7 ms·

Regarding GR I don't think he really perceived or saw time and space much more differently, as much as was well equipped to discuss it with the likes of Minkows

Regarding GR I don't think he really perceived or saw time and space much more differently, as much as was well equipped to discuss it with the likes of Minkowski and Poincare and teach himself the tensor calculus. I would really enjoy a discussion with someone versed on the history of GR about this because it's something I've been thinking for a while. How he "saw" special relativity is I think related to riding a bicycle and the Michelson–Morley experiment.

jdrc 5y ago
we don't really know either do we? The idea of equivalence is not an intuitive path in the universe of possibilities. We don't know if him or others tried other equally singular paths. And do we know to what extent the MM experiment inspired the constancy of speed of light?
- pvarangot 5y ago
  Really don't know what? How Einstein experienced time? I think that a sensible man like Einstein that was also very well versed in physics and the social sciences would have extensively written if he really "experienced" time and space differently. But he didn't, he just wrote about physics and formulas and their manipulation to describe a collectively experience reality. I don't know how to attribute an "extent" to how the Michelson-Morley experiment influenced Einstein but Einstein himself quotes Maxwell-Lorentz theory of electromagnetism as heavy inspiration in his papers and books and mentions the Michelson-Morley experiment directly many times. "Relativity: The Special and General Theory" is really approachable and even though I can't find a searchable version right now I am pretty sure grepping for Michelson-Morley and Maxwell there will find references. Einstein was inspired by studying movement of particles like electrons in a CRT to come up with ideas for both Special and General Relativity. He was much more of a working physicist than what popular media tends to portray, it's not that he was some kind of alien magician that had an answer for everything because of his alien magic. He was just super up to date on a lot of things electromagnetism and light, remember he also discovered the photoelectric effect before relativity.
  - jdrc 5y ago
    I did not mean that Einstein had a different intuition of time. It s pretty much impossible to derive an absolute spacetime from experience where time is monotonic. I wasn't talking about that, but about the ability of the brain to entertain and adopt counterintuitive notions in general. He was one of the few for whom this ended up being successful. He did know about the MM experiment but i wonder if that was the primary motivator for his hypothesis.
    - Koshkin 5y ago
      For all we know, Einstein did not “entertain and adopt counterintuitive notions” of time and space at an intuitive level. He just had the right perspective, used the right math, and was just as amazed by the physics that came out of this as everyone else.
      - jdrc 5y ago
        i m pretty sure if you ask people about something like the relativity of simultaneity , 100% of people who havent studied relativity will call it counterintuitive
        mannerheim 5y ago
        Physics is full of concepts that are counterintuitive. Inertia is an early example of one such concept. But ideas are adopted based on their explanatory power, and one way you get places is with an ethos called 'shut up and calculate'. I.e., don't think too hard about the 'counterintuitive' nature of what the theories predict, crunch the numbers and figure out what the predictions are and leave the implications to the philosophers. Once you accept that the speed of light is constant in all reference frames, relativity falls out from that. That in itself is a bit hard to accept, though, which was why it was some number of years between the Michelson-Morley experiment in 1887 and Einstein's paper on SR in 1905. GR basically also comes from 'shut up and calculate' after accepting the principles behind SR but adapting them to non-inertial reference frames (and also the insight behind gravity being a fictitious force), but the mathematics is much more complicated than SR, which I assume is why it took Einstein over a decade to work it out.

jdrc 5y ago

we don't really know either do we? The idea of equivalence is not an intuitive path in the universe of possibilities. We don't know if him or others tried other equally singular paths. And do we know to what extent the MM experiment inspired the constancy of speed of light?

pvarangot 5y ago
Really don't know what? How Einstein experienced time? I think that a sensible man like Einstein that was also very well versed in physics and the social sciences would have extensively written if he really "experienced" time and space differently. But he didn't, he just wrote about physics and formulas and their manipulation to describe a collectively experience reality. I don't know how to attribute an "extent" to how the Michelson-Morley experiment influenced Einstein but Einstein himself quotes Maxwell-Lorentz theory of electromagnetism as heavy inspiration in his papers and books and mentions the Michelson-Morley experiment directly many times. "Relativity: The Special and General Theory" is really approachable and even though I can't find a searchable version right now I am pretty sure grepping for Michelson-Morley and Maxwell there will find references. Einstein was inspired by studying movement of particles like electrons in a CRT to come up with ideas for both Special and General Relativity. He was much more of a working physicist than what popular media tends to portray, it's not that he was some kind of alien magician that had an answer for everything because of his alien magic. He was just super up to date on a lot of things electromagnetism and light, remember he also discovered the photoelectric effect before relativity.
- jdrc 5y ago
  I did not mean that Einstein had a different intuition of time. It s pretty much impossible to derive an absolute spacetime from experience where time is monotonic. I wasn't talking about that, but about the ability of the brain to entertain and adopt counterintuitive notions in general. He was one of the few for whom this ended up being successful. He did know about the MM experiment but i wonder if that was the primary motivator for his hypothesis.
  - Koshkin 5y ago
    For all we know, Einstein did not “entertain and adopt counterintuitive notions” of time and space at an intuitive level. He just had the right perspective, used the right math, and was just as amazed by the physics that came out of this as everyone else.
    - jdrc 5y ago
      i m pretty sure if you ask people about something like the relativity of simultaneity , 100% of people who havent studied relativity will call it counterintuitive
      - mannerheim 5y ago
        Physics is full of concepts that are counterintuitive. Inertia is an early example of one such concept. But ideas are adopted based on their explanatory power, and one way you get places is with an ethos called 'shut up and calculate'. I.e., don't think too hard about the 'counterintuitive' nature of what the theories predict, crunch the numbers and figure out what the predictions are and leave the implications to the philosophers. Once you accept that the speed of light is constant in all reference frames, relativity falls out from that. That in itself is a bit hard to accept, though, which was why it was some number of years between the Michelson-Morley experiment in 1887 and Einstein's paper on SR in 1905. GR basically also comes from 'shut up and calculate' after accepting the principles behind SR but adapting them to non-inertial reference frames (and also the insight behind gravity being a fictitious force), but the mathematics is much more complicated than SR, which I assume is why it took Einstein over a decade to work it out.