🚀 go-pugleaf

In article 
<64dae92c-5489-4184-ad6d-b19a882e5b63@a7g2000yqk.googlegroups.com>,
 Pentcho Valev <pvalev@yahoo.com> wrote:

> On Apr 2, 1:26�am, maxwell <s...@shaw.ca> wrote in
> sci.physics.relativity:
> > Hans C. Ohanian is a well-qualified physicist (PhD with John Wheeler),
> > author of numerous papers & several texts on physics (EM, SR, GR, etc)
> > and a life-long student of Einstein, who has decided that he is now
> > old enough to 'dish the dirt' on the 20th century's "greatest hero".
> >
> > Some in this NG may know of Einstein's serious flaws in his personal
> > life but few will have realized that throughout his professional life
> > he made numerous errors & mistakes in his physics. �Ohanian describes
> > (without the use of any math) some of the more egregious mistakes made
> > in his key papers (4 of the famous 5 in 1905), with a total of over 40
> > mistakes in his almost 180 publications. �A few students of the
> > history of physics may know that Einstein's 1905 derivation of the
> > mass-energy relationship contained a serious, invalidating error or
> > that Einstein failed on six other occasions (up to 1935) to prove
> > "his" formula. �Throughout his life, Einstein never challenged the
> > erroneous Maxwellian EM theory that was the basis for all of SRT.
> >
> > The critics of Einstein in this NG will find plenty of ammunition
> > here, while those physics undergrads who were simply taught that
> > Einstein laid the firm foundations for 20th century physics will be
> > given pause for thought.
> >
> > The early chapters on Galileo's and Newton's contributions to the
> > concept of relativity also reveal that these 'giants of science' were
> > not adverse to fudging their own results to propagate their own
> > glory. �You would not want to be on the Enemy's List of either of
> > these founders. �This is also an amusing review for those
> > professionals who thought that politics only came with the creation of
> > modern university departments.
> >
> > Amazon has this book in stock (published in 2008) priced at $16.47 ;
> > it can be found at:
> >
> > http://www.amazon.com/Einsteins-Mistakes-Human-Failings-Genius/dp/0393062937
> > /ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1238624467&sr=1-1
> 
> This statement (of yours?) deserves special attention:
> 
> "Throughout his life, Einstein never challenged the erroneous
> Maxwellian EM theory that was the basis for all of SRT."
> 
> He did in fact, in 1909 and then again in 1954:
> 
> http://www.astrofind.net/documents/the-composition-and-essence-of-radiation.ph
> p
> The Development of Our Views on the Composition and Essence of
> Radiation by Albert Einstein
> Albert Einstein 1909: "A large body of facts shows undeniably that
> light has certain fundamental properties that are better explained by
> Newton's emission theory of light than by the oscillation theory. For
> this reason, I believe that the next phase in the development of
> theoretical physics will bring us a theory of light that can be
> considered a fusion of the oscillation and emission theories. 

***{For those who wonder how discrete particles can, in their conjoint 
behavior, manifest as waves, here is an unusual example:

"As barchan dunes migrate, smaller dunes outpace larger dunes, bumping 
into the rear of the larger dune and eventually appear to punch through 
the large dune to appear on the other side. The process seems to be 
similar to waves of light, sound or water that pass directly through 
each other; the detailed mechanism is, however, very different, being 
nonlinear. These are known as solitons."

"The dunes emulate soliton behavior but unlike solitons, the sand 
particles do not pass through each other. When the smaller dune 
rear-ends the larger dune, the winds begin to deposit sand on the rear 
dune while blowing sand off the front dune without replenishing it. 
Eventually, the rear dune has assumed dimensions similar to the former 
front dune which has now become a smaller, faster moving dune that pulls 
away with the wind. (Schw�mmle & Herrmann, 2003)" [Source: 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barchan.]

--Mitchell Jones}***

> The
> purpose of the following remarks is to justify this belief and to show
> that a profound change in our views on the composition and essence of
> light is imperative.....Then the electromagnetic fields that make up
> light no longer appear as a state of a hypothetical medium, but rather
> as independent entities that the light source gives off, just as in
> Newton's emission theory of light......Relativity theory has changed
> our views on light. Light is conceived not as a manifestation of the
> state of some hypothetical medium, but rather as an independent entity
> like matter. Moreover, this theory shares with the corpuscular theory
> of light the unusual property that light carries inertial mass from
> the emitting to the absorbing object."

***{The only way to make sense out of Einstein is to separate his math 
from his attempts to explain, in terms of natural language, why the math 
is true--and, like it or not, his math is mostly true. (By "true" in 
this case, I mean that when it is used in calculations within its 
domain--i.e., between experimentally measured data points--it gives good 
results.) 

His attempts to explain his math in natural language, however, are 
childlike to the point of, in many cases, being utterly nonsensical. 
Some of his passages, with justification, have even been described as 
"gibberish." Do not, however, make the mistake of thinking that the math 
must be wrong simply because the natural language interpretations are 
absurd. 

In the above connection it is worthwhile to remember that Newton 
couldn't explain his math either. Unlike Einstein, he simply did not try 
to explain it. Instead, he took pot shots at others, when they tried to 
do so. When others tried to explain gravity as "action at a distance," 
for example, he replied as follows:

"That one body may act upon another at a distance through a vacuum, 
without the mediation of anything else, is to me so great an absurdity 
that I believe no man who has in philosophical matters a competent 
faculty for thinking, can ever fall into it."

Einstein, by way of contrast, tried to explain his math in terms of 
natural language, with the result that, for a hundred years, others have 
had the privilege of taking pot shots at him.

The moral of the story is simple: if you come up with an equation that 
matches up well with a set of experimentally measured data points, and 
gives accurate predictions in the unmeasured regions of that domain, do 
not make the mistake of trying to explain your equation, unless you 
actually have an explanation that is rationally comprehensible. If you 
do not have a defensible explanation, simply admit it, and move on.

--Mitchell Jones}***

> Thus while he had no specific theory about the mechanism underlying 
> gravitation, he rejected out of hand any theory that involved *space* 
> ("vacuum") as the agent, and would have regarded Einstein's "curved space" 
> idea as utter nonsense. 
> 
> http://www.perimeterinstitute.ca/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=317
> &Itemid=81&lecture_id=3576
> John Stachel: "Einstein discussed the other side of the particle-field
> dualism - get rid of fields and just have particles."
> Albert Einstein 1954: "I consider it entirely possible that physics
> cannot be based upon the field concept, that is on continuous
> structures. Then nothing will remain of my whole castle in the air,
> including the theory of gravitation, but also nothing of the rest of
> contemporary physics."
> John Stachel's comment: "If I go down, everything goes down, ha ha,
> hm, ha ha ha."
> 
> Pentcho Valev
> pvalev@yahoo.com

*****************************************************************
If I seem to be ignoring you, consider the possibility
that you are in my killfile. --MJ