"Unthinking respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth."
"The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources."
"The influence of the crucial Michelson-Morley experiment on my own efforts has been rather indirect. I learned of it through H.A. Lorentz's decisive investigations of the electrodynamics of moving bodies (1895) with which I was acquainted before developing the special theory of relativity . . . What led me more or less directly to the special theory of relativity was the conviction that the electromotive force acting on a body moving in a magnetic field was nothing else than an electric field."
"No amount of experimentation can ever prove me right; a single experiment can prove me wrong."
"My opinion about Miller's experiments is the following. ... Should the positive result be confirmed, then the special theory of relativity and with it the general theory of relativity, in its current form, would be invalid. Experimentum summus judex. Only the equivalence of inertia and gravitation would remain, however, they would have to lead to a significantly different theory."
— Albert Einstein, in a letter to Edwin E. Slosson, July 1925
"I believe that I have really found the relationship between gravitation and electricity, assuming that the Miller experiments are based on a fundamental error. Otherwise, the whole relativity theory collapses like a house of cards."
— Albert Einstein, in a letter to Robert Millikan, June 1921 (in Clark 1971, p.328)
“You imagine that I look back on my life’s work with calm satisfaction. But from nearby it looks quite different. There is not a single concept of which I am convinced that it will stand firm, and I feel uncertain whether I am in general on the right track.”
— Albert Einstein, on his 70th birthday, in a letter to Maurice Solovine, 28 March 1949 (in B. Hoffman Albert Einstein: Creator and Rebel 1972, p.328)
Creation time: May 21, 2013 02:49 PM PDT
No scientist is going to answer with anything other than "Of course not!!". Their answer will invariably be "We examine and use the evidence alone and if real evidence surfaces against Einstein's theories they will immediately be replaced"
This is because scientists erroneously believe their brain works on "truths" instead of recognizing the absolute pure necessity of faith for intellect.
The actual issue is not Einstein's theories, per se. That is simply the newest form. The question is better asked:"Are scientists capable of abandoning old theories without major revolution and contention?" or "Why do scientists hold on to old theories and shoehorn new evidence into existing belief systems".
The issue is that to stand on the shoulders of giants you must believe they are giants. Science requires faith to operate. If you utterly lacked faith you would have to re-discover every human accomplishment yourself to eliminate that faith and would never accomplish everything.
This is one of the two aspects of AI development. Left and right brain, if you will.
1) Faith is required to make the next step (rational simple-mindedness)
2) Searching for new discoveries requires putting together connections with little proof. (schizophrenia/delusion or fascination with low probability)
In each case there is a judgement call and a system of dampening that can go wrong. Mathematician "left-brained" types tend toward faith in the "likely" to the exclusion of the "unlikely". Whereas artistic creative types tend towards a focus on the "unlikely". Both are issues of extremity
The problem is that "Likely" and "Unlikely" are both judgement calls based on personal experience, faith in organizations, appeals to authority, social norms and typically an amalgamation of these factors.
A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it. ~Max Planck
Creation time: Oct 24, 2013 06:00 PM PDT
2) This concept was first extensively explored by Hendrik Lorentz in the development of Lorent Ether Theory (LET) He developed this mathematical illusion to describe a null reading supposedly found in the Michelson Morley Experiment.
"Light speed constancy" is a very poor description of this phenomena which often fools people into believing it is something more rational and intuitive than the actual theory describes. In classical terms, if viewed from a third party perspective it would seem that light travels a wide variety of speeds. In Einstein's original paper, he says that light plays the part of an infinitely great speed. This is because it travels every speed simultaneously.
The only thing that makes it "constant" is that it's speed is the same regardless of the observer's motion which is radically different from all other phenomena in the universe. So the "constancy" is only in the context of any single perspective.
For instance, when pressure and temperature are the same, sound is a "constant" but if you move with respect to the medium it's speed will seem different from this new perspective even though you know it's a "constant". This is utterly different from the description of light according to Einstein.
So first Lorentz attempted to mathematically describe a situation in which a wave travelling in a medium would behave in a fashion that creates an illusion. This required objects to shorten. This illusion alters your measuring devices such that you think light is travelling the same speed with respect to you no matter how you move around, but it's actually your perspective that is all jacked up. (an illusion)
Einstein then took this illusion and, using the math to describe a physical mechanical wave, directly imported it unaltered into his own theory and stated that the illusion is the truth. IE that light does not just seem to follow you around as it's center of propagation no matter how you are moving... It really does follow you around as the center of propagation. (to paraphrase constancy)
Even academics are very frequently confused by what "constancy" really means in a larger sense and will often explain the concept incorrectly by explaining something that is more rational, intuitive and mechanistic (more classical). While their explanation makes more sense, it''s not an accurate description of the theory
Creation time: Jan 28, 2014 11:06 PM PST
Specifically because he proposed ideas which seemed irrational. To say that light actually travels a speed relative to every moving observer simultaneously (and they are all correct) is absurd to classical sensibilities. Additionally suggesting a wave can travel without a medium was also seemingly asinine to the contemporary scientists.
You must understand that this is at the very same time that Lorentz's theory which was fully relativistic, had time dilation, length contraction and the illusion of light speed constancy was considered completely rational if a bit ad hoc whereas the particular changes I mentioned above (light speed constancy) were seen as complete nonsense.
Those changes mentioned in the first paragraph were enough to draw ridicule and scorn whereas ideas we still find difficult such as time dilation and length contraction were interesting and strange to contemporary scientist but not considered impossible like the concepts Einstein introduced.
You must understand that Lorentz considered light speed constancy a perspective illusion caused by aether. (a simple math trick) Einstein eliminated the aether entirely and insisted light speed constancy was no illusion. These changes led to the new concept of the relativity of simultaneity.
In LET there is no twins paradox though there is still a difference in the twins age.
My Quora blog explains in far greater detail but still laymen's terms: Relativity Demystified
Creation time: Mar 31, 2014 12:15 AM PDT
What you have is something that is the inverse of an ad hominem attack. It's an ad hominem support.
Your problem is that you are focussing on the social aspect so much you are disregarding the possibility of the exact opposite type of person. One who utterly disregards any social aspect.
It's hasn't been popular to disprove Einstein since the 70s. It's been ridiculed, dismissed and called crackpottery for years. No legitimate scientist would dare contradict Einstein for fear of instant ridicule and ostracisation from his academic community he hoped to work in.
Why it has been around for so long is because the suggestions of Special Relativity are magical and contradictory and have led to ideas and ideals which have been exponentially escaping from rational science and embracing irrational nonsense and dogma.
Every magical idea in modern physics has roots in SR even the ideas Einstein himself argued against.
The schism lies in the fact that most human beings get the feeling of "truth" from factors linked to social considerations and a few (a very damn few) actually get it the way we all claim to in science, through a rational consideration of the facts. (because the idea of "the facts" is also a social consideration)
[Or were you just fishing for someone to say something like "Because he's a jew and people are just hating on jewish people again!!! Poor guy, what'd he do to deserve this!! He was a great humanitarian!!! *sniffle*"]
Einstein was a great guy... a great guy that totally led us the wrong direction. And still a great guy... Whoa, mind blown!
Creation time: Apr 05, 2014 07:46 AM PDT
Tesla invented, Einstein confused. There is absolutely no comparison between their contributions. One produced all the concrete concepts and designs that created the modern world. The other gave us theories that are irrational and allowed magic thinking to re-enter science as acceptable.
The information is so voluminous and difficult to convey that most indoctrinated into the relativity cult will simply dismiss the possibility relativity is wrong before ever looking at evidence. That's the very essence of religious behavior.
[Update: This old answer (2014) is getting noticed and needs this caveat: The cult of Einstein is not Einstein’s fault and the irrational views are something he tried to correct but people didn’t listen. The idol of a person is not the real person. It was the sudden death of Minkowski that is actually the most singular cause of the lasting confusion. In trying to honor his work, Minkowski’s students popularized his interpretation of Einstein’s paper and THAT confusion became dominant no matter how much Einstein tried to recant. (Added quotes at the bottom.) The real person Einstein was venerable, the idol created from him that people think of, is a problem.]
Tesla specifically ridiculed Relativity on a regular basis and for you to have any respect for Tesla whatsoever, you need to be able to question the cult of Einstein. They are a direct antithesis.
Today's scientists have substituted mathematics for experiments, and they wander off through equation after equation, and eventually build a structure which has no relation to reality. The scientists from Franklin to Morse were clear thinkers and did not produce erroneous theories. The scientists of today think deeply instead of clearly. One must be sane to think clearly, but one can think deeply and be quite insane. - Nikola Tesla "Radio Power Will Revolutionize the World". Modern Mechanics and Inventions. July, 1934.
[Update continued below:]
Below is the nonsense, based on light speed constancy, that Minkowski added before abruptly dying:
A concept to which Einstein quipped: “Since the mathematicians have invaded the theory of relativity, I do not understand it myself anymore.” (Before Minkowski, his mentor died)
This is one of many times Einstein tried to gracefully back out of his dead mentor’s blunder.
The final quote above was 1920… a full 15 years after the constancy debacle and 5 years after general relativity. (After he had time to think it all through)
Creation time: Sep 30, 2014 04:51 PM PDT
Irrational thinking... hear me out because I actually agree on some level.
Specifically, the special theory of relativity completely defies logic with certain paradoxes and effects you see nowhere else in nature such as "constancy" in light speed. We like to call this "counter-intuitive" but the truth is that it's just plain old irrational.
[EDIT: It was pointed out that this quote may have been more about social commentary than specifically theory building though it may have included both so let me expound the social idea somewhat to be inclusive. Here is a quote of Einstein himself later expounding on the statement:
"Many persons have inquired concerning a recent message of mine that "a new type of thinking is essential if mankind is to survive and move to higher levels."Often in evolutionary processes a species must adapt to new conditions in order to survive. Today the atomic bomb has altered profoundly the nature of the world as we knew it, and the human race consequently finds itself in a new habitat to which it must adapt its thinking.
In the light of new knowledge, a world authority and an eventual world state are not just desirable in the name of brotherhood, they are necessary for survival. In previous ages a nation's life and culture could be protected to some extent by the growth of armies in national competition. Today we must abandon competition and secure cooperation. This must be the central fact in all our considerations of international affairs; otherwise we face certain disaster. Past thinking and methods did not prevent world wars. Future thinking must prevent wars."
When we refer to altruism in old-school game theory we call it "irrational" because it seems as though the individual is not maximizing his gains, but we have now found through evolutionary game theory is that group competition is real and so therefore it is the emergent property of a complex system of cooperation that helps the individual through helping others. The furthering of the group is the furthering of the individual who is part of it.
Now back to the focus on scientific theory building...]
The thing is that any revolutionary physical scientific idea will be perceived by an ignorant observer as irrational. When something has a great deal of complexity, it appears to defy logic.
A professional illusionist uses this to his advantage. If you set yourself in an older age you can imagine being ignorant of illusionist's tricks and having someone relay their very real and amazing observations of that illusionist to you. If you are a rational and scientific type you'd dismiss these real observations out of hand because you "know" that they are impossible.
The truth however is that your mind lacked the ability to model the complex underpinning required to create the effect the observer was relaying to you. Your "rational" mind stood in the way.
If you had instead, temporarily accepted an "irrational" truth you might have been able to discover a set of complex mechanisms by which the "irrational" becomes rational. It was your knowledge and experience that specifically stood in your way.
Unfortunately exploration of this kind is a double edged sword. Sometimes you find a new theory and other times you just keep propping up a mistaken idea with confirmation bias.
What Einstein was referring to was the heart of creativity and optimism. It is the singular place where great discoveries are made but it also the place where the great mistakes are made more often than not. Unfortunately, you just can't have one without the other.
Creation time: Mar 19, 2015 05:53 PM PDT
Rodney Brooks did a good job of calling out a particular issue he described as “top-down” and while I haven’t read his work, it seems to lead towards my own but I take it further than I’m sure he is willing.
It is and has been the consensus viewpoint that Lorentz’s formulation and Einstein’s are equivalent, but I have proven this to be false under certain particular applications.
The singular thing which defines the fine line between Lorentz’s work and Einstein’s, “the principle of constancy” is the crucial point of failure.
The statement above is easily misunderstood because the number of people who understand the difference between the two theories could probably be counted with your fingers and toes.
Specifically the difference is a subtlety most would consider “metaphysical” but I’ve shown it expressed as mathematical. That difference is still tested for today in the search for a “one-way speed of light test,” which has never yet been successfully accomplished in science.
More specifically, while Lorentz’s version of the theory has length contraction, time dilation and the appearance of light speed constancy, the fact that there is a preferred frame means that light speed constancy and relative simultaneity are illusions.
Furthermore this approach has underlying mechanics which can be applied to discover additional information not available through special relativity.
Two descriptions of an illusionist’s effect
One can accurately describe all the events, distances, trajectories, speeds etc of an illusionist impaling himself upon a spike and build a mathematical model of what is observable. If you are never behind stage, it is technically “metaphysical” for you to include in your description of that event the various gadgets and physics which make it possible for it only to appear that the spear has pierced the illusionists chest because it is not observable.
This very principle, very important to science, is also something that breaks rational processes. To describe what you have not observed is non-scientific, yet is it scientific to describe this illusionists effect without requiring further mechanism beyond what is observed?
This very directly reflects the difference between Einstein and Lorentz’s theories.
Two descriptions of the same events but one insists there is additional mechanism: Lorentz’s. Specifically his theory asserts that the effect is impossible without preferred frame mechanics and only occurs because of the preferred frame.
Why is one superior to the other if they describe the same thing?
This additional mechanism, which is Lorentz’s description of events, though complicating the theory, also provides tools and further applications/extensions not available in Einstein’s theory.
It reveals additional information which is not otherwise part of our model for testing the universe. These additional mechanics can lead to different mathematical outcomes when applied in particular ways.
I’ve laid this all out as succinctly as possible here on quora: Relativity Demystified
In Lorentz’s theory there is absolutely no appearance of the twins paradox or any other logical paradox or fallacy. This occurs because there is literally double the amount of information available/revealed via preferred frame mechanics.
To recapitulate, my criticism of Einstein’s theory is that it provides half as much information (or less) as its superior predecessor, Lorentz’s theory.
He cut too deeply with occam’s razor and in so doing, eventually required more and more supporting ideas (extra-dimensions) than was removed in the “simplification” process. (the aether)
Creation time: Aug 12, 2016 06:59 AM PDT
Because of the Michelson Morley experiment. Specifically because of Lorentz’s description of the MM.
Anyone who says it’s Maxwell’s equations is GROSSLY misleading you!
Math is a tool to model. When one uses math to solve a problem, what that person is doing is creating a analogy and a representation of something in the real world. It is a tool to DESCRIBE the world.
It is not the world itself. This seems like something that needs not be explained but it does need to be hammered away at now in the new postmodern age of insanity and irrationality.
The description is not the thing described! They are not one!
This simple truth is somehow missing inside many people’s minds.
So when Maxwell says “The electromagnetic field behaves as if it were a collection of wheels, pulleys and fluids.”
What that means is that he is DESCRIBING a fluid’s behaviors with math. The math can’t magically exist by iteself. All throughout every one of his papers he goes into excruciating detail describing fluid behaviors.
Therefore the idea that he, in any way, intimated that light would be “constant” is a complete irrational and absurd assertion of the highest order.
I have to believe these people who insist this do not understand that the word “constant” used in context with relativity is a behavior that means nothing at all like the common sense word. It is a behavior that exists in NOTHING ELSE in the universe.
Saying Maxwell’s equations infer constancy is as inane as saying that describing a sound wave in air but not describing it for someone moving through the air, is inferring sound is “constant.” It’s completely ridiculous. He simply didn’t go through all the trouble of describing a situation of a perspective change for moving through the medium. That makes perfect sense in an experimental environment where the fastest possible speed wouldn’t make a difference anywhere near the size of experimental error.
(and it was Michio Kaku who started this rumor in 2004 as far as I can tell)
If you understand constancy at all, you understand that the idea of Maxwell inferring constancy is completely asinine. Here’s Feynman’s take:
"Another consequence of the [Maxwell's] equations is that if the source of the disturbance is moving, the light emitted goes through space at the same speed c. **This is analogous to the case of sound, the speed of sound waves being likewise independent of the motion of the source.** This independence of the motion of the source, in the case of light, brings up an interesting problem: Suppose we are riding in a car that is going at a speed u, and light from the rear is going past the car with speed c. Differentiating the first equation in (15.2) gives dx'/dt=dx/dt-u, which means that according to the Galilean transformation the apparent speed of the passing light, as we measure it in the car, should not be c but should be c-u. For instance, if the car is going 100,000 mi/sec, and the light is going 186,000 mi/sec, then apparently the light going past the car should go 86,000 mi/sec. In any case, by measuring the speed of the light going past the car (if the Galilean transformation is correct for light), one could determine the speed of the car. A number of experiments based on this general idea were performed to determine the velocity of the earth, but they all failed - they gave no velocity at all. We shall discuss one of these experiments [the Michelson-Morley experiment] in detail..."
Constancy is a description of a null Michelson interferometer.
Lorentz created the math to describe how an experiment moving through the aether in which light propagates as a wave with respect to the aether, could hide the effect. It was a mathematical model of an illusion.
Einstein then insisted the illusion was reality because it was more direct and that is like saying that “the presumption that uncle Jimmy’s thumb is actually removable is the most expedient truth.” In just such a way, the constancy of light was presumed to also be the truth. This is an abuse of Occam’s razor.
(but the mechanics the math described were removed while retaining the math)
"The influence of the crucial Michelson-Morley experiment on my own efforts has been rather indirect. I learned of it through H.A. Lorentz's decisive investigations of the electrodynamics of moving bodies (1895) with which I was acquainted before developing the special theory of relativity. Lorentz's basic assumption of an aether at rest seemed to me not convincing in itself and also for the reason that it was leading to an interpretation of the Michelson-Morley experiment which seemed to me artifical" - Albert Einstein 1952, in a letter to Robert Shankland
All of special relativity comes from the null of the Michelson experiment because it is this phenomena that Lorentz was DESCRIBING with the math.
What is lost on people is that if you remove the thing described, the description is also invalidated unless you are a magical and irrational thinker. You can’t go into some detailed mechanics of how “nothing” does things without being fundamentally irrational.
The Lorentz transform is a simple description of how a person/perspective moving through a medium would perceive light’s (a mechanical wave) passage in that medium, if A) that person was traversing the medium and B) the devices used to measure are distorted by medium. (IE a simple perspective illusion)
The change factor is an amount by which to distort a perspective.
The truth of the matter is that Lorentz-Poincare aether is fully relativistic and has none of the problems that relativity has ever been criticized for. It is mathematically equivalent and the conceptual difference eliminates the infinite additional realities created by upgrading reality from three dimensions to four. It is the rational choice of Occam’s razor.
Additionally Einstein admitted the necessity of preferred frames (breaking constancy) by 1912 and extolled the virtue of preferred frame mechanics long afterwards!
"According to the general theory of relativity, space without aether is unthinkable; for in such space there not only would be no propagation of light, but also no possibility of existence for standards of space and time (measuring-rods and clocks), nor therefore any space-time intervals in the physical sense." -Albert Einstein 1920
I explain it all below in terms a construction worker can understand. Be warned, however. All the awe and majesty of an illusion drops away when someone just shows you the trick. Uncle Jimmy isn’t magic after all…
PostScript:
For further confirmation of the absolute reliance of special relativity upon the null of the Michelson experiments, see these quotes about Dayton Miller’s non-null Michelson replications:
"My opinion about Miller's experiments is the following. ... Should the positive result be confirmed, then the special theory of relativity and with it the general theory of relativity, in its current form, would be invalid. Experimentum summus judex. Only the equivalence of inertia and gravitation would remain, however, they would have to lead to a significantly different theory."
— Albert Einstein, in a letter to Edwin E. Slosson, July 1925
"I believe that I have really found the relationship between gravitation and electricity, assuming that the Miller experiments are based on a fundamental error. Otherwise, the whole relativity theory collapses like a house of cards."
— Albert Einstein, in a letter to Robert Millikan, June 1921 (in Clark 1971, p.328)
Creation time: Jan 02, 2018 02:11 PM PST
There is not a simple answer and those who give simple answers on this are ideologues.
The truth of the matter is that there’s no fine and definite line between plagiarism and using a lot of prior art in a new way. Let’s mention a silly but a very modern example people can relate to in Queen’s “Under pressure” bassline and “Vanilla Ice’s” intro to “Ice Ice Baby.”
Some people call it clear plagiarism and others can show subtle differences which they believe make it unique. This shows that plagiarism is in the eye of the beholder. There is always a way to split hairs to make something seem not plagiarism and there’s always a way to be overly inclusive to make things seem like plagiarism.
Therefore everything people are giving you is opinion. So now let’s talk about manipulative influence tactics.
One of the best ways to vilify a group or attempt to cheat a discussion and make your point automatically win is to either say “it’s for the children” or associate the opposition with Nazi’s.
With good reason, the “if you believe X you’re a Nazi” manipulation was an instant win during the last century if it held the loosest credence and weakest evidence. Nazi’s were a real threat. Now they’re mainly a disgusting joke, but still a group we have to keep a close eye on.
The validity of the villain is easy to conflate with the veracity of the argument. So is it true that people who were against Einstein were against him for anti-semitic reasons?
The historically based answer to this is a resounding and clear NO!
In the book “100 authors against Einstein” there were as many jewish authors as there were anti-Semites and both were a minority. There have been thousands of people arguing against relativity for rational reasons alone, including greats like Ernest Rutherford.
Even the primary anti-semite against Einstein, can be shown to have not directly shown anti-semitic views prior to his association with national socialism around 1920 but did eventually become a monster through his continued association with that regime. There’s 15 years of people including Lenard blasting relativity on purely rational terms before that point that were utterly unrelated to anything racial.
It was this particular garbage-human’s attacks on Einstein that gave Einstein the most credit in the eyes of the rest of the world. It’s this one man that made this absurd anti-semitism argument look valid and that did more for Einstein than against him.
Don’t fall prey to race-baiting when trying to examine Science or History!!!
Here’s an answer I’ve given on some of the history behind why he didn’t get a Nobel for Relativity:
Or here’s a conversation between Rutherford and Eddington that reveals perspectives of scientists contemporary to the time:
I do not see why Einstein is accorded a greater public acclaim than you. After all, you invented the nuclear model of the atom and that model provides the basis for all of physical science today and it is even more universal in its application than Newton's laws of gravitation. Also Einstein's predictions refer to such minute departures from the Newtonian theory that I do not see what all the fuss is about.
Rutherford, in response turned to Eddington and said 'You are responsible for Einstein's fame'. And more seriously he continued: 'The war had just ended; and the complacency of the Victorian and the Edwardian times had been shattered. The people felt that all their values and all their ideals had lost their bearings. Now, suddenly, they learnt that an astronomical prediction by a German scientist had been confirmed by expeditions to Brazil and West Africa and, indeed, prepared for already during the war, by British astronomers. Astronomy had always appealed to public imagination; and an astronomical discovery, transcending worldly strife, struck a responsive cord. The meeting of the Royal Society, at which the results of the British expeditions were reported, was headlined in all the British papers; and the typhoon of publicity crossed the Atlantic. From that point on, the American press played Einstein to the maximum.' (Chandrasekhar 1983, p. 28)
So why is it seen as plagiarism?
In my opinion it’s because Einstein was focused upon electromagnetism in the context of Lorentz’s theory. He ported Lorentz’s work in unchanged and was basically in a race with Poincare for precedence on the electromagnetism component.
Anyone with any competency with the history of the theory can clearly see that there’s nothing revolutionary added by Einstein. It was a small advancement over Lorentz’s work and would have been completed by Poincare and credited to Poincare if not for some small publication timing errors.
The time dilation, length contraction and illusion of light speed constancy were all the work of Lorentz and Larmor before him. There was a widespread confusion about who contributed what but it was Lorentz’s component that gave the revolutionary perspective, not Einstein.
Even the conjoining of space and time into spacetime was well after special relativity and was because of Minkowski. Einstein initially rejected the Minkowski convention as late as circa 1912 and this is something I personally only learned in recent years.
Einstein was quoted as speaking about Minkowski’s convention that ““Since the mathematicians have invaded the theory of relativity I do not understand it myself any more.”
…and then the sudden massive shift in direction Einstein takes after a decade of trying and turns on a dime within a few weeks of collaborating with Hilbert on General Relativity and you find that many scientists continued to grant Hilbert precedence on that.
Perhaps the final touch was Einstein’s alone, but getting him the long way up to that finally little dotted “i” was all Hibert in my opinion as well. Is that technically plagiarism? Hard to say…
Will it all be “disproven” soon?
Heck no! It’s all deeply rooted in so much prior art, that’s just absurd.
Will there be a massive shift in how it’s viewed soon? A revolution in interpretation?
Absolutely!!! There’s never been an experimental reason to prefer Einstein’s metaphysical interpretations over Lorentz and Poincare. Understanding the difference between the two is something lost to history and explained below.
Relativity Demystified (and this is before I knew spacetime was all Minkowski!)
and if you really want to dig into the history of physics and see how and why a revolution of interpretation is in the works then read below:
Archived here:
[1804.01846] History of the NeoClassical Interpretation of Quantum and Relativistic Physics
Or here:
History of the NeoClassical Interpretation of Quantum and Relativistic Physics
Creation time: Apr 13, 2018 04:51 PM PDT
People keep trying to say Maxwell’s equations is at the root and this is much less than a half truth.
Let me steal a fantastic quote from another answer and then follow the advice:
Einstein starts from the hypothesis that the laws will look the same to all observers in uniform motion. This permits a very concise and elegant formulation of the theory, as often happens when one big assumption can be made to cover several less big ones... But in my opinion there is also something to be said for taking students along the road made by FitzGerald, Larmor, Lorentz and Poincaré. The longer road sometimes gives more familiarity with the country. — John Bell
So before we can explain the physical roots that come from different places we need to speak about the two different component roots of the theory.
Einstein’s relativity can be considered a two part theory. The first labeled as kinematics is the portion completely and directly (admittedly) taken from Lorentz’s work which descends from Larmor. It is about relative motion and all the time dilation, length contraction and other weird things everyone associates with relativity. (this is NOT Einstein’s contribution)
The second part is the “electrodynamical part” as he calls it (electromagnetism) is from Maxwell and Hertz in which he explains how electromagnetism would work in a world with Lorentz’s Kinematics.
This is a part that Poincare was also working on with Lorentz at the same time and he would have been credited with “relativity” had it not been for some publishing irregularities. (Even the name comes from Poincare’s “Principle of Relativity”)
So, remember it is just the equations of electromagnetism applied to those weird circumstances Lorentz described, that Einstein contributed. It answers questions like, “How can we mathematically describe the way electromagnetic waves from two electromagnets interact if those magnets are passing each other?”
Einstein answered these questions in the framework invented by Lorentz and Larmor. Lorentz is the one most responsible for the things you think of as relativity. Einstein provided an important, complex, and detailed exposition on those things.
So, the question you are likely most interested in is, “What physical reasoning caused Lorentz to come up with time dilation and length contraction?”
The answer is that the Michelson-Morley experiment showed that we could not detect the speed of light being altered by our speed through the universe. This means that either the earth is the center of the universe, we’re in some sort of local bubble, or something very odd is going on with nature.
Why does it mean that? Because a wave is an action not an item. Never, before relativity, would a wave be considered truly a noun because it is a verb. It is a description of action like a “jog” is something a jogger might do, but you cannot have a jog when the jogger is removed just like a wave on the ocean can’t exist without the ocean waving. This is something every classical thinker understood instantly and automatically.
A wave is what happens to the particles of an elastic medium when they are disturbed. The equilibrium of forces get out of wack and the particles keep moving toward least (local) resistance as it moves around with a delay. Above is one simple type of wave but the more complex ones are the same principle in action.
(…and if you think of photons somehow moving up and down in waves, that’s just flatly wrong in a variety of ways. Even those in the modern majority who have been taught to think of EM waves magically, will tell you that doesn’t work.)
So, regardless of others trying to bring Maxwell into this part, it has nothing to do with the equations that describe electromagnetic waves; it’s about the nature of waves and it was known beyond doubt that light behaved as a wave.
So the physical reasoning is for the purpose of explaining the Michelson-Morley in an Aether environment. (old spelling “Ether”)
For the sake of brevity I’ll leave it to you to look up the details of the experiment, but Michelson expected that if we’re moving through the aether and light wave just a disturbance of the aether and the speed of a wave is determined by properties of a medium (like water for ocean waves or air for sound) and remains constant within the frame of a homogenous medium. Then moving through that medium should make a wave look faster in one direction and slower in the other. (Note: I just used the word “constant” intuitively and completely opposite to its meaning in relativity. This will be important later.)
Michelson detected much less of that effect than you would expect of a solar system moving through the galaxy and even much less than just what would be expected from going around the sun. (as though we’re at the center of the universe, in a bubble, local current, or something really weird is happening)
George Fitzgerald suggested the “something really weird is happening” tack, that the reason that the experiment didn’t detect an aether wind was because aether wind flowing across particles, strengthens the bonds between those particles and therefore shortens any “ruler” you might use to measure the length of something depending on the direction they are facing: A strange optical and situational illusion.
Lorentz decided to model exactly how the waves would have to go both upstream and downstream (of the wind that was assumed had to be there) compared to going across the stream to create a weird little average that makes it seem like it travels the same speed in all directions. This required length to contract in the direction of the wind.
It’s the mechanism behind an optical illusion that the universe plays on us. Furthermore, since it would take longer for electromagnetic waves to go upstream in a wind and it’s not cancelled out by the downstream “speed up” trip, then all electromagnetic interactions take longer for an object in motion.
If time is just a measure of change, then things would take longer to change if they were in motion, (this includes turning gears and mental processes) thus the apparent time is dilated.
That’s just a requirement for the whole illusion to work out mathematically. The time thing even works for classical considerations but was just brought to the fore by this conundrum of the Michelson experiment that they were solving.
Then the question becomes, “How does a mathematical description of moving aether’s impact on light get directly imported -unchanged- into a theory without it?”
The answer is because Einstein thought it’d be simpler to just believe the illusion is the underlying reality and has no mechanical underpinning or reason. “It just is,” sort of like how often god is believed to “just be” the way the universe appeared.
(IE the mathematical description remains but you remove what it describes is happening and just believe without mechanics)
This, then, requires that the 4th dimension which Lorentz used to keep up with faulty clock times, is actually alternate slices of a larger reality in which things travel through time and space at the same time. The 4th dimension has to become real to believe the illusion “just happens.”
IE: In order to remove aether, you must add the possibility of infinite 3D realities to exist for any given moment of time and promote reality to truly 4D.
This move of “simplifying” by removing the aether, is considered in recent times to be a metaphysical preference based on “Occam’s razor” but, obvious to any unbiased reader of history, obviously cut the wrong direction.
Lorentz’s kinematics combined with Poincare’s electromagnetism is mathematically indistinguishable from Einstein’s relativity and no “one-way speed of light” experiment which is needed to scientifically prefer one over the other, has ever been accomplished.
(Lorentz’s theory, however, has the possibility of more information being possibly available beyond Einstein’s mechanism-lacking metaphysical assertions)
If you would like a laymen’s terms explanation of the differences between Lorentz Ether Theory (LET) and Special relativity, the blog below has illustrations, examples, and an in-depth exploration of the topic most high school graduates can follow:
Below is a paper on the detailed history of all the tools of modern physics and how they share a common ground with fluid dynamics and further how modern physics is beginning to circle back to those historical roots.
[1804.01846] History of the NeoClassical Interpretation of Quantum and Relativistic Physics
(BONUS) Finally, let’s deal with a circulating rumor about Maxwell that was created by Michio Kaku circa 2004:
A rumor has spread around between professors and other science communicators that Maxwell’s equations inferred the constancy of light. I’ve tracked this to Michio Kaku’s book as the earliest retelling of this absurdity. I have not found a single instance of it prior to this point but the infection of the rumor spread very far and wide.
Anyone who believe this is true either does not understand what exactly “constancy of light” actually means and thinks it could possibly apply to something like a mechanical wave. (this is disappointingly common) Or they are utterly ignorant of the fact that Maxwell was mathematically modeling waves in an inviscid fluid medium and was neither an idiot nor insane and had absolutely no reason whatsoever to ever believe such a completely unique behavior of reality was occurring. (many decades prior to Michelson-Morley)
This rumor, however, has mutated and influenced opinion and understanding to the point that it shows up without its full absurdity and instead leaves people vaguely misunderstanding the role and impetus played by Maxwell’s equations.
Maxwell’s equations did not include transformations to additional frames which neither he nor any experimenter on earth (until modern times) would ever encounter. The speed required to go above experimenter error on their devices would be faster than the fastest modern spaceships by orders of magnitude. Why on earth would he go through the absurd extra trouble? It would be lunacy for him to do so, so he didn’t. This is not surprising.
It is like describing the wave equation for sound only in the frame of the air and neglecting to explain it in the context of moving through the air. Moving through the air obviously makes the speed of sound seem different depending on direction. (We can just move a very significant portion of the speed of sound very easily) The same would be true of EM in Maxwell’s mind as well and he left it to the intelligent people he was addressing in his papers to automatically understand that unnecessary and blindingly obvious detail.
I’ve been trying to squash this bug with the following quote from someone of greater note who explains with alacrity that constancy cannot be inferred from Maxwell’s equations: (found here in the Feynman Lectures: The Special Theory of Relativity)
"Another consequence of the [Maxwell's] equations is that if the source of the disturbance is moving, the light emitted goes through space at the same speed c. This is analogous to the case of sound, the speed of sound waves being likewise independent of the motion of the source.
This independence of the motion of the source, in the case of light, brings up an interesting problem: Suppose we are riding in a car that is going at a speed u, and light from the rear is going past the car with speed c. Differentiating the first equation in (15.2) gives dx'/dt=dx/dt-u, which means that according to the Galilean transformation the apparent speed of the passing light, as we measure it in the car, should not be c but should be c-u. For instance, if the car is going 100,000 mi/sec, and the light is going 186,000 mi/sec, then apparently the light going past the car should go 86,000 mi/sec. In any case, by measuring the speed of the light going past the car (if the Galilean transformation is correct for light), one could determine the speed of the car.
A number of experiments based on this general idea were performed to determine the velocity of the earth, but they all failed - they gave no velocity at all. We shall discuss one of these experiments [the Michelson-Morley experiment] in detail..." - Richard Feynman
…and with this quote from Maxwell that he specifically believed in light speed anisotropy:
"...And if we attempt to extend our theory [of radiation] to the case of dense media, we become involved not only in all the ordinary difficulties of molecular theories, but in the deeper mystery of the relation of the molecules to the electromagnetic medium. To evade these difficulties we shall assume that in certain media the specific capacity of the electrostatic induction is different in different directions,..." - Maxwell, "Treatis," II pp 794 (from Larmor's Book, "Aether and matter" pp 80)
Creation time: Jun 04, 2018 12:27 AM PDT
Incorrect! (and I’m a person that argues against certain aspects of relativity)
The vast majority of people do not even tolerate expressing an opinion against anything related to relativity and will viciously attack those that do. Most people believe in relativity without the mildest question.
The reason people argue about it is that, within 3 dimensions, the idea of constancy is magical nonsense. Adding another dimension without proof is basically insisting that infinite 3D realities exist for every moment of time.
Doing this instead of simply understanding the previous theory (Lorentz’s aether theory) that relativity was based on, accomplishes all the same things as relativity without magical nonsense happening in 3 dimensions or making up extra nonsense to support wild absurd conjectures.
The problem is that most people do not understand that there’s an aether theory mathematically equivalent to relativity and it has no magical nonsense or paradoxes but still accomplishes all the exact same things.
There is NO experimental reason to prefer special relativity to Lorentz and Poincare’s aether model.
Lorentz’s kinematics was used by both Poincare and Einstein while they developed alternative paths to the same equations and treatments of electromagnetism.
The only thing that would show which is superior is a One-way speed of light test and the philosophical claims of relativity make it possible to think that any physical evidence against relativity is just another irrational aspect of relativity. (relative simultaneity and clock synchronization problems combined)
To recap, relativity adds additional philosophical arguments that make evidence we currently have to prefer Lorentz’s simpler and more elegant theory, be interpreted via more magical thinking prevarications. Huge long schizophrenia-like lines of reasoning to excuse irrationality allow them to insist a one-way speed of light test that proves Lorentz’s theory is better, is not evidence at all.
Many of these tests have been performed successfully and then argued to not be valid.
This habit started all the way back with almost every experiment heralded as proof for relativity but was designed to falsify and did so successfully. (Especially the Sagnac experiment.)
Relativity supporters are the greatest example of psychological projection of the last century. They add infinite 3D realities, insist waving (an action that occurs to a thing, not a thing itself) can exist on its own without anything to wave, presume that wave behaves like nothing else in the universe being a certain speed and also infinite… and then insist that a simple medium that avoids all those inanities is the idea that needs to be eliminated by Occam’s razor.
It would be laughable if social mechanics didn’t uphold irrational ideas. The important authorities in their important hats have all agreed to believe in nonsense for thousands of years and they still do it in the same way today even when they insist they are different this time…
Quick Quiz: Where did “Dark Matter” come from?
It’s what we invented when we looked out to the stars and experimentally falsified relativity. Instead of accepting the evidence, we invented exactly the amount of magical undetectable fairy dust needed to prop up the theory and make it “right” again.
If you’re familiar with religious behavior, this maneuver should sound very familiar.
Creation time: Jul 21, 2018 08:01 AM PDT
Know your History: The first thing to know is that the concepts most people think of when they think about relativity is not from Einstein at all!
That’s right these relativity things and the math describing them are not Einstein’s in the slightest:
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Time dilation
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Length contraction
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The apparent constancy of light
These were first addressed by Larmor and then generalized by Lorentz as a description of how the aether would have to alter light’s path for the Michelson Morley to give the result it did.
Einstein ported in that work and the math describing it unaltered.
This is just a matter of well known history and he even separates it into a different section than his work and calls it the “Kinematical part”
What Einstein did is mathematically describe electromagnetism under Lorentz’s model.
Lorentz was still busy working on something he called a theory of electrons and it wasn’t going all that well. Poincare, however, was taking the same path as Einstein and using Lorentz’s work to create a theory of EM under that paradigm. If not for some publishing and correction irregularities, Poincare would have been granted primacy for relativity.
Einstein was particularly concerned with the inability to determine the difference between moving a magnet past a conductor or moving a conductor past a magnet that went along with Lorentz’s kinematics.
While Lorentz showed, mechanically, how the signals arrived at the same time while appearing to travel different distances in the Michelson-Morley, Einstein took this and turned the concept inside out. (without any mathematical change)
He focused on the arrival times being the same and concluded that light travels the same speed according to you, no matter how you are moving. You go faster and it goes faster in response, but the same escape speed. While this is true in Lorentz’s theory it was for a very different reason, an illusion.
In Lorentz’s theory, the effect of constancy was because reality (the aether) warps our perception (by warping matter) when moving through it. Einstein believed the fabric of reality itself was utterly different from any conception we’ve ever had before and radically different from what Lorentz proposed. He postulated that light is able to travel in a way that would literally be magic if there were only 3 dimensions to reality. It takes a shortcut through another dimension. (IE it’s nonsense without altering reality to suit Einstein’s concept of the same thing as Lorentz) These two radically different views use the same math but in one case the results are thought to be partially optical illusion, in the other, the illusion is a reality defying effect requiring a whole new version of reality for it to work.
Recapping: Lorentz’s concept still works just fine and light isn’t a new special reality-shortcutting unique thing and reality doesn’t have to be warped into a new form to produce the same results. Lorentz concepts work in a 3D reality but Einstein’s can only work in a 4D reality.
Same math, two very different concepts that in other areas of physics would be called interpretations.
So finally, What Einstein did was weirdly alter the interpretation of Lorentz’s work and then applied Maxwell’s equations of electromagnetism to Lorentz’s kinematics.
If you’d like to understand the process followed by Lorentz and more about the differences between Lorentz and Einstein’s interpretations, check out these posts below:
Want to know how the original interpretation still has an impact today? This paper follows the historical origins and modern methods that are influenced by or descended from those earlier interpretations of phsyics:
[1804.01846] History of the NeoClassical Interpretation of Quantum and Relativistic Physics
Creation time: Jul 31, 2018 09:34 AM PDT
He didn’t!
Einstein didn’t come up with the central core of relativity, Larmor and Lorentz did. I’ve seen people try to claim he came to it independently but that’s just ignorance of history and the numerous direct quotes in which Einstein spoke about learning from Lorentz before developing relativity.
What Einstein did is take something that some might categorize (from bias) as partially formed theories and complete them into a usable system.
All the strange effects we associate with relativity were not conceived of by Einstein. The time dilation, length contraction, and the appearance of light speed constancy were already mathematically developed before him and he very directly and admittedly used that prior art as a basis to finish a theory of electromagnetism.
It was the application of Maxwell’s equations of electromagnetism to the system Lorentz mathematically described that completed the theory.
Even the phrase “principle of relativity” wasn’t from Einstein, it was from Poincare who was nearly credited over Einstein with the development of relativity. (It came down to a small publishing irregularity)
Creation time: Aug 06, 2018 08:43 AM PDT
It should have, but didn’t.
Allow me to paint you the picture in his own words…
"According to the general theory of relativity, space without aether is unthinkable; for in such space there not only would be no propagation of light, but also no possibility of existence for standards of space and time (measuring-rods and clocks), nor therefore any space-time intervals in the physical sense." -Albert Einstein 1920
"The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources."
"The influence of the crucial Michelson-Morley experiment on my own efforts has been rather indirect. I learned of it through H.A. Lorentz's decisive investigations of the electrodynamics of moving bodies (1895) with which I was acquainted before developing the special theory of relativity. Lorentz's basic assumption of an aether at rest seemed to me not convincing in itself and also for the reason that it was leading to an interpretation of the Michelson-Morley experiment which seemed to me artifical" - Albert Einstein 1952, in a letter to Robert Shankland
. . . What led me more or less directly to the special theory of relativity was the conviction that the electromotive force acting on a body moving in a magnetic field was nothing else than an electric field." - Letter to the Michelson Commemorative Meeting of the Cleveland Physics Society (1952)
“Since the mathematicians have invaded the theory of relativity I do not understand it myself any more.” (referring to Minkowski spacetime)
"No amount of experimentation can ever prove me right; a single experiment can prove me wrong."
"I believe that I have really found the relationship between gravitation and electricity, assuming that the Miller experiments are based on a fundamental error. Otherwise, the whole relativity theory collapses like a house of cards." — Albert Einstein, in a letter to Robert Millikan, June 1921 (in Clark 1971, p.328)
"My opinion about Miller's experiments is the following. ... Should the positive result be confirmed, then the special theory of relativity and with it the general theory of relativity, in its current form, would be invalid. Experimentum summus judex. Only the equivalence of inertia and gravitation would remain, however, they would have to lead to a significantly different theory." — Albert Einstein, in a letter to Edwin E. Slosson, July 1925
(Dayton Miller won the Newcomb Clevelant prize from the AAAS for proving the effect of the aether and directly blocked Einstein’s nobel consideration for relativity via tens of thousands of varied experiments)
“You imagine that I look back on my life’s work with calm satisfaction. But from nearby it looks quite different. There is not a single concept of which I am convinced that it will stand firm, and I feel uncertain whether I am in general on the right track.” — Albert Einstein, on his 70th birthday, in a letter to Maurice Solovine, 28 March 1949 (in B. Hoffman Albert Einstein: Creator and Rebel 1972, p.328)
“I am generally regarded as a sort of petrified object, rendered blind and deaf by the years.” (Letter to Max Born, April 12, 1949)
“I have become an obstinate heretic in the eyes of my colleagues…” (Letter to Michele Besso, August 8, 1949)
“All these fifty years of conscious brooding have brought me no nearer to the answer to the question, 'What are light quanta?' Nowadays every Tom, Dick and Harry thinks he knows it, but he is mistaken...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." Einstein in a 1954 letter to his friend Michele Besso, quoted from Subtle is the Lord , A. Pais, Oxford University Press (1982) p. 467
HISTORY OF THE NEOCLASSICAL INTERPRETATION OF QUANTUM AND RELATIVISTIC PHYSICS
Creation time: Sep 06, 2018 03:52 AM PDT
Unfortunately it’s only been in recent years the truth of history has become more clear so even physicists will give a completely false answer.
"The influence of the crucial Michelson-Morley experiment on my own efforts has been rather indirect. I learned of it through H.A. Lorentz's decisive investigations of the electrodynamics of moving bodies (1895) with which I was acquainted before developing the special theory of relativity. Lorentz's basic assumption of an aether at rest seemed to me not convincing in itself and also for the reason that it was leading to an interpretation of the Michelson-Morley experiment which seemed to me artifical" - Albert Einstein 1952, in a letter to Robert Shankland
People used to say he didn’t know about the Michelson Morley and now I see a familiar name here claiming he didn’t know about the Lorentz Transform. They may not just be grossly ignorant of history, but could simply choosing some sort of pedantic hyper specific definition of the Lorentz Transform.
In the same vein, the exact set of equations we use and call “Maxwell’s equations” weren’t directly from Maxwell, they were from Heaviside’s simplifications. So if you wanted to play misleading word games you could say that nobody knew Maxwell’s Equations before Heaviside, including Maxwell.
Using that same sort of deceptive weird language game, one could claim Einstein didn’t know the Lorentz Transform and feel justified. I don’t think they are justified in doing so, I’m simply commenting on the human capacity for self-delusion and hero worship.
The truth of the matter is the Larmor came up with the first mathematical representation of the Lorentz Transform and Lorentz only made it more general.
The answer to your question is NO. Absolutely not!
There is no reason in the world to come up with the idea of constancy other than the Michelson-Morley “null.” The idea of light speed constancy is a behavior that exists in nothing else in the universe and no other example even remotely similar to the effect exists anywhere.
There is no rational path of thought leading from any other source of information that would lead to the idea of light speed constancy. There is still no rational or mechanical underlying reason (in modern interpretation) why the Lorentz transform should work other than simply describing how reality must work for the Michelson to be null.
Einstein’s claims of no necessity for aether, transformed and codified by Minkowksi, are a metamorphosis of the Michelson null and come from Lorentz.
Unless you believe in magical things like strokes of knowledge that occur without reason or building blocks or logical paths of thought that lead to them…(just random completely impossible looking thoughts out of the blue that happen to be correct for no good reason) …then the answer is that any claim to the contrary is not just absurd, but grossly ignorant of the theory, and of the process of theory making in general.
If, by chance, someone drops by this question with the recent memetic infection that came from Michio Kaku, let me fix that now too.
Around 2004 a rumor I’ve traced to Micho Kaku started going around in which people started repeating the claim that Maxwell’s equations hint at, or directly predict, the constancy of light.
This is so far off, it’s not even wrong.
To say such a thing is tantamount to saying that if a person described sound waves in a room without also describing every possible moving perspective’s perception of those waves, they are hinting that sound is “constant.” (constancy in sound isn’t possible)
Unfortunately, so many people do not understand constancy (a very misleading term) that they may not understand exactly how ridiculous what I’ve just outlined is, so let me simply leave it with Feynman’s description.
"Another consequence of the [Maxwell's] equations is that if the source of the disturbance is moving, the light emitted goes through space at the same speed c. **This is analogous to the case of sound, the speed of sound waves being likewise independent of the motion of the source.** This independence of the motion of the source, in the case of light, brings up an interesting problem: Suppose we are riding in a car that is going at a speed u, and light from the rear is going past the car with speed c. Differentiating the first equation in (15.2) gives dx'/dt=dx/dt-u, which means that according to the Galilean transformation the apparent speed of the passing light, as we measure it in the car, should not be c but should be c-u. For instance, if the car is going 100,000 mi/sec, and the light is going 186,000 mi/sec, then apparently the light going past the car should go 86,000 mi/sec. In any case, by measuring the speed of the light going past the car (if the Galilean transformation is correct for light), one could determine the speed of the car. A number of experiments based on this general idea were performed to determine the velocity of the earth, but they all failed - they gave no velocity at all. We shall discuss one of these experiments [the Michelson-Morley experiment] in detail..." -Richard Feynman
(from The Special Theory of Relativity Feynman lectures)
Finally, let me say that there is a good reason for the “unreasonable effectiveness” of the Lorentz Transform.
Right now, there is no grounded mechanical basis why reality should shorten up, time would slow or any of the concepts that came from Larmor and Lorentz about objects in motion. Nothing is taught but that it works because no one understands the “why” anymore. They will respond like every parent who can no longer answer their child’s “why” question; by becoming petulant to protect themselves from being revealed as ignorant.
There once was a rational set of reasoning but now people will simply attempt to pass off descriptions as explanations and use linguistic tricks to hide the lack of explanation they have given.
The next paper I’m writing will outline exactly how and why the Lorentz transform works in a completely mechanical fashion with a chain of reasoning that isn’t add hoc, or without precedent and reliant upon appeals to authority like the current one is.
The only way to understand Relativity is to understand the historical predecessors. The only way to value history is the see the ways in which it is still influential and not just relevant, but crucial to solving problems in the future:
Einstein starts from the hypothesis that the laws will look the same to all observers in uniform motion. This permits a very concise and elegant formulation of the theory, as often happens when one big assumption can be made to cover several less big ones... But in my opinion there is also something to be said for taking students along the road made by FitzGerald, Larmor, Lorentz and Poincaré. The longer road sometimes gives more familiarity with the country. — J. Bell
[1804.01846] History of the NeoClassical Interpretation of Quantum and Relativistic Physics
Creation time: Sep 22, 2018 10:40 PM PDT
It specifically came from Einstein and Minkowski.
Lorentz used a 4th dimension like any modern programmer would. It was just a way to associate some information he wanted to keep up with. He was keeping up with faulty clock readings caused by the aether’s effects on a moving clock.
Light would have to chase upstream something that was moving through the medium it propagates in, so in physics prior to Einstein, once we started thinking about particles communicating via waves in the aether, we knew extra time would be required for things moving through it. It’s just obvious wave mechanics.
Einstein decided we didn’t even need to think about the aether because he didn’t know Lorentz was attempting to describe a perspective illusion caused by the aether.
He just imported the math and discarded the mechanism the math described.
Once you decide that the illusion is real, you’re no longer storing faulty clock times, but alternate versions of 3D reality that are not exactly the same. Therefore Lorentz’s 4D storing of faulty perspectives became a belief that multiple versions of 3D reality all exist at the same time as alternate versions of truth.
Therefore, instead of just a tool describing a mistaken viewpoint, the 4th dimension became interpreted as the way reality is able to work in conflicting ways. (same math, different interpretations)
How can both twins be older than each other? Mathematically, they are just in alternate 3D realities that are mirrors of each other. Two conflicting but nearly identical 3D configurations of reality can only be stored together in a 4D array.
Think of it this way. A sheet of paper is 2D and I can draw a version of 2D reality on it and if I add another dimension (3D) I get additional sheets of paper I can draw alternative versions of reality on. I can have as many sheets of paper as I like in 3D reality, and you can have as many versions of 3D reality you like inside a single moment of a 4D reality.
That’s how we started deciding reality had additional dimensions instead of just our math: We removed the aether…
It’s also how we decided that a wave, which is known as just group action of a collection of objects, could exist without the objects. It’s like believing a “jog” can exist without a jogger to take them simply because I can speak abstractly about numerous “jogs” that were taken as countable objects without considering who jogged or when they did so.
Basically, the age of reason has been on a brief hiatus since 1905 but the internet is beginning to correct it.
Creation time: Oct 14, 2018 09:31 PM PDT
Unfortunately, the only very open frontier left in physics appears to be interpretation.
So the answer to your question is not immediately addressable without a bit of digression first. The very act of using math requires an interpretation of what goes where and how it interacts. (metamathematics and metaphysics)
So while we believe quite strongly, and with good reason, in the perfection of math, we cannot eliminate the human factor, even from that purity of mathematics. It’s always there messing with things just as much as we cannot visually inspect the world without the adulteration created by eyesight.
Did you know that right now your eyes are just making up a fudge factor in your vision which, by rights, should be a black blind spot? Yes, you are hallucinating, right this very moment and filling in gaps you never knew were there.
So let me rephrase your question a little: “Is it possible that Einstein identified a blind spot in interpretation that adulterates mathematical treatments of quantum mechanics?”
Yes. It’s quite likely but very difficult to describe, understand, and communicate because it relies on vagaries of human thought and especially the unreliable nature of human communication methods.
The very reason we try to use the purity of mathematical forms and rely upon pedantic exacting definition is to eliminate all of that, but unfortunately there are mutually exclusive factors to more than conjugate variables. Mutual exclusion is all throughout our world and we can see the value of “forest and trees” viewpoints throughout the study of biology.
Does understanding genes tell you organ system coordination in a way a human mind can grasp at once? Obviously not. Does understanding just a differentiated organ cell tell us all the functions of a single organ like the liver in a way that a human mind could grasp? Still, the answer is no.
Could it be possible that the perfection of our methods and our focus at that extreme hides layers of action and understanding of collective behaviors in physics?
Yes!
( for you information theory geeks out there, I’d like to mention error correction codes have analogies in human communication…)
—- Now strap yourself in because this is difficult to piece together! —-
Now first, back to your question of hidden variables and my first point of “local” versus non-local.
Given that “Bell inequalities” are the primary topic of discussion around EPR let’s start with a quote from Bell himself:
“That the guiding wave, in the general case, propagates not in ordinary three-space but in a multidimensional-configuration space is the origin of the notorious ‘nonlocality’ of quantum mechanics. It is a merit of the de Broglie-Bohm version to bring this out so explicitly that it cannot be ignored.” ~ John Bell
The very notion of what exactly “local” means is less well defined than even physicists might think it is but certainly doesn’t conform to the common sense definition of the word. That’s the problem with language, it tends to morph over time and sometimes it’s dependent upon a whole stack of fuzzy redefinitions of other words. Locality and collapse of the wave function are tied together and that means we have to accept the believe something collapses. This, in turn requires the belief that energetic particles actually exist as dimensionless points and that this idea is not an abstraction like a Phonon. (hint: In the alternative, it is)
There are literally nested hidden dependencies that have to be called out to even properly begin to discuss the alternative.
Thankfully however, a system similar enough to quantum mechanics that it’s useful for discussing the abstract complexities of it, has shown itself to us: The Couder “walker” experiments.
Hydrodynamic quantum analogs (please visit this MIT research site!!!)
In these systems there is something called chaotic determinism in which the complexities of the various inputs are so subtle and varied that there is no way to predict the outcome but through statistics. The phenomena are clearly pure mechanics under the surface but look like pure probability. This combined with the similarity to quantum mechanics means we can use the tools of quantum mechanics to predict and interpret the outcomes of this phenomena.
This means that we would have probability densities that would “collapse” upon “observation” but that only means we’ve gained information that separates the garbage possible predictions from the truth of the complex outcome.
The system of waves that are interacting with the droplet are technically non-local sources determining the outcome of the walker’s path but at any given moment the interaction with the surface is quite “local” to any common sense examination.
The alternative is Bohmian mechanics but may also require revisiting Einstein’s version of Aether as well. (not a popular topic)
So first let Bell himself tell you what he thought about the topic:
“But in 1952 I saw the impossible done. It was in papers by David Bohm. Bohm showed explicitly how parameters could indeed be introduced, into nonrelativistic wave mechanics, with the help of which the indeterministic description could be transformed into a deterministic one. More importantly, in my opinion, the subjectivity of the orthodox version, the necessary reference to the ‘observer,’ could be eliminated… But why then had Bohm not told me of this ‘pilot wave’?... Why did von Neumann not consider it? More extraordinarily, why did people go on producing “impossibility” proofs, after 1952, and as recently as 1978?... Why is the pilot wave picture ignored in textbooks? Should it not be taught, not as the only way, but as an antidote to the prevailing complacency? To show us that vagueness, subjectivity, and indeterminism, are not forced on us by experimental facts, but by deliberate theoretical choice?” J. S. Bell. (1987), p. 160.
(Emphasis mine)
Before we go any further, I have to deal with that niggling problem of “Everyone knows there’s no aether because of the constancy of light!” So, let me point out that Einstein abandoned the constancy of light long before and long after general relativity and he repeated this fact but nobody listened. This is crucial to this whole system of re-interpretation!
Volume 4: The Swiss Years: Writings 1912-1914 (English translation supplement): “On the other hand I am of the view that the principle of the constancy of the velocity of light can be maintained only insofar as one restricts oneself to spatio-temporal regions of constant gravitational potential”.
Volume 4: The Swiss Years: Writings 1912-1914 (English translation supplement): “I arrived at the result that the velocity of light is not to be regarded as independent of the gravitational potential. Thus the principle of the constancy of the velocity of light is incompatible with the equivalence hypothesis”.
Volume 4: The Swiss Years: Writings 1912-1914 (English translation supplement): “In the case where we drop the postulate of the constancy of the velocity of light, there exists, a priori, no privileged coordinate systems.”
Volume 4: The Swiss Years: Writings 1912-1914 (English translation supplement): “the writer of these lines is of the opinion that the theory of relativity is still in need of generalization, in the sense that the principle of the constancy of the velocity of light is to be abandoned”. (Note: this one isn’t a very good quote but the whole entry sort of needs to be considered, since it’s all about constancy. Also note from page 278, he’s well aware that in Mie’s approach -that will eventually be brought up again by Hilbert- constancy is illusory.)
Volume 6: The Berlin Years: Writings, 1914-1917 (English translation supplement): “In the second place our result shows that, according to the general theory of relativity, the law of the constancy of the velocity of light in vacuo, which constitutes one of the two fundamental assumptions in the special theory of relativity and to which we have already frequently referred, cannot claim any unlimited validity”.
Volume 7: The Berlin Years: Writings, 1918-1921 (English translation supplement): “Second, this consequence shows that the law of the constancy of the speed of light no longer holds, according to the general theory of relativity, in spaces that have gravitational fields. As a simple geometric consideration shows, the curvature of light rays occurs only in spaces where the speed of light is spatially variable”.
And finally:
“According to the general theory of relativity space without ether is unthinkable; for in such space there not only would be no propagation of light, but also no possibility of existence for standards of space and time (measuring-rods and clocks), nor therefore any space-time intervals in the physical sense.” - Albert Einstein, University of Leiden, 1920
Which all comes to the point. Under a different interpretation of the very nature of particles which requires continuum mechanics, the very question of hidden variables is no longer the same and what the experiments do or do not prove becomes radically different!
Very early in the history of quantum mechanics, Madelung demonstrated that quantum mechanics can be represented as hydrodynamics.
Understanding what exactly that would “look like” is a huge mental gap because it means that the zoo of “particles” we see are actually an abstract mathematical representation of behaviors and interactions of fluid phenomena.
Not only is this mental leap almost impossible for mortal men without a tremendous amount of diagrams, pictures, animation and other tools which no person has yet created, it’s especially cumbersome for physicists who have spent a lifetime working out the problems with a completely different mathematical methodology.
The starting point is something called a Soliton but this answer is the super-short answer. (as terribly long as it seems.)
The takeaway, however, is this:
There is a radically different way to treat particles and spacetime that has the same mathematical outcomes but gives a completely different description of reality via the interpretation of the links between the math and the reality that math represents and how it represents it.
The major difference is in the interpretation layer, not the mathematical one.
There are real scientists as institutions like Cambridge who work with these models to create a better picture more and more physicists could begin to grasp and explore. One of the best starts in that direction was created by Robert Brady at Cambridge:
[1301.7540] The irrotational motion of a compressible inviscid fluid
https://arxiv.org/abs/1305.6822
This collection of ideas has a name that I mistakenly thought I originated, but found one of the major contributors, David Delphenich, had already been using!
It is the Neoclassical Interpretation theoretical physics and it’s just the revolution we’ve been hoping for. A revolution of interpretation.
Below is my paper on the conjoined history of theoretical physics and fluid mechanics, its temporary separation, and its re-emerging role in the coming revolution.
History of the NeoClassical Interpretation of Quantum and Relativistic Physics
Creation time: Nov 14, 2018 04:54 AM PST
It’s very ironic actually. Much for the same reason people argued against special relativity: non-mechanical interaction. (Magical thinking)
Einstein called it “spooky action at a distance” when referring to QM. The scientific basis of his argument is that a signal could be sent faster than light and it violates special relativity.
I completely agree with him on this and find that modern day excuses sound just like religious arguments. They are typically circular and rely and intimidation or appeals to group and authority to get you to accept them.
While he had overarching philosophical problems in that he didn’t like magical effects being postulated in science, his finer point was about entanglement in particular. He usually stuck to violation of theory over arguments about logic and rationality.
You must understand however that his problem was NOT with QM altogether, but specifically with the Copenhagen interpretation of QM. Proponents of that belief system want to make you associate them as one and the same, but they are not.
I personally consider them charlatans and hucksters for this behavior but since they now dominate the field, they’ll win the argument by the “mob-rule” version of people’s feelings about truth.
So let’s specifically talk about the scientific example based problem of entanglement.
Simplifying a bit, in the phenomena of entanglement two particles have their wave functions “entangled” such that they share a fate. The wave function is a description of the probability that a particle will be found in a specific location and according to the Copenhagen interpretation (it’s crucial to understand this is one of at least 3 viable interpretations but often represented as the only one) the particle exists in a “superposed” state that means it really doesn’t have a single real solid physical point it exists at until something called an “observation” occurs to cause the collapse of that wave function. Initially in the history of the interpretation this literally required a conscious observer but in recent years it’s been widely accepted that any recording constitutes an observation.
While every interaction of any kind is technically a recording, we’ll sort of squint our eyes and accept this nonsense to keep from digressing on all the massive gaping holes in the logic. Moving on anyway!
So the problem is that when one of the two particles is observed, and therefore the wave function collapses and the particle has a real true position and/or momentum, the other entangled partner does the same instantly even if it’s across the galaxy at the time!
The problem is actually manifold but most people don’t know that.
So Einstein’s first problem is that if there is an actual change to the state of something that can be used as a signal of an event. An instant signal goes against special relativity. The proponents of Copenhagen daftly insist “no information was sent” as though it’s a magical incantation that can protect them from recognizing their own irrationality. This “information” argument has been around for some time and is a sad ineffectual distraction like so many religious arguments down through the ages but people will keep regurgitating it at you with glassy eyes.
If a collapse is a real change of state then change is mediated across distance and that constitutes a signal no matter how you wave your hands.
There’s even something called “weak measurement” that partially preserves the superposed state such that detecting collapse event is already technically feasible (that is, of course… if it were something real other than the fevered imagination of a long held belief system called Copenhagen interpretation)
But beyond this problem, according to relativity, time is literally different in another location based on gravity or inertial motion. Therefore you could cause a collapse event at a distant location “instantly” and then because the very notion of “instant” is relative but has a very specific mechanism, (It’s called relative simultaneity) that signal can cut through time.
You can be “at an angle” through spacetime with another observe such that “instant” collapse would actually cause the collapse to happen at a point in time you consider the past at a distant location.
In this way they too, after detecting the entangled particle twin’s collapse, could observe a particle twin at their location and cause a collapse of a twin’s wave function in your past. In this way, information could be sent to the past and you have all the retro-causal nonsense of “Back to the Future” and killing your own grandfather.
Finally let’s talk about the discomfort he had with magical unmediated effects.
If things can actually be affected across the universe without anything mediating it then we’ve utterly departed from physics and implicitly embraced an idea that anything could affect anything else. Who then is to say that your magical concentration power didn’t alter the statistical outcome required to subtly change the football game you were cheering for? Maybe your brain particles were entangled with the football particles and just the right alteration of properties via collapse caused the ball to slip instead of hold.
The point is that there was a rule of mechanics and parsimony in classical physics. We used to never buy into anything that didn’t have mechanism. If it didn’t have an underpinning and a “why” that connected it to the rest of reality we knew it was BS.
People have been telling us in church “It’s just beyond your mind” for thousands of years whenever we ran into religious irrationality but it was the ability to say NO! to that argument that pulled us out of the dark ages. Now a new church wants us to believe “It’s just beyond you man…”
There is now a school of thought that truth can only be known via direct observation alone and not by understanding basic rules of the universe. This means that if David Copperfield the illusionist puts a spear through his chest with thousands of people watching and replicates it over and over, you have no scientific basis to claim that there is a mechanism hidden in his coat or the shaft of the spear because you have not observed it.
This sort of madness makes it such that we can no longer recognize problems caused by experimenters that produce absurd results and correct them without our understanding of reality. We have to integrate the new nonsense. We must accept the observation as a new effect in reality.
This thinking originated with the constancy of light in special relativity. When Einstein intimated that the aether could be removed it was a massive mistake he publicly backed out of over and over for more than a decade.
How can a wave, which is only a behavior and not something with a separate existence occur without a medium? It’s like speaking about ocean waves when you do not believe the ocean has any water in it. It’s asinine.
Volume 4: The Swiss Years: Writings 1912-1914 (English translation supplement): “the writer of these lines is of the opinion that the theory of relativity is still in need of generalization, in the sense that the principle of the constancy of the velocity of light is to be abandoned”.
Volume 6: The Berlin Years: Writings, 1914-1917 (English translation supplement): “In the second place our result shows that, according to the general theory of relativity, the law of the constancy of the velocity of light in vacuo, which constitutes one of the two fundamental assumptions in the special theory of relativity and to which we have already frequently referred, cannot claim any unlimited validity”.
Volume 7: The Berlin Years: Writings, 1918-1921 (English translation supplement): “Second, this consequence shows that the law of the constancy of the speed of light no longer holds, according to the general theory of relativity, in spaces that have gravitational fields. As a simple geometric consideration shows, the curvature of light rays occurs only in spaces where the speed of light is spatially variable”.
Swallowing one irrational thing led to swallowing another. It led to quantum woo-woo being mainstream and once that train was on the tracks nobody could stop it.
“I have become an obstinate heretic in the eyes of my colleagues…” (Letter to Michele Besso, August 8, 1949)
“I am generally regarded as a sort of petrified object, rendered blind and deaf by the years.” (Letter to Max Born, April 12, 1949)
- Albert Einstein
Bonus fact! Someone reading this is all geared up to start talking about Bell inequalities and just like Einstein, Bell tried to fix a pile of nonsense people attribute to him, but nobody listened to him either!! (It’s called de Broglie-Bohm or “pilot wave” interpretation and all the magical faith-based nonsense is replaced with rational mechanics.)
“But in 1952 I saw the impossible done. It was in papers by David Bohm. Bohm showed explicitly how parameters could indeed be introduced, into nonrelativistic wave mechanics, with the help of which the indeterministic description could be transformed into a deterministic one. More importantly, in my opinion, the subjectivity of the orthodox version, the necessary reference to the ‘observer,’ could be eliminated…
But why then had Bohm not told me of this ‘pilot wave’?... Why did von Neumann not consider it? More extraordinarily, why did people go on producing “impossibility” proofs, after 1952, and as recently as 1978?... Why is the pilot wave picture ignored in textbooks? Should it not be taught, not as the only way, but as an antidote to the prevailing complacency? To show us that vagueness, subjectivity, and indeterminism, are not forced on us by experimental facts, but by deliberate theoretical choice?” J. S. Bell. (1987), p. 160.
…However, people will never let go of magical thinking. NEVER.
They’ll forever generate endless excuses to uphold their faith in magical concepts. I’ve experienced this tens of thosands of times over the past 15 years and it led me to understand that people can hold scientific information as religious belief while having no spirituality.
Religion is not just something that exists in the physical world, it’s a set of mental behaviors that are instinctual in humans.
Creation time: Feb 06, 2019 06:53 PM PST
It’s different for each of those names.
There’s another answer here by Erik Kofoed (Erik Kofoed's answer) that I like quite a lot even though there’s some opinions we differ on. I recommend you always read more than one answer so you can get the various opinions about a topic.
Let’s start with the easiest one, Lorentz:
"The influence of the crucial Michelson-Morley experiment on my own efforts has been rather indirect. I learned of it through H.A. Lorentz's decisive investigations of the electrodynamics of moving bodies (1895) with which I was acquainted before developing the special theory of relativity. Lorentz's basic assumption of an aether at rest seemed to me not convincing in itself and also for the reason that it was leading to an interpretation of the Michelson-Morley experiment which seemed to me artifical" - Albert Einstein 1952, in a letter to Robert Shankland
The roots of the Lorentz transform can be traced back to Fresnel’s work on refractive index and what he predicted as the “coefficent of aether drag” that was proven by the Fizeau experiment, eventually translates to what we call the “velocity addition formula” today.
The first person to apply it to the problem of the Michelson Morley, however, was a colleague of George FitzGerald who first presented the most direct core math that leads to everything in special relativity. FitzGerald is famous in the story of relativity for proposing the concept of material shortening as a solution to Michelson’s 1881 and 1887 null results. That colleague who first applied the relevant math, was Joseph Larmor who identified the proper methods early on but did not get as much credit because of a lack of generality to his equations which Lorentz eventually provided.
Personally, I find such pedantic requirements for credit to be from very narrow minds since all math in relativity flows very automatically from the change factor which Larmor had identified, but I digress…
The “Kinematical Part” and the “Electrodynamical Part” are two divisions of “On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies” important to understanding his relationship with Poincare.
These divisions are actually very important to understand because the first claims of plagiarism again Einstein are based upon his lack of citation of sources. However, it’s more than obvious that all humans require an assumption of context whenever they are speaking about any remotely interesting topic. To efficiently communicate you must assume some level of knowledge in the listener and rely upon it. Einstein was initially speaking to a very small crowd with OEMB who would know Lorentz’s work.
It seems Einstein was relying upon the fact that his contemporaries knew Lorentz had supplied the “Kinematical Part” and there was no need for him to point that out. It’s admittedly a slight error of informality on his part, but the context is that he was not claiming the first part at all, simply explaining it in a way that would lead smoothly to the part he was actually attempting to contribute: “The Electrodynamical part.”
This is the part which is his original contribution that competes with Poincare’s contribution on the same topic. Lorentz’s kinematics was extended into electrodynamics by two people at the same time taking two different paths. Had there not been a slight publishing irregularity with a correction Poincare had sent in advance of Einstein’s paper, Poincare would be the name we remember associated with relativity. He’s even he one who coined the name we use: “Relativity”
So it is crucial to understand that Lorentz-Poincare relativity is mathematically indistinguishable from Lorentz-Einstein relativity and it is a preference of metaphysical INTERPRETATION that divides them, not scientific viability or mathematical accuracy!
Here forward, I’ll strongly diverge from Erik Kofoed’s answer in which he commentates:
Einstein took a more bold and insightful route.
Getting the equations right is one thing but understanding what they mean is something else.
While I, alternatively, will argue that this is the point in history from which all the problems we have today in physics descend. The influence of Einstein and “his” metaphysics lie at the base of all modern theoretical physics and colors all of it in specific ways. One can even trace such apparently disparate subjects like Einstein's use of a statistical approach to Brownian motion to the dominance of Copenhagen interpretation over Pilot Wave interpretation. Unfortunately everything Einstein is blamed for in the modern idea of “his” metaphysics, is not actually his idea, or opinion in many cases.
Furthermore, with the interpretation of Lorentz-Poincare relativistic preferred frame physics, though mathematically equivalent, there is no appearance of any of the familiar paradoxes seen in relativity such as the twin paradox. (I can explain in comments if needed)
One of the most important things to understand, however, is that our preference is usually chalked up to Occam’s razor, but adding a true 4th dimension to reality is mathematically equivalent to adding infinite copies of a 3D universe. If we were to use occam’s razor faithfully, it would obviously have cut in the opposite direction.
Now I’ve said a mouthful that has eyebrows raised…
So, you must excuse a short digression on this crucial topic of scientific cultural preferences to understand how important it is in slowly pushing physics into a corner. (and for me to explain the relationship with the next character in your list, Minkowski) While most people are aware that Quantum mechanics has alternative interpretations, they often do not realize how much it is just preference and can lead to many assumptions when interpreting experimental results. (and they are usually completely ignorant of the fact that relativity is also an interpretation with an alternative)
John Bell is the most central figure called upon in he commonplace preference of Copenhagen and Many-Worlds over Pilot-Wave, yet his later assertions are not communicated, only his earlier, more inexperienced ideas we call “Bell Inequalities” are brought forward repeatedly in ignorance:
“But in 1952 I saw the impossible done. It was in papers by David Bohm. Bohm showed explicitly how parameters could indeed be introduced, into nonrelativistic wave mechanics, with the help of which the indeterministic description could be transformed into a deterministic one. More importantly, in my opinion, the subjectivity of the orthodox version, the necessary reference to the ‘observer,’ could be eliminated…
But why then had Bohm not told me of this ‘pilot wave’?... Why did von Neumann not consider it? More extraordinarily, why did people go on producing “impossibility” proofs, after 1952, and as recently as 1978?... Why is the pilot wave picture ignored in textbooks? Should it not be taught, not as the only way, but as an antidote to the prevailing complacency? To show us that vagueness, subjectivity, and indeterminism, are not forced on us by experimental facts, but by deliberate theoretical choice?” J. S. Bell. (1987), p. 160.
Again, I must emphasize how important this subject matter is and how much it completely pervades all of theoretical physics.
“Einstein starts from the hypothesis that the laws will look the same to all observers in uniform motion. This permits a very concise and elegant formulation of the theory, as often happens when one big assumption can be made to cover several less big ones... But in my opinion there is also something to be said for taking students along the road made by FitzGerald, Larmor, Lorentz and Poincaré. The longer road sometimes gives more familiarity with the country.” — J. Bell
This was the most respectful way to say that Einstein’s abstraction from OEMB of eliminating the aether is a loss of resolution. Information is lost via abstraction.
What is worse is that it’s NOT EINSTEIN’s FAULT! (It’s Minkowski’s fault for dying too abruptly!)
“Space without aether is unthinkable…” - Albert Einstein, 1920, University of Leiden (5 years after general relativity and 15 after special)
Einstein tried to gracefully back out of the concept of light’s constancy (the incompatibility with aether) repeatedly over the years but Minkowski had codified the concept of constancy into his methodology and it is Minkowski’s methodology that unifies space with time. That is a huge mistake that requires constancy be a basic universal truth of reality itself. Constancy and space-time unification are two viewpoints of the same mathematical formalism. They are not separate in any way.
There is reason to believe Einstein’s initial assertion that ether was “superflous” was not an ontological statement as is commonly assumed, but just a (mostly true in either interpretation) comment on mathematical simplicity which was eventually forced more into being a metaphysical assertion by later discussions on the topic. It was only, truly, Minkowski’s spacetime that changed a convenient observation into a hard assertion, thus creating a large division between Lorentz-Poincare relativity and Lorentz-Einstein relativity.
It is the fact that Minkowski was an influential and central figure in the heart of academic physics who contributed to relativity in 1907 and then abruptly died in 1909 that forced Einstein into a basically impossible position,
When Minkowski first became involved, Einstein quipped about Minkowski’s contribution: “Since the mathematicians have invaded the theory of relativity I do not understand it myself any more.”
After insulting his senior in the community, that same important figure, friend and mentor to many, suddenly and unexpectedly dies leaving his grieving students and friends attempting to honor his final works. (Such as famed mathematician, David Hilbert)
These many quotes of Einstein trying to gracefully back out of constancy, are crucial to understanding the context of that period in physics.
Volume 4: The Swiss Years: Writings 1912-1914 (English translation supplement): “I arrived at the result that the velocity of light is not to be regarded as independent of the gravitational potential. Thus the principle of the constancy of the velocity of light is incompatible with the equivalence hypothesis”.
Volume 4: The Swiss Years: Writings 1912-1914 (English translation supplement): “the writer of these lines is of the opinion that the theory of relativity is still in need of generalization, in the sense that the principle of the constancy of the velocity of light is to be abandoned”.
Volume 6: The Berlin Years: Writings, 1914-1917 (English translation supplement): “In the second place our result shows that, according to the general theory of relativity, the law of the constancy of the velocity of light in vacuo, which constitutes one of the two fundamental assumptions in the special theory of relativity and to which we have already frequently referred, cannot claim any unlimited validity”.
Volume 7: The Berlin Years: Writings, 1918-1921 (English translation supplement): “Second, this consequence shows that the law of the constancy of the speed of light no longer holds, according to the general theory of relativity, in spaces that have gravitational fields. As a simple geometric consideration shows, the curvature of light rays occurs only in spaces where the speed of light is spatially variable”.
This was further compounded by the fact that he was also in the midst of being very publicly accused of contradicting himself as he attempted to develop general relativity past the constraints of special relativity.
This public polemic between Max Abraham and Einstein occurred in the prestigious “Annalen der Physik.”
"Already a year ago, A. Einstein has given up the essential postulate of the constancy of the speed of light by accepting the effect of the gravitational potential on the speed of light, in his earlier theory; in a recently published work the requirement of the invariance of the equations of motion under Lorentz's transformations also falls, and this gives the death blow to the theory of relativity.“ "Relativität und Gravitation. Erwiderung auf eine Bemerkung des Herrn. A. Einstein", Annalen der Physik 38, 1912, pp. 1056-1058; p. 1058.
To which he replied:
"This is, in my opinion, not the limit of validity of the principle of relativity, but is that of the constancy of the velocity of light, and thus of our current theory of relativity." Albert Einstein, "Relativität und Gravitation. Erwiderung auf eine Bemerkung von M. Abraham", Annalen der Physik 38, 1912, pp. 1059-1064 (CPAE, Vol. 4, Doc 8), pp. 1061-1062.
More can be read about the related controversy here: Abraham–Minkowski controversy - Wikipedia
Therefore the relationship between Einstein and Minkowski is so tangled that their very ideas and contributions are not well separated in our current general ideas about history!
So my final point is that this subject matter is CRUCIAL to the current revolution in physics that is happening right now.
You don’t hear about the progress of an academic revolution as anything other than a bunch of name-calling polemics and “bah-humbug” bluster until it reaches a level of success that is something akin to consensus, but I can tell you that revolution is in full swing at the highest levels of credible academia and in places like MIT and Cambridge.
We’re at the point that, like a full re-write of the windows operating system from the bottom level where it addresses the hardware, the task is so monumental and the methodologies so deeply ingrained and interconnected that it will take a herculean effort of a whole community to shift and that just cannot happen in a mere decade or two.
The direction we’d have to go has been known for some time however:
“Well, you see, I don't really know. For me it's not something where I have a solution to sell! For me it's a dilemma. I think it's a deep dilemma, and the resolution of it will not be trivial; it will require a substantial change in the way we look at things. But I would say that the cheapest resolution is something like going back to relativity as it was before Einstein, when people like Lorentz and Poincare thought that there was an aether - a preferred frame of reference - but that our measuring instruments were distorted by motion in such a way that we could not detect motion through the aether. Now, in that way you can imagine that there is a preferred frame of reference, and in this preferred frame of reference things do go faster than light. But then in other frames of reference when they seem to go not only faster than light but backwards in time, that is an optical illusion.” - John S Bell, on the bell inequalities The Ghost in the Atom, P.C.W. Davies and J. Brown, ch.3, p.48-9
History of the NeoClassical Interpretation of Quantum and Relativistic Physics
Creation time: Aug 20, 2019 05:48 PM PDT
"My opinion about Miller's experiments is the following. ... Should the positive result be confirmed, then the special theory of relativity and with it the general theory of relativity, in its current form, would be invalid. Experimentum summus judex. Only the equivalence of inertia and gravitation would remain, however, they would have to lead to a significantly different theory."
— Albert Einstein, in a letter to Edwin E. Slosson, July 1925
Dayton Miller won the Newcomb Cleveland Prize in 1925 from the AAAS essentially for proving relativity wrong.
He was actively and famously conducting experiments in 1921 when Einstein was being considered for a prize.
In May, Miller returned to Cleveland to close out the semester and participate in the 1921 graduation ceremonies. On that very weekend, Miller welcomed a surprise visitor, someone who had come to Case expressly to meet him and to discuss his work. His guest book, now part of the Library of Congress D. C. Miller Collection, contained one line in small, neat handwriting: “Albert Einstein Berlin (Haberlandstr. 5) 25 Mai 21.” The world-famous theorist was travelling with Chaim Weizmann, the future president of Israel, on a tour to raise money for the establishment of an independent Zionist state of Israel. - Excerpt: “Miller’s Waves” William Fickinger ISBN: Hardcover 978-1-4568-7746-0
"I believe that I have really found the relationship between gravitation and electricity, assuming that the Miller experiments are based on a fundamental error. Otherwise, the whole relativity theory collapses like a house of cards."
— Albert Einstein, in a letter to Robert Millikan, June 1921 (in Clark 1971, p.328)
Dayton Miller's 1921 Experimentation: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/...
The long story:
The single largest contributing factor that blocked Einstein's nobel is the very famous work of Dayton Miller, a close colleague and co-experimenter of the Edward Morley of the original Michelson-Morley experiment. He had published a number of papers starting in the first decade of the 1900s which all had results similar to the original experiment which he was able to explain were very non-null.
The original experiment had a fringe reading which was around 7% of the expected fringes but an understanding of the experiment reveals this reading is actually 1/3 of the expected speed of aether drift at the time because it is a second-order effect and therefore is a non-linear effect.
In addition, these data points (original and Miller's) were predictably in a characteristic double sine wave expected of that particular experiment instead of a random distribution. (in an earlier paper he retracted, he had combined the peaks and troughs of the readings)
After tens of thousands of experiments which were double blinded, carried out by a wide variety of assistants on devices made of various materials in differing locations and alititudes, he was awarded the Newcomb Cleveland Prize by the AAAS in 1925 and was given much of the credit for blocking Einstein's Nobel.
His readings were consistent and prolific enough that variations were found to be reliable throughout them. The aether wind reached a maximum/minimum during the solstices and a median during the equinoxes.
Additionally, he and Michelson were the only interferometer experimenters to use white light which avoids an effect in optics sometimes called called "phase locking" or more commonly "lock-in" which would make all monochromatic experiments fundamentally flawed. (all subsequent experiments have not only been monochromatic but usually laser driven which is particularly subject to lock-in.)
Years later after Miller's death, Robert Shankland, a proponent of Relativity hoping to absolve relativity of the doubts it still garnered at the time, obtained all Miller's results and used the same arguments Miller had long ago easily defended, to summarily dismiss the work. One such attack on the work included the assertion that thousands of data points were used. This "too much consistent data" argument is still quoted today alongside the argument that the data was within the error of the experiment. Please note that thousands of data points is the only way to prove that a reading is not simply within the error of the experiment.
The reading of the original Michelson experiment and each of Dayton Miller's thousands of experiments was ~8-10 km/sec with the original (unfounded) expectation being 30 km/sec
The opus of Dayton Miller has been forgotten since Shankland's 1955 dismissal and apparent one-man override of the AAAS committee which was impressed by the experiments.
This significant work which was well known and considered by the Nobel committee is likely the largest contribution to blocking Einstein's Nobel.
The primary criticism leveled at relativity at the time was based upon inadequate experimentation and while political and personal issues were present in the committee, this experimental evidence against relativity was surely the final truncheon used regardless of the agendas.
Only a thorough and personal examination of his 1933 paper The Ether-Drift Experiments and the Determination of the Absolute Motion of the Earth with a very good understanding of optics can fully reveal exactly how and why this work was so important to this discussion.
Creation time: Apr 16, 2013 09:36 PM PDT
The EPR paradox shouldn't be called a paradox. It is, however, a scientific method of proving a theory inaccurate. Since we have found evidence of that theory being proven inaccurate we instead hide our eyes and prefer to believe in magic.
Regardless of all the mystical mumbo jumbo language used to obfuscate discussion of entanglement such as "counter-factual definiteness" it is obvious that our proofs of "entanglement" are actually simple proof that uncertainty is exactly as stated by Schroedinger"
"There is a difference between a shaky or out-of-focus photograph and a snapshot of clouds and fog banks" (a problem with perception, not reality)
The writers of these theories should try their hand in The International Obfuscated C Code Contest because they'd likely place well. Thankfully some of us are quite good at untangling knots of logic.
When we found evidence that particles mechanically interact such that we can know their "conjugate variables" we could have simply accepted that our hallowed theory needs an update but instead, we invented magic we called entanglement. Rather than admit an inaccuracy we'd rather believe in the absurdity that simply finding out the properties of the distant particle actually changes it somehow. What a crock of inane homo-centrism...
This is the equivalent of creating a mathematical theory for the rotation of planets and then when you look out to the stars and find that your cherished theory is inaccurate for some sizes of planets, you simply start to believe there is undetectable fairy dust that makes them spin faster to fill in the holes in your faulty theory. Would you do that and still call yourself a scientist?
Is that science or the very death of science itself?
Solipsism is the root of the insanity that always swallows civilization. We are not the center of universe and inventing new ways to make that true is nothing but blind hubris and schizophrenia.
Creation time: Apr 22, 2013 01:08 AM PDT
Where is "time" reasonably verified to exist, as opposed to just being assumed, in Einstein’s "On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies", special relativity paper?
Time physically existing is a requisite assertion of the paper but it is not directly verified. This assertion is a consequence of the second postulate namely that light speed is "constant", a very misleading name.
It is therefore verified in as much as the paper as a whole is verified and therefore only via inference. I personally take issue with the idea of the paper being verified but that is a discussion for another time.
Specifically however, one must understand that the presumption of constancy as a "reality" versus the illusion that Lorentz designed is the singular reason for time having a physical existence. In Lorentz's formulation of the theory, the constancy is presumed to be an illusion and therefore the one-way speed of light is presumed to differ based upon the motion of the observer. It was a fully classical rethinking of the Galilean transformation with a wave mechanics (aether) base.
This earlier idea of the effect presents us with a fully commutative universe in which there is a never a twins paradox because there is a hidden "time-contraction" and "length-dilation" which occurs as an equal and opposite effect in the theory. (and time is only a measure of change which can differ when the speed of electromagnetism, the governor of change, is altered)
While Lorentz's theory had time-dilation, length-contraction and the illusion of light speed constancy, it was purely rational and commutative when examined and therefore caused no contention whatsoever in the scientific community of the day. The very important distinction is that even with a difference in clock rates and a difference in signal delays due to motion, there was no relativity of simultaneity as is expressed in special relativity. (a subtle differentiation many do not understand correctly)
It is only the new presumption of Einstein that it is not only possible but assumed via inference that the one-way speed of light is equal in all directions in combination with the "constancy" presumption, that the universe becomes non-commutative, the relativity of simultaneity appears, and space and time must be linked and a fourth dimension is required.
IE: In Lorentz's theory there was no space-time linkage even though there was a fourth "dimension" used as notation. It was simply a handy notation and not a true dimension. It is only in Einstein's theory that the relativity of simultaneity makes three dimensions incapable of recording the events as Einstein's theory asserts that they are happening. This effect disappears in a context of a universal frame or classical aether)
For more explanations please see my blog entry: (a second entry coming soon! ...and possibly a grounding prequel post after that...) Einstein's Theory in Lorentz's World by Shiva Meucci
Creation time: Sep 27, 2014 12:57 PM PDT