black magick hustla
17th March 2009, 07:53
Everybody knows einstein's very "particular" way of doing science. While the development of quantum mechanics in the 20th century was the product of probably thousands of scientists, with the theoretical constructs themselves being the conclusions of various really offbeat experimental results (black body radiation, hydrogen spectrum, electron diffraction, etc), einstein's approach to science was very interesting.
We cannot say that QM was the discovery of only a man, but we can almost certainly say that general relativity, atleast as a theoretical framework, was the work of only Einstein. even the 60s and 70s cosmologists have apported very little to the theory itself. For example, I read an amazon review accusing a lot of the "general relativists" today giving off this vibe of "revolutionary scientists" by publishing lots of gimmicky pop books about time travel, black holes etc, while in reality, they have done very little after einstein.
What boggles my mind is the "philosophical" implcations of einstein's work. this man's science was almost entirely based on thought experiments. not only that, but it is completely counter-intuitive. I generally treat his gravitational theory of curved-spacetimes as a mathematical model, and in that sense it might make more "sense". However, the geometrical assumptions that led einstein to treat "space-time" like this is really mind boggling. Even if quantum mechanics is really weird, the most sober QM theorists never assumed something beyond the fact that there was a wavefunction that happened to give an estimation of the position of the particle. I.e. QM was based on those observations. General Relativity was the product of a man sitting in his office, assuming there was something like a "space-time manifold" and then treating it as malleable by the energy in the universe.
now, we might relegate GR as just a mathematical tool, like most physicists have relegated the wavefunction as simply an "information wave" i.e. not a real wave like a sound wave or an EM wave but just a mathematical wave. However, there is something called a "gravitational wave" that can be "pictured" as ripples in spacetime, if we treat spacetime as some sort of giant ocean. It is assumed this exist because of the behavior of things like pulsars, which seem to to loose energy through some sort of unknown radiation. G-waves have not been detected, but there are some detectors spread around the world and it is assumed they exist.
If gravitational waves are detected, then it means that space-time is not just some mathematical gimmick, but a real entitiy. It would have the same effect as the discoverey of E-M waves by maxwell, which relegated magnetic and electric fields from some sort of mathematical tool to a real entitiy that propagates in space.
my point is, if mathematics are just mental constructs or a language, how is it that a man that sat on his ass scribbling numbers all day was able to come up with a model of the universe which has a surprisingly predictive power and is completely counter-intuitive. For example, for all the mathematical sophistication of classical mechanics, the mathematics it uses, like the differential equation, is completely intuitive once you have a grasp of it. For example, by simply looking at the behavior of something, even me, some undergrad physics rookie, can come up with a differential equation for it simply because the difeq is very intuitive, kindof like using language to express something. However, the math of GR relies on a sophistication beyond intuition and worse, it was the product of very little observation compared to other "counter-intuitive" theories like QM. newtons mechanics might have been mostly the work of only one man, but they were based on very elegant intuition and on very empirical assumptions.How does a sober materialist deals with this?
We cannot say that QM was the discovery of only a man, but we can almost certainly say that general relativity, atleast as a theoretical framework, was the work of only Einstein. even the 60s and 70s cosmologists have apported very little to the theory itself. For example, I read an amazon review accusing a lot of the "general relativists" today giving off this vibe of "revolutionary scientists" by publishing lots of gimmicky pop books about time travel, black holes etc, while in reality, they have done very little after einstein.
What boggles my mind is the "philosophical" implcations of einstein's work. this man's science was almost entirely based on thought experiments. not only that, but it is completely counter-intuitive. I generally treat his gravitational theory of curved-spacetimes as a mathematical model, and in that sense it might make more "sense". However, the geometrical assumptions that led einstein to treat "space-time" like this is really mind boggling. Even if quantum mechanics is really weird, the most sober QM theorists never assumed something beyond the fact that there was a wavefunction that happened to give an estimation of the position of the particle. I.e. QM was based on those observations. General Relativity was the product of a man sitting in his office, assuming there was something like a "space-time manifold" and then treating it as malleable by the energy in the universe.
now, we might relegate GR as just a mathematical tool, like most physicists have relegated the wavefunction as simply an "information wave" i.e. not a real wave like a sound wave or an EM wave but just a mathematical wave. However, there is something called a "gravitational wave" that can be "pictured" as ripples in spacetime, if we treat spacetime as some sort of giant ocean. It is assumed this exist because of the behavior of things like pulsars, which seem to to loose energy through some sort of unknown radiation. G-waves have not been detected, but there are some detectors spread around the world and it is assumed they exist.
If gravitational waves are detected, then it means that space-time is not just some mathematical gimmick, but a real entitiy. It would have the same effect as the discoverey of E-M waves by maxwell, which relegated magnetic and electric fields from some sort of mathematical tool to a real entitiy that propagates in space.
my point is, if mathematics are just mental constructs or a language, how is it that a man that sat on his ass scribbling numbers all day was able to come up with a model of the universe which has a surprisingly predictive power and is completely counter-intuitive. For example, for all the mathematical sophistication of classical mechanics, the mathematics it uses, like the differential equation, is completely intuitive once you have a grasp of it. For example, by simply looking at the behavior of something, even me, some undergrad physics rookie, can come up with a differential equation for it simply because the difeq is very intuitive, kindof like using language to express something. However, the math of GR relies on a sophistication beyond intuition and worse, it was the product of very little observation compared to other "counter-intuitive" theories like QM. newtons mechanics might have been mostly the work of only one man, but they were based on very elegant intuition and on very empirical assumptions.How does a sober materialist deals with this?