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It's my understanding that most of Einstein's theory was the product of intuition, backed up after-the-fact with mathematics and experimentation. Intuition isn'
by _bxg1 8y ago
It's my understanding that most of Einstein's theory was the product of intuition, backed up after-the-fact with mathematics and experimentation. Intuition isn't a bad compass, as long as you can set it aside if reality measurably contradicts it. In fairness, Einstein never accepted quantum mechanics because they flew in the face of his intuition, but it still got him pretty far.
- madhadron 8y agoThis is very false. Einstein's reputation was built on explaining known phenomena such as the photoelectric effect and Brownian motion. Special relativity was heavily motivated by a pile of puzzling evidence and a bunch of existing mathematics.
- ianai 8y agoAnd he funded his studies, initially, as a hobby alongside a job. We’ve not progressed very far if ground breaking research almost requires a person to find a novel study path.
- btrettel 8y agoWhat do you mean by "novel study path" here? Funding yourself with money received from a job? On my first reading I took "novel study path" to mean new research techniques or something along those lines, which seems obvious and is not likely what you meant.
- ianai 8y agoEither applies really.
- raverbashing 8y agoIt's not false, w.r.t. general relativity And you still need a good amount of creativity to come up with special relativity and to a certain extent, with the photoelectric effect (though we could say that was the 'easy' one) But yes, the puzzling results and existing mathematics were part of it. But there is a reason we hear much more about Einstein than Lorenz or Michelson-Moreley
- iainmerrick 8y agoSpecial relativity was heavily motivated by a pile of puzzling evidence If you mean the Michelson–Morley experiment (apparent zero velocity of earth with respect to the ether), apparently Einstein himself claimed that wasn’t a motivation. I believe it was all about resolving the long-standing "action at a distance" question raised by Newtonian physics (Newton himself noted that this was philosophically disturbing but didn’t venture an answer). Intuition and philosophy, rather than experimental evidence and mathematics.
- dboreham 8y agoAt the beginning of his paper he cites the relativistic nature of Maxwell's equations, and "unsuccessful attempts to discover any motion of the earth relatively to the 'light medium' ". https://www.fourmilab.ch/etexts/einstein/specrel/www/ https://www.fourmilab.ch/etexts/einstein/specrel/www/
- nessus42 8y ago> This is very false. But didn't Einstein write the following in his own book? “I believe in intuition and inspiration. … At times I feel certain I am right while not knowing the reason. When the eclipse of 1919 confirmed my intuition, I was not in the least surprised. In fact I would have been astonished that it turned out otherwise. Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world, stimulating progress, giving birth to evolution. It is, strictly speaking, a real factor in scientific research.”
- arketyp 8y agoGödel was motivated by convictions about meta-mathematics, motivated by his Catholic fatih. Perhaps a purely mechanistic world view would have eventually generated the same result, e.g. Turing's halting problem, but who knows.
- gjm11 8y agoGödel's background was Lutheran, not Catholic, and I don't think he was particularly orthodox. (I have no idea how his religious convictions influenced his metamathematical ones; you might well be right about that.)
- arketyp 8y agoThanks for the correction. I'm sure I've heard biographers (Jessica Goldestein perhaps?) describe his faith as having had a strong influence, but I must have misconstrued it quite a bit as memory faded. You're right, he was raised Lutheran. But his father was Catholic.
- Cobord 8y agoGödel spacetimes to fuck with your intuitions.
- gowld 8y agoThought experiments, not intuition. Thought experiments are kind of theoretical physics: Making an assumption ("c is the universal speed limit"), and thinking about the implications ("addition of velocity cannot be linear"), even though available experimental tools are not powerful enough to demonstrate the implications in a way observable to the though-experimenter.
- nessus42 8y ago> Einstein never accepted quantum mechanics Wait? Since when did Einstein not accept Quantum Mechanics? He won the Nobel Prize for his work in discovering an important part of Quantum Mechanics. Einstein rejected the Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics. That's not the same thing as rejecting Quantum Mechanics. I've seen no claims that he would object to either the Everett or Bohm Interpretations of QM. (But then again, he died before they were invented.) Einstein, by the way, is far from the only critic of the Copenhagen Interpretation. Quite a few physicists are drawn to the Everett Interpretation instead, for instance.
- kgilpin 8y agoWell, he never accepted non-locality. And it turns out, quantum mechanics is indeed non-local.
- nessus42 8y agoIn the Everett interpretation, everything is local.
- codethief 8y agoThis is a common misconception. (The Copenhagen interpretation of) QM is a local theory, in the sense that there's no faster-than-light travel of information. Otherwise you'd have to take into account what's happening at the other end of the universe in order to successfully predict the outcome of experiments. (Which I hear is what the people working on Bohmian mechanics struggle with.)
- nessus42 8y agoIt's been a while since I studied this, and I know that some Copenhagenist try to wiggle their way out of this, but if you consider the probability waves in the Copenhagen interpretation to be "real" and "measurement" to cause their collapse, book-keeping information by the universe would seem to have to travel at faster than the speed of light, IIRC. On the other hand, it's certainly been proven that this cannot be used to transmit information that you might like to at faster than the speed of light. So causality is preserved in any case.