Einstein: Superman or Super Stubborn?

http://math-blog.com/2010/09/03/einstein-superman-or-super-stubborn/

by acangiano • 16 years ago

25 18 16 years ago

math-blog.com

devmonk2• 16 years ago

Maybe so, but he still rules because of relativity and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power

acangiano• 16 years ago

I don't think that the article claims that Einstein doesn't rule.

bitwize• 16 years ago

It says we shouldn't deify guys like him and Feynman, but I think that stating they're at or near the upper boundary of human awesomeness is still okay.

eru3• 16 years ago

What does Einstein have to do with Nuclear Power?

Just to stop one answer: The mass-energy equivalence works as well for lighting a fire or for water-turbines as for nuclear energy. And yes, Einstein did some initial work on quantum mechanics.

ithkuil• 16 years ago

"Einstein's greatest role in the invention of the atomic bomb was signing a letter to President Franklin Roosevelt urging that the bomb be built."

http://hypertextbook.com/eworld/einstein.shtml

where he cites the work made by Fermi el al.

The first artificial nuclear reactor was built in 1942 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Pile-1)

Einstein's relativity theory and the equivalence of mass and energy is commonly cited has having laid the ground for the exploitation of the energy from nuclear decay, but I have the feeling that research in the nuclear energy field would have continued and yield some interesting results even without knowing that E=MC^2 beforehand.

known• 16 years ago

"I have no special talent. I am only passionately curious." --Albert Einstein

wwortiz• 16 years ago

If you ask me that is a pretty special talent.

T_S_• 16 years ago

For the tl;dr-impaired:

"Einstein, like many inventors and discovers, spent many years stubbornly pursuing his great discoveries — about seven years for special relativity and the other discoveries published in 1905 and seven years for General Relativity. His accomplishments did not come easily or quickly or without error."

Well, at least when he was finished, he didn't have to code it up in LaTeX and run a bunch of experiments using code written at 2AM after the lab sysadmin disabled his login for downloading too much data. Instead he went for walks.

sever• 16 years ago

A great article, and a great illustration of the fact that you can't always judge the correctness of an action based on outcome, but only based on the information you had available at the time.

If QM turns out to be right, it doesn't mean Einstein was wrong to work against it. If string theory turns out to be right, doesn't mean the theoretical physics community was correct to invest all its time into it.

baguasquirrel• 16 years ago

Boohoo, he was on the losing side Schrodinger and de Broglie. I'd give a kidney to be named on the losing side of a problem of this level, with guys like these.

korch3• 16 years ago

Mathematics is not yet ready for such problems.

—Paul Erdös

It may take another century, but I believe with absolute certainty that Einstein will be vindicated for thinking Quantum Mechanics was incomplete, rejecting the non-visualizable, non-intuitive, entirely algorithmic hoisting up of the mathematical machinery which Heisenberg, Schrödinger, Dirac, de Broglie et. al. built into quantum mechanics.

Einstein was on the far-most opposite end of the spectrum than all of them. Einstein was looking towards intuition to explain the physics and the experimental reality, while they were looking for mathematical models which seemed to fit the experimental data, while providing no understanding of what it all meant. Once Heisenberg & Schrödinger made a big break into QM, it's like all of physics jumped on it and forged ahead, damn whether anyone understands what is really happening.

Even Schrödinger himself, in his own first paper presenting his wave mechanics formulation, said there is no hope of visualizing nor understanding what Psi really represents. It's all just empty mathematical symbols, that when manipulated according to a particular set of rules, within a particular context, will give somewhat accurate predictions about some physical experiment. It really doesn't help at all the the entire QM apparatus is just plain ugly, inelegant and incapable of justifying itself. I'm not condemning it, nor any of the enormous geniuses who tossed their own contribution onto our great, immeasurable & eternal bonfire of accumulated human knowledge which we call science.

But if you read through a few grad-level books about QM, it's blindingly obvious that nobody really knows what's really going on. This is more of a consequence of our current gaps in mathematics, more than a failure of any individuals. Believe me, once someone discovers how to solve The Eigenvalue Problem in quadratic time, all of QM, as it is currently formulated, is going to go away and be replaced by a much simpler model. It'll be just as simplifying as centuries ago when we replaced Ptolemy's epicycles with Kepler's elliptic orbits. I bet even the probability concepts embedded in QM will be entirely thrown out(they were never anything but trouble anyways), and replaced by something even more fantastic & currently unimaginable.

nazgulnarsil• 16 years ago

when I say that something is unknown I am making a statement about my own ignorance, not a statement about the physical world.

korch3• 16 years ago

I'm not sure what your point is, but it made me think of something amusing:

You exist in the physical world. You body is in meatspace, and your mind is in the ever fluctuating electrodynamic field. Both of these can be modeled by physics equations to a very high precision.

Therefore when you say you believe you do not know something, even in reference to your own perception of your self-knowledge, you are nonetheless making a statement about the physical world.

Sorry if this sounds pedantic. :P

eru3• 16 years ago

Eigenvalues (and eigenvectors etc) can already be calculated numerically in polynomial time. Why would quadratic time make such a difference?

korch3• 16 years ago

We can lick gravity, but sometimes the paperwork is overwhelming.

— Wernher von Braun

Because having a worst case algorithm of n^2 is tractable, while solving for n^1000000 or bigger is not so much. The numbers are as shockingly big as in thermodynamics. And for real problems, it's not just one matrix, but thousands, all interlocked. And for some reason, the most common cases involve extremely sparse matrices. Numerical methods can only scratch the surface. On the bright side, we can't even imagine the true difficultly level. Sure computers can model the easy text book examples, but when it comes to modeling the real world, our current best mathematical capabilities don't even get off the paper.

Einstein: Superman or Super Stubborn?

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