agonz253

Two mathematical physicists took the time to go through his talk on it and pointed out serious flaws with it, which the author didn't address in his paper and has gone on to ignore.

[1] https://timothynguyen.files.wordpress.com/2021/02/geometric_...

[2] https://decoding-the-gurus.captivate.fm/episode/special-epis...

> “When I read Helmholtz for the first time, it seemed so odd that you were not at my side and today, this is not getting better. I find the work we do together very good, healing and also easier.”

Note that this was written when they were both undergraduate students and would study together.

It was Marcel Grossman who introduced him to Riemman's work: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcel_Grossmann

There is no evidence that his wife provided any of the "mathematical muscle needed for GR", nor is there reason to suspect that she would have been in a position to do so, since she was not a mathematician and had failed the undergraduate physics degree at the institute where she met Einstein (Einstein himself barely passed though).

[0] https://www.springer.com/gp/book/9781402039997

> There are no startling discoveries to be made of facts, not open to the methods of science, yet accessible “from the armchair” through some blend of intuition, pure reason and conceptual analysis.

A counterexample of this is the kind of philosophical speculations that led to the General Theory of Relativity. E.g see the first 3 sections in Einstein's paper from 1916 "The Foundation of the General Theory of Relativity".

I agree with the sentiment of this quote but I think that sometimes there are indeed truly fruitful ideas to be found buried in a given philosophical work. What's hard is spotting them by weeding out all the BS. David Hume's and Mach's work certainly influenced the development of scientific ideas. For one, their empiricism taught us to be wary of concepts about which we cannot talk about in an operational sense, such as absolute space and absolute time. Both SR and QM owe something to this view. It's funny that some of the thinking employed in the formation of GR actually resembles more the kind of philosophizing employed by ancient thinkers, and would perhaps be dismissed as "metaphysical" by most scientists today.

Here's the original paper: http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2016/160719/ncomms12172/full/nc...

Dropping something the mass of a tennis ball into this pulsar(assuming 2 solar masses for it) would generate approximately the same amount of energy upon impact as that of 12 atomic bombs like the one tested in New Mexico, and it would reach the surface at 60% the speed of light...relativistic effects aside

>This assumes that wealth is a zero-sum game, so it can be traded around but not created.

>And it very much is.

You may be confusing wealth with money, which is in fact a zero-sum game. Wealth, on the other hand, can be created and it's been constantly created all the time throughout history. The section on the Pie Fallacy in this article may help clarify it: http://paulgraham.com/wealth.html