Comments on: Two things you can learn reading Albert Einstein's personal correspondence

By: lorq

lorq — Tue, 17 Apr 2012 19:20:00 +0000

Oh, I get that it’s still a postulate. It’s just that once it’s explained exactly how it aligns with Maxwell, it looks a hell of a lot more coherent and precise *as* a postulate. For a layperson like me, that site filled a gap in understanding.

By: Sam Flowers

Sam Flowers — Tue, 17 Apr 2012 19:02:00 +0000

Conservapedia is a site for all those who like to stick their fingers in their ears and go ‘la la la la’.

By: pjcamp

pjcamp — Tue, 17 Apr 2012 15:57:00 +0000

Then the special and general theories exist by imposing the same invariance on the laws of mechanics (special) and gravity (relativity). It all does revolve around the fact, noticed by Lorentz and others, that the mathematical method for transforming Maxwell’s equations between frames is different from the method for transforming Newton’s Laws. Einstein reformulated mechanics to make it consistent with electromagnetism. But it is still a postulate. It may be motivated by Maxwell but it cannot be derived from Maxwell.

By: digi_owl

digi_owl — Tue, 17 Apr 2012 15:05:00 +0000

Indeed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falsifiable

By: lorq

lorq — Tue, 17 Apr 2012 14:14:00 +0000

That Einstein Light site has something I’ve looked for for a long time: a clear explanation for the reasoning behind Einstein’s postulate of the invariance of the speed of light. In every pop science description of special relativity I’ve come across, the postulate is just mentioned without any additional context. This site explains the postulate as basically the *outcome* of assuming the invariance of Maxwell’s equations describing electromagnetic phenomena (which of course include light) in all reference frames. Pop science discussions never seem to want to bring Maxwell into the picture — presumably because it would add extra complexity to the explanation. For me, at least, it’s very clarifying. Thanks for the tip.

By: Jay Converse

Jay Converse — Tue, 17 Apr 2012 13:01:00 +0000

Oh my god, here is footnote 64 on that page:
Tribe, acknowledging help by Obama, argued that the Constitution should be interpreted to establish a right to federally funded abortion and that, more generally, Roe v. Wade does not go far enough. They insisted that a relativistic “curvature of space” could achieve this result by expanding application of the Constitution based on its impact on personal choice.

Nut cases!!!!

By: VerySincerely

VerySincerely — Tue, 17 Apr 2012 03:19:00 +0000

According to research recounted in “The Golem: What You Should Know About Sceince” by sociologists Collins and Pinch, the actual tests were performed under less than ideal conditions, with less than ideal gear and the results were pretty inconclusive. http://books.google.ca/books/about/The_Golem.html?id=ijtA0JLYlooC&redir_esc=y

“As late as the 1960s and 1970s, this test was still being done with the understanding that Einstein’s predictions hadn’t yet been verified.”
I thought that the scientific method of Verificationism had been dropped in favour of falsification, no? That is, we should know what observations would lead us to conclude that the theory must be abandoned.

By: oasisob1

oasisob1 — Tue, 17 Apr 2012 02:39:00 +0000

Crowdsource that search. Hard. Make it a Kickstarter project, giving backers copies of the plates after they are recovered… or something.

By: noah django

noah django — Tue, 17 Apr 2012 02:02:00 +0000

third thing: he had lovely penmanship

By: pjcamp

pjcamp — Tue, 17 Apr 2012 01:55:00 +0000

Two important addenda:

1. The eclipse was in Africa. You can’t just hop on a boat and go eclipse measuring. It requires an enormous amount of planning and computation of exactly where the Sun will be relative to the Hyades and what it will do to their starlight. For most of that planning period, Eddington and Einstein were on opposite sides of a battle front. Einstein had only published the General theory in 1915, while the war was still raging. The armistice was in November 1918, the eclipse was the following May. The story of how the expedition was coordinated across battle lines (with message passing via Willem de Sitter in neutral Holland) is really rather remarkable which you can read about in Abraham Pais’ lovely biography (he was a friend of Einstein when he was young and Einstein was old) or see in the BBC drama Einstein and Eddington (plot described here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein_and_Eddington).

2. When I was a freshly minted Ph. D. in physics, dissertation in relativity, quantum gravity, quantum cosmology, I worked for a time on a project to create a lower division laboratory science class in relativity. It is rather challenging to come up with labs doable by freshmen and sophomores in that subject. One of the things we wanted to do was some sort of deflection measurement and we thought it would be cool to reproduce the original photographic plates so people could get a visual feel for just how small the angles were. A rather disturbing fact soon became evident: the Eddington eclipse plates appear to have vanished from the universe. The last place they are said to have been is in the Palomar library, but Palomar no longer has them nor any record of where they went next. So the raw data from one of the most important and difficult experiments in history is apparently completely gone.

By: EH

EH — Tue, 17 Apr 2012 01:21:00 +0000

It’s all about the gravity table and the red/blue scooters (motorcycles) in “Cosmos” for me. I’m sure that’s not complete, but hey, I’m no physicist.

By: daen

daen — Tue, 17 Apr 2012 01:21:00 +0000

Thank you very much. Now I need to bleach my brain and eyes.

By: Maddy

Maddy — Tue, 17 Apr 2012 01:16:00 +0000

“and in the future, please don’t believe every quote that is attributed to me on the Internet”

By: Nylund

Nylund — Tue, 17 Apr 2012 01:12:00 +0000

If you want a laugh (or something that may make you very angry) you should read the Conservapedia page on the Theory of Relativity. Spoiler alert: Not too different from how conservatives feel about climate change or evolution.

http://www.conservapedia.com/Theory_of_relativity