ockham opened this issue on Nov 03, 2007 · 100 posts
AnAardvark posted Tue, 06 November 2007 at 8:00 AM
Quote - Einstein is a Myth
Einstein turned into a myth and not a person or scientist. As anything that disagree with a myth is ignored Einteins himself was added to the ignore list.
Everyone know very well that Einstein did two theories that gave him all the fame, the Special Relativity (1905) and the General Relativity (1915) and here ends the myth of Einstein.
Like all the quantum mechanics researchers who disagreed with Einstein's views about the fundamental incorrectness of Quantum Mechanics?
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Einstein after his glorious General Relativity, didn't retired, dedicated to bonzai trees, made tourism in the Greek Islands or died, he instead continued with his work! and in 1950 he published his third and last theory, the Unified Field Theory.
Very few people knows that he made a third theory and if know it all end in the title of the theory.
Is almost impossible to find something about this theory.
That's because he never finished the Unified Field Theory. He was trying to integrate gravity with the other forces. Einstein was hampered on four counts. First, gravity is probably the most difficult of the forces to unify with the others (considering that the electromagnetic and weak forces were unified in the early 70s, in part helped by high-energy collisions and the use of quantum mechanics. There has been no generally accepted further unification -- competing unifications of the electroweak and strong forces are awaiting experimental verification. The second problem Einstein had was that he didn't really understand or fully believe in quantum mechanics, which is the heart of the other unified theories. The third strike is that experimental physics hadn't provided the rich experimental basis for creating unified theories. Simply put, you just can't describe a unified field theory of gravity plus the other forces (especially the nuclear ones) using relativity and classical mechanics alone. The fourth strike is that two of the forces, the weak nuclear and strong nuclear forces, weren't all that well understood in the 1950s (again, due to lack of experimentation.)
Besides, if Einstein has been irrationally and incorrectly deified, despite his obviously :) incorrect theories of relativity, why hasn't his Unified Theory been accepted via dictat, rather like Lysenko's genetics?
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Einstein had the dream of his life that was to make a theory that integrated Gravitation with Electromagnetism, he worked his whole life and did this theory, the problem was that is Unified Field theory failed, appled to an electron gave ridiculous results and here is the problem, as for a myth is something inadmisible, Einstein's Unified Field theory together with 35 years of work was added to the ignore list.
It doesn't matter if the theory failed, it was a result of 35 years of work added to all the work of his previous theories, he could have failed, commited some mistakes, his theory can be revised, corrected the mistakes and turned into something useful , but all has vanished, nothing to analyze, nothing to correct or improve, no concept or idea to be learnt, the MYTH doesn't allows this, so Einsteins life as a scientist ends in 1916, forty years before his death!
It was 35 years of work which didn't accomplish anything other than show which way not to progress. Brilliant as Einstein was, he reached his level of incompetence when dealing with unified fields because thinking about them productively required tools not in his arsenal. He really had no coherent unified field theory, and his papers on unified fields were barking up the wrong tree. That said, it appears (from a cursory, 5-minute google search), that all the papers are still available (though not all online), and that there are several non-kook books out about them, from a philisophical and from a history of science basis. (There are also some clearly kook books out.) I also see some papers (dating from the 80s at least) exploring some consequences of Einstein's Unified Field Theory (mostly having to do with the gravitational consequences), and some history of science articles.