Not Everyone Agreed with Einstein
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Great spoilers for the book Project Hail Mary below so stop reading if you’ve not finished it (and why havent you?): it was such a brilliant idea in that book to suggest that the space faring alien race never figured out relativity still and could still head out to a nearby star and only then discover there’s a massive discrepancy in their calculations. To use such an obscure observation that relativity is not obvious at all as a plot point needs a lot of kudos to the author.
Even for general relativity, it is not clear whether this statement is true, see
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_relativity_priority_di...
According to this Wikipedia article, it seems that David Hilbert came up with a different way of deriving general relativity at about the same time as Albert Einstein.
But he did that only after having Einstein visit him for several weeks in the summer of 1915 and having long discussions with Einstein about the latter's ongoing efforts to discover a general theory of relativity. AFAIK Hilbert himself acknowledged that his final effort was only possible because of all the work that Einstein had already done.
The necessary transformations for special relativity (Lorentz transformations) were already developed by Hendrik Lorentz and Henri Poincaré. Einstein's central contribution for special relativity was to reinterpret these equations in a novel way.
As compared to SR as Einstein originally developed it, yes. But note that modern usage of SR often makes use of the same differential geometry tools that were developed for GR--because those tools turn out to be useful even in flat spacetime.
> But once SR was clear it was "just" an extension to the same ideas.
Again, if that were the case one would not have expected it to take ten years to get to GR. Yes, Einstein had to learn about Riemannian geometry from Grossmann, but that didn't take him anywhere close to the ten years to do. He spent most of that ten years struggling with the physical concepts involved, not learning the math.
> The leap here was the original idea that gave rise to SR. The rest could have been worked out by most physicist of the time.
This is strongly contradicted by the fact that there were many other physicists working on a relativistic theory of gravity at the time--and they all got it wrong. Only Einstein, and Hilbert (who was a mathematician, not a physicist) after getting key input from Einstein, got it right.
This seems like a hyperbole to make a point about how smart Einstein was.
From what I've seen in past discussions like this, including one on HN [0], is that it would've been delayed by 1-5 years. And it wasn't just the Mercury's orbit. There were fundamental questions about electormagnetism that had unclear answers with the predominant theory of aether.
> The new feature of it was the realization of the fact that the bearing of the Lorentz transformation transcended its connection with Maxwell's equations and was concerned with the nature of space and time in general. A further new result was that the "Lorentz invariance" is a general condition for any physical theory.
This seems like a massive leap even given what Lorentz and Poincaré were coming up with, which is all at that point trying to understand what the math leads to and no real intuition on what that means in reality. Einstein on the other hand came up with something that had almost no mathematical underpinning (his first paper had no derivation). The final conclusion of the author in that comment, that this insight was only a year away, is thus completely unfounded in my opinion.
In that thread itself someone quotes Feynman concluding the same. I’ll listen to Kip Thorne, Feynman and my own intuition for now until someone gives a fairly thorough reasoning for their skepticism then.
I would also make a point of not quoting Einstein himself on such nuanced takes. He spent basically 30 years just commenting on his own theory and its motivations every single day. One would assume he would have decided to be more modest on some of those occasions in a mere whim or to placate that particular audience.
Once you start trying to measure the speed of light compared to your own speed it becomes quite obvious that there’s a problem with not being able to measure anything but c regardless of the movement of source and receiver.
All other observations likely would have taken decades to stumble upon as well. I see no argument still why any other scientist would have made the relativity leap (which to be clear isn’t directly a requirement for deriving E=mC^2).
Einstein is also credited with saying that "Two things are infinite: The universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe."
Many people don't want Einstein to have been right, and their motivations vary. Some really really really want FTL to be a thing. Some desire an absolute frame of reference. Some have philosophical issues with the concepts. A few seem to be under the impression that Michelson-Morley was done just the one time and that was the end of any attempts to falsify.
Do we? It's incompatible with the standard model, but that's not the same as "not quite right".
Not necessarily. "Not quite right" implies that GR makes wrong predictions for experiments that have already been done--which is wrong. "Incomplete" just means that GR might not cover some experiments that have not yet been done.
(https://www.nytimes.com/1935/07/11/archives/tesla-79-promise...)
That certainly didn't age well.
I think the most interesting thing about him is that, despite all his work in taming electricity, he disagreed with the existence of electrons (or really any subatomic particles).
https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=tCcDAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA171&re...
The article immediately distinguishes between philosophy and science while you appear to be, for some reason, conflating them:
Atomism [a privative and temnein to cut, i.e. indivisible] is the system of those who hold that all bodies are composed of minute, indivisible particles of matter called atoms. We must distinguish between
1) atomism as a philosophy and
2) atomism as a theory of science.
And I mentioned "atomism as a theory of science" under the instrumentalism part of my comment. In Catholic Theology, philosophy always means "ontological interpretation". That section you quoted is saying that Catholics are allowed to believe in atomism as an instrumental model, but not as the ultimate interpretation of how the Universe works.
That's a rather bold claim. It implies that Catholic theologians are, among other things, uninterested in ethics, aesthetics, metaphysics, and epistemology, just to name a few other subjects of interest to philosophers. I'm frankly baffled that you would reach such a conclusion, but OK.
> Catholics are allowed to believe in atomism as an instrumental model, but not as the ultimate interpretation of how the Universe works
Well to be Catholic you have to believe in an ultimate eternal God, so ultimately we believe that everything in the universe is both created and sustained by Him and everything observable is some kind of instrumentality, be it evolution, quantum electrodynamics, or anything else. Nevertheless that doesn't in any pragmatic way restrict one's ability to form scientific hypotheses or theories. Indeed it's arguably closer to the Newtonian ideal of focusing on accurate description of phenomena.
Where can I learn more about instrumentality (besides Neon Genesis Evangelion)?
In short, instrumentality deals with the how of God achieving His will. God, the incarnation excepted, is pure spirit, so in order to achieve His will materially He created and then used physical laws, among other things. The Big Bang is the greatest billiard break in cosmic history. So, for the well-formed Catholic, the possibility and apparent likelihood that God achieved the creation of Man using, among other instruments, evolution from lower life forms, isn't at all a problem.
Tesla also died 80 years ago.
The Catholic encyclopedia was finished in 1912, tesla was 56 at the time.
Why should we be surprised people disagreed?
The concept of the photon seems unnecessary and confusing to people, if not just plain wrong.
Lorentz ether theory seems like a better theory (or interpretation of the empirical data at least) than special relativity.
The last major contribution of Einstein is general relativity, which I suspect is incorrect too. (Obviously I can't offer a better theory though)
Like, for example, what is this device detecting? https://www.thorlabs.com/newgrouppage9.cfm?objectgroup_id=52...
As far as special relativity goes, the predictions of Lorentz ether theory and SR are identical. SR is basically a metaphysical theory that discards an absolute reference frame, while Lorentz ether theory keeps it.
I can't tell if you're pranking us, but of course there is. Without thinking too hard about experimental evidence: squeezed states and the Casimir effect both spring to mind. Hell, the photoelectric effect originally led Einstein directly to the quantization of the EM field. Or Compton scattering as another example.
EDIT: for example: https://thiscondensedlife.wordpress.com/2019/08/25/
> The only quantisation needed in the Casimir effect is boundary-induced quantisation, that EM waves should have, right?
No. You need to explain why there is attraction in the absence of EM waves.
fyi the various noise measurements from squeezed states might hold interest for you.
My take after skimming [1] plus references therein, plus those that cited [1]: There is a cottage industry of papers trying to replay the early work on QED. Each paper takes one effect as it was known around 1930 or so, and then explains it using something other than QED.
I find the papers interesting in an academic sense. However, as guidance for how the world works, they build a box around the things they are trying to explain, but ignore the more difficult aspects of experimental data found after the 1930s. For the case of Compton, there are higher order scattering processes which lead to nonlinear Compton scattering, which happened in the 1960s.
To make a specific answer to your comment: My quick read is that Schrodinger's explanation fails at higher intensities, since the semiclassical treatment of E&M will increase only the amplitude of the radiation field, whereas nonlinear Compton scattering will need something in the way of additional terms or mechanisms to explain the experimental results.
More generally, that set of papers seemed to address only the singleton mechanisms but ignored the more general problem of noise and statistics. For example: Increasing the field amplitude in various experiments will reveal the shot-noise profile of photons, but I saw nobody try to approach that problem in my brief survey.
In any case, thanks for the reference. It lead to some interesting reading.
[1] Strnad, J. (1986). The Compton effect-Schrodinger’s treatment. European Journal of Physics, 7(4), 217–221. doi:10.1088/0143-0807/7/4/001
I haven't gone through any of the maths in detail. I do however have a semi-classical electrodynamics computer simulation that I occasionally work on, so why do the maths when you can just run a simulation :)
When I get back to it maybe I will try and simulate Compton scattering or the photoelectric effect.
EDIT: will try and find Compton paper later, going for walk now.
Casimir is not about fluctuations. There is an attraction between metal plates in the absence of electromagnetic radiation.
And as I think it through, an even simpler example is the laser. Bose-Einstein statistics require that you have indistinguishable particles to multiply occupy a state. Without the indistinguishability, you don't end up with the right statistics. Without the right statistics, you don't end up with the right Einstein rate equations, and you'll be missing the stimulated emission term. Without that term, you will be missing the lasing action, as well as secondary effects such as noise statistics.
Nice to see a stand taken on uncommon ground.
Yes, there is: we can make Fock states of the EM field in the laboratory. Such states can only exist if the EM field is quantized.
More generally, phenomena like bunching and antibunching are only possible if the EM field is quantized. Quantization of matter alone is not enough.
Is there a classical explanation of entangled photons experiments?
A theory can be wrong, or approximate, and still be useful for calculations and intuition. For example Newton's gravity theory is wrong (or approximate) but still useful.
For your education: one of the main sources for the development of the quantum theory of light was the ultraviolet catastrophe. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultraviolet_catastrophe
Raising ether theories is usually troublesome especially pre-Lorentz concepts such as the luminiferous ether but one can't deny the fact that c = 1/√(ε0 μ0).
If we agree that this relationship is accurate then it seems to me that that just saying the vacuum permittivity and permeability are universal constants is a bit of a cop-out. If ε0 or μ0 change then so does c. Whether one uses the word ether or some other, there's something about a vacuum that's very significant/determines the rate of causality, etc.
Edit: seems to me if we had a better understanding of that relationship then we'd likely have an answer to the fine structure conundrum.
Where would we have run the experiment to confirm/deny the association you're describing?
EDIT: not sure if you are familiar with relativistic length contraction and time dilation or not
Where would we have run the experiment to confirm/deny the association you're describing?
What is your most charitable interpretation of what I just asked you?
It does no such thing. An "absolute rest frame" would be a rest frame that is inherent in the laws of physics, independent of the distribution of matter and energy. The CMBR only provides a "rest frame" in terms of its distribution of energy, and any piece of matter or energy will do that. For example, you, as a piece of matter, define a "rest frame"--does that mean your rest frame is absolute? Of course not.
Like the fundamental original reasons why we went to quantum theory itself seems like we made some leaps in hypothesis (charged electron can’t orbit without losing energy, if the universe is filled with an ether then everything will slow down, etc) only to never actually solve that original conundrum ever.
To be fair, some early conceptions of the ether included it flowing, like a liquid, which we don't think it does currently, and which quantum fields don't do.
If you have drunk the special relativity kool-aid, you might also be confused about how the ether/quantum field can be 'real' or something physical, if everything is relative. The Lorentz ether theory viewpoint helps with that confusion though, I think.
Individual quantum fields are not Lorentz invariant; they define distributions of matter and energy that look different in different frames.
The hypothetical ether of Lorentz ether theory, however, is Lorentz invariant: it is basically the vacuum in EM theory. So it looks the same in all frames. (Yes, LET claims that there is one particular frame that is the "absolute rest frame"--but there is no way of telling which frame it is because the ether looks the same in all frames.)
To be more precise, any quantum field state except the vacuum will not be Lorentz invariant. That's not something specific to quantum fields: any non-vacuum state in classical special relativity will also not be Lorentz invariant. It will look different in different frames. That's just an obvious consequence of things like length contraction, time dilation, the fact that the energy and momentum of an object are different in different frames, etc.