The Einstein Myth
Rob Virkus
> One of the great myths of the 20th century is Albert Einstein. Albert
> Einstein is held up as a rare genius who drastically changed the field
> of theoretical physics.
He was and he did. If he were not what he claimed to be intellectually,
other leading scientists of the day would have quickly known and
denounced him. He was highly praised.
People in the field of physics at that time were not stupid . Read any
good Einstein biography such as Pias' 'Subtle is the Lord' .
Best Regards,
Rob Virkus
Uncle Al
lyl...@my-deja.com wrote:
[snip]
> The reality is that Einstein 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 media made him a
> hero. 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.
[snip]
Those stupid physicsts were too stupid to recognize how stupid they
were by not seeing how stupid stupid Einstein made them look. I'm
sure glad we have you to set the record straight! We wait with
unbearable anticipation as you move from 1906 into the 1920s,
unleashing your rapier-sharp analytical mind that is protectively
surrounded by your coccygeus.
Have you applied for a MacArthur Genius Grant?
--
Uncle Al
http://www.mazepath.com/uncleal/
http://www.ultra.net.au/~wisby/uncleal/
http://www.guyy.demon.co.uk/uncleal/
(Toxic URLs! Unsafe for children and most mammals)
"Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?" The Net!
Rajarshi Ray
most amazing plagiarizer, with truly superhuman deviousness, that ever
lived. So much so that it becomes easier to believe, on the contrary,
that he was actually one of the greatest physicists who ever lived.
Don't you think it more likely that he "stood on the shoulders of
giants" when he was developing his own theories? Andrew Wiles couldn't
have accomplished his feat of proving FLT without using the work of
numerous mathematicians. But it seems that this very ability to absorb
and see the applicability of previous work is itself a mark of genius.
Not many people have it. I would be ecstatic if I had this ability of
Einstein and Wiles to "plagiarize"!
Cheers,
Rajarshi
lyl...@my-deja.com wrote:
>
> One of the great myths of the 20th century is Albert Einstein. Albert
> Einstein is held up 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 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 media made him a
> hero. 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.
>
> 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." 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. 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 position. 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.
>
> He would work at the patent office until 1909, all the while
> continuously trying to get a position at a university, but without
> success. All of these facts are true, but now the myth begins.
> 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. 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
> someone admittedly inept 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.
>
> Therefore, we will look at each of these ideas and discover the source
> of each. It should be remembered that these ideas are presented by
> Einstein's admirers 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.
>
> 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 Lorentz,
> Michelson, and Morley 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
> 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.
>
> 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. 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. In
> short, by 1904, everything in Einstein's paper regarding the Special
> Theory of Relativity had already been published.
>
> The Frenchman Poincaré 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."
>
> Anyone who has read Einstein's 1905 paper will 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.
> Over the next few years, Poincaré 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 Poincaré was
> busy bringing the rest of the academic world up to speed regarding
> relativity, Einstein was still working in the patent office in Bern 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.
>
> 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.
>
> 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^2. Einstein's biographers categorize this
> as "his most famous and most spectacular conclusion." 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.
>
> That there was an equivalence between mass and energy had been shown in
> the laboratory in the 1890's by both J.J. Thomsom of Cambridge and by
> W. Kaufmann in Göttingen. In 1900, Poincaré had shown that there was a
> mass relationship for all forms of energy, not just electromagnetic
> energy. Yet, the most probable source of Einstein's plagiarism was
> Friedrich Hasenöhrl, one of the most brilliant, yet unappreciated
> physicists of the era. Hasenöhrl 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, Hasenörhl had received in 1904 a
> prize from the prestigious Vienna Academy of Sciences.
>
> Furthermore, the mathematical relationship of mass and energy was a
> simple deduction from the already well-known equations of Scottish
> physicist James Maxwell. Scientists long understood that the
> mathematical relationship expressed by the equation E=mc^2 was the
> logical result of Maxwell's work, they just did not believe it. Thus,
> the experiments of Thomson, Kaufmann, and finally, and most
> importantly, Hasenörhl, confirmed Maxwell's work. 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.
>
> In this same plagiarized article of Einstein's, he suggests 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. 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. In fact, in response to this article, J. Precht
> remarked that such an experiment "lies beyond the realm of possible
> experience."
>
> 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. 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.
>
> 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. 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.
>
> 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. But the principles and
> equations governing the process in general had been deduced by Planck
> in 1900. 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.
>
> 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. Still, it was not until a 1919 newspaper headline
> that he gained any notoriety.
>
> 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, 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. 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.
>
> 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. It appears that Grossmann was not sharp
> enough to figure it out for Einstein. So Einstein was forced to look
> elsewhere to plagiarize his General Theory. 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. Hilbert submitted for publication, a week
> before Einstein completed his work, a paper which contained the correct
> field equations of General Relativity. What this means is that Hilbert
> wrote basically the exact same paper, with the same conclusions, before
> Einstein did. Einstein would have had an opportunity to know of
> Hilbert's work all along, because there were friends of his working
> for Hilbert. 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 Göttingen. 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. Therefore, this
> serves as incontrovertible proof that Einstein quickly plagiarized the
> work and then presented it, hoping to beat Hilbert to the punch. 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, five
> days before Einstein's submission. Einstein, the lowly young patent
> clerk, contended that Hilbert, a celebrated professor at the University
> of Gottingen, had stolen the theory after reading one of his papers.
> Hilbert discovered the correct field equation for general relativity
> before Einstein but never claimed priority.
>
> Hilbert's paper is the forerunner of the unified field theory of
> gravitation and electromagnetism and of the work of Erwin Schrödinger,
> whose work is the basis of all modern day quantum mechanics.
>
> Sent via Deja.com http://www.deja.com/
> Before you buy.
--
Sir, I have found you an argument. I am not obliged to find you
an understanding.
- Samuel Johnson
Jim Carr
>
>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.
The only reason you can post this anonymously and get away
with it is that you cannot legally libel a dead person.
Your article is full of errors and misconceptions that
are regularly debunked in sci.physics.relativity (where
part of it belongs) and in this newsgroup.
--
James A. Carr <j...@scri.fsu.edu> | "The half of knowledge is knowing
http://www.scri.fsu.edu/~jac/ | where to find knowledge" - Anon.
Supercomputer Computations Res. Inst. | Motto over the entrance to Dodd
Florida State, Tallahassee FL 32306 | Hall, former library at FSCW.
JCA
science and physicists are a collection of morons who have allowed
an insignificant German theoretical physicist to trick them into believing
that he was one of the greatest thinkers ever, and it is only thanks to
you
that a glimpse of the truth is coming to light.
I am, for once, going to be cruel. You, sir, are nothing. This posting
of
yours will be rightly and generally ignored, except maybe by a few of us
who have had enough of self-appointed truth-bringers that know little
or nothing on the stuff they pontificate about. Your opinions will have
no impact whatsoever on the views of the scientific community on
Einstein's contributions to the development of physics. Like I said, you
are nothing and when you die and disappear it will make no difference
whether or not you existed, but Einstein's ideas will still be remembered
with the respect and awe that they deserve.
Live with it.
James Hunter
Jim Carr wrote:
> In article <8i91r9$l6u$1...@nnrp1.deja.com>
> lyl...@my-deja.com writes:
> >
> >When we actually examine the life of Albert Einstein, we find
> >that his only brilliance lies in his ability to plagiarize and steal
> >other people's ideas, passing them off as his own.
>
> The only reason you can post this anonymously and get away
> with it is that you cannot legally libel a dead person.
>
> Your article is full of errors and misconceptions that
> are regularly debunked in sci.physics.relativity (where
> part of it belongs) and in this newsgroup.
Where were all of the "righteous" scientists when Einstein was alive,
and lambasting everybody else. What a bunch of moron dickheads
they *all* where.
Jim Carr
|
| In article <8i91r9$l6u$1...@nnrp1.deja.com>
| lyl...@my-deja.com writes:
| >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.
|
| The only reason you can post this anonymously and get away
| with it is that you cannot legally libel a dead person.
|
| Your article is full of errors and misconceptions that
| are regularly debunked in sci.physics.relativity (where
| part of it belongs) and in this newsgroup.
In article <39492827...@Jhuapl.edu>
James Hunter <James....@Jhuapl.edu> writes:
>
> Where were all of the "righteous" scientists when Einstein was alive,
> and lambasting everybody else.
Nonsequitur. Your unsupported assertion has nothing to do with the
libelous claims made in the referenced article. The other scientists
were doing and publishing physics just like Einstein was, and they
often argued physics with each other.
> What a bunch of moron dickheads they *all* where.
Similarly unsupported, but I'm sure they could care less about
your opinion of their work.
James Hunter
Jim Carr wrote:
[...]
> Similarly unsupported, but I'm sure they could care less about
> your opinion of their work.
They have a right to, since I can't say that I really
care all that much about their work
.
C. Cagle
> One of the great myths of the 20th century is Albert Einstein. Albert
> Einstein is held up as a rare genius who drastically changed the field
> of theoretical physics.
<snip rest of the rant>
I think what is really funny here is that you are at least promoting
the idea that all of the ideas were acceptable even though the man
credited with bringing them all together you find unacceptable. So it
appears that you have an agenda here against the promotion of the man
as a great thinker because your thesis is that he didn't have any
original ideas of his own.
I'd like to dispute that. But first a note on energy:
I once read a work by James Joule where (and I'm doing this from
memory so it might be a tad off) he stated that the energy contained in
matter was proportional to the the square of the velocity of light in
interplanetary space (somewhere in there he inserted the 'vis a vis').
I actually think he made the comment before the birth of Einstein.
Now, back to the thesis that Einstein wasn't original or capable of
being original. I'll buy into the idea that Einstein collected ideas
and assembled them into an attempt at a unified theory of the universe.
That assemblage is a correlative work which indicates a reasonably high
IQ. But his original work was yet to come.
Everyone was hooked into the what they all considered the obvious
notion of continuous structures. Of course, GR and QM could neither of
them exist without such a notion. Einstein's greatest expression of
genius was when he wrote to his life long friend Michele Besso the
following lines in a 1954 private letter:
: "I consider it quite possible that physics cannot be based on the
: field concept, i.e., on continuous structures. In that case,
: nothing remains of my entire castle in the air, gravitation theory
: included, [and of] the rest of modern physics."
quoted from:
_Subtle is the Lord_, Abraham Pais, page 467.
With those two sentences Einstein expressed the greatest insight of
all. The first sentence contained the great conjecture which if true
then led logically to the result which was contained in the second
sentence.
But such a conjecture undoes almost all of the physics of the century
and he had the strength of character to realize that undoing all of the
physics of the century is exactly what needed to be done to get to
truth in physics. His use of the word 'physics' contained the implicit
idea of reality and that reality was that the idea of continuous
structures, which was a wonderful concept for generating approximations
of a high degree of accuracy, could not be ultimately useful in a world
composed of quanta. The 'field' is not continuous in actuallity but
composed of a finite number of discrete components upon which modern
attempts at descriptions of the universe (physics) still hasn't managed
to put a handle.
This was the man's genius and it is this genius that is rejected by
modern physicists today who have put such great intellectual effort
into the comprehension of the continuous structure description of the
universe. In this also Einstein displayed great personal integrity or
character to suggest that all of his previous work was a 'castle in the
air'. The man could learn from his mistakes. Would that there were
more men who could learn from his mistakes, as well, instead of merely
learning his mistakes.
Charles Cagle