagiarized
> the work and then presented it, hoping to beat Hilbert to
> the punch.
... "incontrovertable proof" !! LOL! When logic fails, just
talk louder, toy-Nazi!
> Also, at the same time, Einstein publicly began
> to belittle Hilbert, even though in the previous summer he
> had praised him in an effort to get Hilbert to share his
> work with him. Hilbert made the mistake of sending Einstein
> this draft copy, but still he delivered his work first.
At this point you go so far off the rails that there's really
no point in commenting further.
> Not only did Hilbert publish his work first, but it was of
> much higher quality than Einstein's. It is known today that
> there are many problems with assumptions made in Einstein's
> General Theory paper. We know today that Hilbert was much
> closer to the truth. Hilbert's paper is the forerunner of
> the unified field theory of gravitation and
> electromagnetism and of the work of Erwin Schr?dinger,
> whose work is the basis of all modern day quantum mechanics.
In other words, Einstein and Hilbert were treating two different
areas.
> That the group of men discussed so far were the actual
> originators of the ideas claimed by Einstein was known by
> the scientific community all along.
.... toy-Nazi bullshit.
> In 1940, a group of
> German physicists meeting in Austria declared that "before
> Einstein, Aryan scientists like Lorentz, Hasen?hrl,
> PoincarÈ, etc., had created the foundations of the theory
> of relativity..."
One of the reasons that "Aryan science" remains even today a
laughingstock -- because at the same time they were holding their big
rallies promoting how wonderful "Aryan science" was, a huge fraction of
their best scientists were being chased out by Nazi nuttiness -- more
than a few chased straight to Los Alamos, where they would in a fair
square race beat the pants of the inept Nazi atomic bomb project.
> However, the Jewish media did not promote the work of these
> men.
And at this point the essay degenerates into the same old jewbait
World Conspiracy to Destroy the Aryans foolishness that loons like
you always devolve to sooner or later. So I've snipped a dozen
or so crapperfuls.
> This brazen lying has culminated in the Jew controlled Time
> magazine naming Einstein "The Person of the Century" at the
> close of 1999. It may be demonstrated that the Jewish lies
> have become more bold with the passage of time because
> Einstein was never named "Man of the Year" while he was
> alive, but now, over forty years after his death, he is
> named "Person of the Century."
>
> Einstein was given this title in spite of the clear-cut
> choice for the "Person of the Century," Adolf Hitler.
... and, well, it goes on in High Nazi Rant mode for a few more
crapperfuls, but by now my point is made. (Although again I note that
Oppenheimer wasn't a communist, as much as the toy-Nazis wish he was.)
Now, at this point, a reader might reasonably ask, why did I go to all
this trouble to wipe out what was clearly a chunk of coagulated
cluelessness? First, it was fun brushing the dust off my old modern
physics text (_Elementary Modern Physics, 3rd Edition_ by Weidner and
Sells) and taking another look at the birth of modern physics. It's also
fun to shoot fish in a barrel every now and then, KCloudd's barrel was
smaller than his fish, and the fish themselves were all carrying
placards saying "Please Shoot Me!"
---- end repost
--
@%<
Andrew
> Andrew wrote:
> >
> > Richard Phillips <rgp...@mbay.net> wrote in message news:<3E1C6DB6...@mbay.net>...
<snip>
>
> (3) I quote your statement:
> "Special relativity does not contradict Newtonian
> mechanics. It merely generalizes it to all inertial
> reference frames including those approaching the speed of
> light."
>
> I'd say it does. Newtonian mechanics holds that length,
> mass, and time are fixed quantities independent of the
> conditions under which they are measured. Relativity says it
> ain't so.
Something I forgot to add in my prior posting is that within a single
inertial coordinate frame, all of Newton's laws hold true. This is,
fundamentally, the basis for relativity. If you're in an inertial
reference frame, there is no experiment you can perform to tell
whether you're standing still, or moving at 99% of the speed of light.
Newton simply did not consider that the observation of a phenomenon
may be different for a person in motion, and a person standing still.
What Einstein said was that
1. If Newton's laws hold true in two inertial reference frames
and
2. Both observers will measure the speed of light to be the same
regardless of their relative motion,
then the observers must disagree upon certain details of any
experiment (time taken, length of an object, and so on)
So, if you're moving at 99% of the speed of light _you_ would not
observe length contraction, time dilation, or any other relativistic
phenomenon.
However, another observer would note that time, for you, was slowed
down, and your length had been squashed.
<snip>
Hope this clears things up.
--Drew
Andrew
Absolutely. Even General Relativity, in the absence of acceleration,
and at v<<c reduces to simple Newtonian Mechanics (this one, however,
requires some rather high-level tensor calculus to figure out)
>
> Thanks for your input on EPR - this is fascinating stuff.
>
>
Glad you liked it, and you're right, this is fascinating stuff. The
problem being that enough people are not well versed (or interested)
in it that they see something that seems to suggest that a great man
is a fraud, and they believe it. Say "physics" to someone, and their
eyes glaze over. Say "Einstein's work was plagiarized" and show some
information which at first blush appears to support this statement,
and people will believe it. Frankly, this is a tactic I find
repulsive, and it's one that is all too common.
--Drew
Andrew
[snip really good stuff]
Good response. And thanks: I was planning on posting something
similar on the entire Albert Einstein essay that Phillips quoted, but
I'm glad you saved me the trouble.
--Drew
David Gehrig
Looking back at it, I see that I got one of the names wrong having
to do with the discovery of the neutron. Maybe Richard G. Philllllips
can step in here and provide the correct one? Or has he, as it appears,
skulked away in silent but well-earned embarrassment?
--
@%<
Andrew
It would seem he has (skulked away, that is). And just when I was
starting to enjoy the conversation too... Oh well.
--Drew
Richard Phillips
Andrew wrote:
>
> David Gehrig <zem...@earthlink.net> wrote in message news:<_cqU9.7491$Qr4.7...@newsread1.prod.itd.earthlink.net>...
> > Andrew wrote:
> >
> > > David Gehrig <zem...@earthlink.net> wrote in message
> > > news:<3kBT9.3224$Qr4.2...@newsread1.prod.itd.earthlink.net>...
> > >
> > > [snip really good stuff]
> > >
> > > Good response. And thanks: I was planning on posting something
> > > similar on the entire Albert Einstein essay that Phillips quoted, but
> > > I'm glad you saved me the trouble.
> > > --Drew
> >
> > Looking back at it, I see that I got one of the names wrong having
> > to do with the discovery of the neutron. Maybe Richard G. Philllllips
> > can step in here and provide the correct one?
================================================
Phillips
Nope, sorry but I can't.
===========================
Or has he, as it appears,
> > skulked away in silent but well-earned embarrassment?
=======================================================
Phillips
No great embarrasment. I just no longer felt I had anything
worthwhile to add.
Mr. Gehrig's presentation was certainly a powerful one and
yet I have certain problems with it.
(1) Einstein (hereafter just E) was a man with a wretched
academic record holding an extremely modest position
unconnected with any institution of learning or research,
with no access to a laboratory for experiments. Yet we are
asked to believe that it was ONLY E who managed to disclose
to us the REAL meaning and significances of the works of
many others. THis, we are told, was the work of sheer
intellectual brilliance.
Such things can and do happen but, without supporting
evidence, should be cegarded with the greatest of
skepticism.
(2) My 11 years of delving into the question of the
Holoocaust has taught me that NO ONE ever has the last
word; that any argument can be shot down by another
argument. That when A claims something, B will shoot him
down, then C will support A by shooting B down, then
somebody will anihilate C, and on and on it goes.
I suspect that if other players in the thing --Lorentz,
Fitzgerald, Hilbert, etc-- were alive today to have their
say they might have something very different to tell us
THe question of what exactly E DID contribute can only be
setled by a prolonged discussion between knowledgeable and
disinterested parties.
(3) Gehrig weakens his own case by letting his Jewish
paranoia into the picture. Certain persons presume to
challenge the eminence of E, therefore they are "Nazis."
======================================================================
Roger
in message <3E239D78...@mbay.net>,
>I suspect that if other players in the thing --Lorentz,
>Fitzgerald, Hilbert, etc-- were alive today to have their
>say they might have something very different to tell us
Of course, that they never did so while *alive* (during the time that
Einstein was publishing) would tend to suggest that this supposition
has no more basis in reality than many of phillips' other delusions...
Andrew
People with PhD's, practically by definition, do not have "a wreched
academic record."
> holding an extremely modest position
> unconnected with any institution of learning or research,
To say that he was "unconnected with any institution of learning or
research" is patently false.
> with no access to a laboratory for experiments.
Which is what _theoretical_ physics is. Your laboratory is your
brain, a pad of paper, and a pencil. In theoretical physics, you
generally don't need any more than that. Especially, as Mr. Gherig so
eloquently put it, if it happens to be Einstein's brain you're working
with.
> Yet we are
> asked to believe that it was ONLY E who managed to disclose
> to us the REAL meaning and significances of the works of
> many others.
Yes, largely because it's true, and you have yet to establish
otherwise. This particular posting of yours is nothing more than
hand-waving.
> THis, we are told, was the work of sheer
> intellectual brilliance.
And it was. Could _you_ have done it?
>
> Such things can and do happen but, without supporting
> evidence, should be cegarded with the greatest of
> skepticism.
How about Einstein's own publications? How about the fact that not
one scientist ever came forward to claim that Einstein was a fraud?
How about the fact that he was right?
You have yet to satisfactorily refute any one of these facts.
>
> (2) My 11 years of delving into the question of the
> Holoocaust has taught me that NO ONE ever has the last
> word; that any argument can be shot down by another
> argument. That when A claims something, B will shoot him
> down, then C will support A by shooting B down, then
> somebody will anihilate C, and on and on it goes.
>
> I suspect that if other players in the thing --Lorentz,
> Fitzgerald, Hilbert, etc-- were alive today to have their
> say they might have something very different to tell us
So, why didn't they say something when they _were_ alive? Doesn't it
make equally little sense to assume that they would just let what you
insist is blatant fraud pass without so much as batting an eye at it?
Hilbert in particular, for example, did not claim that Einstein stole
his work, in fact he publicly conceded it in his own publication:
http://www-groups.dcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/~history/Mathematicians/Hilbert.html
<quote>
Many have claimed that in 1915 Hilbert discovered the correct field
equations for general relativity before Einstein but never claimed
priority. The article [11] however, shows that this view is in error.
In this paper the authors show convincingly that Hilbert submitted his
article on 20 November 1915,
five days before Einstein submitted his article containing the correct
field equations. Einstein's article appeared on 2 December 1915 but
the proofs of Hilbert's paper (dated 6 December 1915) do not
contain the field equations. As the authors of [11] write:
In the printed version of his paper, Hilbert added a reference to
Einstein's conclusive paper and a concession to the latter's priority:
"The differential equations of gravitation that result are, as it
seems to me, in agreement with the magnificent theory of general
relativity established by Einstein in his later papers."
If Hilbert had only altered the dateline to read "submitted on 20
November 1915, revised on [any date after 2 December 1915, the date of
Einstein's conclusive paper]," no later priority question would have
arisen.
[...]
11.L Corry, J Renn and J Stachel, Belated Decision in the
Hilbert-Einstein Priority Dispute, Science 278 (14 November, 1997)
</quote>
Even when Einstein became quite famous due to empirical observations
substantiating his claims, not one scientist you insist he stole his
results from ever stepped forward to claim that he had stolen their
work. This is when it would have been in their best interest to do
so. That they did not directly refutes your point.
>
> THe question of what exactly E DID contribute can only be
> setled by a prolonged discussion between knowledgeable and
> disinterested parties.
Which is what we're trying to do here. But I don't think you can
really be described as knowledgeable on the subject (by your own
admission).
>
> (3) Gehrig weakens his own case by letting his Jewish
> paranoia into the picture. Certain persons presume to
> challenge the eminence of E, therefore they are "Nazis."
>
You'll notice that I have never referred to you as a "Nazi." I've
called you ignorant, wrong and (implicitly) stupid, but not a "Nazi."
I've contested your stance on Einstein on scientific grounds, you have
yet to meet me on the same ground.
--Drew
David Gehrig
A PhD in theoretical physics is "wretched"? I know plenty of
grad students busting their butts to get as "wretched" an
education.
> holding an extremely modest position
> unconnected with any institution of learning or research,
Until a year or two after his breakthrough papers appeared
in 1905.
> with no access to a laboratory for experiments.
That's what makes theoretical physics _theoretical_. His
work was largely mathematical. If you think that only people
with microscopes and atom smashers can do physics, you don't
know how physics works. Read Richard Feynmann's account of
how he developed the theory for which he won _his_ Nobel; it
started out as mathematical doodlings about how acrobats spin
plates.
> Yet we are
> asked to believe that it was ONLY E who managed to disclose
> to us the REAL meaning and significances of the works of
> many others. THis, we are told, was the work of sheer
> intellectual brilliance.
That's because it's true. He picked up a piece here and
a piece there, but he's the first one to see the mosaic
they really formed. That's how it works sometimes, Phillllips.
> Such things can and do happen but, without supporting
> evidence, should be cegarded with the greatest of
> skepticism.
Yet there is an avalanche of evidence, which you are both
unwilling to pursue and unable to comprehend if you did.
This is the sign of a crackpot. On the other hand, you
seem quite willing to postulate some grand conspiracy among
physicists to celebrate someone they would think is a dolt.
That's far more ridiculous a stance than that of a lone
genius recasting the Laws of Motion, which were themselves
the work of a lone genius.
> (2) My 11 years of delving into the question of the
> Holoocaust has taught me that NO ONE ever has the last
> word; that any argument can be shot down by another
> argument. That when A claims something, B will shoot him
> down, then C will support A by shooting B down, then
> somebody will anihilate C, and on and on it goes.
In other words, you're simply too stupid to believe that
anything can be proven, yet you only invoke this principle
when it comes to the achievements of the Jews.
> I suspect that if other players in the thing --Lorentz,
> Fitzgerald, Hilbert, etc-- were alive today to have their
> say they might have something very different to tell us
An appeal to seance.
> THe question of what exactly E DID contribute can only be
> setled by a prolonged discussion between knowledgeable and
> disinterested parties.
As it has been for nearly a decade. If you're looking for
a good, general introduction, try Nigel Calder's _Einstein's
Universe_. It's very light on the math.
> (3) Gehrig weakens his own case by letting his Jewish
> paranoia into the picture. Certain persons presume to
> challenge the eminence of E, therefore they are "Nazis."
No, the reason I called the author of that essay "Nazi" is because
he was. I just snipped the Nazi ravings -- about how awful it was
that Time didn't name Adolf Hitler "Man of the Century" and chose
a Jew instead.
@%<
Richard Phillips
==========================================
Phillips
Are we speaking of the Swiss Patent Office?
===============================================
>
> > with no access to a laboratory for experiments.
>
> Which is what _theoretical_ physics is. Your laboratory is your
> brain, a pad of paper, and a pencil. In theoretical physics, you
> generally don't need any more than that. Especially, as Mr. Gherig so
> eloquently put it, if it happens to be Einstein's brain you're working
> with.
=========================================
Phillips
True to a point. You need only paper, pencil, and a brain to
conceive the ideas; but you will also want a laboratory to
test them.
======================================
>
> > Yet we are
> > asked to believe that it was ONLY E who managed to disclose
> > to us the REAL meaning and significances of the works of
> > many others.
>
> Yes, largely because it's true, and you have yet to establish
> otherwise. This particular posting of yours is nothing more than
> hand-waving.
>
> > THis, we are told, was the work of sheer
> > intellectual brilliance.
>
> And it was. Could _you_ have done it?
=========================================
Phillips
Lord, no.
======================
David Christian
wrote:
No, Dick, we're talking about little obscure places like the
Kaiser-Wilhelm Institute in Berlin, California Institute of
Technology. and the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton
University.
Eugene Holman
<rgp...@mbay.net> wrote:
>
> ==========================================
> Phillips
>
> Are we speaking of the Swiss Patent Office?
>
> ===============================================
If your hold on reality is solely a function of the bullshit that you
read in the *Barne's Review*, you wil not know that:
1. a substantial amount of the progress made in theoretical physics is
done by constructing mathematical models rather than by running
concrete laboratory experiments;
2. Einstein, an internationally recognized super-genius after 1915, had
access to the major laboratories and think-tanks of the world merely
for the asking;
3. on the other hand, the type of problems he was concerned with could
not usually be dealt with within the framework of laboratory
experiments; paper, pemcil, and a blackboard were far more important
when dealing with issues such as the modifications of Newtonian physics
which arise at speeds close to the speed of light or the nature of
gravity in solar-system sized entities;
4. it is really a pity that you, a would-be intellectual, continue to
accept the puerile and tendentious *Barne's Review* as your out-,
excuse me, lighthouse.
--
Best,
Eugene Holman
Andrew
> Andrew wrote:
<snip>
> > >
> > > (1) Einstein (hereafter just E) was a man with a wretched
> > > academic record
> >
> > People with PhD's, practically by definition, do not have "a wreched
> > academic record."
No response from Mr. Phillips.
> >
> > > holding an extremely modest position
> > > unconnected with any institution of learning or research,
> >
> > To say that he was "unconnected with any institution of learning or
> > research" is patently false.
>
> ==========================================
> Phillips
>
> Are we speaking of the Swiss Patent Office?
>
> ===============================================
Um, no. Among other things, we're speaking of the Kaiser-Wilhelm
Institute, and the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.
> >
> > > with no access to a laboratory for experiments.
> >
> > Which is what _theoretical_ physics is. Your laboratory is your
> > brain, a pad of paper, and a pencil. In theoretical physics, you
> > generally don't need any more than that. Especially, as Mr. Gherig so
> > eloquently put it, if it happens to be Einstein's brain you're working
> > with.
>
> =========================================
> Phillips
>
> True to a point. You need only paper, pencil, and a brain to
> conceive the ideas; but you will also want a laboratory to
> test them.
>
> ======================================
Really? It wasn't until a solar eclipse occurred that they were able
to substantiate some of Einstein's claims. It wasn't until several
years after his death that accurate enough measurements of Mercury's
orbit could be made to substantiate more of his claims.
Please explain how either
a) a solar eclipse
or
b) Mercury's orbit
could be produced in a laboratory.
In fact, I can't think of any relativistic phenomenon which could have
been measured in a laboratory setting until the last ten-or-so years
(recent work has been done in gravitational radiation, waves in
spacetime). If you can think of one (and can establish that the
experiment could have been done when Einstein was alive), I will all
too gladly concede that I was wrong.
In fact, in the last year, scientists measured the speed of gravity.
They needed to use some of the most sensitive radiotelescopes in
existance (which Einstein didn't have) to measure it.
> >
> > > Yet we are
> > > asked to believe that it was ONLY E who managed to disclose
> > > to us the REAL meaning and significances of the works of
> > > many others.
> >
> > Yes, largely because it's true, and you have yet to establish
> > otherwise. This particular posting of yours is nothing more than
> > hand-waving.
> >
> > > THis, we are told, was the work of sheer
> > > intellectual brilliance.
> >
> > And it was. Could _you_ have done it?
>
> =========================================
> Phillips
>
> Lord, no.
>
> ======================
Neither could I. But Einstein did.
> >
> > >
> > > Such things can and do happen but, without supporting
> > > evidence, should be cegarded with the greatest of
> > > skepticism.
> >
> > How about Einstein's own publications? How about the fact that not
> > one scientist ever came forward to claim that Einstein was a fraud?
> > How about the fact that he was right?
> >
> > You have yet to satisfactorily refute any one of these facts.
No response from Mr. Phillips.
If you want to find the whole paper referred to here, it's in Science
278 (Nov. 14, 1997) pages 1270-1273.
> >
> > Even when Einstein became quite famous due to empirical observations
> > substantiating his claims, not one scientist you insist he stole his
> > results from ever stepped forward to claim that he had stolen their
> > work. This is when it would have been in their best interest to do
> > so. That they did not directly refutes your point.
No response from Mr. Phillips.
<snip>
--Drew