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Einstein's relativity was purely theoretical when it was accepted world wide based on abstract principles. So, your characterization of how modern physics work

Einstein's relativity was purely theoretical when it was accepted world wide based on abstract principles. So, your characterization of how modern physics works is completely wrong.

pdonis 4y ago
No, your claim regarding the historical facts is completely wrong. If by "relativity" you mean special relativity, nobody used it for anything when it was published. The first real use of it theoretically was to explain the Compton effect in 1921, based on experimental results. It took another decade or so for it to be routinely used, mainly due to its success in explaining the fine structure of atomic spectra and in developing quantum field theory. If you mean general relativity, the first event that could be said to have gotten it "accepted world wide" was the 1919 eclipse expeditions organized by Eddington, which confirmed the GR prediction of bending of light by the Sun. And even then acceptance of it was still limited (see below). Also, even before that, GR was known to correctly predict the extra precession of Mercury's perihelion, which could not be explained by Newtonian gravity. So that was a piece of evidence for GR that was known before it was published. Note that even after the 1919 eclipse expedition and the 1921 explanation of the Compton Effect, relativity was still considered too "out there" to justify a Nobel Prize; when Einstein got the prize in 1922 the Nobel committee specifically excluded relativity from the scientific work by Einstein that was the basis for it.
- pclmulqdq 4y ago
  I believe that GR being true implies the truth of SR, so the 1919 eclipse expedition is actually evidence of both.
- random314 4y ago
  Einstein's speech in the Nobel ceremony was entirely about relativity, which had been accepted as fact since 1908 within the physics community. General relativity was immediately accepted as fact on being published. The same is true for the discovery of gravitational waves. Relativity was excluded from the prize for relatively obscure reasons, the then famous philosopher Henry Bergson objected to Einstein's concept of time at the time that the committee met to decide on the prize[1]. To top it off Alfred Nobel was not a fan of theoretical physics and made it clear that only experimentally verified theoretical results should be awarded[3]. This is at odds with the physics community. No prominent physicist has objected to relativity since 1910. If you have actually studied physics, you will see that special relativity is "obviously" correct. There is no reasonable explanation of electromagnetism that doesn't logically imply special relativity. If you accept Maxwell's electromagnetic field equations, special relativity follows mathematically from it. Theoretical Physics proceeds by exposing contradictions within theories and solving them. 1. Galileo challenged Aristotle's physics by assaulting the contradictory laws for heavenly and earthly bodies 2. Newton gave it a sound mathematical footing resolving contradictions between the laws of heavenly and earthly bodies 3. Maxwell resolved contradictions in Biot Savarts law by introducing displacement current and thus predicting that light is an EM wave 4. Special relativity eliminated the extra ordinary coincidence that prevented any physical experiment from distinguishing an electric field from a magnetic field, even in a theoretical setting, by proposing that the speed of light is constant wrt the observer [2] 5. General relativity solved the extra ordinary coincidence that we cannot distinguish gravity from acceleration while also resolving contradictions between gravity and special relativity. These theoretical explanations were adequate by itself and did not need experimental verification to be celebrated. Because they solved long standing contradictions and coincidences in a simple compact explanation that reduced the axiom set in physics, not increase them. That's what differentiates theoretical physics from experimental physics. Alfred Nobel had an aversion to theoretical physics, that's why Higgs had to wait for his prize for decades. But the physics community always knew that the Higgs boson existed. Otherwise, they wouldn't spend billion plus dollars on speculation. Stanford would not hire Susskind as a professor in theoretical physics if the physics community thought his works are flights of fancy. The same goes for the Lucasian chair conferred on Stephen Hawking, who worked almost entirely in theory with very little experimental verification for his work. Einstein was offered professorships in theoretical physics at various institutions in the 1910s, including the prestigious ETH Zurich well before any sort of experimental verification of his theories. [1] https://nautil.us/this-philosopher-helped-ensure-there-was-no-nobel-for-relativity-235898/ https://nautil.us/this-philosopher-helped-ensure-there-was-n... [2] https://www.fourmilab.ch/etexts/einstein/specrel/www/ https://www.fourmilab.ch/etexts/einstein/specrel/www/ [3] https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/63049/can-a-theoretical-physicist-win-a-nobel-prize-anymore https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/63049/can-a-the...
  - pdonis 4y ago
    > There is no reasonable explanation of electromagnetism that doesn't logically imply special relativity. In other words, the experimental confirmations of Maxwell electrodynamics can also be considered as evidence for SR. That's fine, but it contradicts your claim that SR's acceptance was purely "theoretical" and abstract. > These theoretical explanations were adequate by itself and did not need experimental verification to be celebrated. Einstein took a similar position. As one story goes, when he was asked what he would think if experimental tests contradicted the predictions of relativity, he said something like "Then I would feel sorry for the Lord, because the theory is correct." All of which does not at all change the fact that, unless and until a theory makes accurate predictions, it cannot claim to be "scientific truth". "Solving theoretical contradictions" is fine and a worthwhile endeavor, but it's still not the same as making accurate predictions. String theorists wax lyrical about the same wonderful things you mention, but that doesn't change the fact that, unless and until string theory makes accurate predictions, it cannot claim "scientific truth". > the physics community always knew that the Higgs boson existed. Otherwise, they wouldn't spend billion plus dollars on speculation. By the same argument, supersymmetry would have been discovered at the LHC, since the physics community "knew" that supersymmetry was "right". But of course this prediction by many physicists is now notorious for its wrongness. Beautiful theories sometimes get spoiled by ugly facts. Nature doesn't always do what theorists expect. As for professorships, obviously a professorship in theoretical physics is going to be based on someone's theoretical work, which might be judged by different standards than the standard of "scientific truth". Many theorists have come up with theories that didn't turn out to be right. That doesn't make them bad theorists. It just shows that theories need to be tested to see whether they make accurate predictions. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don't. Nobody gets it right all the time.
- throwaway81523 4y ago
  > If by "relativity" you mean special relativity, nobody used it for anything when it was published. The first real use of it theoretically was to explain the Compton effect in 1921, The Michelson-Morley experiment was in 1887 and a whole bunch of theories resembling relativity were developed to explain it. SR itself was one of those, and the cleanest.
  - pdonis 4y ago
    Yes, good point. Also, classical electrodynamics based on Maxwell's Equations was already known to be Lorentz invariant, not Galilean invariant, so SR can be thought of as simply taking the invariance properties of electrodynamics and "porting" them to mechanics (whereas pretty much all other approaches went the other way, trying to "port" the invariance properties of Newtonian mechanics to electrodynamics).
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]

Einstein's relativity was purely theoretical when it was accepted world wide based on abstract principles. So, your characterization of how modern physics works is completely wrong.

pdonis 4y ago

No, your claim regarding the historical facts is completely wrong. If by "relativity" you mean special relativity, nobody used it for anything when it was published. The first real use of it theoretically was to explain the Compton effect in 1921, based on experimental results. It took another decade or so for it to be routinely used, mainly due to its success in explaining the fine structure of atomic spectra and in developing quantum field theory. If you mean general relativity, the first event that could be said to have gotten it "accepted world wide" was the 1919 eclipse expeditions organized by Eddington, which confirmed the GR prediction of bending of light by the Sun. And even then acceptance of it was still limited (see below). Also, even before that, GR was known to correctly predict the extra precession of Mercury's perihelion, which could not be explained by Newtonian gravity. So that was a piece of evidence for GR that was known before it was published. Note that even after the 1919 eclipse expedition and the 1921 explanation of the Compton Effect, relativity was still considered too "out there" to justify a Nobel Prize; when Einstein got the prize in 1922 the Nobel committee specifically excluded relativity from the scientific work by Einstein that was the basis for it.

pclmulqdq 4y ago
I believe that GR being true implies the truth of SR, so the 1919 eclipse expedition is actually evidence of both.
random314 4y ago
Einstein's speech in the Nobel ceremony was entirely about relativity, which had been accepted as fact since 1908 within the physics community. General relativity was immediately accepted as fact on being published. The same is true for the discovery of gravitational waves. Relativity was excluded from the prize for relatively obscure reasons, the then famous philosopher Henry Bergson objected to Einstein's concept of time at the time that the committee met to decide on the prize[1]. To top it off Alfred Nobel was not a fan of theoretical physics and made it clear that only experimentally verified theoretical results should be awarded[3]. This is at odds with the physics community. No prominent physicist has objected to relativity since 1910. If you have actually studied physics, you will see that special relativity is "obviously" correct. There is no reasonable explanation of electromagnetism that doesn't logically imply special relativity. If you accept Maxwell's electromagnetic field equations, special relativity follows mathematically from it. Theoretical Physics proceeds by exposing contradictions within theories and solving them. 1. Galileo challenged Aristotle's physics by assaulting the contradictory laws for heavenly and earthly bodies 2. Newton gave it a sound mathematical footing resolving contradictions between the laws of heavenly and earthly bodies 3. Maxwell resolved contradictions in Biot Savarts law by introducing displacement current and thus predicting that light is an EM wave 4. Special relativity eliminated the extra ordinary coincidence that prevented any physical experiment from distinguishing an electric field from a magnetic field, even in a theoretical setting, by proposing that the speed of light is constant wrt the observer [2] 5. General relativity solved the extra ordinary coincidence that we cannot distinguish gravity from acceleration while also resolving contradictions between gravity and special relativity. These theoretical explanations were adequate by itself and did not need experimental verification to be celebrated. Because they solved long standing contradictions and coincidences in a simple compact explanation that reduced the axiom set in physics, not increase them. That's what differentiates theoretical physics from experimental physics. Alfred Nobel had an aversion to theoretical physics, that's why Higgs had to wait for his prize for decades. But the physics community always knew that the Higgs boson existed. Otherwise, they wouldn't spend billion plus dollars on speculation. Stanford would not hire Susskind as a professor in theoretical physics if the physics community thought his works are flights of fancy. The same goes for the Lucasian chair conferred on Stephen Hawking, who worked almost entirely in theory with very little experimental verification for his work. Einstein was offered professorships in theoretical physics at various institutions in the 1910s, including the prestigious ETH Zurich well before any sort of experimental verification of his theories. [1] https://nautil.us/this-philosopher-helped-ensure-there-was-no-nobel-for-relativity-235898/ https://nautil.us/this-philosopher-helped-ensure-there-was-n... [2] https://www.fourmilab.ch/etexts/einstein/specrel/www/ https://www.fourmilab.ch/etexts/einstein/specrel/www/ [3] https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/63049/can-a-theoretical-physicist-win-a-nobel-prize-anymore https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/63049/can-a-the...
- pdonis 4y ago
  > There is no reasonable explanation of electromagnetism that doesn't logically imply special relativity. In other words, the experimental confirmations of Maxwell electrodynamics can also be considered as evidence for SR. That's fine, but it contradicts your claim that SR's acceptance was purely "theoretical" and abstract. > These theoretical explanations were adequate by itself and did not need experimental verification to be celebrated. Einstein took a similar position. As one story goes, when he was asked what he would think if experimental tests contradicted the predictions of relativity, he said something like "Then I would feel sorry for the Lord, because the theory is correct." All of which does not at all change the fact that, unless and until a theory makes accurate predictions, it cannot claim to be "scientific truth". "Solving theoretical contradictions" is fine and a worthwhile endeavor, but it's still not the same as making accurate predictions. String theorists wax lyrical about the same wonderful things you mention, but that doesn't change the fact that, unless and until string theory makes accurate predictions, it cannot claim "scientific truth". > the physics community always knew that the Higgs boson existed. Otherwise, they wouldn't spend billion plus dollars on speculation. By the same argument, supersymmetry would have been discovered at the LHC, since the physics community "knew" that supersymmetry was "right". But of course this prediction by many physicists is now notorious for its wrongness. Beautiful theories sometimes get spoiled by ugly facts. Nature doesn't always do what theorists expect. As for professorships, obviously a professorship in theoretical physics is going to be based on someone's theoretical work, which might be judged by different standards than the standard of "scientific truth". Many theorists have come up with theories that didn't turn out to be right. That doesn't make them bad theorists. It just shows that theories need to be tested to see whether they make accurate predictions. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don't. Nobody gets it right all the time.
throwaway81523 4y ago
> If by "relativity" you mean special relativity, nobody used it for anything when it was published. The first real use of it theoretically was to explain the Compton effect in 1921, The Michelson-Morley experiment was in 1887 and a whole bunch of theories resembling relativity were developed to explain it. SR itself was one of those, and the cleanest.
- pdonis 4y ago
  Yes, good point. Also, classical electrodynamics based on Maxwell's Equations was already known to be Lorentz invariant, not Galilean invariant, so SR can be thought of as simply taking the invariance properties of electrodynamics and "porting" them to mechanics (whereas pretty much all other approaches went the other way, trying to "port" the invariance properties of Newtonian mechanics to electrodynamics).
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]