Einstein or Newton

[Chaboo_Cleric]

More food for thought from Albert Heisenberg

How significant were Albert Einstein's contributions to science?
Albert Heisenberg
Albert Heisenberg, M.S. Physics from Brown University
Written Dec 28, 2015

Ginormous. Albert Einstein is the father of the two major pillars of modern physics: General Relativity and Quantum Mecahnics. There are only two other thinkers whose intellectual revolutions are on par with Einstein: Aristotle and Isaac Newton. In terms of brain power, incredible geniuses like Archimedes, Descartes, Leibniz (arguably the most underrated genius of all-time), Euler, Maxwell, Gauss, Plato, Shakespear, Goethe, and a few others have stirred the bucket, but only the aforementioned three (Einstein, Aristotle, and Newton) have completely shattered paradigms.

Starting at the age of 22, Einstein began re-deriving all of statistical mechanics from the laws of thermodynamics (something J.W. Gibbs did as the pinnacle of his life’s work at 70, Einstein did at 22). Had Gibbs not done it 1 year prior, Einstein would have probably been a physics rock star even before 1905. Historians have pointed out that Einstein, and most German speaking physicists, were not aware of Gibbs work until a few years later.

Cite1 : http://faculty.poly.edu/~jbain/h...

Then there’s the so-called “Annus Mirabilis” of 1905:

Brownian Motion and Calculating Avogrado's Number. Einstein solved the near 100 year old problem of Brownian Motion in which flower pellets jiggle randomly in a solution. Einstein then solved the mystery of Avogrado’s number, and calculated the size of molecules and atoms by using statistical mechanical methods he developed by himself from 1902 -1904 as well as the novel, but obscure, entropy-probability mechanisms Boltzmann created a few decades earlier. Jean Perrin later won the Nobel Prize for experimentally proving Brownian Motion a few years later: http://www.projects.science.uu.n...

Special Relativity. Albert Einstein's theory of special relativity revolutionized science and, once proven observationally, brought the physicist international fame. Though some observers dismiss much of the science that came before him, Einstein relied upon older work to formulate his landmark theory, experts say.

"The standard account of relativity tends to say that before Einstein, there was darkness … and then Einstein brought light," Dan Siegel, of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told reporters.. Yes, the “groundwork” had already been laid there by Lorentz – some of whose work was already done by Fitzgerald – Maxwell, and Poincare, but all three could never let go of two things that make Einstein’s achievement of particular elegance: absolute time, absolute space, and the lumineferous aether. ) The strange thing about internet trolls is they never realize one profound fact: Einstein was in his twenties when all these men had came up with different pieces of the puzzle and no one was really “close” to really tying them together. We say that as post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy after the fact. From historian of science and physicist Harvey Brown: “Brown denies the idea of other authors and historians, that the major difference between Einstein and his predecessors is Einstein's rejection of the aether, because, it is always possible to add for whatever reason the notion of a privileged frame to special relativity, as long as one accepts that it will remain unobservable, and also Poincaré argued that "some day, no doubt, the aether will thrown aside as useless". However, Brown gave some examples, what in his opinion were the new features in Einstein's work:

p. 66: "The full meaning of relativistic kinematics was simply not properly understood before Einstein. Nor was the 'theory of relativity' as Einstein articulated it in 1905 anticipated even in its programmatic form." p. 69. "How did Albert Einstein...arrive at his special theory of relativity?...I want only to stress that it is impossible to understand Einstein's discovery (if that is the right word) of special relativity without taking on board the impacts of the quantum in physics." p. 81. "In this respect [Brown refers to the conventional nature of distant simultaneity] Einstein was doing little more than expanding on a theme that Poincaré had already introduced. Where Einstein goes well beyond the great mathematician is in his treatment of the coordinate transformations... In particular, the extraction of the phenomena of length contraction and time dilation directly from the Lorentz transformations in section 4 of the 1905 paper is completely original."

After that, Brown develops his own dynamical interpretation of special relativity as opposed to the kinematical approach of Einstein's 1905 paper (although he says that this dynamical view is already contained in Einstein's 1905-paper, "masqueraded in the language of kinematics", p. 82), and the modern understanding of space-time.

http://www.aip.org/history/einst...

E=MC2 (Absolutely genius as he derived it from the postulates of SR): http://www.symmetrymagazine.org/...

The Photo-electric effect (which should REALLY be called, the “Quantization of energy”). As both respected science historians T.S. Kuhn and I. Cohen have repeated ad naseum, it was really Einstein that started the Quantum revolution not Planck. Don’t believe me? Read it from the top laser physicist in America: http://blog.press.princeton.edu/...

General Relativity, well, what more can I say? Gravity is the curvature of space-time due to the dynamical imposition of a mass on the fabric of space-time itself. He needed a little bit of help from friend Marcel Grossman to familiarize himself with the foundations of the then-obscure branch of math known as Riemannian geometry. He had, ironically, skipped all of those classes in university thinking it was silly abstract math – like number theory today – that he would never need to use. But after the first year, as the letters between Grossman and Einstein show, Einstein taught himself much of the hard lifting (levi-civita tensor, metric tensor, Riemannian manifolds, etc). It was all Einstein. Oddly enough, he mastered Riemannian geometry so well it may have led to his downfall as he started to build his unified field theory from a Riemannian geometrization of the electromagnetic field. A quick aside, Riemannian geometry might be named after him (as he invented it, probably from ideas Gauss had given him), but many of the concepts were develop by others like Levi-Civita, Minchowski, etc. It doesn’t diminish Riemann’s immense genius (and that goes for all great scientists, nobody, including Newton, worked in a vacuum): Nobel laureates Paul Dirac called General Relativity “probably the greatest scientific discovery ever made”; Max Born called it “the greatest feat of human thinking about nature.”: http://www.ias.ac.in/jarch/jaa/5...

And for those think Hilbert was on his heels, quick historical fact: the only reason Hilbert was even aware or cognizant of GR was because he invited Einstein to give a series of 6, 2-3 hr long lectures on GR at the University of Gottingen. Hilbert was not only in attendance, but according to historian Albrecht Folsing, he was taking copious notes. The lectures were given after he had published the provisional but ultimately flawed Entwurf version of GR that had already contained the metric tensor and much of the core that would become the final version of GR. Hilbert, for all intents and purposes took Einstein’s own working paper and, as one of the greatest pure mathematicians of all time, was unable to beat him to the goal-line despite his superior pure mathematical training. Turns out Hilbert’s field equations were not generally covariant: http://www.nytimes.com/1997/11/1...

I didn’t even mentioned his other contributions to science in the form of his work on quantum chaos theory, Bose-Einstein condensates, the LASER (yes, without him we wouldn’t be able to invent the laser, i.e. AB Coefficients), gravitational lensing, critical opalescence, probability waves (preceding Born), and even quantum entanglement (which he admittedly meant as a disproof, but he was the first to invent the idea and it’s harmonic operators), and other aspects of solid state physics, etc. http://arxiv.org/ftp/physics/pap...

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In reference to Quantum Mechanics, his contributions are nothing less than startling.

Douglas Stone. T.S. Kuhn, John Stachel and others, have convincingly argued that Einstein should be called the Father of Quantum Mechanics.

*Albert Einstein was the first to prove the existence of atoms in his seminal paper on the ~100 year problem of Brownian motion (this, incidentally, also proved the existence of molecules and is one of the 10 most cited papers of the 20th century).

*Albert Einstein was one of the first scientists to invent a new way to calculate Avogrado's Number (incidentally his dissertation).

*He is probably the most influential figure in the history of Quantum Mechanics thanks to his 1905 paper on the quantization of the radiation field, incorrectly referred to as the "Photoelectric Effect Paper" (it does much more than simply explain the photoelectric effect). This seminal work revolutionized physics by postulating that light was a particle and that the energy exchanges in the radiation field come in discrete chunks of indivisible particles. In essence, he proposed that the field itself was quantized (very revolutionary indeed). He, more than Max Planck, introduced the concept of the quantization of energy in atomic mechanics.

*Einstein, in his paper on the Specific Heat of Solids (1906), was the first physicist - using his own work on the quantization of the radiation field - to accurately explain the conditions for thermal equilibrium between matter and radiation.

*Einstein proposed the photon, the first force-carrying particle discovered for a fundamental interaction, and put forward the notion of wave-particle duality, based on sound statistical arguments 14 years before De Broglie's work.

*Einstein, in his paper on Spontaneous and Stimulated Emission, was the first to recognize the intrinsic randomness in atomic processes, and introduced the notion of transition probabilities, embodied in the A and B coefficients for atomic emission and absorption. Einstein was also the first to introduce a notion central to quantum mechanics known as complimentarity. In this paper we see Einstein invent a completely original (and elegant) derivation of Planck's radiation law as well a completley original (and elegant) derivation of Bohr's frequency rule. His trilogy of papers between 1916 and 1917 form the foundation of the LASER and is a work of prescient genius. Read Daniel Kleppner's (MIT) paper on the work:

http://cua.mit.edu/8.421/Papers/...

*Einstein also preceded Max Born in suggesting the interpretation of wave fields as probability densities for particles, photons, in the case of the electromagnetic field. Born would later win a Nobel Prize in 1954 by taking Einstein's idea and simply applying it to electrons - and was gracious enough to given Einstein the credit for the idea.

*Einstein, stimulated by Bose, was the very first to introduce the notion of indistinguishable particles in the quantum sense and derived the condensed phase of bosons, which is one of the fundamental states of matter at low temperatures. For this Manuel Cardona and others have called Einstein "the father of condensed matter physics":

http://arxiv.org/ftp/physics/pap...

*His work on quantum statistics in turn directly stimulated Schrodinger towards his discovery of the wave equation of quantum mechanics. Schrodinger always acknowledged this (see: Abraham Pais "Subtle is the Lord," 1982).

*Einstein was the first scientist to predict Quantum Entanglement in his controversial EPR Paradox paper that was later validated by John Bell (i.e. Bell's Theorem). Einstein theorized of entanglement as a disproof, but nonetheless he was the first scientist to see where others could not see. His ideas of hidden variables and non-locality are still being debated today, 80 years after the fact.

It was only due to his rejection of the final theory due to philosophical incongruities that he is not generally recognized as the most central figure in this historic achievement of human civilization.

Was he wrong about Quantum mechanics? He said it was a powerful theory that predicted a lot but explained little. He described it "incomplete." Most physicists today would probably agree that it is indeed "incomplete" seeing as it doesn't explain why the Standard Model possesses the specific properties it does. Lastly, Einstein was very bothered by the implication that the observer "collapses" the wave function, thereby implying that QM had a subjective component to it. So, no, Einstein was not wrong about quantum mechanics - were he alive today he would probably be working on quantum problems.

Sources:

Professor Douglas Stone (Head of Applied Physics at Yale University): "Einstein and the Quantum: The Quest for the Valiant Swabian" (2014)

Abraham Pais (Professor at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton): "Subtle is the Lord" (1982)

Daniel Kleppner (Professor of Physics at MIT): "Rereading Einstein on Radiation" (2005)

I’ve written far too much but as somebody who studies the history of science, there’s a profound reason legendary science historians (who are physicists in their own right) such as T.S. Kuhn and Gerald Holten revere Einstein and call him the greatest scientist at least since Newton. And it has nothing to do with him being a “pop icon” or them being fanboys. Real scientists recognize real genius.