Was Einstein indeed "Very Great"? [Physics]

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From: Marvin the Martian on 12 Mar 2010 21:11

On Fri, 12 Mar 2010 08:40:39 -0800, Raymond Yohros wrote:

> On Mar 12, 4:03 am, Robert Higgins <robert_higgins...(a)hotmail.com>
> wrote:
>> > His contributions were using Dirac's quantum theory to explain the
>> > photo- electric effect,
>>
>> Einstein explained the photoelectric effect in 1905, when Dirac was
>> three (!) years old. What version of QM had Dirac developed by age
>> three? Dirac was born in 1902 - maybe you can do the math, but maybe
>> not.
>>
> i dont understand why so many in this physics group talk as if einstein
> was a fake when the true scientific comunity have always recognise his
> great achivements QM was build by many great scientist over
> experimental observation for almost a century and eintein was right
> there at the begining.
>
> and i know for sure that eintein had nothing but the deepest respect for
> lemaitre who took alot of his time to check up all his work and who was
> totally inspired by it.
>
> its like they try to change a moment of victory and turn it into chame?
>
> r.y

I have no problem at all with SR. It is follows from electromagnetism and
Maxwell's equations. Every prediction of SR save for length contraction
has been proven experimentally. The vast bulk of the SR posts in
sci.physics is a bunch of drivel that claims SR can't be right. The folks
who make these claims are so ignorant of physics they don't realize they
are not only claiming a well tested theory is false, but one that
logically follows straight from E&M, which is a very, very well tested
theory.

The validity of SR is not the issue here.

The issue here is "Was Einstein Great". He is regarded as the founder of
a theory that is nothing more than Lorentz's transformation warmed over.
Sure, he made contributions, but I contend that they were little more
than filling in the blanks, like applying the quantum theory to the
photoelectric effect. The theory of quanta was already applied to explain
the ultraviolet problem. The idea that light came in quantized energy
units wasn't even novel.

As for the Brownian motion paper; he didn't discover Brownian motion, and
he didn't even develop the math that explained it. Nor did he discover
atomic theory.

I never said he was a fake; He was a bit of a plagiarizer. To say that
the argument is that he was a fake is a straw dog. The argument is, was
Einstein great. To say that either Einstein was great or a fake is a
false dilemma. There is obviously a middle ground.

I find the claim that Einstein, who told Lemaitre to keep to his religion
and not do physics and that his big bang theory was "Catholic science"
had "deepest respect" for Lemaitre is laughable. Einstein was insulting,
condescending and completely wrong.

And if I hear that false canard about "science community" one more time...

Einstein had little to do with QM besides his constant irrational braying
that it wasn't so.

I'm afraid that there is some merit to Potter's argument that Einstein
was put forward as the poster boy for Jewish intelligence. In the early
20th century, there were those that argued that the average intelligence
of the Jewish population group was less than the average intelligence of
the general white population. Quite frankly, they could have chosen a
better poster boy than Einstein. ;-0

It is sort of like how every "Black History Month" we're told over and
over about the great black inventor, Garrett Morgan, who "invented the
gas mask and saved thousands of lives in World War I". Sadly, that isn't
the case. His gas mask was not the activated charcoal chemical gas mask,
it was a mask with a tube that dragged on the floor. The idea was that in
fires, the air near the floor is usually breathable. That would have been
a total disaster in WW I, where poison gas sank to the ground. There were
many different variations of gas masks being invented.

Einstein was not great. He was a contributing physicist who made many
mistakes and often let his personal bias color his physics.

From: Marvin the Martian on 12 Mar 2010 21:18

On Fri, 12 Mar 2010 18:03:01 -0800, Raymond Yohros wrote:

> On Mar 12, 11:05 am, Robert Higgins <robert_higgins...(a)hotmail.com>
> wrote:
>> On Mar 12, 12:15 pm, Marvin the Martian <mar...(a)ontomars.org> wrote:
>> > The simple fact is, Einstein used someone else's theory to explain
>> > the photoelectric effect, which was also discovered by someone else.
>> > That was the point, which you totally missed.
>>
>> Hate to tell you, MOST scientists use "someone else's" theory to
>> explain anything. Too bad Planck didn't use his own theory to solve the
>> probelme, but he didn't, and Einstein did. Bet you didn't know (just
>> like you didn't know that "Planck" was spelled P-L-A-N-C-K and not
>> D-I-R-A-C) that Planck was responsible for the then-unknown Einstein
>> getting his papers published in Annalen der Physik. But thanks for
>> playing.- Hide quoted text -
>>
>>
> he seems to forget that max planck became einsteins greatest supporter
> and sponsor and that the word quanta came from einstein himself.
> the miracle years where the foundation of QM along with plancks work
> that was in contrast with einsteins.
>
> r.y
>
> r.y

Einstein invented the word Quanta. Even if, so what? Rah-Rah Einstein!!

Lil' Wayne invented the word "bling-bling". Are you going to worship him
too?

Having a "supporter" and making accomplishments are two different things.
I don't know why you would even bring that up. It is irrelevant. People
support other people for a variety of reasons, but people who have merit
don't need support.

From: Sam Wormley on 12 Mar 2010 21:34

On 3/12/10 8:11 PM, Marvin the Martian wrote:
> The issue here is "Was Einstein Great". He is regarded as the founder of
> a theory that is nothing more than Lorentz's transformation warmed over.
> Sure, he made contributions, but I contend that they were little more
> than filling in the blanks, like applying the quantum theory to the
> photoelectric effect. The theory of quanta was already applied to explain
> the ultraviolet problem. The idea that light came in quantized energy
> units wasn't even novel.
>
> As for the Brownian motion paper; he didn't discover Brownian motion, and
> he didn't even develop the math that explained it. Nor did he discover
> atomic theory.
>

Miraculous Year (1905)

Ref: http://physicsweb.org/articles/world/18/1/2/1
Adapted from "Five papers that shook the world"
by Matthew Chalmers
January 2005

In 1905 an anonymous patent clerk in Bern rewrote
the laws of physics in his spare time.

Most physicists would be happy to make one
discovery that is important enough to be taught to
future generations of physics students. Only a
very small number manage this in their lifetime,
and even fewer make two appearances in the
textbooks.

But Einstein was different. In little more than
eight months in 1905 he completed five papers that
would change the world for ever. Spanning three
quite distinct topics - relativity, the
photoelectric effect and Brownian motion -
Einstein overturned our view of space and time,
showed that it is insufficient to describe light
purely as a wave, and laid the foundations for the
discovery of atoms.

Genius at work

Perhaps even more remarkably, Einstein's 1905
papers were based neither on hard experimental
evidence nor sophisticated mathematics. Instead,
he presented elegant arguments and conclusions
based on physical intuition.

"Einstein's work stands out not because it was
difficult but because nobody at that time had been
thinking the way he did," says Gerard 't Hooft of
the University of Utrecht, who shared the 1999
Nobel Prize for Physics for his work in quantum
theory.

"Dirac, Fermi, Feynman and others also made
multiple contributions to physics, but Einstein
made the world realize, for the first time, that
pure thought can change our understanding of
nature."

And just in case the enormity of Einstein's
achievement is in any doubt, we have to remember
that he did all of this in his "spare time".

Statistical revelations

In 1905 Einstein was married with a one-year-old
son and working as a patent examiner in Bern in
Switzerland. His passion was physics, but he had
been unable to find an academic position after
graduating from the ETH in Zurich in 1900.

Nevertheless, he had managed to publish five
papers in the leading German journal Annalen der
Physik between 1900 and 1904, and had also
submitted an unsolicited thesis on molecular
forces to the University of Zurich, which was
rejected.

Most of these early papers were concerned with the
reality of atoms and molecules, something that was
far from certain at the time. But on 17 March in
1905 - three days after his 26th birthday -
Einstein submitted a paper titled "A heuristic
point of view concerning the production and
transformation of light" to Annalen der Physik.

Einstein suggested that, from a thermodynamic
perspective, light can be described as if it
consists of independent quanta of energy (Ann.
Phys., Lpz 17 132-148).

This hypothesis, which had been tentatively
proposed by Max Planck a few years earlier,
directly challenged the deeply ingrained wave
picture of light. However, Einstein was able to
use the idea to explain certain puzzles about the
way that light or other electromagnetic radiation
ejected electrons from a metal via the
photoelectric effect.

Maxwell's electrodynamics could not, for example,
explain why the energy of the ejected
photoelectrons depended only on the frequency of
the incident light and not on the intensity.
However, this phenomenon was easy to understand if
light of a certain frequency actually consisted of
discrete packets or photons all with the same
energy.

Einstein would go on to receive the 1921 Nobel
Prize for Physics for this work, although the
official citation stated that the prize was also
awarded "for his services to theoretical physics".

"The arguments Einstein used in the photoelectric
and subsequent radiation theory are staggering in
their boldness and beauty," says Frank Wilczek, a
theorist at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology who shared the 2004 Nobel Prize for
Physics.

"He put forward revolutionary ideas that both
inspired decisive experimental work and helped
launch quantum theory." Although not fully
appreciated at the time, Einstein's work on the
quantum nature of light was the first step
towards establishing the wave-particle duality of
quantum particles.

On 30 April, one month before his paper on the
photoelectric effect appeared in print, Einstein
completed his second 1905 paper, in which he
showed how to calculate Avogadro's number and the
size of molecules by studying their motion in a
solution.

This article was accepted as a doctoral thesis by
the University of Zurich in July, and published
in a slightly altered form in Annalen der Physik
in January 1906.

Despite often being obscured by the fame of his
papers on special relativity and the
photoelectric effect, Einstein's thesis on
molecular dimensions became one of his most
quoted works.

Indeed, it was his preoccupation with statistical
mechanics that formed the basis of several of his
breakthroughs, including the idea that light was
quantized.

After finishing a doctoral thesis, most
physicists would be either celebrating or
sleeping. But just 11 days later Einstein sent
another paper to Annalen der Physik, this time on
the subject of Brownian motion.

In this paper, "On the movement of small
particles suspended in stationary liquids
required by the molecular-kinetic theory of
heat", Einstein combined kinetic theory and
classical hydrodynamics to derive an equation
that showed that the displacement of Brownian
particles varies as the square root of time (Ann.
Phys., Lpz 17 549-560).

This was confirmed experimentally by Jean Perrin
three years later, proving once and for all that
atoms do exist. In fact, Einstein extended his
theory of Brownian motion in an additional paper
that he sent to the journal on 19 December,
although this was not published until February
1906.

A special discovery

Shortly after finishing his paper on Brownian
motion Einstein had an idea about synchronizing
clocks that were spatially separated.

This led him to write a paper that landed on the
desks of Annalen der Physik on 30 June, and would
go on to completely overhaul our understanding of
space and time. Some 30 pages long and containing
no references, his fourth 1905 paper was titled
"On the electrodynamics of moving bodies" (Ann.
Phys., Lpz 17 891-921).

In the 200 or so years before 1905, physics had
been built on Newton's laws of motion, which were
known to hold equally well in stationary
reference frames and in frames moving at a
constant velocity in a straight line. Provided
the correct "Galilean" rules were applied, one
could therefore transform the laws of physics so
that they did not depend on the frame of
reference.

However, the theory of electrodynamics developed
by Maxwell in the late 19th century posed a
fundamental problem to this "principle of
relativity" because it suggested that
electromagnetic waves always travel at the same
speed.

Either electrodynamics was wrong or there had to
be some kind of stationary "ether" through which
the waves could propagate.

Alternatively, Newton was wrong. True to style,
Einstein swept away the concept of the ether
(which, in any case, had not been detected
experimentally) in one audacious step. He
postulated that no matter how fast you are
moving, light will always appear to travel at the
same velocity: the speed of light is a
fundamental constant of nature that cannot be
exceeded.

Combined with the requirement that the laws of
physics are the identical in all "inertial" (i.e.
non-accelerating) frames, Einstein built a
completely new theory of motion that revealed
Newtonian mechanics to be an approximation that
only holds at low, everyday speeds.

The theory later became known as the special
theory of relativity - special because it applies
only to non-accelerating frames - and led to the
realization that space and time are intimately
linked to one another.

In order that the two postulates of special
relativity are respected, strange things have to
happen to space and time, which, unbeknown to
Einstein, had been predicted by Lorentz and others
the previous year.

For instance, the length of an object becomes
shorter when it travels at a constant velocity,
and a moving clock runs slower than a stationary
clock.

Effects like these have been verified in
countless experiments over the last 100 years,
but in 1905 the most famous prediction of
Einstein's theory was still to come.

After a short family holiday in Serbia, Einstein
submitted his fifth and final paper of 1905 on 27
September. Just three pages long and titled "Does
the inertia of a body depend on its energy
content?", this paper presented an "afterthought"
on the consequences of special relativity, which
culminated in a simple equation that is now known
as E = mc^2 (Ann. Phys., Lpz 18 639-641).

This equation, which was to become the most
famous in all of science, was the icing on the
cake.

"The special theory of relativity, culminating in
the prediction that mass and energy can be
converted into one another, is one of the
greatest achievements in physics - or anything
else for that matter," says Wilczek.

"Einstein's work on Brownian motion would have
merited a sound Nobel prize, the photoelectric
effect a strong Nobel prize, but special
relativity and E = mc^2 were worth a super-strong
Nobel prize."

However, while not doubting the scale of
Einstein's achievements, many physicists also
think that his 1905 discoveries would have
eventually been made by others.

"If Einstein had not lived, people would have
stumbled on for a number of years, maybe a decade
or so, before getting a clear conception of
special relativity," says Ed Witten of the
Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.

't Hooft agrees. "The more natural course of
events would have been that Einstein's 1905
discoveries were made by different people, not by
one and the same person," he says. However, most
think that it would have taken much longer -
perhaps a few decades - for Einstein's general
theory of relativity to emerge.

Indeed, Wilczek points out that one consequence
of general relativity being so far ahead of its
time was that the subject languished for many
years afterwards.

The aftermath

By the end of 1905 Einstein was starting to make a
name for himself in the physics community, with
Planck and Philipp Lenard - who won the Nobel
prize that year - among his most famous
supporters. Indeed, Planck was a member of the
editorial board of Annalen der Physik at the time.

Einstein was finally given the title of Herr
Doktor from the University of Zurich in January
1906, but he remained at the patent office for a
further two and a half years before taking up his
first academic position at Zurich.

By this time his statistical interpretation of
Brownian motion and his bold postulates of
special relativity were becoming part of the
fabric of physics, although it would take several
more years for his paper on light quanta to gain
wide acceptance.

1905 was undoubtedly a great year for physics,
and for Einstein. "You have to go back to
quasi-mythical figures like Galileo or especially
Newton to find good analogues," says Wilczek.

"The closest in modern times might be Dirac, who,
if magnetic monopoles had been discovered, would
have given Einstein some real competition!" But
we should not forget that 1905 was just the
beginning of Einstein's legacy. His crowning
achievement - the general theory of relativity -
was still to come.

From: Marvin the Martian on 13 Mar 2010 21:29

The whole issue of making Einstein the poster boy of Genius and physicist
is a gullibility test.

You look at Newton, and ask what did he do? Among other things, he
created the entire science of mechanics and invented the calculus (and
Taunted Leibinitz with hints on the calculus until Leibinitz figured it
out and took credit for co-discovery of the calculus. LOL!),

Then there is Einstein, who basically parroted the work of others in the
Brownian motion paper, did a plug and chug on the quantum theory that was
applied to the ultraviolet catastrophe and did the same trick on the
photo-electric effect, and did a "yeah, that's right" paper on the
Lorentz transformation and Mach Theory of Relativity.

Newton was a "very great". Einstein should get nothing more than a
mention. People who fall for the "Einstein was very great" story JUST
AREN'T TOO SMART. They're not thinking objectively, and will believe most
anything they're told without question.

From: Sam Wormley on 14 Mar 2010 08:38

On 3/13/10 8:29 PM, Marvin the Martian wrote:
> You look at Newton, and ask what did he do? Among other things, he
> created the entire science of mechanics and invented the calculus (and
> Taunted Leibinitz(sic) with hints on the calculus until Leibinitz(sic) figured it
> out and took credit for co-discovery of the calculus. LOL!),

No bias on the part of Marvin the Martian! <laughing>

"Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz was originally accused of plagiarizing
Sir Isaac Newton's unpublished work (only in Britain, not in
continental Europe), but is now regarded as an independent
inventor of and contributor to calculus".

Background
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gottfried_Leibniz