# Tag Info

36

From the rough understanding of the physics of the era I have, I would say there are at least two main reasons as to why it is actually quite expected that finding a relativistic theory of gravity wouldn't be the priority of the majority of physicists. The holy grail of physics was quantum mechanics since the mid-1900s if not from the beginning of the ...

33

To begin, let's start with a very apropos anecdote from Lorentz himself. At a conference on the Michelson–Morley experiment in 1927 at which Lorentz and Michelson were present, Michelson suggested that Lorentz was the initiator of the theory of relativity. Lorentz then replied: “I considered my time transformation only as a heuristic working hypothesis....

23

Einstein himself told the story in his Kyoto address of 1922, which I quote from Pais's biography titled Subtle is the Lord: "If all systems are equivalent, then Euclidean geometry cannot hold in all of them. To throw out geometry and keep laws is equivalent to describing thoughts without words. We must search for words before we can express thoughts. ...

23

A good account is Weinstein, Max Born, Albert Einstein and Hermann Minkowski's Space-Time Formalism of Special Relativity. They did no have much of a relationship, what it was is well-summarized by Sommerfeld: "Strangely enough no personal contacts resulted between his teacher of mathematics, Hermann Minkowski, and Einstein. When, later on, Minkowski ...

14

I am not sure what "explain it like a story" means, but the Bohr–Einstein debates is perhaps the most dramatic story of Einstein making his dissatisfaction known. Pais's scientific biography of Einstein Subtle is the Lord offers an even more comprehensive story of his life and the genesis of his philosophical outlook. As for the main reason for his ...

14

Your claim is simply not true: there was work published by Einstein, Hilbert, Nordstrom, and (slightly later) Whitehead. It was a very hard problem, so undoubtedly for every person who came up with something publishable, there were many others who tried but who we don't know about. This was also very early for anyone to be working on such a theory, based on ...

13

Let's talk about special relativity (1905) first, then general relativity (1915). The motivation for special relativity is stated clearly in the first sentence of Einstein's paper "On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies": It is known that Maxwell's electrodynamics -- as usually understood at the present time -- when applied to moving bodies, leads to ...

13

It seems not. See: A.Douglas Stone, Einstein and the quantum: The quest of the valiant Swabian (2013): [page 6] Planck was the first major figure to recognize Einstein’s seminal 1905 work on relativity theory, and he became Einstein’s greatest champion in the world of science and one of his closest personal friends. [page 83] [Einstein's 1905 paper on ...

12

"Simply modifying" Newtonian gravity to have it spread at finite speed does not work if the finite speed is the speed of light. It was attempted by Laplace in his Celestial Mechanics (1799), who found that the planets will promptly fly off their orbits and the Solar system will disintegrate in seconds, unless the propagation speed is $7×10^6$ times greater ...

12

I am afraid, you are overprojecting the power and the glory of peer review. Although some instances can be cited as early as 17th century, it only became what it is today with the triumph of publish or perish in mid 20th, see How did "publish or perish" become the scientific priority rule? Concerning Einstein's papers specifically see Hate the peer-...

12

The time when experimental evidence supporting relativity began to appear coincided with the rise of antisemitism in Germany following Germany's defeat in WWI. Antisemitism was on the rise in Germany; Jews were being scapegoated for the country's defeat in the war. As both Jew and pacifist, Einstein was an obvious target. The complexity of relativity did ...

9

The story is genuine. Isaacson retells it in his scientific biography Einstein: His Life and Universe based on recollections of his younger sister Maja, along with other evidence that dispels the early "Einstein was a slow starter and flanked school" story exaggerated by his parents: "His uncle Jakob Einstein, the engineer, introduced him to the joys of ...

7

Not sure about "elementary" but, at least, he tried to reduce it to "the simplest and most intelligible form". He assumes the level of a graduating secondary school student, and warns of the "patience and force of will" required to get through. The linked article refers to the German 1916 publication of Über die spezielle und allgemeine Relativitätstheorie,...

7

No. He opposed Quantum Mechanics from the beginning until death. He did it because its inherent non-determinism ("God does not gamble"). In his opinion, the cause of the non-determinism of the QM is that "it is not ready". However, he worked on the further development of the GR until death. A possible direction was to describe also the electromagnetism as ...

7

It is hard to prove that answer is negative, but I suspect that that's the case. That sentence looks familiar. In fact, in his book Relativity: The Special & the General Theory, Einstein wrote “Without it the general theory of relativity […] would perhaps have got no farther than its long clothes.” But here Einstein is talking about ...

7

Einstein was bothered by "action at a distance" long before the 1935 EPR paper, and it was not specific to entanglement. In his debates with Bohr at the 1927 Solvay congress he used the single slit experiment to illustrate it, see Howard, Revisiting the Einstein-Bohr Dialogue. An objective wave function describing a particle hitting the screen after passing ...

6

Einstein did not go against his earlier ideas. The probabilistic rules that the author may be referring to is the use of statistical methods of physics to account for the myriad of particles involved (e.g. as used in kinetic theory and other developments also used by Planck in his earlier work on black body radiation). Rather, from my brief review of the ...

6

Details of Brown's observations, concerning both the pollen and the microscope, are given by Pearle et al. in What Brown saw and you can too. The pollen was from the flower Clarkia pulchella, a.k.a. pinkfairy, ragged robin, or deerhorn clarkia, discovered on the return trip of the Lewis and Clark expedition by Lewis on June 1, 1806. He wrote in his ...

6

There are no published papers where such interpretation is explicitly made. Born's Nobel lecture mention first appears in his celebrated Quantenmechanik der Stossvorgange (1926, Zeitschrift fur Physik 38, 803-827), also with no reference. According to Pais, well-known Einstein's biographer, the inspiration came from Einstein's never published remarks about ...

6

First of all, I did not study in any detail what Einstein's views on evolution were; the following is just a trivial observation: Our sun is constantly pumping energy into the ecosystem of the Earth. Most of the energy that the life forms on Earth are getting, can be traced to the sun (plus, the heat from the Earth mantle). All past, present and (presumably)...

5

Einstein means : mental images. Some background. A.Einstein answered to a questionnaire issued by the French mathematician Jacques Hadamard regarding "THE WORKING METHODS OF MATHEMATICIANS", originally issued in L'Enseignement Mathematique (1902-1904). Einstein letter is reproduced into : Jacques Hadamard, The Psychology of Invention in the Mathematical ...

5

So far I have been unable to find the original source for the story mentioned in the question. However, there are multiple mentions of this incident in the general literature about Einstein. All accounts agree that the teacher was Dr. Ferdinand Ruess, who taught at the Luitpold-Gymnasium in Munich, the high school that Einstein attended from 1888 to 1894. ...

4

No. Very few people had written computer programs at the time of his death, 1955, and most had backgrounds in numerical analysis, and computational techniques. Programs were written in machine code in those days, or a few newer machines had an assembly language. John von Neumann is a much better candidate for computer programming.

4

Both Einstein and Poincaré postulated the principal of relativity as a basis for their theories. Where Einstein's and Poincaré's theories differ is that Einstein postulated the one-way constancy of the speed of light in inertial frames and derived the Lorentz transformation as a consequence, while Poincaré postulated the Lorentz transformation and derived ...

4

Einstein was reading Maxwell. Axiom a) follows from Maxwell's electromagnetic theory of light. Axiom b) is stated imprecisely in your message. The actual axiom is that you cannot detect the absolute motion of the observer (or that the laws of nature must be independent of the motion of the observer (rectilinear and with constant speed)). This is the ...

4

Einstein, on the contrary, was free of any kind of traditions ... This I think really says a great deal more about the author, his preconceptions, the Einstein hagiographical industry and the fetishisation of a free-floating and heavily romanticised libertarianism in Western culture than about Einstein himself. And I mean romanticism in the technical sense ...

4

If Einstein's postulates are correct then Voigt's transformation is incorrect. Einstein showed in his 1905 paper that the Lorentz transformations were the only ones consistent with two postulates: invariance of the speed of light in all inertial frames and form-invariance of the laws of physics in all inertial frames (principle of relativity). His ...

4

Paragraph from The Large and the Small In a letter to Max Born in 1947 Einstein said of the statistical approach to quantum mechanics, which he attributed to Born, “I cannot seriously believe in it because the theory cannot be reconciled with the idea that physics should represent a reality in time and space, free from spooky action at a distance” (...

3

Although the concept of the existence of the atoms originates from the ancient Greek, for them it was yet more a philosophical concept, they were very far from any experimental proof.1 Later, mainly the chemistry provided the first suggestion that it might be an experimental fact. However, none of these results was strong enough at the time. In the late ...

3

It is hard to prove that the answer is negative, but have this in mind: a friend who helped Einstein a lot (and who co-wrote two articles with him) while Einstein was trying to formulate the General Theory of Relativity was Marcel Grossmann, who was a geometer (his PhD thesis was about Non-Euclidean Geometry and he wrote two textbooks on Descriptive Geometry)...

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