Hacker News Reader

Comment by DrDeWitt | Hacker News Reader

Excellent essay. The thing I do not agree with is how they mention that one has to abandon natural language to understand quantum mechanics. The only reason why we made the jump from Newton to Einstein through Maxwell's theory is Einstein's intuition of the physics behind electrodynamics

View on HN

> The only reason why we made the jump from Newton to Einstein through Maxwell's theory is Einstein's intuition of the physics behind electrodynamics

I'm not sure that's true. What kind of model of causality are you using here?

Other people were also on the cusp of doing (most of) what Einstein did. Ultimately, without Einstein most likely progress would have been delayed by a few years, and the laurels would be spread amongst more people. (Eg Lorentz' work was on the way to formulating special relativity.)

So it's hard to say that there was any single 'only reason' for any discovery here.

Everyone seems to think they would have figured out Einstein’s theory but they didn’t until Einstein did.

Huh? Where did I say I would have figured it out?

Albert Einstein was smart, and he definitely was smarter than me. But his achievements weren't beyond all the other smart people. Especially individually and with more time.

See also how Newton and Leibniz came up with calculus at the same time. Or how public key cryptography was invented independently multiple times.

I don't think you're the "they" here. I think "they" means "one of Einstein's contemporaries".

"Don't be snarky."

"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I would argue that Einstein made big leaps in knowledge to formulate SR and even more to formulate GR. He was able to imagine the motion of a body through a curved space-time as the source of gravity imo something that most people would not be able to do.

I agree that what Einstein did was beyond most people. But not beyond all of the great physicists of the time, especially if given more time.

Unlike the special relativity, which was just a new interpretation for facts and formulae already established by others (like Lorentz and Poincare) in electrodynamics, so it can hardly be called as "big leaps", and which was fully developed also only by others, like Minkowsky, the general relativity, which was developed more than a decade later, was the most original work of Einstein, being a completely new mathematical model of gravity and inertia. Nevertheless, if Einstein had not existed, it is likely that Hilbert would have become the author of the general relativity.

However the general relativity has no relationship with the equations of Maxwell discussed here.

While general relativity is the most original work of Einstein and the one best known, the second most original work of Einstein is the one that had the greatest impact on practical technology: the discovery that for computing the properties of electromagnetic radiation one must take into account also the stimulated emission (like in lasers), not only the spontaneous emission and the absorption.

For me, Einstein's paper on stimulated emission is the most important of his work. Even if more than a century has passed, it is not yet clear if Einstein's mathematical model is the best for gravity and inertia or if there exists another model that would be more comprehensive and which could relegate Einstein's model to be an approximation that would be no longer useful.

Natural language can conjure the visual imagination of intuition, but it is less specific than images themselves.

Einstein reportedly ran thought experiments in his imagination.

His intuition was visual and dynamic.

That is images that change - animations.

A natural language description of relativity is one step removed from the moving images of Einstein's intuition.

Fields are not grounded in everyday experience but most modern movie-goers are happy with rapid and grand changes of scale and thanks to wizard and superhero movies there exists a sophisticated visual grammar of rapidly propagating fields, strange paradoxes and simultanous weakly interacting realities.

Many of the concepts of quantum field theory can be grasped by a wide audience when presented as animations.

You are probably right that natural language is not synonymous to a physical intuition. However, I believe that the way quantum theories are taught or even understood are in a much less intuitive manner than GR. Something that is evident by the number of different interpretations of quantum mechanics

Reply on news.ycombinator.com