Re: Einstein, Twins and Moving Clocks

From: Igor (thoovler_at_excite.com)
Date: 08/31/04 

Date: 30 Aug 2004 17:42:20 -0700

lvlus@hotmail.com (TomGee) wrote in message news:<cc2dde17.0408280932.39011a76@posting.google.com>...
> Uncle Al <UncleAl0@hate.spam.net> wrote in message news:<412F55B8.420B894B@hate.spam.net>...
> >
> > Bull***. SR and GR are the most highly verified theories in all
> > of physics.
> >
> That's your opinion. Like the religious folk, you tend to exaggerate.
> By far, Newton's theories have been the most highly verified in all
> of physics.

Funny, but I always heard it was quantum mechanics that had that
distinction. In any case, Newtonian physics is way off base in terms
of the very small and the very fast and/or very massive. That's where
SR/GR and QM fill in the gaps. And if you don't believe that, I just
need to ask where you've been for the last hundred years.

> > 90 years of observation in every venue from particle
> > physics to cosmology.
> >
> Newton's theories have been around a lot longer than that.
> >
> > Every prediction has been empirically
> > verified to the limits of experimental uncertainty.
> >
> He predicted a static universe; when was that verified?

Actually, his equations predicted an expanding universe, but since
this didn't seem to fit in with what was observed at the time, he
added an additional optional term that made everything static. In the
end, his equations were right, and he admitted he was wrong.
Ironically, we now realize that his mistake may not have actually been
so. The cosmological term with a different sign could interestingly
be sufficient to explain why the universe is accelerating outwards and
showing no signs of slowing down.

 
> And when was his "curved space" theory verified and by whom?

A few years after he first published his first papers on GR, Arthur
Eddington made detailed observations of star positions during solar
eclipses, verifying that Einstein's theory (of curved spacetime)was
the correct one. At the time, it was thought that Newton's theory did
not predict deflections of light in a gravitational field. We now
know that it does, but that it predicts a deflection angle half as
large as GR does.

 
> He predicted a perihelion phenomenon of Mercury which went
> undiscovered by Newton because he had not the tools available to
> Einstein, but all he did was to verify Newton's other already
> published works.

This is a very old problem. All planetary perihelia precess a bit
over time. Under Newtonian mechanics, all of the precessions could be
accounted for except for Mercury. Astronomers even went so far as to
hypothesize a planet that they labeled "Vulcan" that orbited very
close to the sun that was throwing Mercury off. Despite some
questionable claims, it was never found. But GR explained the
remaining unexplained part quite well, so it was vindicated in that
regard.

> Like none of us are, he was not perfect. You seem to think he was a
> god of sorts who could do no wrong. You have him on a high pedestal
> which he himself would be embarrassed to be placed on it. To believe
> that he was never wrong cannot help change the facts of history. It
> cannot help you to think better, either, nor to know better, nor to do
> better; it can only hinder your personal progress toward reasonable
> thought.

I don't think anyone in this newsgroup is saying that he was perfect.
To the contrary, he was just as human as anyone else. He did,
however, create a theory that became one of the dominant paradigms of
the last hundred years. He also had a bit of a hand in laying a few
of the foundations of quantum mechanics, the theory which has become
the other major force in modern physics. But in the end, a theory
will stand or fall, not based on the personality of its creator, but
on whether it is capable of empirical verification. And both SR/GR
and QM have indeed done that. The challenge remaining, it seems, is
to get the two to merge into one big theory of everything, something
that, so far, no one has been able to accomplish.

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