CAPITOL IDEAS: Einstein's Revolution, and Counterrevolution
Bethell, Tom
CAPITOL IDEAS Einstein’s Revolution, and Counterrevolution by Tom Bethell W ITH AN HOUR’S WAIT AT PENN STATION, I picked up a copy of Walter Isaacson’s new Einstein biography,1 turned...
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...Einstein: “You don’t seriously believe that none but observable magnitudes must go into a physical theory...
...Which length of the rod is ‘real...
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...Petr Beckmann, who taught at the University of Colorado, proposed a great simplification of Einstein’s relativity by replacing the old ether of Lorentz and Maxwell with one that is equivalent to the local gravitational field...
...Mindful of the perplexing history here, he diplomatically finesses the question (“it is not a question of whether rods actually shrink or time really slows down...
...Sticks “really must” behave in this odd way, JUNE 2007 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 37 CAPITOL IDEAS says Mermin, but only in the sense that it follows mathematically from the two postulates on which Einstein’s special theory was based...
...Saying that atomic clocks (or particles) slow down under certain conditions is not the same as saying that time slows down...
...He even ran his manuscript by a few journalists to be sure it was intelligible to them...
...But it can hardly be “revolutionary...
...He’s right about that...
...Furthermore, sooner or later his much admired notions about relativity will have to be discarded...
...Mermin’s answer is one that you might consider surprising in a book published exactly 100 years after Einstein’s theory was invented: There is by no means unanimity among practicing physicists on this question, and one frequently finds assertions that, for example, moving clocks appear to run slowly when measured by stationary ones, or that moving sticks appear to shrink...
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...Here’s a simpler answer to the above question: Length contraction has never been measured at all...
...As the late Edward Teller said to me in an interview, who can understand the curvature of four-dimensional spacetime...
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...CAPITOL IDEAS Einstein’s Revolution, and Counterrevolution by Tom Bethell W ITH AN HOUR’S WAIT AT PENN STATION, I picked up a copy of Walter Isaacson’s new Einstein biography,1 turned to the index, and started to read a particular passage...
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...I believe also that in holding out, almost alone, against a powerful consensus, Einstein was doing exactly what scientists are supposed to do but usually lack the courage to do...
...It’s in Eddington’s The Nature of the Physical World (1928...
...Most of us know little more than that Heisenberg enunciated an uncertainty principle, wherein observation affects the thing observed...
...He was confronted with his own youthful rebelliousness...
...It is the most definitive and readable Einstein biography to date...
...took the limitation of their cumbersome experiments as evidence for the nature of reality...
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...36 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 2007 Aspen Institute, came to his task with a strong interest in science, inspired by his father...
...I decided to buy the (signed) book on the spot—New York City taxes and all...
...The book is subtitled “his life and universe...
...It is this: that Einstein was right about quantum mechanics, and will eventually be vindicated...
...He began referring to this as a new way to conceive of an ether...
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...Isaac Asimov posed the same question about shrinking sticks and lagging clocks in 1966: “Which [observer] is really ‘right...
...When Einstein objected, Heisenberg confidently replied: “I believe that indeterminism, that is, the non-validity of rigorous causality, is necessary...
...Many such examples could be given...
...In all things he quietly sides with the consensus, brings diplomacy to bear on every controversy, promotes no novel interpretation, upsets no apple carts, and is at all times moderate and balanced...
...He notes the irony that Einstein’s most creative work, his general theory of relativity, “should boil down to conceptualizing space as a medium when his original premise was that no such medium existed...
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...As to time dilation, it has been shown that particles moving at high speed through the Earth’s gravitational field survive longer than slower-moving particles, and this has been construed as evidence for time dilation...
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...I had feared that this would be one more exercise in hagiography, describing Einstein’s askew love life, his left-wing politics, his first wife who didn’t get credit for her contributions to relativity, and his thoughts about God, all decked out with garlands to the great man’s genius and his epic contributions to science...
...We don’t expect a work that aspires to be (and is) authoritative to adopt controversial positions...
...Experts cannot agree whether its most famous predictions—that time goes more slowly and lengths contract in things that move with respect to an observer—are real or not...
...Two decades earlier he had “toppled many of the pillars of Newton’s universe, including absolute space and time,” Isaacson writes...
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...And I would have four hours to read it on the slow train to Washington (distracted, of course, by the incessant cell-phone jabbering...
...This was a feature of the universe, he claimed, not just some deficiency in our ability to measure...
...he never quite elucidates the sleight-of-hand involved (Banesh Hoffmann, an earlier biographer, did...
...M AYBE YOU CAN SEE WHERE this is going...
...Here is what I read, on page 318: … after he finished his theory of general relativity, [Einstein] concluded that the gravitational potentials in that theory characterized the physical qualities of empty space and served as a medium that could transmit disturbances...
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...I won’t go into his life, beyond saying that Isaacson has made full use of the Einstein papers newly released in 2006...
...And unless I am much mistaken, that is precisely Einstein’s new ether...
...To me, however, Isaacson’s Einstein unexpectedly reinforces a contrarian view that I have long entertained...
...Mead also said in an interview that Bohr & Co...
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...not so much politically— he remained a man of the left to the end—but in his scientific outlook...
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...But it has not yet been observed...
...It is not a statement about reality (the absolute) but it is a true statement about appearances in our frame of reference...
...Isaacson, the CEO of the 1Einstein: His Life and Universe...
...Here is Arthur Eddington, the famous British astronomer who led the 1919 eclipse expedition that confirmed Einstein’s prediction about the bending of starlight grazing the sun...
...You could navigate by it, but there was a simpler way...
...it cannot dig up those roots and overthrow the fundamentals, as special relativity did with space and time...
...By 1920, Einstein had brought back his new ether, and I’ll return to that...
...Frank reminded Einstein that that fashion “was invented by you in 1905...
...Overall, he has done a great job of translating relativity and quantum physics into plain language...
...Likewise, Einstein’s views about space and time were based on experiments using 19th-century equipment...
...Yet that principle had been central to special relativity...
...Tom Bethell is a senior editor of The American Spectator and author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to Science (Regnery Publishing...
...Special relativity, I fear, will remain a bit mystifying to those who study his chapter on that conundrum...
...But he makes up for it by taking a valiant stab at explaining general relativity in layman’s terms, which is rarely attempted...
...Eddington wrote: “The shortening of the rod is true, but it is not really true...
...The principle of the constancy of the velocity of light in vacuo must be modified...
...So, exactly the same question that Einstein asked of quantum mechanics could be asked of relativity...
...In denying that there is an objective reality out there, it undermined classical physics...
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...Science, I believe, can be radical (in the sense of going to the roots) and it must be innovative...
...But it is a very weak confirmation, with a simpler explanation...
...Einstein had ruled out the ether in 1905 because all attempts to detect it had failed...
...It is never mentioned in the Easy Einstein books and hardly ever in Einstein biographies...
...When I move, I see your ruler shrink and your watch slow down...
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...There’s an apocryphal story about Eddington...
...A S FOR THE NEW ETHER, Robert B. Laughlin, winner of the 1998 Nobel Prize in physics, discusses it in his book A Different Universe (2005...
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...At the end of a new book called It’s About Time, the recently retired physics professor N. David Mermin, who taught relativity at Cornell for decades, asks the same question...
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...The answer is neither and both,” he wrote...
...to which Einstein retorted that God does not play dice...
...Two full pages about Einstein’s reintroduction of an ether followed...
...It may yet open the door to a revisionist look at relativity...
...The topic needs a fuller treatment...
...I recommend the book...
...This is Isaacson’s view...
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...The modern conception of the vacuum of space, he writes, “is a relativistic ether...
...By the way, the bending of starlight is really real, and it confirms something important that Einstein had written in 1916...
...How Einstein came to conclude that space was a medium “is a fascinating story,” Laughlin continues, but he does not tell it...
...Edwin T. Jaynes, one of the dissenters cited by Carver Mead, said that when he studied physics at Berkeley in 1947, his thesis director, J. Robert Oppenheimer, would never countenance any retreat from the Copenhagen position, and derived “some great emotional satisfaction from just those elements of mysticism that Schrodinger and Einstein had deplored...
...There is something unsatisfactory about such a theory, surely...
...A good joke should not be repeated too often,” Einstein replied...
...This is not just cussedness, although it may betray a conservative bias...
...It was with relativity, in his gloriously rebellious youth, that he scored his great triumph...
...If relativity theory ever is replaced, Einstein himself will have pointed us in the most promising new direction...
...TOM BETHELL Heisenberg insisted that an electron does not have a definite position or path until we observe it...
...It has been told (in part) in Ludwik Kostro’s Einstein and the Ether, issued by a dissident publisher in Montreal, and not listed in Isaacson’s bibliography...
...he further enlisted the aid of physicists and Einstein scholars...
...He is said to have replied: “I’m trying to think who the third one is...
...This was reflected above all in his prolonged and unresolved dispute with Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg about quantum mechanics...
...Isaacson: “Some may be tempted to ask: Which observer is ‘right...
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...As for general relativity, it seems to give the right results, but by an extraordinarily complicated method...
...Einstein then complained to an early biographer, Philipp Frank, that a new and disagreeable fashion had arisen: The new physicists were arguing that things were not real if they couldn’t be observed...
...The theory was 38 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 2007 “incomplete,” he said...
...Meanwhile, we can all learn a great deal from Isaacson’s excellent book...
...Heisenberg: “Isn’t that precisely what you have done with relativity...
...Enthusiasm for that blend of mysticism and science survives to this day...
...He asks of moving sticks and clocks that allegedly shrink and lag: “Do these things really happen, or are they just secondary manifestations… leading to disagreements about what constitutes a valid measurement...
...If you are unfamiliar with that controversy, there could be no better introduction than Isaacson’s...
...Einstein’s position on the quantum was so mild that it surely has to be vindicated...
...Its removal had been a central feature of his special relativity...
...The consensus among physicists is that Einstein erred in his stubborn and “conservative” resistance to the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics...
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...A BASIC POINT ABOUT EINSTEIN’S LIFE (1879-1955) is that he became more conservative when he reached middle age...
...He covers it in about 40 lucid pages, encompassing the contributions of Erwin Schrödinger and others...
...Many people know that in his special theory of relativity, Einstein abolished the luminiferous medium, or ether...
...Yet I believe Beckmann did not know about Einstein’s adoption of this same idea...
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...The emeritus Caltech professor Carver Mead writes in his book Collective Electrodynamics that new researchers (he mentions several unfamiliar names) “have put us in a position to finally settle the Einstein-Bohr debate—with a resounding victory for Einstein...
...You observe no such changes—called time dilation and length contraction—but you do see my ruler shrink and my watch slow down...
...I agree with you that the general relativity theory admits of an ether hypothesis,” he wrote Lorentz in 1916...
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...Very few know that eleven years later he reintroduced a rather different ether...
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...Given his position, and the book’s ambition, this is to be expected...
...Now he was a defender of Newton, of rigorous causality and (by implication) the established order...
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...Possibly,” Einstein said, “but it is nonsense all the same...
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...On the 200th anniversary of Newton’s death, in 1927, Einstein defended classical mechanics...
Vol. 40 • June 2007 • No. 5
