einstein WATCH: How Einstein transformed scientific thought 4 times in a single year

[Reefa]

Quote

What a boss.

 

At the start of 1905, Albert Einstein was an unknown physicist working six days a week at a Swiss patent office, but over the next 12 months he published four momentous scientific papers, each of which would transform our ideas about the Universe.

 

Scientists call it his annus mirabilis (or his "miracle year", for non-Latin speakers) and the TED-Ed video above explains just how mind-blowing Einstein's 1905 papers actually were.

 

Any scientist would have been happy to come up with just one of these ideas, but Einstein achieved all four in an incredible burst of inspiration: he tackled big questions on light particles, the existence of atoms, special relativity, and mass-energy equivalence (which is where the famous E=mc² equation comes from).

 

Let's tackle light first, which back in 1905 was thought to travel in waves, with crests and troughs. Not so, Einstein argued in a March 1905 paper.

 

Actually, he said, it's made up of localised particles - a finite number of photons spreading through space.

 

His hypothesis explained the photoelectric effect, where light beams release electrons from a material, but it was so revolutionary that it wouldn't be widely accepted for another 20 years.

 

Today, Einstein's discovery is a cornerstone of wave-particle duality, the quantum-level concept that light can be both a wave and a particle.

 

But Einstein was just getting started. His next paper, in May 1905, looked at the question of whether atoms actually existed - something that scientists had been debating for centuries.

 

Here Einstein used the phenomena of Brownian motion - the movement of small particles in a liquid - to show that atoms were well and truly present, with millions of them causing the particles to bounce around.

 

Later experiments showed Einstein's calculations were correct, and he had another hit on his hands.

 

And yet the man kept going. In June 1905, he came up with his revolutionary hypothesis concerning special relativity: a way to reconcile two competing ideas about whether absolute motion could be defined.

 

Einstein's ingenious solution only applies in special cases, which is why it's called special relativity, but it supposes that the speed of light is constant while both time and space are relative to the observer.

 

A simple way to think about it is with a ship out at sea and someone watching it from the dock. If a sailor drops a rock from the top of the mast, to him it goes straight down and lands at the bottom of the mast, but to the observer on shore, it travels at an angle to keep up with the pace of the ship.

 

The ship metaphor, formulated by Italian scientist Galileo Galilei in 1632, is an example of what's called Galilean invariance - the idea that absolute motion can't be defined.

 

But Einstein had a problem with it, as it had already been established that the speed of light was constant, so replacing the rock with a beam of light messed up the hypothesis.

 

Because the speed of light is constant, the light lands on deck at the same time for both the sailor and the observer on land, but for the person on the dock, it travels a longer distance, so something doesn't fit.

 

That's when Einstein decided both space and time could be stretched, and it's thanks to this idea - special relativity - that we have everything from particle accelerators to GPS satellites.

 

Finally, Einstein published a fourth paper in September 1905, a kind of add-on to his special relativity paper.

 

After some more thinking, Einstein had concluded that special relativity also indicated a fixed relationship between mass and energy: E=mc², or energy equals mass multiplied by the square of the speed of light.

 

The hypothesis means that as objects approach the speed of light, their mass increases. Einstein was the first to identify the link between the two - a relationship which today helps us understand nuclear reactions and many more aspects of physics.

 

All in all, not bad for a year's work, although Einstein still had plenty of innovative ideas yet to come.

 

Let's hope he had time to enjoy a drink as 1905 turned into 1906 - he'd certainly earned one.

 

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[ThisPC666]

 

[ThisPC666]

Einstein, the Plagiarist

It is now time to speak directly to the issue of what Einstein was: he was first and foremost a plagiarist. He had few qualms about stealing the work of others and submitting it as his own. That this was deliberate seems obvious.

Take this passage from Ronald W. Clark, Einstein: The Life and Times (there are no references to Poincaré here; just a few meaningless quotes).

 

This is how page 101 reads:

"'On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies'...is in many ways one of the most remarkable scientific papers that had ever been written. Even in form and style it was unusual, lacking the notes and references which give weight to most serious expositions!!!".

Why would Einstein, with his training as a patent clerk, not recognize the need to cite references in his article on special relativity? One would think that Einstein, as a neophyte, would over-reference rather than under-reference.

Wouldn't one also expect somewhat higher standards from an editor when faced with a long manuscript that had obviously not been credited? Apparently there was no attempt at quality control when it was published in Annalen der Physik. Most competent editors would have rejected the paper without even reading it. At the barest minimum, one would expect the editor to research the literature to determine whether Einstein's claim of primacy was correct.

Max Born stated,

"The striking point is that it contains not a single reference to previous literature"

(Born, 1956)

He is clearly indicating that the absence of references is abnormal and that, even by early 20th century standards, this is most peculiar, even unprofessional.

Einstein twisted and turned to avoid plagiarism charges, but these were transparent.

From Bjerknes (2002), we learn the following passage from James MacKaye:

"Einstein's explanation is a dimensional disguise for Lorentz's. Thus Einstein's theory is not a denial of, nor an alternative for, that of Lorentz. It is only a duplicate and disguise for it. Einstein continually maintains that the theory of Lorentz is right, only he disagrees with his 'interpretation'.

 

Is it not clear, therefore, that in this [case], as in other cases, Einstein's theory is merely a disguise for Lorentz's, the apparent disagreement about 'interpretation' being a matter of words only?"

Poincaré wrote 30 books and over 500 papers on philosophy, mathematics and physics. Einstein wrote on mathematics, physics and philosophy, but claimed he'd never read Poincaré's contributions to physics.

Yet many of Poincaré's ideas - for example, that the speed of light is a limit and that mass increases with speed - wound up in Einstein's paper, "On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies" without being credited.

Einstein's act of stealing almost the entire body of literature by Lorentz and Poincaré to write his document raised the bar for plagiarism. In the information age, this kind of plagiarism could never be perpetrated indefinitely, yet the physics community has still not set the record straight.

In his 1907 paper, Einstein spelled out his views on plagiarism:

"It appears to me that it is the nature of the business that what follows has already been partly solved by other authors. Despite that fact, since the issues of concern are here addressed from a new point of view, I am entitled to leave out a thoroughly pedantic survey of the literature..."

With this statement, Einstein declared that plagiarism, suitably packaged, is an acceptable research tool.

Here is the definition of "to plagiarize" from an unimpeachable source, Webster's New International Dictionary of the English Language, Second Edition, Unabridged, 1947, p. 1,878:

"To steal or purloin and pass off as one's own (the ideas, words, artistic productions, etc. of one another); to use without due credit the ideas, expressions or productions of another. To commit plagiarism".

Isn't this exactly what Einstein did?

Giving due credit involves two aspects: timeliness and appropriateness. Telling the world that Lorentz provided the basis for special relativity 30 years after the fact is not timely (see below), is not appropriate and is not giving due credit. Nothing Einstein wrote ex post facto with respect to Lorentz's contributions alters the fundamental act of plagiarism.

The true nature of Einstein's plagiarism is set forth in his 1935 paper, "Elementary Derivation of the Equivalence of Mass and Energy", where, in a discussion on Maxwell, he wrote,

"The question as to the independence of those relations is a natural one because the Lorentz transformation, the real basis of special relativity theory..."

So, Einstein even acknowledged that the Lorentz transformation was the real basis of his 1905 paper.

 

Anyone who doubts that he was a plagiarist should ask one simple question:

"What did Einstein know and when did he know it?" Einstein got away with premeditated plagiarism, not the incidental plagiarism that is ubiquitous.

(Moody, 2001)
 

http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/esp_einstein.htm

 

[Reefa]

I gather you like him then with out of date threads? Anyway i like Einstein and for sure believe a lot of his work..Genius...

[ThisPC666]

just showing the other side of the coin.

[Reefa]

On 25/11/2016 at 3:48 AM, ThisPC666 said:

just showing the other side of the coin.

 

Yeah cool that's what its all about mate different opinions..Glad you didn't see my reply as rude as that is not how i meant it peace..

[ThisPC666]

13 hours ago, Reefa said:

 

Yeah cool that's what its all about mate different opinions..Glad you didn't see my reply as rude as that is not how i meant it peace..

 

nah, we must learn to accept different opinions coz that is how we get to learn new things and expand our knowledge. that is why we have forums like this one.   I honestly learned ALOT of new things here in just a span of few weeks. i was mind blown.   so, I, thank you guys and gals.

 

and who knows, what we currently believe as "truth/factual" today will be proven to be false 50-100 years from now.