Even Einstein Doubted His Gravitational Waves (astronomy.com) 156
Flash Modin writes: In 1936, twenty years after Albert Einstein introduced the concept, the great physicist took another look at his math and came to a surprising conclusion. 'Together with a young collaborator, I arrived at the interesting result that gravitational waves do not exist, though they had been assumed a certainty to the first approximation,' he wrote in a letter to friend Max Born. Interestingly, his research denouncing gravitational waves was rejected by Physical Review Letters, the journal that just published proof of their existence. The story shows that even when Einstein's wrong, it's because he was already right the first time.
Re:EinsteinEinsteinEinstein (Score:4, Funny)
and Beetlejuice
Erh... so? (Score:5, Insightful)
Seriously, I fail to see the story here. Scientist ponders problem. Scientist comes to conclusion. Scientist publishes conclusion. Peer review gives it the go. Scientists rethinks problem. Scientist thinks he made a mistake. Peer review looks at new conclusion and thinks first solution was correct. And, lo and behold, it was.
So the scientific method works, is that what the article should tell us?
Re:Erh... so? (Score:5, Insightful)
So the scientific method works, is that what the article should tell us?
Exactly. I'm not sure what the point is here. And TFS's conclusion is just weird: "The story shows that even when Einstein's wrong, it's because he was already right the first time." Actually, if you read TFA, it has a quote from Einstein himself about how he admitted he got things wrong and sometimes his errors had been published.
The only vaguely interesting aspect to TFA is how Einstein apparently got upset that someone dared to do peer-review on his paper before simply publishing it. Granted, peer-review was not a universal standard in the 1930s (at least not peer-review by external reviewers -- review by expert editorial boards was standard long before that), but Einstein still seems to have reacted quite poorly in this case... refusing to admit he was wrong, and later finding his error and not acknowledging he could have found it had he listened to the reviewer's criticism.
The lesson here is NOT that Einstein was always right. He was clearly fallible and recognized himself to be so. On the other hand, he also seems to have a tendency (a natural human one) to refuse to acknowledge errors. That's one of the reasons peer review exists, since scientists often -- consciously or unconsciously -- refuse to see errors in their own logic. TFA's lesson actually shows us that even great scientists can be WRONG, but a proper scientific process can help to weed out those errors.
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He summoned a spooky fist at a distance.
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whole groups of people ( say it specialists or collectivists) can hypnotize themselves into believing their erroneous ideas.
from my experience it is futile and expensive to try to rescue them from their hypnotic state.
let's not bring republicans into this.
Re:Erh... so? (Score:5, Interesting)
Doubt is a trait of the sound mind (Score:3)
Speculating on the ground-breaking physical laws of the universe has to be fraught with doubt and self-reversal.
Ignorance is the primary reservoir of complete confidence in nature.
Re:Doubt is a trait of the sound mind (Score:5, Funny)
New Einstein meme: The Most Interesting Physicist in the World.
"I'm not always wrong, but when I am, it's because I was right before."
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If I had mod points that would be +1 funny
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He kind of embodies one of my favorite sayings.
"Me, no. I'm never wrong. I thought I was wrong once, but I was mistaken."
The uncertainty runs much deeper than doubt (Score:1)
It's much worse than that. Mere doubt doesn't even come close.
Don't forget that the term "Laws of Physics" is just a pop-sci term to simplify the topic for the layman. In fact there are no such laws or if they exist then they are unknowable to us. The things which we loosely call "Laws of Physics" are actually "Laws of Physicists", in other words merely mental abstractions conjured up by human
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We essentially construct theories to explain the observable symptoms of the universe in action, as yet not worthy to understand the machinations of its underlying condition.
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It's much worse than that. Mere doubt doesn't even come close.
Don't forget that the term "Laws of Physics" is just a pop-sci term to simplify the topic for the layman. In fact there are no such laws or if they exist then they are unknowable to us. The things which we loosely call "Laws of Physics" are actually "Laws of Physicists", in other words merely mental abstractions conjured up by human minds. Reality may not even understand or obey mathematics for all we know, and it certainly doesn't take the slightest bit of notice of any "laws" which we conjure up. All we're doing is expressing (roughly) how reality is seen to behave, and we're happy when we find a good mental proxy for that behaviour within a limited range of conditions. We make only very narrow claims, and they're infinitely distant from being actual "Laws of Physics".
The role of the scientist is to dream up mathematical theories which accurately model the observed behaviour of reality, without having any idea of what's really behind the behavioral facade. And that's really mind blowing, because it's turtles invented by humans all the way down, yet it approximates to what we observe fairly well in most areas.
To make matters worse, remember that the physicist doesn't have "root access to reality", to use a Unix metaphor. When we run experiments, we are using one behavioral abstraction of reality (a "user-mode API") to probe another behavioral abstraction of reality, as we totally lack any ability to see inside that "kernel". All we can see and touch and use is reality's behaviour and we can't see how that behaviour is actually implemented. For all we know it's all implemented by incredibly fast gerbils scurrying around behind the behavioral veil. We will never know --- we don't have root. All we can do is theorize what causes certain behaviours, and these theories are created entirely out of human-invented abstractions.
And so, when we oh-so-confidently talk about (say) an electron, we know very well that what we are talking about is our model of a particular behaviour, without having any idea whatsoever what actually exists at that spot. All we know (with incredible precision) is how the thing at that spot behaves, and we can rely totally on that behaviour despite "electron" being only a human abstraction.
It really is a major accomplishment, a triumph of the mind.
standing ovation!
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I'm not so sure about that. Recent (very) evidence indicates that gravitational waves exist. Gravitons [wikipedia.org] are still hypothetical.
"because he was already right the first time"... (Score:2)
...except, of course, about quantum interactions ("God does not play at dice" and "spooky action at a distance"). Or the unified field theory that he spent the last decades of his life chasing unsuccessfully.
You don't have to be right every time to be a scientific giant.
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I'm not sure unified field theory was wrong so much as a failed search. Researchers are still looking for it today - we know Relativity and Quantum Mechanics can't both be right, suggesting that one or both will eventually be replaced by something that can be unified.
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Why is it that R and QR can't both be right? I keep hearing this idea, but I haven't heard a concise description of why this is thought to be so. Appropriate linkage, or argument, would be helpful.
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I forget exactly, I think a big one is that they demand different levels for the vacuum energy... as I dimly recall Relativity demands it be low (zero?), which QM demands it be high, potentially infinite.
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It's not that they can't both be right (in fact, both are correct, insofar as calling a theory "correct" makes sense in physics), it's that they break down in certain regimes. This is the absolute last thing from surprising: every single physical theory we know of so far breaks down at some point. Newtonian mechanics breaks down at high speeds (relative to c). Classical mechanics breaks down in the quantum limit, and is replaced by quantum mechanics. Quantum mechanics breaks down in the relativistic limit (
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Here, watch this:
https://www.youtube.com/playli... [youtube.com]
It's a bit long but pretty good. It's The Fabric of the Cosmos, from NOVA, featuring Brian Greene. It's well worth the time investment.
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Science is much more interesting to a scientist when you're proven wrong. And no scientists minds that. Not really.
And doubting your own science is exactly how you reject those millions of private hypotheses that couldn't have led to anything as they were wrong, and drove you to work out why the maths still pointed that way, and didn't lead you down the garden path of easy assumptions.
For scientists "being wrong" is merely a pathway to "being right". But sometimes they overshoot and it takes 100 years to
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And no scientists minds that. Not really.
We must be hanging around different kinds of scientist. From my point of view I've seen people with massive egos. Those egos dislike even entertaining the possibility of being wrong, and usually they get where they are because they're a) good at bullying their fellow scientists and b) good at bullying people into giving the grant money to them instead of other scientists. A lot of them are even prepared to falsify results to support their continuing grant money and research. While I agree that they are the
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If he freaked about God playing Dice, can you imagine his reaction to Feigenbaum's constants; it was kind of like knowing how many sides the die had.
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This is off topic, and not a defence of anything that Einstein said, but...
"God does not play at dice"
Contrary to what most lay-people believe, quantum mechanics (QM) in no way requires that there be any random element to physics, or the universe in general.
What leads people to claim QM is "random", is the fact that QM cannot be consistent with all of the following popular beliefs simultaneously:
1) All physical laws are fully deterministic (non-random).
2) All macro phenomena (with the possible exception of man's free will) are mere
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You're leaving out many worlds interpretation which is consistent with all points.
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No, that is covered in the link I offered: " many different interpretations have been proposed [wikipedia.org]".
I am not attempting to suggest that QM, alone, proves that there is a God. I do believe that it can be proven - to any reasonable standard - that there is a God, but doing so requires discussing a much wider range of even-more-off-topic issues.
As to the many worlds hypothesis - I agree that it is mathematically consistent with QM, but claiming that it is actually true is not reasonable. Justifying this claim on
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Most modern scientists simply pretend that randomness is the only possible explanation, because they aren't interested in a God whom they cannot manipulate - or vivisect - a God who demands that they follow His moral laws, as the atoms obey His physical laws
No, they accept randomness because it is the simplest explanation that is consistent with experimental evidence.
There is no evidence, nor could there be, for the existence of great magician in the sky
that is not bound by the physics we observe.
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Randomness is an elegant explanation for the properties of QM, taken in isolation, but the sum of human knowledge, as a whole, points in a very different direction.
We know that the physical is not all that there is, because there are many things which have no physical substance to them, and yet exist and play a major role in our day-to-day lives.
How is it that our words have meaning, and that we can perceive it? How is it that you are experiencing this conversation?
A mere sack of chemicals might indeed resp
Covering all the bases (Score:2)
"The story shows that even when Einstein's wrong, it's because he was already right the first time."
The story shows that if you publish both proofs and disproofs of something, you're likely to be right half the time.
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If you're not wrong sometimes, you're never sure you were correct all of the times you could have been.
Science (Score:4, Insightful)
Most great science begins with the words:
"No, that can't be right. Or can it?"
Einstein was no different.
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I thought it was "That's weird..."
Re: Science (Score:2)
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Too Hasty (Score:2)
People are too hasty to jump to conclusions. This is just one bit of evidence. It will take much more time and additional evidence to definitively conclude gravitational waves are the real deal.
To be fair... (Score:4, Funny)
Even Einstein Doubted His Gravitational Waves
Einstein's own gravitational waves were probably really, really small/weak.
Re:To be fair... (Score:4, Funny)
He would have confirmed and measured gravitational waves straight away had he been anywhere near yo mamma's house.
Who were the peer reviewers? (Score:3)
Most of the general public would not know that even Einstein's publications went through peer review and there were reviewers who checked and rejected Einstein's math. Think about it.
Do we know the reviewers who rejected the flawed paper by Einstein? Or, are their names lost to history, without even a Tomb of the Unknown Reviewer?
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If only we could get some decent peer review. Maybe it was different back then?
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pm... [nih.gov]
http://www.economist.com/news/... [economist.com]
http://www.wsj.com/articles/ha... [wsj.com]
http://retractionwatch.com/201... [retractionwatch.com]
http://www.columbia.edu/cu/21s... [columbia.edu]
https://www.theguardian.com/sc... [theguardian.com]
Second guessed himself a lot (Score:2)
He seemed to not like a lot of his own work:
Photoelectric Effect -> early evidence for quantum mechanics, the consequences of which he really didn't like
Cosmological Constant -> he started out with it, decided it was a bad thing and took it out, and now it's back with evidence
Gravity waves
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He seemed to not like a lot of his own work: ...
He got the math right (mostly), but he didn't like some of the answers that he got. That happens a lot, with honest people.
It means that there is more to learn.
It's also a sign that he didn't fudge the results! 8-)
Typical politician... (Score:2)
I'm as smart as Einstein (Score:2)
Unicorns don't exist. Hang on, maybe they do.
Look everyone, I'm as smart as Einstein!
Mass (Score:1)
Einstein could have replaced Energy with Mass;
Re:Can we stop the Einstein worship now (Score:5, Informative)
You are aware that mass energy equivalence is by *far* not his only outstanding work, right? Brownian movement? Photoelectric effect (Nobel prize, by the way)? Special relativity? General relativity? If every researcher had the impact of only one of his papers, we would be travelling through wormholes and be in a post-physical society by now.
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The previous AC was using hyperbolic descriptiveness to emphasize the impact that Einstein's work has had on modern society, not claiming that we really would be living in that sci-fi universe if only other researchers had gotten off the drugs... which you might want to do, actually.
Re: Can we stop the Einstein worship now (Score:1)
GPS is a result of two theories, Quantum Theory, and General Relativity. Same with spaceflight relying on GR. Seems pretty impactful to me.
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Define great. In personal life he was not a great example of father and husband.
Re: Can we stop the Einstein worship now (Score:5, Interesting)
And I bet Einstein's shit stank, too.
Even very good humans have human failings, usually the standard ones.
Good luck not fucking up your own children, especially if the extraordinarily important work you are doing is massively changing the world as we know it.
I say this as the (now adult) child of a quite famous and truly excellent medical professional from the northeastern United States who spent most of the last decade of his 90-year life apologizing to and developing human relationships with the 7 children he pretty much destroyed along the way. Ooops. Love ya, Dad! Always did! An interesting side note: it was the first time he met a grandchild that started his journey to his own humanity. He MELTED. Amazing.
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Einstein was loser. If he was so smart, why wasn't he rich?
boy, there are more great people than rich people.
Even before I read who wrote why wasn't he rich? my sarcasm detector translated it to an indictment of the system, not of Einstein. Then I read who wrote it and I know you missed Ratzo's sarcasm.
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The irony of course is that Einstein did get pretty rich. He owned a few patents plus he was world famous and used his fame to tour the world giving lectures and talking in public. He also had a professorship and won various scientific awards.. He probably had a total wealth of a few million. ($10 to 20 million now)
There's a guy called Mark Zuckerberg, you would probably never guess he was rich if you just met him.. of course compared to Zuckerberg Einstein was poor..
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Einstein was loser. If he was so smart, why wasn't he rich?
Because we didn't have the technology to take proper advantage to what he discover until about a century after he discovered it, imagine if he had gotten a royalty for every solar cell or led ever made.
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Don't you have an election to win, Donald?
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Thank you for being the only one to get my reference.
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This is why I rarely read the comments on /.
slashdot is dead. People used to read *only* the comments, and with good reason too. Ah, the good old days. I wonder if such a haven of intelligent discussion will ever come to be again.
Re: Can we stop the Einstein worship now (Score:1)
Cspan. The epitome of intelligent discussion
Re:Bad moderation drove away the intelligence. (Score:5, Interesting)
Strange. You pick a very selective issue as the core of your thesis, and as someone who has been visiting slashdot regularly for a long, long time, I would say that that issue was not particularly significant, and was symptomatic of slashdot's problems, rather than causal. You're trying to make out that battles between supported of specific technology are what drove changes in the slashdot user base; I don't think that's the case at all. Technologies come and go, and so do their users and proponents; that's the nature of the beast, and it's going to be reflected on any tech site.
But the underlying point that the popularity of slashdot at its peak led to an influx of users who didn't probably respect the way slashdot worked, and thus changed the nature of the site, is probably sound. The slashdot moderation system can only work if people moderate with care, and don't just spaff their mod points on the first karma-whore post they come across, or just mod up posts that agree with their point of view. That clearly doesn't happen much, I see so many highly scored posts where it's obvious that neither the posted nor the people that modded the post up have read the article or know much about the subject.
Meta-moderating is probably even more broken, because it's more effort when meta-moderating to see the context of the post, read the referenced articles, etc. So there are a certain proportion of posts that you can look at in isolation and say they're worth voting up or down, but for the rest, I suspect that even the few people who bother to meta-moderate either skip them or meta-mod them badly without taking the time to look at the context.
I can't suggest practical solutions at this point, unfortunately, but if the quality of the articles, editing, and management of the site improves under the new management, maybe the userbase will as well.
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slashdot is more about never edited, your comments and posts are yours, slashdot just provides a platform for you to make a fool out of yourself. I think some of the problem is the Freind/Foe system; makes it too easy to moderate based on the person rather than the comments made or mod-stalking.
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That's one of the reasons that I use to justify my not-moderating. I get points. I don't use them. I just delete the notice and continue on. I'd rather comment. I'm not always as objective as I could be and so it would be inappropriate for me to moderate - especially on subjects where I'm uninitiated. I'd rather comment than judge. I don't think my judgment should be used to promote or demote. I get plenty of points, I just don't use them.
Re: Bad moderation drove away the intelligence. (Score:1)
Re:Can we stop the Einstein worship now (Score:5, Informative)
E=mc^2 was derived from special relativity, not the basis of special relativity. Einstein becase famous because of his theories of relativity, not because of E=mc^2. If you paid more attention to physics and less attention to pop-science, perhaps you'd begin to understand.
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That doesn't even make sense.
I don't get why Einstein gets some people upset. Was it because he was Jewish? Because he didn't declare God Is Real? Did he run over their grandfather's dog?
Einstein built on other peoples work, just as all scientists do, but the idea that Galileo had the vaguest idea, for instance, what an intertial frame of reference was is ludicrous.
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On Slashdot, it's just because he's smarter than they are.
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Not E=mc^2 & did not prove! (Score:5, Interesting)
Also let us state it correctly. Einstein did not say E= m c^2. He proved it.
Yes lets state it correctly: it is E^2=p^2c^2+m^2c^4. Only when you are stationary, and so have zero momentum, does E=mc^2. Also Einstein did not prove it. He was doing physics, not maths. What he showed was that given his postulates for special relativity it followed that E^2=p^2c^2+m^2c^4. He was then proven to be correct by experiments not by the maths alone because until those experiments were done his theory might have been nothing more than an exercise in abstract maths.
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m is taken to be the relativistic mass rather than the rest mass.
Relativistic mass is a misleading and wrong concept which even Einstein himself cautioned against. Mass is something called a Lorentz invariant which means that it never changes no matter which inertial frame you look at it in. The gamma factor in things like momentum, p=gamma*mv, comes from the mixing of space and time which means that the relativistic concept of velocity (the rate of change of position with respect to time) in relativity is not quite what we think of in our everyday world as velocity. He
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Einstein was just jealous of de Pretto's magnificent facial hair.
http://www.gazzettinodisalerno... [gazzettinodisalerno.it]
Re: Can we stop the Einstein worship now (Score:2)
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Einstein copied from/built off of many others, prompting some physicists to give the credit for relativity to Lorentz and others? Yes
Einstein was weak enough, mathematically, that he needed Hilbert (and even some interns) to help him with the math? Yes
Einstein did little after SR/GR? Yes
Even worse, in my books, is that SR discarding the ether was the single most damaging thing to happen in physics in the last 110 years.
GR saying the ether can be there, but is not neede
Re:Can we stop the Einstein worship now (Score:5, Insightful)
Even worse, in my books, is that SR discarding the ether was the single most damaging thing to happen in physics in the last 110 years.
As best as I understand, Michelson-Morley was responsible for this, with the ether being discarded right away.
Einstein didn't copy: Science is almost always a collaborative process with people building on top of each other. This is why we often have independent co-discovery. Had Einstein not been there someone else would have obtained SR/GR within 5-10 years, just like Mt. Everest summit would have been reached within a few years of Hillary-Norgay, had they not made it to the top.
Einstein did little after SR/GR? Yes
False, he had four major papers after SR/GR:
- In 1917, Einstein-Brillouin-Keller method for finding the quantum mechanical version of a classical system.
- In 1918, Einstein developed a general theory of the process by which atoms emit and absorb electromagnetic radiation (his A and B coefficients), which is the basis of lasers (stimulated emission)
- In 1924, the theory of Bose-Einstein statistics and Bose-Einstein condensates, which form the basis for superfluidity, superconductivity, and other phenomena.
- In 1935, Einstein put forward what is now known as the EPR paradox
Lucky people reach the pinnacle once, because they happen to be around at the time of the final assault. Truly bright people summit many times... Einstein had between 3 and 6 discoveries each alone worthy of a Nobel prize.
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When you don't give credit, as Einstein was famous for not doing, then it is copying. Had Einstein given the proper amount of credit, he wouldn't have the unreasonable levels of adulation he has today. Which was the OP's point.
As to the papers you list: Einstein was always a contributor, and a big factor in general. But
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For anyone else, those papers would be worth framing. But Einstein basically fizzled in his later years.
So he was still hitting home runs, just not game-winning grand slams, and you're calling that 'fizzled'?
Tough crowd.
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Michelson-Morley, a negative (i.e. non) result, did nothing whatsoever.
Right, which is why we are talking about it 130 years after it happened: because it "did nothing whatsoever". From Wikipedia:
The result was negative, in that the expected difference between the speed of light in the direction of movement through the presumed aether, and the speed at right angles, was found not to exist; this result is generally considered to be the first strong evidence against the then-prevalent aether theory, and initiated a line of research that eventually led to special relativity, which rules out a stationary aether. The experiment has been referred to as "the moving-off point for the theoretical aspects of the Second Scientific Revolution". (emphasis added)
That's some nothingness right there.
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Michelson-Morley, a negative (i.e. non) result, did nothing whatsoever.
It proved that there was no such thing as the luminiferous ether.
I don't think you get how science works.
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He's just another net kook, or more likely some crank follower of some previous net kook from the grand old days of Usenet. There was this small cabal of anti-Einstein nutters who used to crank out pseudo-scientific babble, including math salads, to proclaim Einstein was totally wrong. I imagine there are still a few around, though the most famous ones like Archimedes Plutonium are dead now.
I first got on Usenet in the last days of that ancient epoch, when Plutonium was popping up and making his grand decla
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Even worse, in my books, is that SR discarding the ether was the single most damaging thing to happen in physics in the last 110 years.
Why on earth is discarding the ether "damaging"?
There is no evidence for its existence. There is bucketloads of evidence against its existence. It almost certainly doesn't exist, based on everything we've learned so far.
Furthermore, the evidence against the ether really starting mounting in 1887 with the Michelson-Morley experiment, long before special relativity was formulated. The non-existence of the ether led to SR, not the other way around.
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The problem is a large propaganda movement has emerged, discarding the difference between "ether" - a poorly defined antiquated concepts with some interpretations still conceivably valid - and the "luminiferous ether" - a specific hypothesis that was shown false.
I can't speculate on who is involved, but there are a number of new-age type cult websites and forum trolls that go on about these subjects, and Nikola Tesla, getting very hostile toward anyone interested in logical discussion.
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our very thought is what makes gravity
Well, you certainly sound dense enough to have your own gravitational field.
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Wait, what? I was happily shaking my head until I got to this.
Let me see if I understand you well enough, gravity exists because I think it exists? is that what you're saying?
So, if I stop believing in gravity then gravity will no longer go away? And, if it doesn't go away, I suppose that's because I'm not believing hard enough? If I just will it, it will happen? The power of positive thought, something like that?
I don't even... Do you even science?
Smokey room, wine & cheap perfume etc. (Score:2)
Even if you tried really hard to pretend you didn't believe there'd be a bit at the back of your mind that did believe - it's what causes you to not forget that you're trying not to believe. Or something.
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I am baffled. I really am...
I don't watch a lot of movies but a friend recommended a movie. I forget the name, you probably know it. The premise, behind the scenes, is that nothing in the movie violates any known laws of physics. This guy goes off to fix something on a different planet and he's supposed to be able to time travel back and reunite with his family. That doesn't work and his daughter is pissed. There are lies and intrigue and all that sort of crap.
In the end... The guy wills himself to time tra
SR (Score:3)
SR rests on two postulates: first, that the speed of light is invariant, and secondly that the laws of physics are the same in all reference frames. Which do you take issue with?
Light does not need a medium to propagate through. Calling empty space "ether" just means you don't understand the issue. If we have a catastrophic vacuum decay light will still be transmitted. Einstein described the geometry of the universe; it's not that light travels at c, it's that everything is traveling at c and massless effec
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If you think otherwise, please explain how these results match the theory exactly. If your pet theory can explain that, provide an additional test which shows that your theory has greater predictive power. Until you can do the first, you're a simple crank, and until you can do the latter, you're on the wrong side of Occam's Razor.
Explaining something doesn't make you not a crank. Cranks always explain things, it's just that their explanations are wrong or untestable.
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Fair enough. I stand corrected.
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Oh for fuck's sakes. The "ether" pseudo-scientists are as bad as the electric universe types.
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Hey ease up, After you've changed the way we understand the whole universe 3 times (Quantum Mechanics, General Relativity and Special Relativity) it's pretty hard to come up with some new shit. Hell even he knew he had hit the wall, that's why he was working on TOE, The Theory of Everything, because he knew a young buck would blow his wad, where he could coast along on his reputation even while chasing unicorn farts. Only old codgers can serve science by finding what doesn't work, without destroying their