5 ms·

Einstein: Superman or Super Stubborn?

25 points by acangiano 16y ago

devmonk 16y ago
Maybe so, but he still rules because of relativity and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power
- acangiano 16y ago
  I don't think that the article claims that Einstein doesn't rule.
  - bitwize 16y ago
    It says we shouldn't deify guys like him and Feynman, but I think that stating they're at or near the upper boundary of human awesomeness is still okay.
- eru 16y ago
  What does Einstein have to do with Nuclear Power? Just to stop one answer: The mass-energy equivalence works as well for lighting a fire or for water-turbines as for nuclear energy. And yes, Einstein did some initial work on quantum mechanics.
  - ithkuil 16y ago
    "Einstein's greatest role in the invention of the atomic bomb was signing a letter to President Franklin Roosevelt urging that the bomb be built." http://hypertextbook.com/eworld/einstein.shtml http://hypertextbook.com/eworld/einstein.shtml where he cites the work made by Fermi el al. The first artificial nuclear reactor was built in 1942 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Pile-1 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Pile-1) Einstein's relativity theory and the equivalence of mass and energy is commonly cited has having laid the ground for the exploitation of the energy from nuclear decay, but I have the feeling that research in the nuclear energy field would have continued and yield some interesting results even without knowing that E=MC^2 beforehand.
    - eru 16y ago
      And that letter wasn't very influential anyway, from all that I read.
    - devmonk 16y ago
      Anyone could do almost anything without others' influence if given enough time, but that doesn't mean we can't appreciate those that move things along faster and those that bring the science to the forefront. Einstein did a tremendous amount for related fields of research and the world in-general, not only through his work, but by becoming a superstar and elevating the role of science in our lives. If he could go from patent clerk to a world-renown scientist, then surely others could as well.
known 16y ago
"I have no special talent. I am only passionately curious." --Albert Einstein
- wwortiz 16y ago
  If you ask me that is a pretty special talent.
T_S_ 16y ago
For the tl;dr-impaired: "Einstein, like many inventors and discovers, spent many years stubbornly pursuing his great discoveries — about seven years for special relativity and the other discoveries published in 1905 and seven years for General Relativity. His accomplishments did not come easily or quickly or without error." Well, at least when he was finished, he didn't have to code it up in LaTeX and run a bunch of experiments using code written at 2AM after the lab sysadmin disabled his login for downloading too much data. Instead he went for walks.
sever 16y ago
A great article, and a great illustration of the fact that you can't always judge the correctness of an action based on outcome, but only based on the information you had available at the time. If QM turns out to be right, it doesn't mean Einstein was wrong to work against it. If string theory turns out to be right, doesn't mean the theoretical physics community was correct to invest all its time into it.
baguasquirrel 16y ago
Boohoo, he was on the losing side Schrodinger and de Broglie. I'd give a kidney to be named on the losing side of a problem of this level, with guys like these.
korch 16y ago
Mathematics is not yet ready for such problems. —Paul Erdös It may take another century, but I believe with absolute certainty that Einstein will be vindicated for thinking Quantum Mechanics was incomplete, rejecting the non-visualizable, non-intuitive, entirely algorithmic hoisting up of the mathematical machinery which Heisenberg, Schrödinger, Dirac, de Broglie et. al. built into quantum mechanics. Einstein was on the far-most opposite end of the spectrum than all of them. Einstein was looking towards intuition to explain the physics and the experimental reality, while they were looking for mathematical models which seemed to fit the experimental data, while providing no understanding of what it all meant. Once Heisenberg & Schrödinger made a big break into QM, it's like all of physics jumped on it and forged ahead, damn whether anyone understands what is really happening. Even Schrödinger himself, in his own first paper presenting his wave mechanics formulation, said there is no hope of visualizing nor understanding what Psi really represents. It's all just empty mathematical symbols, that when manipulated according to a particular set of rules, within a particular context, will give somewhat accurate predictions about some physical experiment. It really doesn't help at all the the entire QM apparatus is just plain ugly, inelegant and incapable of justifying itself. I'm not condemning it, nor any of the enormous geniuses who tossed their own contribution onto our great, immeasurable & eternal bonfire of accumulated human knowledge which we call science. But if you read through a few grad-level books about QM, it's blindingly obvious that nobody really knows what's really going on. This is more of a consequence of our current gaps in mathematics, more than a failure of any individuals. Believe me, once someone discovers how to solve The Eigenvalue Problem in quadratic time, all of QM, as it is currently formulated, is going to go away and be replaced by a much simpler model. It'll be just as simplifying as centuries ago when we replaced Ptolemy's epicycles with Kepler's elliptic orbits. I bet even the probability concepts embedded in QM will be entirely thrown out(they were never anything but trouble anyways), and replaced by something even more fantastic & currently unimaginable.
- nazgulnarsil 16y ago
  when I say that something is unknown I am making a statement about my own ignorance, not a statement about the physical world.
  - 16y ago

25 points by acangiano 16y ago

Maybe so, but he still rules because of relativity and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power

acangiano 16y ago
I don't think that the article claims that Einstein doesn't rule.
- bitwize 16y ago
  It says we shouldn't deify guys like him and Feynman, but I think that stating they're at or near the upper boundary of human awesomeness is still okay.
eru 16y ago
What does Einstein have to do with Nuclear Power? Just to stop one answer: The mass-energy equivalence works as well for lighting a fire or for water-turbines as for nuclear energy. And yes, Einstein did some initial work on quantum mechanics.
- ithkuil 16y ago
  "Einstein's greatest role in the invention of the atomic bomb was signing a letter to President Franklin Roosevelt urging that the bomb be built." http://hypertextbook.com/eworld/einstein.shtml http://hypertextbook.com/eworld/einstein.shtml where he cites the work made by Fermi el al. The first artificial nuclear reactor was built in 1942 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Pile-1 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Pile-1) Einstein's relativity theory and the equivalence of mass and energy is commonly cited has having laid the ground for the exploitation of the energy from nuclear decay, but I have the feeling that research in the nuclear energy field would have continued and yield some interesting results even without knowing that E=MC^2 beforehand.
  - eru 16y ago
    And that letter wasn't very influential anyway, from all that I read.
  - devmonk 16y ago
    Anyone could do almost anything without others' influence if given enough time, but that doesn't mean we can't appreciate those that move things along faster and those that bring the science to the forefront. Einstein did a tremendous amount for related fields of research and the world in-general, not only through his work, but by becoming a superstar and elevating the role of science in our lives. If he could go from patent clerk to a world-renown scientist, then surely others could as well.

known 16y ago

"I have no special talent. I am only passionately curious." --Albert Einstein

wwortiz 16y ago
If you ask me that is a pretty special talent.

T_S_ 16y ago

For the tl;dr-impaired: "Einstein, like many inventors and discovers, spent many years stubbornly pursuing his great discoveries — about seven years for special relativity and the other discoveries published in 1905 and seven years for General Relativity. His accomplishments did not come easily or quickly or without error." Well, at least when he was finished, he didn't have to code it up in LaTeX and run a bunch of experiments using code written at 2AM after the lab sysadmin disabled his login for downloading too much data. Instead he went for walks.

sever 16y ago

A great article, and a great illustration of the fact that you can't always judge the correctness of an action based on outcome, but only based on the information you had available at the time. If QM turns out to be right, it doesn't mean Einstein was wrong to work against it. If string theory turns out to be right, doesn't mean the theoretical physics community was correct to invest all its time into it.

baguasquirrel 16y ago

Boohoo, he was on the losing side Schrodinger and de Broglie. I'd give a kidney to be named on the losing side of a problem of this level, with guys like these.

korch 16y ago

Mathematics is not yet ready for such problems. —Paul Erdös It may take another century, but I believe with absolute certainty that Einstein will be vindicated for thinking Quantum Mechanics was incomplete, rejecting the non-visualizable, non-intuitive, entirely algorithmic hoisting up of the mathematical machinery which Heisenberg, Schrödinger, Dirac, de Broglie et. al. built into quantum mechanics. Einstein was on the far-most opposite end of the spectrum than all of them. Einstein was looking towards intuition to explain the physics and the experimental reality, while they were looking for mathematical models which seemed to fit the experimental data, while providing no understanding of what it all meant. Once Heisenberg & Schrödinger made a big break into QM, it's like all of physics jumped on it and forged ahead, damn whether anyone understands what is really happening. Even Schrödinger himself, in his own first paper presenting his wave mechanics formulation, said there is no hope of visualizing nor understanding what Psi really represents. It's all just empty mathematical symbols, that when manipulated according to a particular set of rules, within a particular context, will give somewhat accurate predictions about some physical experiment. It really doesn't help at all the the entire QM apparatus is just plain ugly, inelegant and incapable of justifying itself. I'm not condemning it, nor any of the enormous geniuses who tossed their own contribution onto our great, immeasurable & eternal bonfire of accumulated human knowledge which we call science. But if you read through a few grad-level books about QM, it's blindingly obvious that nobody really knows what's really going on. This is more of a consequence of our current gaps in mathematics, more than a failure of any individuals. Believe me, once someone discovers how to solve The Eigenvalue Problem in quadratic time, all of QM, as it is currently formulated, is going to go away and be replaced by a much simpler model. It'll be just as simplifying as centuries ago when we replaced Ptolemy's epicycles with Kepler's elliptic orbits. I bet even the probability concepts embedded in QM will be entirely thrown out(they were never anything but trouble anyways), and replaced by something even more fantastic & currently unimaginable.

nazgulnarsil 16y ago
when I say that something is unknown I am making a statement about my own ignorance, not a statement about the physical world.
- 16y ago