Re: How did Einstein get published?

On Sep 28, 2:42 pm, Randy Poe <poespam-t...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Sep 28, 1:19 pm, jcon <cirej...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:



On Sep 27, 9:15 am, Randy Poe <poespam-t...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

I'm really thinking about Androcles as I write this,
but I invite all of the anti-Einsteinians to contribute.
(You know you will anyway. You're here because
you couldn't resist the title.)

Androcles in particular believes that Einstein's 1905
SR paper is full of nonsensical statements and
elementary errors that any child should catch. Yet
we have the indisputable fact that the version of the
paper we know was accepted and published in
Annalen der Physik, one of the premier physics
journals of the day.

So I invite you to imagine what the editorial process
was. How did a paper with such obvious errors end
up being blessed by the editors and referees and
published in a research journal?

Just to be clear, I think Einstein's 1905 paper is
a masterpiece, and is one of the few original works
I can think of that is still very readable to a modern
audience (as opposed to, say, Maxwell's papers).

On the other hand, merely getting published in 1905
isn't evidence of being correct. If you've ever
gone through the exercise of reading old
scientific papers, you'll realize standards
were a *lot* lower back then.

So your theory then is that just about anything
could have gotten through? Then why so few papers
published per year? Were they were desperate
for content, like the specialty cable TV channels
are today?


I believe I made clear that the sort of simple
arithmetic errors that nuts like Androcles, Wilson, etc
get excited about would not have gotten through.

I was arguing that merely getting published, in 1905
is not proof that the paper is correct.

Indeed, I think if you do a search of theoretical
papers published in 1905, you will find many of them
wrong, and some of them "silly".

I'll admit I've never made a study of old theory
papers, but I've spent some time perusing old
experimental results, and there's some remarkable
crap published up until well into the latter half
of the 20th century.

In particular, peer review did not become common until
the middle of the 20th century, and 1905 Annalen der Physik
was definitely not reviewed by anyone but the editors.

Ah, so at least there were editors. But you don't
think editors ever rejected anything?


I was refuting your phrase "editors and referees".
There were no referees. There's no particular
reason to believe there were editors (plural).
It's entirely possible that the paper was only
read by one person before being published.

In fact, Einstein's first recorded interaction with
a reviewer was in 1936, when he was so insulted that
that the Physical Review had the audacity to show his
paper to an "outside specialist" without his
express permission that he *withdrew it in disgust*:http://www.physicstoday.org/vol-58/iss-9/p43.html
It's clear from his indignation that he believed
anything he wrote should be published without
question. For the record, in the paper, Einstein
concluded that gravitational waves could not
exist (!!), so it would have been a permanent
embarrassment if it had been published.

Well, we have on the record a number of opinions
Einstein had that later changed, or that didn't
and turned out to be incorrect. He didn't believe
in black holes, and he had the well-known philosophical
aversion to the probabilistic view of nature in QM.
He also introduced the cosmological constant, then
later decided that was a blunder (but as I understand
it, he might have been right in the first place).

I think these kind of things just help point out
that we was, after all, human. Something the
crackpots just don't want to hear anyone say.


My point was that as late as 1936, Einstein was
(unpleasantly) surprised to find his work
peer-reviewed. Many journals at that time would
have published the incorrect paper verbatim.
In fact, one did, but by that time Einstein
had found the mistake himself.


As far as experimental papers go, you don't have to
go back very far before error analysis gets shoddy
and then non-existent.

Of course, you're correct that the editors of
A d. Phys. would never have missed the sort of
silly errors the kooks on this NG regularly bring
up, but they could certainly have missed some
logical flaws, had they been there.

Even with peer review, some flaws get published. But
we've had a century to review Einstein's work, and
I'm not aware of any sane person finding a problem
with it.


No argument, but the same could not be said for
everything published in 1905.

-jc

- Randy


.

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