🚀 go-pugleaf

nearly native wrote:

> Robert J. Kolker ha scritto:
> 
> 
>>Dio wrote:
> 
> 
>>>What's the best cosmological theory?
>>>
>>>I think Einstein is old fashioned
> 
> 
>>The age of a theory is irrelevent. It is the experimental soundness of a 
>>theory that counts.
> 
> 
> It's not just him that thinks that Einstein's cosmological theory is old
> fashioned, but physicists in general. And that has already been going on
> for ages. In fact, Einstein thought that the universe is static and
> immutable as well as Aristotle did. Of course, the Theory of Relativity is
> quite another pair of shoes and it has been proven and applied in
> experimental physics long after Einstein had formulated it, both in
> particle physics and in astrophysics.

O.K. I thought he meant Einstein's theories as opposed to Einstein 
himself. Yes, Einstein was stuck in several ways. He could never accept 
quantum theory except as a defecient approximation to reality. His 
opinions on locality have been refuted by experiment etc. etc..

Indeed Einstein made mistakes, but the product of his mind, the General 
Theory of Relativity, brought up to date and buffed up with more modern 
mathematical methods is a potent tool of cosmology.

Bob Kolker

  Therefore, it appears pretty wrong
> to state that Einstein is or not old fashioned: it depends on what part of
> Einstein's theory and thoughts we are considering. Among other things,
> Einstein thought that "God does not play dice" when interrogated about
> quantum mechanics, so that is another issue in which he might be regarded
> as 'old fashioned'. One thing alone is clear: there no more room for a
> Newtonian view of the universe like a clockwork in which everything can be
> pre-determined, but possible interpretations of phenomena are becoming to
> appear even more visionary than some religions. Let's just think of
> travels through time and the arising paradoxes, or the matter which can
> simply come out of nothing according to quantum mechanics, or the
> indetermination principle. For this reason a good sceptic believer in
> science who does not support religion cannot, in my opinion, be exactly
> the other way round, that is an atheist: he could at most be an agnostic.
> We are at the moment absolutely unable to know what we cannot perceive by
> our deterministic means, what lies in the Thereafter and what will become
> of our conscience after death. And what this universe, or the universes
> connected through wormholes or whatever they are, means at all.
>