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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.
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."
I am not your blowing wind, I am the lightning.
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.
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.
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.