Einstein's maths

[Lief]

So, 60 years on, why are his thoughts still the pinacle of our thoughts on mathematical and unknown problems?

Seriously, he was clever, I know, have we really not moved on enough from the 40's to debunk all this crap.

Why do we defer to the einsteins and hawkins (two people amonst nearly 7billion), is it fear of being wrong?

What is going on?

I fixed your stupid grammar mistake in the title.

[Ilya Muromets]

Wait, what? I don't get what you're trying to say. "Debunk?" Are you saying relativity or some other theory of Einstein was wrong?

And people do not "defer" to Einstein or Hawking like they were the final authority in their respective fields or something. Just because they're two people the public instantly recognize as being "big shot scientists" doesn't mean they run the entire scientific community. Statements like that betray an ignorance of how the scientific community works.

[SilverWingedSeraph]

I'm trying to wrap my brain around the question posed in this thread and I'm not quite able to, because if you're saying what I think you're saying then I just... are you drunk-posting again, or are you really this stupid?

[Serafina]

Ladies and gentlemen:
What you see here is a moron who can't even spell properly trying to tackle the entire physicists community!
That's right, our little moron-boy is so arrogant that he thinks he is smarter than thousands of people who devoted their entire life to this very subject!


Seriously, Lief - fuck off. You are either trolling or just plain dumb - actually, you are either both or the latter.
Oh, and don't try the "i am DRUNK"-excuse again - because for that to be true, you would have to be drunk permamently. No one believes you anymore.

Look, you imbecile - some of the smartest people in the world have looked at Einsteins work. The Theory of Relativity has not only been tested in the lab or mathematically, but also under real-life conditions. It WORKS. It is an accurate description of how the universe (or rather parts of it) works.
Just because something is old (and 80 years is not old) and you are too stupid to grasp it is is not wrong.

[Surlethe]

So, 60 years on, why are his thoughts still the pinacle of our thoughts on mathematical and unknown problems?

They are not.

Seriously, he was clever, I know, have we really not moved on enough from the 40's to debunk all this crap.

Why do we defer to the einsteins and hawkins (two people amonst nearly 7billion), is it fear of being wrong?

We don't.

What is going on?

What's going on is you don't know any of the relevant mathematics or physics, so you jump to conclusions about the state of mathematics and physics.

[Starman7]

Ah yes, back for another round Mr. Troll?

The reason most of Einstein's theories have not been debunked is, despite science's best efforts, we have not yet devised a test which has shown his theories to be wrong. Every test yet conducted returns the results that would be predicted by relativity, plus or minus some error factor for the instruments used.

And you know what? Einstein was wrong on some things. He disliked the idea that the universe was expanding, so he introduced an unknown lambda factor into some of his equations. He disliked the probabilistic models that quantum physics projected, so he simply stuck his head into the sand and said "lalalalala God doesn't play dice with the universe lalalalala". I suspect there are aspects to relativity that Einstein never thought of before he died, but which have been explained by other scientists.

I don't know terribly much about Hawking, but I imagine much the same goes for him. Both of them are famous for devising a few theories that accurately explain how the universe works; in Einstein's case, those theories revolutionized the concepts of space, time, and gravity.

[Packbat]

And you know what? Einstein was wrong on some things. He disliked the idea that the universe was expanding, so he introduced an unknown lambda factor into some of his equations. He disliked the probabilistic models that quantum physics projected, so he simply stuck his head into the sand and said "lalalalala God doesn't play dice with the universe lalalalala". [...]

Not disagreeing, but in Einstein's defense, not all interpretations of quantum physics are probabilistic - from what I hear, an actual majority of physicists favor the many-worlds interpretation.

(Seriously, though, I'm a bit surprised. I expected the "science consists of what the most recent famous guy thought" idea to be restricted to creationists slamming "Darwinism"...)

[Ilya Muromets]

(Seriously, though, I'm a bit surprised. I expected the "science consists of what the most recent famous guy thought" idea to be restricted to creationists slamming "Darwinism"...)

Nope. That's a fairly common misconception by people who don't know much about how the science and mathematics communities actually work. A lot of them see it as some kind of hierarchy where the "big names" decide what's right and what's wrong and everyone has to toe the line or get marginalized and ridiculed. It doesn't help that a lot of fictional depictions of scientists in popular media help reinforce this (you know, all those stories where a "maverick scientist" is actually right but gets ridiculed by everyone else until the plot proves him/her right)

[Eternal_Freedom]

In response to someone above, there are bits that Hawking came up with that are about as silly as Einsteins Cosmological Constant.

His "Cosmic Censorship" principle, which means you cant have a naked singularity.

Or his idea that the laws of physics conspire to stop time machines from working somehow because he hates the idea of time travel with a vengeance

[Ilya Muromets]

Or his idea that the laws of physics conspire to stop time machines from working somehow because he hates the idea of time travel with a vengeance

Do you have any source for this, or are you just pissed off that someone disagrees with your idea of time travel? Because, from what I recall, he's said that time travel to the future with relativistic speeds is possible when we gain the capability to do so. He's also spoke about the possibility of wormholes for time travel.

He admitted that he avoided talking about it before because the theories weren't well-formed enough back then for him to back, which is a far cry from "hates it with a vengeance."

[Simon_Jester]

So, 60 years on, why are his thoughts still the pinacle of our thoughts on mathematical and unknown problems?

Seriously, he was clever, I know, have we really not moved on enough from the 40's to debunk all this crap.

Why do we defer to the einsteins and hawkins (two people amonst nearly 7billion), is it fear of being wrong?

What is going on?

What is going on is the following:

People smarter than you are smart enough to know that they have to read things and understand what they are before calling them crap.

People smarter than those people (like, say, me) are smart enough to try and check the math. You won't trust me on this, but: it checks out.

People smarter than those people (I don't really think I'm smart enough to do this part) are smart enough to actually make a career out of using those theories as tools to understand the world, mostly in ways you never will and never could.

People smarter than those people (at this point there aren't very many of them) are smart enough to make significant improvements on our knowledge in this field.

It doesn't help that a lot of fictional depictions of scientists in popular media help reinforce this (you know, all those stories where a "maverick scientist" is actually right but gets ridiculed by everyone else until the plot proves him/her right)

To be fair the "maverick scientist" thing does happen sometimes. Usually it's not because of a "big name" (though that used to happen a hundred years ago). It's often because the one guy didn't do a good job with his work but turned out to be right anyway, either because he was lucky or because his intuitive grasp of a problem outran his ability to write convincing papers on it... or because the guy's a dick and convinces people to disagree with him by being a dick.

And then there's a whole category of "maverick" scientists who do their homework and it checks out... only to be completely ignored by major corporations and policy-makers, because it would be too expensive (see the case of the pesticide atrazine, which officially doesn't chemically castrate frogs and officially doesn't cause infertility in males at the concentrations found in and around fields where it's used). These are the most realistic maverick scientists, and sometimes they do run into problems with corporate-funded studies.

Of course, by this interpretation you get cases where the mavericks are a majority of all scientists in the field- like climate change, where practically every climatologist in the world knows damn well it's happening and can't get anyone to admit it.

[Ilya Muromets]

I should've clarified what I mean. I'm talking more on the reactions of the fictional scientific community as related to said fictional mavericks. They'll usually be met with hard-headed dogma and refusal to accept, or even perform the tiniest test to see whether whatever the maverick's doing checks out in some way. In those depictions, it's essentially the opponents of the maverick going "SCIENCE says that's impossible so it's not. End of story."

To be fair, things like that did happen--in the past before professional peer review and the proper application of the scientific method. To see depictions of scientists in a contemporary setting essentially being the dogmatic Pope and the Catholic Church while the "maverick" being essentially Martin Luther is annoying. Unfortunately, it's also such depictions that stay with most people.

[Lord of the Abyss]

Why do we defer to the einsteins and hawkins (two people amonst nearly 7billion), is it fear of being wrong?

No, as said it's just they appear to have been right. Far from fearing them to be wrong, any physicist worth his or her salt would love to prove Einstein wrong*; it would do wonders for his or her scientific reputation and career.



* Or rather incomplete; like Newton, relativity has been confirmed in the real world well enough that it being flat out wrong isn't really an option

[starslayer]

And you know what? Einstein was wrong on some things. He disliked the idea that the universe was expanding, so he introduced an unknown lambda factor into some of his equations. He disliked the probabilistic models that quantum physics projected, so he simply stuck his head into the sand and said "lalalalala God doesn't play dice with the universe lalalalala". I suspect there are aspects to relativity that Einstein never thought of before he died, but which have been explained by other scientists.

A couple of things here: to Einstein's credit, while he did initially put in a cosmological constant term because his original field equations did not hold in a static universe, when Hubble proved the universe was expanding, he immediately recanted, eventually calling the addition of the constant his "greatest blunder." You probably already knew that. What most people don't get is that Einstein was perfectly fine with the probabilistic nature of quantum mechanics; after all, it's predictions agreed startlingly well with experiment, so he couldn't reject it even if he wanted to. What he disliked was the so-called "spooky action at a distance" that QM allows, hence why he helped develop the EPR Paradox and posited that there may exist hidden variables underlying quantum mechanics that we have so far been unable to measure.*



*And never will; John Bell proved in the 60's that all possible hidden variable theories are incompatible with QM. Experiments conducted in the 80's and 90's confirmed the predictions of QM, meaning that no hidden variables exist.

[Bakustra]

I don't know terribly much about Hawking, but I imagine much the same goes for him. Both of them are famous for devising a few theories that accurately explain how the universe works; in Einstein's case, those theories revolutionized the concepts of space, time, and gravity.

Hawking's "cosmological censor" is not a serious theory, but rather a joking example. As far as we know, there is nothing preventing traveling into the past outright- as long as there is a time machine that was built before the date you want to go to. This raises the specter of a paradox. So Hawking proposed that the universe itself acts to prevent paradoxes, and so you cannot actually change the past. The "cosmological censor" is an illustrative example- anything traveling into its own past is erased from existence by the censor to prevent paradoxes. It's by no means serious.

[Kuroneko]

Einstein was both a giant in science and in the media, though he had enough disagreements that it's silly to suggest than the scientific community defers to him. In contrast, Hawking is much more of the latter than the former. While he does have important contributions, the perception the public tends to have of Hawking is much more disproportionate to his actual impact on the community. The accusation of deference is outright ludicrous in Hawking's case.

[Einstein] disliked the probabilistic models that quantum physics projected, so he simply stuck his head into the sand and said "lalalalala God doesn't play dice with the universe lalalalala".

Really? My perception of the Einstein-Bohr split is almost the opposite. It started out well enough, with Einstein constructing various puzzles for Bohr to solve, which he did. That's just what should have happened, since testing a theory is not only a matter of experiment, but of internal coherence as well. But I can't make heads or tails of what some of Bohr's arguments even are, especially his response to the EPR paper. Somewhat ironically, neither can Bell himself. As far as I can tell, Bohr only came out the "winner" of the debate because he picked the position that was vindicated after both of them were dead, not due to the quality of his arguments.

Hawking's "cosmological censor" is not a serious theory, but rather a joking example.

Not really joking--simply a hypothesis rather than a theoretical result. It was, however, not Hawking's.

[OmegaChief]

So, 60 years on, why are his thoughts still the pinacle of our thoughts on mathematical and unknown problems?

So I suppose we need some new Laws of Motion too? I mean Newtons theories are even older then Einsteins and (Aside from some points being prooved not entirly accurate or incomplete by Reletivity) still form the core of how we understand gravitational interactions.

Oh wait! Some of our maths comes from Ancient Greece, we'll have to reinvent basic principles because they're old guys!

But on a more serious note, Einstein at least laid the groundwork for a lot of modern phsyics, just like Newton did before him, for all we know in another hundred years or so there'll be a third name to add to that list, as for why we still use things like Reletivity? They still work, think of it like the wheel or the lever, we have them we understand them we know they work and how. They and thier principles are always going to apply, we don't 'move on' from Einstein for similar reasons (Unless future physcics proove his work incorrect/incomplete, but explaining the fundamental workings of the Universe is like that).

[Modax]

But on a more serious note, Einstein at least laid the groundwork for a lot of modern phsyics, just like Newton did before him, for all we know in another hundred years or so there'll be a third name to add to that list, as for why we still use things like Reletivity? They still work, think of it like the wheel or the lever, we have them we understand them we know they work and how. They and thier principles are always going to apply, we don't 'move on' from Einstein for similar reasons (Unless future physcics proove his work incorrect/incomplete, but explaining the fundamental workings of the Universe is like that).

Sure, and if modern physics is really *wrong* about anything, it will be very exotic phenomena, very far removed from what happens on earth. Like the state of the universe before cosmic inflation, or the existence of naked singularities or the nature of dark energy. All the things that general relativity / quantum mechanics successfully predict and explain will continue to be real after a major scientific advance. Our current physics, and the body of experimental evidence that supports it puts constraints on future theories. I.E, if some future string theory explained the acceleration of the universe but got the motion of terrestrial satellites wrong, it would be rejected.

[Serafina]

To say it in a simple way:
People do not get that our science is derived from observations that have been checked dozens, hundreds or thousands of times. No matter how far we advance, these observations - and the universe we observed - are extremely unlikely to change. And therefore our science derived from these observations is also unlikely to change.

[Sarevok]

To say it in a simple way:
People do not get that our science is derived from observations that have been checked dozens, hundreds or thousands of times. No matter how far we advance, these observations - and the universe we observed - are extremely unlikely to change. And therefore our science derived from these observations is also unlikely to change.

Sometimes existing theories and models are amended slightly. But on the other hand there have been some sweeping changes to widely held beliefs in some fields. Witness the changes astronomy has gone through over past 50 years alone. I daresay until we are confident we have seen everything there remains to be seen the possibility to great changes can not be ruled out.

[Prometheus Unbound]

Einstein was both a giant in science and in the media, though he had enough disagreements that it's silly to suggest than the scientific community defers to him. In contrast, Hawking is much more of the latter than the former. While he does have important contributions, the perception the public tends to have of Hawking is much more disproportionate to his actual impact on the community. The accusation of deference is outright ludicrous in Hawking's case.

Hello o/

I don't want to drive this thread off topic or anything but I don't really think it warrents a new thread all on its own. Besides, this one seems mostly pointless as the OP doesn't seem to have an understanding of what he's on about. But that's why we all ask questions I guess.

Stephen Hawking - whilst he's obviously an extremely intelligent man and I in no way mean to diminish his work... am I the only one who thinks he's a lot more famous and admired by people because he's "the guy in the wheel chair who can't talk" ? Is he actually any more revolutionary than any other popular science writer (say, Lawrence Krauss, Richard Dawkins [his biology work, rather than religious debunking]) etc?

[Skgoa]

He was a pretty good physicist even before his body started to break down, you know. Not in the same leage as Einstein, Newton or Kepler, but still a great and important mind. IMHO his greatest accomplishments and the reason for his fame are his popular science books. They are straight forward and relatively easy to understand, even if you have no idea about phyics or math; yet they manage to not be dumbed down to much.

[Simon_Jester]

That said, yes, muscular dystrophy has definitely boosted his recognizability as a public figure by making him more than just another face in a lab coat, so to speak.

He has done some really significant work in physics, stuff that matters, but he hasn't turned the field inside out the way someone like Einstein (or the group of top minds responsible for quantum mechanics) did.

[Channel72]

He's probably most well known for his work on black holes, and of course, Hawking Radiation.

[PaperJack]

So, 2500 years on, why nobody has debunked the Pythagorean theorem ?

Seriously, Pythagoras was clever, I know, have we really not moved on enough from 500 BC to debunk all this crap ?

Why do we defer to Pythagoras and Aristotle (two people amongst nearly 7 billion), is it fear of being wrong?

What is going on?