Why No “New Einstein”?
math.columbia.edu
math.columbia.edu
But the basis of the theory of relativity was an empirical fact: that the speed of light appeared to be constant in all directions. The theory of light waves traveling through an ether (like sound waves through air) suggested that we would be able to find the earth's speed relative to it, by measuring the speed of light. But that wasn't what people were finding...
A lot of the really smart theoreticians today don't seem to be basing it on new empirical facts, they're just making clever theories up. Clever people like to do that. Of course, it's not their fault if there aren't any mysterious facts that don't fit current theories - but that's the place to start.
That said, we could have asked, in the 19th century, is there any practical consequence of electricity and magnetism being the same force?
The history of electricity and magnetism reads as a sequence of empirical observations, with explanations eventually following.
From researching this thread today, I learnt that a similar thing happened when Hertz discovered radio waves: they were predicted by Maxwell's theory (which was based on an observation by Faraday):
> When Faraday discovered that a magnetic field can affect the polarization of light, he proposed in 1845 that light may be waves in the lines of force of electromagnetism.
> [...] In 1864 James Clerk Maxwell followed up Faraday's ideas with mathematical formulas that described light as waves of electromagnetism and that implied other forms of electromagnetic waves. Maxwell's work was experimentally verified in 1888 when Heinrich Hertz, following a suggestion from George Francis Fitzgerald, discovered radio waves by directly applying Maxwell's formulas.
http://www.answers.com/topic/electricity-and-magnetism
Can you imagine how much Hertz's mind was blown when the prediction turned out to be true? I got goosebumps just typing that.
The interesting thing is that there is stuff that is (indirectly) observed and actually part of the modern framework of cosmology: dark matter and dark energy. Modern cosmology says that for every pound of regular stuff there is 5x dark matter and 14x dark energy, so it'd be important to figure out what it actually is. As one of my elderly professors put it, "I hope to live long enough to learn what this stuff actually is; my friends always ask me what it is, and I my answer at the end is always 'I don't know'." There are current experiments that try to detect dark matter particles (in cosmic radiation I think), but they don't seem to get a lot of attention, maybe if they find something.
I wonder if he's the same physicist John Cramer that has written a couple of SF novels; John Cramer's novel "Einstein's Bridge" is excellent hard-hard SF.
That's exactly the reason why nobody in the field will take them very seriously, if some outsider would come along with a working theory of the universe and en-passent come up with a GUT that would pass inspection a lot of people would look pretty silly.
I think the chances of that happening are very small, but every now and then one of these guys comes up with something that is not trivial to dispose of.
If there is one thing all great scientific discoveries had in common then it is that when they were first posited a number of people thought 'rubbish'.
That does not mean that all rubbish will eventually be accepted as the new established theory.
I personally think S. Wolfram fits the bill in terms of being a fiercely independent thinker and being financially independent. I meant to write that he does not follow through with his ideas, but that would be untrue, as he has spent large amounts of time simulating his CAs and examining their output. So I won't say that, but I will say that he seems to prefer publicity and sensationalism ("New Kind of Science"), ie. short-term success over discourse with scientific peers and coming up with actual physical theories that withstand the test of time. (He has written physics paper when he was young, but not recently).
Also, to name your book 'a new kind of science' takes hubris to a whole new level.
It would have been a lot more classy if he would have simply written up his findings in a 2 or 300 page volume and left it to others to give it its place.
But that's what you get when you don't need an editor because you've already made it.
Still, if you cut all that out you're left with some pretty neat and insightful ideas about cellular automata and how some things could work.
I'm not sure what the answer is.
Quantoken"
He has announced that he is a quack; this is almost a 3 line distillation of the essays in Martin Gardner's "Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science".
Sorry but I really can't afford to share readers with that particular person who produces so many untrue statements and who parasites on the work of scientists. I've had huge problems with the people who were being sent from that website to my weblog. I apologize if you're not one of these aggressive and extremely ignorant problem-makers but there's no way to distinguish.
Interesting way of making a quality statement about a page linking to one of yours.
Who said that you couldn't strike back at those who link to you, apparently there is a potential cost!
Then, couple of months ago I found the Susskind lectures on iTunes, watched and enjoyed many of them. (They're aimed at a general engineering audience, but I still found portions such as General Relativity illuminating.) Susskind is clearly a physicist of the highest caliber, the last time I heard such first-class lectures was when I listened to the Feynman MP3s during my freshman year. So on one hand, if Susskind says these ideas have merit, they're probably worth taking a look at. On the other hand, there are so many other interesting areas (in physics and elsewhere) where I feel something tangible could come out of that I am still ignoring string theory for the most part. I should note that I'm not very representative in this regard, as Smolin notes, most theoretical physicists at top U.S. universities are string theorists. It's interesting that here in Hungary, while the graduate school offers some courses on string theory, I don't know anybody pursuing related research. Most theoretical/particle people are doing SM/QCD related stuff, which is clearly a cultural thing here.
(') In reality, falsifications and predictions are a tricky business in physics with people making implicit assumptions, circular logic, estimated error bars, etc. --- I think that non-physicists' view of this is similar to my view about police work based on CSI:NY.
Of course, you should expect any prediction I make about AI to be wildly enthusiastic.
We do not have similar environment now.
As for his suggestions and problem, I think society has already found the solution. Whenever you read of people who are considered to have made a great contribution to this world, you will notice that their parents are aristocrats, or business men, or judges, surgeons, rich people basically. The child of these people is free to spend their time as they wish, outside of the confinements of the current system and it is perhaps this freedom compounded with the networking and other means of influencing, which allows them to contribute so greatly.
The only way to open the door to more people is by paying scientists as much as footballers are paid. However, while a footballer peaks in his late 20s, a scientist peaks in his late 30s, so even this approach would perhaps not address the issue and lead to a world of pop science which seems to be flourishing somewhat currently.
We need them, thousands of them, 999 can be wrong but just one right would be enough.