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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.
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.
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?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
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.
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.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
and Beetlejuice
Einstein was just jealous of de Pretto's magnificent facial hair.
http://www.gazzettinodisalerno...
You are welcome on my lawn.
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 prove them right. If it took me 100 years to prove you right, that's 99 years of everyone else thinking you could still be wrong.
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.
Most great science begins with the words:
"No, that can't be right. Or can it?"
Einstein was no different.
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.
why he doubted gravitational waves ?
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.
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.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
Even Einstein Doubted His Gravitational Waves
Einstein's own gravitational waves were probably really, really small/weak.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
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.
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?
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
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 effects have zero velocity in the time dimension.
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.
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
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.
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 (and is replaced by quantum field theory). Most QFT breaks down at high energies, as we can only solve it in the pertubative low-energy limit.
In the case of GR and quantum mechanics, that's exactly what happens. At low energies, the two work together fine. It's at high energies and short length-scales where the two fall apart (no surprise, as again, both theories were formulated from the low-energy behavior, which is the regime we can perform experiments/observations in quite easily). This is why people are looking for some unified theory that would include both theories in the low-energy regime, and at the same time would work at high energies (this has already been done with electrodynamics and the weak force: at high energies, they become unified through the electroweak interaction). String theory, loop quantum gravity, etc. are all such attempts. So far, we've not been able to perform experiments that would be required to confirm any of them.
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
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.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Thank you for being the only one to get my reference.
You are welcome on my lawn.