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I wasn't criticizing Einstein's theories, I was criticizing Einstein's arithmetic. In a letter to Mt. Wilson observatory, he requested that they point their te

I wasn't criticizing Einstein's theories, I was criticizing Einstein's arithmetic. In a letter to Mt. Wilson observatory, he requested that they point their telescope just off the edge of the sun in full daylight - NOT during an eclipse - to determine whether the stars whose light passed through the sun's gravity would be out of place with respect to the positions of those stars when the sun was not nearby. He was apparently unaware that to point an observatory scope that close to the sun - I don't recall whether it was the 100" or the 60" - would melt the glass photographic plate. His calculations of where the stars would be, was wildly inaccurate. Someone - a Mt. Wilson astronomer I expect but don't really know - had to point out to Einstein that he required an eclipse. I expect someone else had to do the arithmetic for the African eclipse expedition. In my original post I clearly distinguished symbolic mathematics from arithmetic. I've studied some tensor calculus, while straightforward in principle it is conceptually quite difficult to follow. Einstein had his tensors right what he did not have correct was "2 + 2". I mean like he'd try that computation then come up with "5".

dalke 11y ago
But what does that have to do with the linked-to article?
- MichaelCrawford 11y ago
  I haven't read the article. What I've been repeatedly pointing out is that Einstein was appallingly poor at arithmetic. I am also repeatedly pointing out that his theories are flawless, as far as we can tell through experiment. When Einstein attempted to predict the experimental results of his theory, while the theory was correct, his predictions were wildly inaccurate, because he was really, really bad at arithmetic. I'm not just making this up - I learned it in physics class at Caltech, from the president of the Institute. Caltech is in pasadena, Mt. Wilson overlooks pasadena, the Mt. Wilson Observatory office is in pasadena. Mt. Wilson and Caltech are different organizations but work very closely together.
  - dalke 11y ago
    Grr! Then at least start your first comment with "I haven't read the article, but based on keyword matching in the title I want to say .." or something like that. There's no reason to repeatedly point out that Einstein's theories are flawless. The article specifically says "To most physicists, such discussions are largely irrelevant, as these classic experiments were only the first ones in a long series of tests that showed the complete agreement between observations and predictions from special relativity." See also http://www.phdcomics.com/comics.php?f=1632 http://www.phdcomics.com/comics.php?f=1632 .
  - GFK_of_xmaspast 11y ago
    Have you considered the possibility that your instructor is not infallible and may have been in error.
    - MichaelCrawford 11y ago
      He was the president of the institute, and a tenured physics professor.
      - GFK_of_xmaspast 11y ago
        Yeah but he's not the pope.
        dalke 11y ago
        I think you have the same confusion I did. MichaelCrawford appears to be showing off via name dropping, rather than providing useful information, which is what I expected. There is a common misperception that Einstein was lousy at math. Some sources say it's because the Swiss and German systems both use a numerical scale, but in opposite directions, so what looks like an excellent grade in one is lousy in the others. Others conjecture that it was because he didn't originally think that high mathematics was important for physics, so was considered a lazy student. (See http://www.quora.com/Is-it-true-that-Albert-Einstein-failed-in-mathematics-many-times-during-his-school-days http://www.quora.com/Is-it-true-that-Albert-Einstein-failed-... for various comments.) It seems that MichaelCrawford is unaware of this misperception, as the claim that Einstein was "appallingly poor at arithmetic" is attributed only be reputation of the speaker of said claim. While that may be a good first step, anyone who was aware of the misperception would know it is necessary to have stronger evidence to remove doubt. Such evidence does not exist. Instead, we see that MichaelCrawford doubles down by appealing again to authority, instead of doing a search for "Einstein bad at arithmeic". All 10 of the first hits from Google describe how Einstein was not bad at algebra and how such a belief - even when expressed by a tenured CalTech professor - is simply wrong. In http://io9.com/the-math-problem-that-had-einstein-asking-for-help-from-1443667839 http://io9.com/the-math-problem-that-had-einstein-asking-for... we even see a case where Einstein did get the math wrong - he had miscalculated coefficient of friction. Had he been "appallingly poor at arithmetic" there would be many more, and much more clear, examples of arithmetic errors.
NeutronBoy 11y ago
> Someone - a Mt. Wilson astronomer I expect but don't really know - had to point out to Einstein that he required an eclipse What a terrible theoretical physicist, not knowing mundane details of astronomy.
- MichaelCrawford 11y ago
  there's a damn good reason some physicists are theoreticians. While Caltech had a physics laboratory requirement - for everyone, not just the physics majors - there was a way that one could be excused from it, typically as a result of the destruction of expensive equipment. I don't really know but would be unsurprised were Einstein one such, when he was an undergrad. It's not well known but it is well documented, that Einstein wrote his four historically-important papers in the simple hope of getting a modest raise in pay. Patent examiners with doctorates were paid more than examiners who didn't have PhD's, you see. He hoped one of the papers would be accepted as his dissertation. (E=mC^2 was derived from one of the first four.)
Luc 11y ago
Here's a much, much more accurate article about Einstein's correspondence with astronomers: http://huntingtonblogs.org/2015/03/einstein-and-the-astronomers/ http://huntingtonblogs.org/2015/03/einstein-and-the-astronom... Also, by the way, the first result on Google when I searched for it. As you will see (if you care to read the article) his first calculation was made in 1911, only 3 years after his special relativity publication, and before he even knew about differential geometry. His second calculation was based on general relativity, and the fact that it predicts twice the angle of his previous calculation is hugely important in the history of science.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- MichaelCrawford 11y ago
  I expect the letter Dr. Goldberger referred to, was the one to Dr. Hale. Goldberger was quite specific that Einstein asked that the telescope be pointed right at the edge of the sun. I've studied german but not in enough depth that I could translate Einstein's letter. One arc second is not far from the limit of the resolution of an amateur telescope. While in principle the larger telescopes could resolve finer detail, atmospheric turbulence leads them not to resolve much better - they can see dimmer objects, but not more clearly. It is only in recent years that adaptive optics, faster imaging sensors and more-sophisticated image processing algorithms enable better resolution. I don't know but expect that when the 1919 expedition confirmed GR, it was done by measuring the positions of multiple stars to determine that their positions were, on the average, out of place. The scope they used was not that big, as they had to carry it out into the African countryside. The tensor calculus used in GR is quite complex. To reduce that to specific predictions of the star locations would require quite a lot of arithmetic. Back then they would have used logarithm tables and adding machines. I am willing to concede the Einstein could balance his checkbook, but numerical analysis is hard enough to get right on a modern computer, it is quite hard when done the old-fashioned way, with logarithms and the like. It would be easy to write down a single digit incorrectly, or to not carry the computation out to enough significant figures. Dr. Goldberg was also quite specific about Einstein's computations - not his theory - being "wildly inaccurate". Finally, that article brought back many memories for me, some good some bad. I love the Huntington, I love Mt. Wilson but I had a rough time at Caltech. I was, for a very brief time, a solar astronomer, but at Big Bear Lake.

dalke 11y ago

But what does that have to do with the linked-to article?

MichaelCrawford 11y ago
I haven't read the article. What I've been repeatedly pointing out is that Einstein was appallingly poor at arithmetic. I am also repeatedly pointing out that his theories are flawless, as far as we can tell through experiment. When Einstein attempted to predict the experimental results of his theory, while the theory was correct, his predictions were wildly inaccurate, because he was really, really bad at arithmetic. I'm not just making this up - I learned it in physics class at Caltech, from the president of the Institute. Caltech is in pasadena, Mt. Wilson overlooks pasadena, the Mt. Wilson Observatory office is in pasadena. Mt. Wilson and Caltech are different organizations but work very closely together.
- dalke 11y ago
  Grr! Then at least start your first comment with "I haven't read the article, but based on keyword matching in the title I want to say .." or something like that. There's no reason to repeatedly point out that Einstein's theories are flawless. The article specifically says "To most physicists, such discussions are largely irrelevant, as these classic experiments were only the first ones in a long series of tests that showed the complete agreement between observations and predictions from special relativity." See also http://www.phdcomics.com/comics.php?f=1632 http://www.phdcomics.com/comics.php?f=1632 .
- GFK_of_xmaspast 11y ago
  Have you considered the possibility that your instructor is not infallible and may have been in error.
  - MichaelCrawford 11y ago
    He was the president of the institute, and a tenured physics professor.
    - GFK_of_xmaspast 11y ago
      Yeah but he's not the pope.
      - dalke 11y ago
        I think you have the same confusion I did. MichaelCrawford appears to be showing off via name dropping, rather than providing useful information, which is what I expected. There is a common misperception that Einstein was lousy at math. Some sources say it's because the Swiss and German systems both use a numerical scale, but in opposite directions, so what looks like an excellent grade in one is lousy in the others. Others conjecture that it was because he didn't originally think that high mathematics was important for physics, so was considered a lazy student. (See http://www.quora.com/Is-it-true-that-Albert-Einstein-failed-in-mathematics-many-times-during-his-school-days http://www.quora.com/Is-it-true-that-Albert-Einstein-failed-... for various comments.) It seems that MichaelCrawford is unaware of this misperception, as the claim that Einstein was "appallingly poor at arithmetic" is attributed only be reputation of the speaker of said claim. While that may be a good first step, anyone who was aware of the misperception would know it is necessary to have stronger evidence to remove doubt. Such evidence does not exist. Instead, we see that MichaelCrawford doubles down by appealing again to authority, instead of doing a search for "Einstein bad at arithmeic". All 10 of the first hits from Google describe how Einstein was not bad at algebra and how such a belief - even when expressed by a tenured CalTech professor - is simply wrong. In http://io9.com/the-math-problem-that-had-einstein-asking-for-help-from-1443667839 http://io9.com/the-math-problem-that-had-einstein-asking-for... we even see a case where Einstein did get the math wrong - he had miscalculated coefficient of friction. Had he been "appallingly poor at arithmetic" there would be many more, and much more clear, examples of arithmetic errors.

NeutronBoy 11y ago

> Someone - a Mt. Wilson astronomer I expect but don't really know - had to point out to Einstein that he required an eclipse What a terrible theoretical physicist, not knowing mundane details of astronomy.

MichaelCrawford 11y ago
there's a damn good reason some physicists are theoreticians. While Caltech had a physics laboratory requirement - for everyone, not just the physics majors - there was a way that one could be excused from it, typically as a result of the destruction of expensive equipment. I don't really know but would be unsurprised were Einstein one such, when he was an undergrad. It's not well known but it is well documented, that Einstein wrote his four historically-important papers in the simple hope of getting a modest raise in pay. Patent examiners with doctorates were paid more than examiners who didn't have PhD's, you see. He hoped one of the papers would be accepted as his dissertation. (E=mC^2 was derived from one of the first four.)

Luc 11y ago

Here's a much, much more accurate article about Einstein's correspondence with astronomers: http://huntingtonblogs.org/2015/03/einstein-and-the-astronomers/ http://huntingtonblogs.org/2015/03/einstein-and-the-astronom... Also, by the way, the first result on Google when I searched for it. As you will see (if you care to read the article) his first calculation was made in 1911, only 3 years after his special relativity publication, and before he even knew about differential geometry. His second calculation was based on general relativity, and the fact that it predicts twice the angle of his previous calculation is hugely important in the history of science.

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
MichaelCrawford 11y ago
I expect the letter Dr. Goldberger referred to, was the one to Dr. Hale. Goldberger was quite specific that Einstein asked that the telescope be pointed right at the edge of the sun. I've studied german but not in enough depth that I could translate Einstein's letter. One arc second is not far from the limit of the resolution of an amateur telescope. While in principle the larger telescopes could resolve finer detail, atmospheric turbulence leads them not to resolve much better - they can see dimmer objects, but not more clearly. It is only in recent years that adaptive optics, faster imaging sensors and more-sophisticated image processing algorithms enable better resolution. I don't know but expect that when the 1919 expedition confirmed GR, it was done by measuring the positions of multiple stars to determine that their positions were, on the average, out of place. The scope they used was not that big, as they had to carry it out into the African countryside. The tensor calculus used in GR is quite complex. To reduce that to specific predictions of the star locations would require quite a lot of arithmetic. Back then they would have used logarithm tables and adding machines. I am willing to concede the Einstein could balance his checkbook, but numerical analysis is hard enough to get right on a modern computer, it is quite hard when done the old-fashioned way, with logarithms and the like. It would be easy to write down a single digit incorrectly, or to not carry the computation out to enough significant figures. Dr. Goldberg was also quite specific about Einstein's computations - not his theory - being "wildly inaccurate". Finally, that article brought back many memories for me, some good some bad. I love the Huntington, I love Mt. Wilson but I had a rough time at Caltech. I was, for a very brief time, a solar astronomer, but at Big Bear Lake.