Personally, I think his work on the Photo-Electric Effect deserved the recognition that it received. But Albert Einstein is far more myth than man. Everyone idolizes Einstein, he was the quintessential mad scientist. And it is difficult to challenge the notion of this myth without being accused of anti-semetism. But I risk doing so...
When one actually studies the History of Science, one discovers shocking things. None of the ideas attributed to Einstein were actually Einstein's. I don't want to bash Einstein. He was truly brilliant. So another way to put it is Einstein stood on the shoulders of giants. Though I can and will bash the notion that Einstein was so innovative that all the ideas were his. None of them were. Let's examine all the original insights traditionally attributed to Albert Einstein.
Comment too long, I will reply to my own comment and continue...
Empedocles (c. 490–430 BC) was the first to propose a theory of light, and claimed that light has a finite speed. In 1021, Alhazen (Ibn al-Haytham) published his Book of Optics, in which he presented a series of arguments dismissing Empedocles emission theory of vision in favour of the now accepted intromission theory, in which light moves from an object into the eye. This led Alhazen to propose that light must have a finite speed. Also in the 11th century, Ab Rayhn al-Brn agreed that light has a finite speed, and observed that the speed of light is much faster than the speed of sound. In the 13th century, Roger Bacon argued that the speed of light in air was not infinite, using philosophical arguments backed by the writing of Alhazen and Aristotle. In the 17 century, Pierre de Fermat also argued in support of a finite speed of light. In 1629, Isaac Beeckman proposed an experiment in which a person observes the flash of a cannon reflecting off a mirror about one mile (1.6 km) away. In 1638, Galileo Galilei proposed an experiment, with an apparent claim to having performed it some years earlier, to measure the speed of light by observing the delay between uncovering a lantern and its perception some distance away. He was unable to distinguish whether light travel was instantaneous or not, but concluded that if it were not, it must nevertheless be extraordinarily rapid. The first quantitative estimate of the speed of light was made in 1676 by Rømer. From the observation that the periods of Jupiter's innermost moon Io appeared to be shorter when the Earth was approaching Jupiter than when receding from it, Rømer concluded that light travels at a finite speed, and estimated that it takes light 22 minutes to cross the diameter of Earth's orbit. Christiaan Huygens combined this estimate with an estimate for the diameter of the Earth's orbit to obtain an estimate of speed of light of 220000 km/s, 26% lower than the actual value. In his 1704 book Opticks, Isaac Newton reported Rømer's calculations of the finite speed of light and gave a value of "seven or eight minutes" for the time taken for light to travel from the Sun to the Earth (the modern value is 8 minutes 19 seconds). Newton queried whether Rømer's eclipse shadows were coloured; hearing that they were not, he concluded the different colours travelled at the same speed. In 1729, James Bradley discovered stellar aberration, and from this effect he determined that light must travel 10210 times faster than the Earth in its orbit (the modern figure is 10066 times faster) or, equivalently, that it would take light 8 minutes 12 seconds to travel from the Sun to the Earth. In the 19th century Hippolyte Fizeau developed a method to determine the speed of light based on time-of-flight measurements on Earth and reported a value of 315000 km/s. His method was improved upon by Léon Foucault who obtained a value of 298000 km/s in 1862. In the year 1856, Wilhelm Eduard Weber and Rudolf Kohlrausch measured the ratio of the electromagnetic and electrostatic units of charge, 1/00, by discharging a Leyden jar, and found that its numerical value was very close to the speed of light as measured directly by Fizeau. The following year Gustav Kirchhoff calculated that an electric signal in a resistanceless wire travels along the wire at this speed. In the early 1860s, Maxwell showed that, according to the theory of electromagnetism he was working on, electromagnetic waves propagate in empty space at a speed equal to the above Weber/Kohlrausch ratio, and drawing attention to the numerical proximity of this value to the speed of light as measured by Fizeau, he proposed that light is in fact an electromagnetic wave. In 1865, James Clerk Maxwell had proposed that light was an electromagnetic wave, and therefore travelled at the speed c appearing in his theory of electromagnetism. The well-designed experiment performed by Albert A. Michelson and Edward W. Morley in 1887 failed to detect a luminiferous aether medium through which electromagnetic waves travelled. Essential to Einstein's theories, irregardless of still clinging to the notion of aether, and really because of the Michelson-Morley experiment, Hendrik Lorentz proposed that the motion of the apparatus through the aether may cause the apparatus to contract along its length in the direction of motion, and he further assumed, that the time variable for moving systems must also be changed accordingly ("local time"), which led to the formulation of the Lorentz transformation. Based on Lorentz's aether theory, Henri Poincaré (1900) showed that this local time (to first order in v/c) is indicated by clocks moving in the aether, which are synchronized under the assumption of constant light speed. In 1904, Poincaré speculated that the speed of light could be a limiting velocity in dynamics, provided that the assumptions of Lorentz's theory are all confirmed. In 1905, Poincaré brought Lorentz's aether theory into full observational agreement with the principle of relativity. To be clear, the modern origin of Relativity is rooted in Poincaré's work, and it's deeper origins first appears nearly 300 years earlier in the 1632 Galilean Invariance, aka Galileo's Theory of Relativity.
>the modern origin of Relativity is rooted in Poincaré's work,
And Poincare never developed it from first principles, elevating the speed of light being fixed in all frames. Poincare only noted that this was a solution to Lorentz invariance.
Einstein did take this as a first principle, and demonstrated what follows: time dilation (something completely alien to all before him, including Galileo). He then derived E=mc^2 from relativisitic momemtum (another completely alien concept to those before him).
> and it's deeper origins first appears nearly 300 years earlier in the 1632 Galilean Invariance, aka Galileo's Theory of Relativity
Galieo's view of the word is that velocities add, which Special Relativity shows to be incorrect. Galileo's theory of relativity is that the laws of physics are the same for all observers, which no one claims Einstein created.
Galileo had zero idea that velocities are sub-additive.
time dialation (something completely alien to all before him
No, not so much.
You missed this in my GP comment: "Hendrik Lorentz proposed that the motion of the apparatus through the aether may cause the apparatus to contract along its length in the direction of motion, and he further assumed, that the time variable for moving systems must also be changed accordingly ("local time"), which led to the formulation of the Lorentz transformation."
>>time dialation (something completely alien to all before him
>Hendrik Lorentz prop
Lorentz did not think that time actually dilated; his notion of "local time" he considered purely a mathematical trick, unrelated to actual physics, in the same manner that renormalization sweeps away infinities in a clever manner.
Here's the quote: "While for Lorentz length contraction was a real physical effect, he considered the time transformation only as a heuristic working hypothesis and a mathematical stipulation to simplify the calculation from the resting to a "fictitious" moving system. " [1]
So no, Lorentz absolutely did not think physical time actually dilated. Stop repeating this nonsense.
Also, Lorentz was not the first to publish the time dilation formula. And, like Lorentz, all before him thought it a neat mathematical trick, devoid of actual physics.
Poincare did think it may be actual time dilation, but he too lacked the insights that Einstein had that put these dilation and stretching concepts not as ad-hoc after effects, but that they come from a simple, single physical principle. What's more, Einstein's way of looking at it all was the one that turned out to match reality the best.
For example, in 1905 Poincare introduced "Poincare stresses", another fictitious set of forces, to reconcile the math they didn't like from what they thought of as reality.
Lorentz and Poincare used the now-disproven aether as the basis for their theories. Einstein did not.
Spend a moment reading that wiki page, replete with sources, and especially the section on "The shift to relativity." It's abundantly clear that Einstein was the first to publish the correct interpretation, devoid of all the ad hoc (and physically incorrect) assumptions that Lorentz, Poincare, and others, used to reconcile their belief with the evidence. Einstein, in one simple argument, showed that one simple physical idea - light has the same speed regardless of observer - leads to the correct equations that model reality, needs no other ad hoc forces or aether or any other items.
Here's [2] notes from a talk I gave (and still give from time to time) on a simple derivation of all these things from the one principle.
You spend an incredible amount of time misrepresenting and discounting the work of Einstein, so much so that you're posting many, many wrong items. I gave up listing them since the sheer amount of it baffling. Why?
I'd also like to point out that Einstein was humble, and the myth of Einstein that developed was not his doing. It was the common man, the everyday people and the press of the time that said, incorrectly, "wow! He is so smart, no one can understand what he is doing!" Which is patently false. Non-physicists could not be expected to understand Relativity. But the physicist peers of Einstein didn't have much trouble with it, contrary to Arthur Eddington's famous quote in response to the statement that only 3 people in the world understood Einstein, "I am trying to think who the third would be." False. Physicists of the day that looked at his work understood his work.
To Einstein's credit, one of the hallmarks of his genius, he had an ability to take complex ideas and describe them very simply, so that any might understand.
It is General Relativity that is Einstein's really only major contribution worth noting. And that is enough! Though he was first to describe Special Relativity, had he not, someone else would have within a few years of his publication. But had Einstein not given us General Relativity, it might have taken another 50 or 75 years for that to appear. But it also absolutely would have come from someone else had Einstein never existed.
Einstein is amazing, he is just not at all the myth that everyone thinks he was. He was just a humble theoretical physicist.
>It is General Relativity that is Einstein's really only major contribution worth noting.
Special relativity was a leap no one else was making, despite 20+ years of people knowing enough to make the leap. He also postulated light was made of photons (which was correct) to explain the photoelectric effect, which is another amazingly important thing. That one a Nobel Prize, but according to you, this is not a major contribution?
He developed the quantum theory of heat, also correct.
He gave solid empirical evidence for atomic theory using statistical physics.
He showed energy and mass are interchangeable (E=mc^2).
He predicted gravitational waves, just recently demonstrated, giving Thorne and other a Nobel. Had this demonstration been during Einstein's life, he would have gotten another Nobel prize.
He discovered the field equations predicted a dynamic, changing universe, something so far from thought at the time he tried to fight it by adding a cosmological constant, but he published the dynamic possibility anyways.
He (with Rosen) created a model of wormholes in 1935.
He invented Bose-Einstein condensates (Bose published statistics on photons, Einstein modified that to apply more widely and demosnteated completely new states of matter).
I could go on and on.
It's baffling you consider all this, especially one Nobel prize and enough for a second, to not be major contributions to physics.
>had Einstein not given us General Relativity, it might have taken another 50 or 75 years for that to appear
Also not true. As you yourself pointed out, Hilbert was right there, and if Einstein had not published, it would not have been more than a year until Hilbert (or a host of others) would have made the same discovery.
This "50 or 75 year" claim is just pulled from nowhere, like a lot of your other claims.
Rereading your posts on this, you clearly have selected at every possible point an anti-Einstein view, far more than is reasonable from the evidence. I could go on to post a ton more sourced items you get wrong.
Oh well, hopefully anyone reading this deep doesn't just believe the things you wrote, but takes some time to check them. I've provided enough places for them to start.
I disagree as to your opinions, which seem to just disagree for the sake of disagreement. The elements of Special Relativity were around. I stand by the assertion that someone else would have developed that theory within a few short years had Einstein not. And I stand by the assertion that General Relativity, had Einstein not existed, would have taken several decades before anyone would have fully put it together.
For anything Einstein is given credit for after about 1918, it was just the momentum of his popularity. Anytime another name is on anything, it is that other name that did most of the work, and because it was based on Einstein's earlier work, his name went on it also. And this is absolutely normal and expected in academia. Nearly all physicists do their life's work before they are 30, usually by the time they are 23. Einstein was nearly 40 when he published his Theory of General Relativity, and that is extremely out of the ordinary. You are seeing things, perpetuating the myth, when you place Einstein, the man, central to any breakthroughs after about 1918.
> Einstein was nearly 40 ... extremely out of the ordinary.
Over all Nobel Prizes, it happened around 1/3 of the time. In Physics since 2000, it happened 80% of the time [1]. Care to rethink this claim?
Have you read the original papers? I have. Do you understand the math, and can do calculations related to relativity? I can.
Again the claim General Relativity was not being solved by others? I just demonstrated Hilbert was right on Einstein’s heels, with a paper published right after Einstein, with the same results.
Why stick to that gun when I just cited the evidence, that you can check yourself? The original papers are both online for you to read.
Einstein and Hilbert even worked quite a bit together on it. Of course Hilbert was interested and working on it too.
By several decades do you mean a few months? Is this time dilation?
The specific fallacies you have chosen to employ to attempt support your frail argument are interesting. I have read Special Relativity in translation, it is short enough and there is little math. My German is not even pedestrian, so no, I have not read Einstein's original article on General Relativity.
No, I meant what I said. Special Relativity would have appeared within a few years of Einstein's publication had it not occurred, but for General Relativity derived elsewhere would have taken decades at least. Hilbert didn't have it and wasn't on anyone's heels.
>General Relativity derived elsewhere would have taken decades at least
Is this based on the quality of evidence you used when you claimed people over 40 don't do much science? That turned out to be wildly incorrect.
What do you base the "decades" claim on? There was no new math needing invented, no new empirical evidence needed, no new physics needed, and many people were close at the time, and certainly more and more physicists were heading down the same paths.
BTW, Einstein's most cited paper, by far, is from 1935, written when he was 56. I suspect that's some evidence he did good work after general relativity.
So in one breath you're saying GR would have appeared quickly if Einstein had not described it, and in the other you're saying he was the legend of his myth and productive his entire career.
It is simply my opinion that GR was so amazing, insightful, and non-obvious that it would have taken a similar miracle as Einstein himself for someone else to have intuited it and worked it out, but given enough time, eventually it would have appeared.
BTW, Einstein's most cited paper, by far, is from 1935, written when he was 56. I suspect that's some evidence he did good work after general relativity.
OR it is evidence that he had decent research assistants.
It is in the ballpark. The point is that Einstein did not pull a rabbit out of his hat, others had thought similar weirdness, and Einstein was aware of it.
Claiming as factual all the things you did is not "in the ballpark." It's simply wrong, and oddly skewed to paint the worst possible light with ad hominem, misconceptions, and lies.
Yes, plenty of people were working on similar stuff - this is true for every single case I've ever dug into (Newton, Gauss, Tesla, Einstein, Witten, Feynman, Wright Brothers, Marconi, transistor, laser, fission, fusion, ...), but to claim (as you did) that the person who actually make the breakthrough did not do it (and backing it by lies, as I sourced), is deceitful.
I've yet to see someone create something so vastly improved from the world around them that it would not have been made by another person or group immediately. But that does not mean it's fine to discount the work of the person who did it first, especially if that requires falsehoods.
No, I was correct. Ad hominem is an attack. I have not attacked you, and I do not see how you could find ad hominem in my replies. Unfounded paranoia is probably not something you should ignore.
My point was very simply was that Einstein did not walk on water nor did he operate in a vacuum. I am not sure why this is so difficult to believe.
Ad hominem is not simply an attack; it's disparaging someone to undermine their argument.
>I have not attacked you, and I do not see how you could find ad hominem in my replies.
I didn't say tou attacked me. You threw in Einstein being a womanizer in a discussion about people worthy of Nobel Prizes. I don't think the Nobel comittee takes that into consideration.
>Unfounded paranoia is probably not something you should ignore.
Agreed. Since you brought up unfounded paranoia, and since you thought the ad hominem was about you attacking me when that is not what I wrote, you should get that paranoia checked :)
>My point was very simply was that Einstein did not walk on water nor did he operate in a vacuum. I am not sure why this is so difficult to believe.
I never claimed anything like that. Strawman?
I agree he didn't operate in a vacuum, which is why I think there's ample evidence his work would have been done by others soon after he did it if he did not exist. This is true for just about every person and discovery.
You're the one arguing that all of mankind could not have developed General Relativity for decades without Einstein.
Which is it? Was his work able to be done by others around the same time (i.e., not in a vacuum), or was his work so spectacular and impossible for all of mankind to not be able to produce it for decades (i.e., the walks on water argument)?
Ad hominem is not simply an attack; it's disparaging someone to undermine their argument.
Which is why it is also fallacy. Attacking the man does not undermine the argument, so the argument stands unassailed. Anytime we say "you..." it is the beginning of an ad hominem fallacy. Informal fallacy is invalid argument.
The rest of your last comment is all ad hominem fallacy. It's all you you you with you.
If there is one brilliant insight Einstein derived, it is that light travels at the same speed from all frames of reference. But everything else, great work was done before him, and Einstein was likely aware of it, but we forget what came before and attribute everything to Einstein.
What about Black Holes? Not so much, no. Einstein himself was pleasantly surprised to learn that the field equations, developed by Grossmann, admitted exact solutions, because of their prima facie complexity, and because he himself had only produced an approximate solution. Einstein's approximate solution was given in his famous 1915 article on the advance of the perihelion of Mercury. There, Einstein used rectangular coordinates to approximate the gravitational field around a spherically symmetric, non-rotating, non-charged mass. Karl Schwarzschild, in contrast, chose a more elegant "polar-like" coordinate system and was able to produce an exact solution which he first set down in a letter to Einstein of 22 December 1915, written while Schwarzschild was serving in the war stationed on the Russian front. Schwarzschild concluded the letter by writing: "As you see, the war treated me kindly enough, in spite of the heavy gunfire, to allow me to get away from it all and take this walk in the land of your ideas." In 1916, Einstein wrote to Schwarzschild on this result:
>I have read your paper with the utmost interest. I had not expected that one could formulate the exact solution of the problem in such a simple way. I liked very much your mathematical treatment of the subject. Next Thursday I shall present the work to the Academy with a few words of explanation.—Albert Einstein
Schwarzschild's struggle with pemphigus eventually led to his death on 11 May 1916. He was only 42 years of age and at the height of his achievements when he died. Schwarzschild's work encompassed a wide range of scientific topics: he not only studied observational astronomy, but also furthered the development of astronomical instrumentation, and he was the first to give an exact solution to Einstein's (ahem, Grossmann's) field equations, which is now known as the “Schwarzschild solution."
In 1905, Albert Einstein postulated that the speed of light c with respect to any inertial frame is a constant and is independent of the motion of the light source. But he didn't just pull this rabbit out of his hat. There is a long history of science of at least the notion of the finite speed of light, and Einstein is standing on the shoulders of giants when he publishes his Special Theory of Relativity, and heavily relied on the work of three mathematicians to develop General Relativity, and a forth for his work on Black Holes. But neither Relativity nor the constancy of the speed of light were Einstein's ideas, and not remotely so. History just gave him all the credit.
He became a rock star, world renowned, and for some reason Niels Bohr gave him a lot of attention (Bohr was a the real hero scientist, sort of a manly man scientist for all seasons), but all of Einstein's decades of thought towards a GUT produced no results. After 1915, other than his plagiarism of Schwarzschild's work (following his plagiarism of David Hilbert's work), Albert Einstein did not again contribute anything to the annals of Physics or Cosmology. He became somewhat of a unfaithful husband and womanizer of his own young female students at Princeton. No judgements here. Who wouldn't have done similarly given the same opportunity? Coeds, right? They were randy for him. He had no ability to resist it.
It is well-known that Einstein was notoriously bad at mathematics. The sole reason for the decade of delay between his 1905 Special Theory of Relativity and his 1915 General Theory of Relativity is that Einstein did not have the mathematics to calculate the formulas. He needed some of the work done by Hermann Minkowski. By 1908 Minkowski realized that the special theory of relativity, introduced by his former student Albert Einstein in 1905 and based on the previous work of Lorentz and Poincaré, could best be understood in a four-dimensional space, since known as the "Minkowski spacetime," in which time and space are not separated entities but intermingled in a four-dimensional space–time, and in which the Lorentz geometry of special relativity can be effectively represented using the invariant interval x^2 + y^2 + z^2 -c^2*t^2. So even the notion of space-time was not Einstein's idea. Although Einstein is credited with finding the field equations for General Relativity, the German mathematician David Hilbert published them in an article before Einstein's article. This has resulted in accusations of plagiarism against Einstein, although not from Hilbert, and assertions that the field equations should be called the "Einstein–Hilbert field equations". However, Hilbert did not press his claim for priority.
Albert Einstein's friendship with Marcel Grossmann began with their school days in Zurich. Grossmann's careful and complete lecture notes at the Federal Polytechnic School proved to be a salvation for Einstein, who missed many lectures. Grossmann's father helped Einstein get his job at the Swiss Patent Office in Bern, and it was Grossmann who helped to conduct the negotiations to bring Einstein back from Prague as a professor of physics at the Zurich Polytechnic. Grossmann was an expert in differential geometry and tensor calculus; just the mathematical tools providing a proper mathematical framework for Einstein's work on gravity. Thus, it was natural that Einstein would enter into a scientific collaboration with Grossmann.
It was mathemetician Marcel Grossmann who emphasized the importance of a non-Euclidean geometry called Riemannian geometry (also elliptic geometry) to Einstein, which was a necessary step in the development of Einstein's general theory of relativity. Abraham Pais's book on Einstein suggests that Grossmann mentored Einstein in tensor theory as well. Grossmann introduced Einstein to the absolute differential calculus, started by Christoffel and fully developed by Ricci-Curbastro and Levi-Civita. Grossmann facilitated Einstein's unique synthesis of mathematical and theoretical physics in what is still today considered the most elegant and powerful theory of gravity: the general theory of relativity. The collaboration of Einstein and Grossmann led to a ground-breaking paper: "Outline of a Generalized Theory of Relativity and of a Theory of Gravitation," which was published in 1913 and was one of the two fundamental papers which established Einstein's theory of gravity.
>It is well-known that Einstein was notoriously bad at mathematics.
That's pop nonsense. The quote people take out of context was not applicable to what you're implying. Simple googling shows this claim to be a misconception.
> the German mathematician David Hilbert published them in an article before Einstein's article.
Not correct. Hilbert submitted a paper before Einstein, but the paper did not contain the field equations. After seeing Einstein's field equations, Poincare added them to his paper.
Also, Hilbert's paper didn't get published until 1916, after Einstein's.
I heard Kip Thorne say, "Einstein was a mediocre mathematician. Now don't get me wrong; he was a vastly better mathematician than I'll ever be, but Hilbert was a great mathematician." We undergrads are sitting around thinking "great: Hilbert > Einsten > Thorne >>>> us. We're doomed"
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/einstein-fantasy-physics_b_49...