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Even Einstein Doubted His Gravitational Waves (astronomy.com)
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.
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.
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.
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.
I think the story is primarily an interesting bit of behind the scenes drama and personalities. Einstein was not used to peer-review process and reacted emotionally to a legit criticism and refused to publish in the premiere physics journal anymore despite the fact that the criticism turned out to be accurate. In addition, the story is pretty interesting the way the reviewer was able to indirectly get the criticisms explained to the assistant and ultimately to Einstein who accepted those criticisms as valid.