Nuclear Electrons & the Ether

daniel_rey_m · Oct 29, 2008

A few days ago I started to read a book titled THE STORY OF ELECTRICITY AND MAGNETISM (Robin Beach, P.F. Collier & Son Corporation, 1948) and was surprised to find out that in the postwar years and just three years before I was born they were talking about nuclear and extra-nuclear electrons.  They thought that the nucleus had protons and half of the electrons, and the other half was the electrons going around the nucleus.  They also thought that gamma rays were neutrons, so they did know about the existence of neutral subatomic particles, but they didn’t realize that neutrons belonged in the nucleus. They were primitive times.  On page 24 it says, “So little is known concerning the structure of the nucleus, except in a few of the simplest types of substances, that speculation in the subject is still more prevalent than fact.” I’m also reading a physics textbook by a French author, J. Langlebert, printed in 1920, when one of my grandfathers was 45 years old and they were still in the Copper Age of science.  It says that “electricity” is “an imponderable agent” and that it seemed like heat, light and electricity were different manifestations of one and the same cause, “or rather of a single, universal agent, which is the ether.  However, while heat and light seem to be caused by the vibrations transmitted to the ether by the molecules of ponderable matter, electricity seems to arise from the mere agitation of the ethereal fluid (&hellip

.”   It’s more amusing to read these really old textbooks, with engravings than look like they were etched in the XVIIIth Century, and a wonderful, strong smell that reminds you of ancient wooden furniture, than any brand-new one, and they make you feel like you’re back in those days, too….   However, my true pride and joy is A TEXT-BOOK OF PLANE SURVEYING, published by the American Book Company in 1896, so I wonder if any of you can boast about anything older than that on the bookshelf.  <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> </div>

kg · Oct 29, 2008

Replying to: <DIV CLASS='Discussion_PostQuote'>….   However, my true pride and joy is A TEXT-BOOK OF PLANE SURVEYING, published by the American Book Company in 1896, so I wonder if any of you can boast about anything older than that on the bookshelf.  Posted by daniel_rey_m</DIV> Umass here in Amherst used to be an agricultural college.  In the tower library there are trade journals going back to 1800.  In them there are advertisements (with wonderful illustrations) for horse and ox drawn implements touted as being the cutting edge of modern agriculture!

daniel_rey_m · Oct 31, 2008

Thanks for sharing that piece of local history.  Maybe that “kg” is just your initials, or it could stand for “kilogram”.  Anyway it’s a coincidence since I found your comment yesterday during a session at an Internet café, right after a visit to a public library where I’d been reading recent issues of the “Scientific American” magazine.  One of the articles I photocopied was one titled “A New Kilogram”, in the Jan. or Feb./07 issue, about how they’re trying to redefine this universal mass unit.  It’s not one of those eerie coincidences that Carl Gustav Jung called "synchronicities" but I did find it amusing.  Concerning that old book on surveying, it’s just a museum piece for me because I have nothing to do with civil engineering.  I bought it out of curiosity at a used-book fair.  It seems like surveyors are still using exactly the same techniques and instruments they used a full century ago.  One sees college students in parks doing their field assignments with the same hardware.  Actually there WAS a better reason for buying the book.  Surveying and astronomy both use triangulation:  the parallax method is the first rung of the distance-reckoning ladder astronomers use…so this matter is not too off-topic here….           <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> </div>

DrRocket · Nov 2, 2008

Replying to: <DIV CLASS='Discussion_PostQuote'>A few days ago I started to read a book titled THE STORY OF ELECTRICITY AND MAGNETISM (Robin Beach, P.F. Collier & Son Corporation, 1948) and was surprised to find out that in the postwar years and just three years before I was born they were talking about nuclear and extra-nuclear electrons.  They thought that the nucleus had protons and half of the electrons, and the other half was the electrons going around the nucleus.  They also thought that gamma rays were neutrons, so they did know about the existence of neutral subatomic particles, but they didn’t realize that neutrons belonged in the nucleus. They were primitive times.  On page 24 it says, “So little is known concerning the structure of the nucleus, except in a few of the simplest types of substances, that speculation in the subject is still more prevalent than fact.” I’m also reading a physics textbook by a French author, J. Langlebert, printed in 1920, when one of my grandfathers was 45 years old and they were still in the Copper Age of science.  It says that “electricity” is “an imponderable agent” and that it seemed like heat, light and electricity were different manifestations of one and the same cause, “or rather of a single, universal agent, which is the ether.  However, while heat and light seem to be caused by the vibrations transmitted to the ether by the molecules of ponderable matter, electricity seems to arise from the mere agitation of the ethereal fluid (&hellip

.”   It’s more amusing to read these really old textbooks, with engravings than look like they were etched in the XVIIIth Century, and a wonderful, strong smell that reminds you of ancient wooden furniture, than any brand-new one, and they make you feel like you’re back in those days, too….   However, my true pride and joy is A TEXT-BOOK OF PLANE SURVEYING, published by the American Book Company in 1896, so I wonder if any of you can boast about anything older than that on the bookshelf.  Posted by daniel_rey_m</DIV>Interesting.I wonder when the nuclear parts was written and what expertise was involved.  It is my impression that the physicists who worked on the Manhattan project had a much greater degree of sophistication with regard to nuclear physics than what is suggested in your book.  <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> </div>

daniel_rey_m · Nov 9, 2008

The author was Head of the Electrical Engineering Dept. of the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn & the revisor was Director of Broadcasts of the N.Y. University, so one wouldn’t expect them to be incompetent professionals.  Also, the publishers are a well-known concern & they even have their own encyclopedia, so they, too, deserve to be trusted.   Maybe a PARTIAL explanation can be found in the fact that the book has a long printing history: it first came out in 1922, & copyrights are claimed for five other years --1930, 1933, 1939, 1941 & 1943-- in between the first one & my edition, & all the editions seem to have been identical since no revised edition is mentioned. Still to be explained is why in that quarter of a century no need was felt for a revision.  Maybe the developers of the first A-bomb DID know more, as you suggest, & they abstained from sharing their knowledge for national security reasons (raisons d’etat), & then they finally told all after the Soviets exploded their first bomb (1949?), since that meant that they already knew about the structure of the nucleus???   It looks like even PhD’s who are rocket scientists can have a hard time trying to clear up the matter.  What we really need is a historian of science here to help us out….        <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> </div>

DrRocket · Nov 9, 2008

Replying to: <DIV CLASS='Discussion_PostQuote'>The author was Head of the Electrical Engineering Dept. of the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn & the revisor was Director of Broadcasts of the N.Y. University, so one wouldn’t expect them to be incompetent professionals.  Also, the publishers are a well-known concern & they even have their own encyclopedia, so they, too, deserve to be trusted.   Maybe a PARTIAL explanation can be found in the fact that the book has a long printing history: it first came out in 1922, & copyrights are claimed for five other years --1930, 1933, 1939, 1941 & 1943-- in between the first one & my edition, & all the editions seem to have been identical since no revised edition is mentioned. Still to be explained is why in that quarter of a century no need was felt for a revision.  Maybe the developers of the first A-bomb DID know more, as you suggest, & they abstained from sharing their knowledge for national security reasons (raisons d’etat), & then they finally told all after the Soviets exploded their first bomb (1949?), since that meant that they already knew about the structure of the nucleus???   It looks like even PhD’s who are rocket scientists can have a hard time trying to clear up the matter.  What we really need is a historian of science here to help us out….        Posted by daniel_rey_m</DIV>That makes sense.  The book dates from 1922 and in that period of time not so much was known of nuclear physics.  For instance the potential for fission was not known.  Even the 1941 and 1943 editions, had there been a re-write, might well not have been up to date.  Nuclear physics was a relatively small club of elite physicists then.  I would not expect and electrical engineer to have been in that club.The authors that you note are not incompetent professionals.  But neither are they nuclear physicists, so they may well not have been on the cutting edge of that subject at the time that they did their writing. <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> </div>

daniel_rey_m · Nov 14, 2008

Anyway the rest of the book is still useful because it describes electric & magnetic circuits & how machines work, with plenty of diagrams & photographs.    Those comments concerning the tiny club of nuclear physicists remind me about something my mother told me when I was a schoolboy (c.1965):  that only something like 200 people in the world could really understand Einstein’s equations.  That sounded very impressive.    A few months ago I read somewhere a similar comment, but this time it was a rather bigger number, like a thousand and something, maybe.  I do remember thinking that we had collectively improved somewhat, at least as concerns brainpower.    Maybe there’s someone who can tell us EXACTLY HOW MANY HUMAN BEINGS CAN FOLLOW HIS RECKONINGS.  Why doesn’t someone put together a test that will tell who does and who doesn’t, so we can finally have the right figure?  It would be the Test To End All Tests, or the Mother Of All Tests.  Meanwhile, is there ANYBODY somewhere who can come up with a “rough estimate”?  Make a public poll, &  then we can have an average.  No matter that “public polls are prostitutes for the Establishment”.         Something odd about that club is that there used to be a time when most nuclear physicists were Jewish, like Einstein,  J.Robert Oppenheimer, Lise Meitner….  Apparently the Christians have been doing their homework & are closing the nuclear physics gap...& what about atheists, animists, Muslims, Shintoists, New Agers, Wiccans….               <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> </div>

DrRocket · Nov 15, 2008

Replying to: <DIV CLASS='Discussion_PostQuote'> Anyway the rest of the book is still useful because it describes electric & magnetic circuits & how machines work, with plenty of diagrams & photographs.    Those comments concerning the tiny club of nuclear physicists remind me about something my mother told me when I was a schoolboy (c.1965):  that only something like 200 people in the world could really understand Einstein’s equations.  That sounded very impressive.    A few months ago I read somewhere a similar comment, but this time it was a rather bigger number, like a thousand and something, maybe.  I do remember thinking that we had collectively improved somewhat, at least as concerns brainpower.    Maybe there’s someone who can tell us EXACTLY HOW MANY HUMAN BEINGS CAN FOLLOW HIS RECKONINGS.  Why doesn’t someone put together a test that will tell who does and who doesn’t, so we can finally have the right figure?  It would be the Test To End All Tests, or the Mother Of All Tests.  Meanwhile, is there ANYBODY somewhere who can come up with a “rough estimate”?  Make a public poll, &  then we can have an average.  No matter that “public polls are prostitutes for the Establishment”.         Something odd about that club is that there used to be a time when most nuclear physicists were Jewish, like Einstein,  J.Robert Oppenheimer, Lise Meitner….  Apparently the Christians have been doing their homework & are closing the nuclear physics gap...& what about atheists, animists, Muslims, Shintoists, New Agers, Wiccans….               Posted by daniel_rey_m</DIV>LOTS of people understand general relativity.  There are now numerous text books on the subject.  It is not even a useful question any longer.  This has nothing whatever to do with increased intelligence or lack of intelligence, just availability of treatments on the subject and people interested in reading them.There are people who probably understand general relativity now better than did Einstein.  This is simply because many people have studied the subject, published their results and caused others to also do more research.  Roger Penrose is probably such a person.  There are others.Einstein was smart.  He was also in the right place at the right time to capture a lot of attention from the press.  There have been other people just as smart and probably smarter.  Quite a few of them.There was a time when the newspapers said that only twelve men understood the theory of relativity.  I do not believe that there ever was such a time.  There might have been a time when only one man did, because he was the only guy who caught on, before he wrote his paper.  But after people read the paper, a lot of people understood the theory of relativity in some way or other, certainly more than twelve.  On the other hand, I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics. – Richard P. Feynman in The Character of Physical Law   <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> </div>

arkady · Nov 15, 2008

Replying to: <DIV CLASS='Discussion_PostQuote'>He was also in the right place at the right time to capture a lot of attention from the press.  There have been other people just as smart and probably smarter.  Quite a few of them. Posted by DrRocket</DIV>Yes, science history is full of such examples. Bit of a startling realization to discover that not only do you have to get your theories right, you also need to develop them at the right time and place.  <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> "The choice is the Universe, or nothing ... " - H.G Wells </div>

arkady · Nov 15, 2008

Replying to: <DIV CLASS='Discussion_PostQuote'> Those comments concerning the tiny club of nuclear physicists remind me about something my mother told me when I was a schoolboy (c.1965):  that only something like 200 people in the world could really understand Einstein’s equations.  That sounded very impressive.            Posted by daniel_rey_m</DIV> I remember reading about that very subject recently. It was in Bill Bryson's "A Short History of Nearly Everything". I quote:" .... when the New York Times decided to do a story (on relativity red.), and - for reasons that can never fail to excite wonder - sent the paper's golfing correspondent, one Henry Crouch, to conduct the interview.   Crouch was hopelessly out of his depth, and got nearly everything wrong. Among the more lasting errors in his report was the assertion that Einstein had found a publisher daring enough to publish a book that only twelve men 'in all the world could comprehend'. There was no such book, no such publisher, no such circle of learned men, but the notion stuck anyway. Soon the number of people who could grasp relativity had been reduced even further in the popular imagination - and the scientific establishment, it must be said, did little to disturb the myth.   When a journalist asked British astronomer Sir Arthur Eddington if it was true that he was one of the only three people in the world who could understand Einstein's relativity theories, Eddington considered deeply for a moment and replied: 'I am trying to think who the third person is.' In fact, the problem with relativity wasn't that it involved a lot of differential mathematics (though it did - even Einstein needed help with some of it), but that it was just so thoroughly non-intuitive."  I wholeheartedly recommend this book btw for anyone interested in science history, and appreciates a bit of humor along the way.  <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> "The choice is the Universe, or nothing ... " - H.G Wells </div>

DrRocket · Nov 15, 2008

Replying to: <DIV CLASS='Discussion_PostQuote'> ...In fact, the problem with relativity wasn't that it involved a lot of differential mathematics (though it did - even Einstein needed help with some of it), but that it was just so thoroughly non-intuitive."  I wholeheartedly recommend this book btw for anyone interested in science history, and appreciates a bit of humor along the way.  Posted by arkady</DIV>Einstein did receive quite a bit of help with the mathematics of tensor analysis.  It turns out that David Hilbert also took an interest in what Einstein was doing, and Hilbert was a very strong mathematician.  Hilbert actually discovered the Einstein field equations and published them a bit before Einstein did -- but the theory and the credit still rightly belong to Einstein. <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> </div>

SHU · Nov 16, 2008

Getting off topic from the OP but I stumbled on this recently. http://www.tc.umn.edu/~janss011/pdf%20files/Einstein-De%20Sitter.pdf

DrRocket · Nov 16, 2008

Replying to: <DIV CLASS='Discussion_PostQuote'>Getting off topic from the OP but I stumbled on this recently. http://www.tc.umn.edu/~janss011/pdf%20files/Einstein-De%20Sitter.pdf Posted by SHU</DIV>Don't know if it is off topic.  Do know that it is interesting.  Thanks.If you stumble on any more interesting articles like that please post them as well.  <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> </div>

arkady · Nov 17, 2008

Indeed. The footnote on page one on metric fields was quite informative for a dabbler into such matters as myself. Gotta admit I had to call it quits around page 6 though, in fear of my mind exploding. Small steps I suppose.   <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> "The choice is the Universe, or nothing ... " - H.G Wells </div>

daniel_rey_m · Nov 17, 2008

After reading all those scholarly comments the following one will be embarrassing...sorry.  I need a little help from all you experts once again.  The problem is that I think the author or his secretary made a mistake in that old book.  It says, "The body which is considered to be moved from a remote distance toward the charged fixed body is considered to possess one unit of POSITIVE [my emphasis.-d.r.m.] charge of electricity.  If it is caused to approach a positively-charged body, this body is said to possess a positive potential.  If, on the other hand, the fixed body is negatively charged, it is said to have a negative potential."It would seem to be obvious that the emphasized word shouldn't be there since that sentence is talking about the general case, and that it should read simply "one unit of charge of electricity", because in the next sentence he goes on to mention the two possible cases.  If this isn't so then I'm not grasping his argument, which would be discouraging....      <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> </div>

DrRocket · Nov 17, 2008

Replying to: <DIV CLASS='Discussion_PostQuote'>After reading all those scholarly comments the following one will be embarrassing...sorry.  I need a little help from all you experts once again.  The problem is that I think the author or his secretary made a mistake in that old book.  It says, "The body which is considered to be moved from a remote distance toward the charged fixed body is considered to possess one unit of POSITIVE [my emphasis.-d.r.m.] charge of electricity.  If it is caused to approach a positively-charged body, this body is said to possess a positive potential.  If, on the other hand, the fixed body is negatively charged, it is said to have a negative potential."It would seem to be obvious that the emphasized word shouldn't be there since that sentence is talking about the general case, and that it should read simply "one unit of charge of electricity", because in the next sentence he goes on to mention the two possible cases.  If this isn't so then I'm not grasping his argument, which would be discouraging....      Posted by daniel_rey_m</DIV>It is a bit hard to be definitive without seeing a bit more of the text from your book. The idea is that if you have a fixed body of positive charge somewhere then it takes work to bring another bit of positive charge to it, and work is done on a negative bit of charge when it is brought to the fixed body.  I think that the text is OK, since the usual convention is for potential energy to be zero at infinity, and that would be the case here since all of the work available to be performed on the positive charge by the fixed charge would have been done when the positive charge was moved to infinity.      <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> </div>

arkady · Nov 18, 2008

Replying to: <DIV CLASS='Discussion_PostQuote'>After reading all those scholarly comments the following one will be embarrassing...sorry. Posted by daniel_rey_m</DIV>Haha, don't worry. I know the feeling. But asking such stuff is really what this place is all about isn't it? Maybe a cliché, but I like the saying my highschool physics teacher used to beat into out heads constantly, that there is no such thing as a stupid question, only stupid answers.Also from reading your posts it seems to me that you're not quite so un-scholarly yourself are you?  <img src="http://sitelife.space.com/ver1.0/content/scripts/tinymce/plugins/emotions/images/smiley-wink.gif" border="0" alt="Wink" title="Wink" />    <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> "The choice is the Universe, or nothing ... " - H.G Wells </div>

daniel_rey_m · Nov 18, 2008

I'll have to copy the previous paragraph in the book, then, but I don't have it with me now.  Meanwhile there's another matter, having to do with what DrRocket said about Hilbert having come up with certain equations before Einstein but Einstein, nevertheless, deserving most of the praise.  Some people are not that mild concerning the issue and they even say that Einstein was a shameless plagiarist.  For example, the "Nexus" magazine published an article titled "Einstein--Plagiarist of the Century", which is no longer freely available.  I downloaded & saved many a long time ago when they allowed you to see most of them, & so I could even place here the entire article, but maybe it's enough with the subtitle...Einstein plagiarised the work of several notable scientists in his 1905 papers on special relativity and E = mc2, yet the physics community has never bothered to set the record straight in the past century.  ...& the abstract... Proponents of Einstein have acted in a way that appears to corrupt the historical record. Albert Einstein, Time Magazine's "Person of the Century", wrote a long treatise on special relativity theory (it was actually called "On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies", 1905a), without listing any references. Many of the key ideas it presented were known to Lorentz (for example, the Lorentz transformation) and Poincaré before Einstein wrote the famous 1905 paper. As was typical of Einstein, he did not discover theories; he merely commandeered them. He took an existing body of knowledge, picked and chose the ideas he liked, then wove them into a tale about his contribution to special relativity. This was done with the full knowledge and consent of many of his peers, such as the editors at Annalen der Physik. The most recognisable equation of all time is E = mc2. It is attributed by convention to be the sole province of Albert Einstein (1905). However, the conversion of matter into energy and energy into matter was known to Sir Isaac Newton ("Gross bodies and light are convertible into one another...", 1704). The equation can be attributed to S. Tolver Preston (1875), to Jules Henri Poincaré (1900; according to Brown, 1967) and to Olinto De Pretto (1904) before Einstein. Since Einstein never correctly derived E = mc2 (Ives, 1952), there appears nothing to connect the equation with anything original by Einstein. Arthur Eddington's selective presentation of data from the 1919 Eclipse so that it supposedly supported "Einstein's" general relativity theory is surely one of the biggest scientific hoaxes of the 20th century. His lavish support of Einstein corrupted the course of history. Eddington was less interested in testing a theory than he was in crowning Einstein the king of science. The physics community, unwittingly perhaps, has engaged in a kind of fraud and silent conspiracy; this is the byproduct of simply being bystanders as the hyperinflation of Einstein's record and reputation took place. This silence benefited anyone supporting Einstein.  That magazine is quite sensationalist, so you never know what to believe when you read its reports.   Arkady: I don't have a college degree but I do have some college education.  I dropped out of college after just three semesters of  Biology.  Biology departments don't give physics courses, though.  I'm going over my high school physics, math & chemistry so I can reach a higher level of expertise that can be of use for an amateur astronomer.  Apparently most such amateurs dislike these subjects & just want to watch...like voyeurs. I'm having problems here with choosing the font size after copying/pasting....                                          <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> </div>

DrRocket · Nov 18, 2008

Replying to: <DIV CLASS='Discussion_PostQuote'>I'll have to copy the previous paragraph in the book, then, but I don't have it with me now.  Meanwhile there's another matter, having to do with what DrRocket said about Hilbert having come up with certain equations before Einstein but Einstein, nevertheless, deserving most of the praise.  Some people are not that mild concerning the issue and they even say that Einstein was a shameless plagiarist.  For example, the "Nexus" magazine published an article titled "Einstein--Plagiarist of the Century", which is no longer freely available.  I downloaded & saved many a long time ago when they allowed you to see most of them, & so I could even place here the entire article, but maybe it's enough with the subtitle...Einstein plagiarised the work of several notable scientists in his 1905 papers on special relativity and E = mc2, yet the physics community has never bothered to set the record straight in the past century.  ...& the abstract... Proponents of Einstein have acted in a way that appears to corrupt the historical record. Albert Einstein, Time Magazine's "Person of the Century", wrote a long treatise on special relativity theory (it was actually called "On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies", 1905a), without listing any references. Many of the key ideas it presented were known to Lorentz (for example, the Lorentz transformation) and Poincaré before Einstein wrote the famous 1905 paper. As was typical of Einstein, he did not discover theories; he merely commandeered them. He took an existing body of knowledge, picked and chose the ideas he liked, then wove them into a tale about his contribution to special relativity. This was done with the full knowledge and consent of many of his peers, such as the editors at Annalen der Physik. The most recognisable equation of all time is E = mc2. It is attributed by convention to be the sole province of Albert Einstein (1905). However, the conversion of matter into energy and energy into matter was known to Sir Isaac Newton ("Gross bodies and light are convertible into one another...", 1704). The equation can be attributed to S. Tolver Preston (1875), to Jules Henri Poincaré (1900; according to Brown, 1967) and to Olinto De Pretto (1904) before Einstein. Since Einstein never correctly derived E = mc2 (Ives, 1952), there appears nothing to connect the equation with anything original by Einstein. Arthur Eddington's selective presentation of data from the 1919 Eclipse so that it supposedly supported "Einstein's" general relativity theory is surely one of the biggest scientific hoaxes of the 20th century. His lavish support of Einstein corrupted the course of history. Eddington was less interested in testing a theory than he was in crowning Einstein the king of science. The physics community, unwittingly perhaps, has engaged in a kind of fraud and silent conspiracy; this is the byproduct of simply being bystanders as the hyperinflation of Einstein's record and reputation took place. This silence benefited anyone supporting Einstein.  That magazine is quite sensationalist, so you never know what to believe when you read its reports.   Arkady: I don't have a college degree but I do have some college education.  I dropped out of college after just three semesters of  Biology.  Biology departments don't give physics courses, though.  I'm going over my high school physics, math & chemistry so I can reach a higher level of expertise that can be of use for an amateur astronomer.  Apparently most such amateurs dislike these subjects & just want to watch...like voyeurs. I'm having problems here with choosing the font size after copying/pasting....                                          Posted by daniel_rey_m</DIV>My advice, based on that excerpt is to ignore Nexus in the future and burn any back copies that you might have.  They have taken a grain of truth and built it into a mountain.Certainly elements of special relativity were known to Lorentz and Poincare.  The transformation of coordinates in special relativity is called the Lorentz transformation for a reason.  Poincare was also interested in the problems associated with the "aether".  But it was Einstein who formulated special relativity and who framed it economically with just axioms: 1) the speed of light is the same in all inertial reference frames and 2) the laws of physics take the same form in all inertial reference frames.  Poincare doesn't need anyone to defend his contributions to science, and more so to mathematics.  The most famous problem in mathematics for the last century or so was the Poincare Conjecture, solved only a few years ago by Perleman.  His contributions to celestial mechanics are seminal.  And it was Poincare's work in celestial mechanics and dynamical systems that really set the stage for what is, inaccurately, called "chaos theory".  His reputation is safe.  Einstein is the father of special relativity, and Nexus is just all wet.General relativity is even more clearly the work of Einstein.  Special relativity was needed to address some clear, major and vexing open problems in physics.  It would have been invented by someone, maybe Lorentz or Poincare, if Einstein had not cracked the problem.  But general relativity was a great invention for which there was no apparent crying need.  Sure the precession of the perihelion of Mercury, was not adequately predicted with Newtonian mechanics, but the error is actually quite small.  Einstein accurately predicted it, although the initial calculations were a bit off, as were his initial calculations of the bending of light by the gravitational field of the sun -- which is what Nexus was slyly alluding to with regard to Eddington and his experimental confirmation of that effect.  But it was Einstein working alone who came up with the fundamental idea that gravity could be explained by geometry.  That was a stroke of genius.What is true is that the popular press exaggerates Einstein's mental prowess.  He was exceedingly smart.  But so were a lot of other people.  Einstein was one of the best.  But he did not stand head and shoulders above all others.  He was not particularly strong in mathematics -- lots of other people were better.  Hilbert was much stronger in mathematics, and that ought not be a big surprise.  Hilbert was a mathematician.  Einstein was a physicist.  Einstein was a better physicist than was Hilbert.  <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> </div>

daniel_rey_m · Nov 21, 2008

There seem to be many people who’ve been trying to convince everybody that Einstein was a dishonest scientist who fooled everybody, & none of them is a physicist.  This suggests that they’re reacting emotionally to his Jewishness.  Lyndon Larouche, the ambiguous politician, who dropped out of college twice & has no degrees, publishes a magazine called “21st Century Science & Technology” where you can find many articles about unorthodox science, on subjects like “the geometric basis for the periodicity of the elements” & the Robert J. Moon Model of the nucleus, & there’s an editorial titled “How I Discovered the Swindle of Special Relativity”, all of which is available in the online version of the magazine.  Poor James Clerk Maxwell is also bashed around on this occasion.   The editorial starts out by saying…  If we wish to assure the survival of science into the new century, we must begin by clearing up the mess we have made of it over the last. Let’s start with the swindle called The Special Theory of Relativity. Here we have a roof of wastepaper shingles, set upon the house of fraud that Maxwell built. Einstein’s alleged great achievement, that “triumph of 20th century physics,” was that he saved the appearances of the (then well-known) fraud which the great British faker, James Clerk Maxwell, had constructed over the dead bodies of Ampère, Gauss, Riemann, and, finally, Weber.This is the story of how I came to recognize the swindle Einstein perpetrated. Like most great liars, Einstein tells you what he is doing, albeit in a devious fashion. Like most discoveries, mine came about through an indirect path. Yet, each step is important in its own way. Bear with me, and you too shall see, if you dare.<a name="first_steps"></a>First StepsAbout two months ago, I read in a column by Jeffery Kooistra in Infinite Energy magazine (Issue 27, 1999) of a simple and paradoxical experiment, originally proposed by Dr. Peter Graneau, the author of Ampère-Neumann Electrodynamics in Metals and other works. The result so fascinated me that I decided to reproduce the experiment on my own.  (&hellip

DrRocket · Nov 21, 2008

Replying to: <DIV CLASS='Discussion_PostQuote'>There seem to be many people who’ve been trying to convince everybody that Einstein was a dishonest scientist who fooled everybody, & none of them is a physicist.  This suggests that they’re reacting emotionally to his Jewishness.  Lyndon Larouche, the ambiguous politician, who dropped out of college twice & has no degrees, publishes a magazine called “21st Century Science & Technology” where you can find many articles about unorthodox science, on subjects like “the geometric basis for the periodicity of the elements” & the Robert J. Moon Model of the nucleus, & there’s an editorial titled “How I Discovered the Swindle of Special Relativity”, all of which is available in the online version of the magazine.  Poor James Clerk Maxwell is also bashed around on this occasion.   The editorial starts out by saying…  If we wish to assure the survival of science into the new century, we must begin by clearing up the mess we have made of it over the last. Let’s start with the swindle called The Special Theory of Relativity. Here we have a roof of wastepaper shingles, set upon the house of fraud that Maxwell built. Einstein’s alleged great achievement, that “triumph of 20th century physics,” was that he saved the appearances of the (then well-known) fraud which the great British faker, James Clerk Maxwell, had constructed over the dead bodies of Ampère, Gauss, Riemann, and, finally, Weber.This is the story of how I came to recognize the swindle Einstein perpetrated. Like most great liars, Einstein tells you what he is doing, albeit in a devious fashion. Like most discoveries, mine came about through an indirect path. Yet, each step is important in its own way. Bear with me, and you too shall see, if you dare.First StepsAbout two months ago, I read in a column by Jeffery Kooistra in Infinite Energy magazine (Issue 27, 1999) of a simple and paradoxical experiment, originally proposed by Dr. Peter Graneau, the author of Ampère-Neumann Electrodynamics in Metals and other works. The result so fascinated me that I decided to reproduce the experiment on my own.  (&hellip

Posted by daniel_rey_m</DIV> This has gone from an interesting question to trolling and slurring Einstein without any supporting basis.This thread no longer belongs but perhap has a place in The Unexplained.BTW this attack on Einstein and Maxwell is utter rubbish.  There is no truth with regard to either the real physics or the alleged fraud.Rubbisn.  Bunk.  Nonsense.  <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> </div>

DrRocket · Nov 21, 2008

Replying to: <DIV CLASS='Discussion_PostQuote'>There seem to be many people who’ve been trying to convince everybody that Einstein was a dishonest scientist who fooled everybody, & none of them is a physicist.  This suggests that they’re reacting emotionally to his Jewishness.  Lyndon Larouche, the ambiguous politician, who dropped out of college twice & has no degrees, publishes a magazine called “21st Century Science & Technology” where you can find many articles about unorthodox science, on subjects like “the geometric basis for the periodicity of the elements” & the Robert J. Moon Model of the nucleus, & there’s an editorial titled “How I Discovered the Swindle of Special Relativity”, all of which is available in the online version of the magazine.  Poor James Clerk Maxwell is also bashed around on this occasion.   The editorial starts out by saying…  If we wish to assure the survival of science into the new century, we must begin by clearing up the mess we have made of it over the last. Let’s start with the swindle called The Special Theory of Relativity. Here we have a roof of wastepaper shingles, set upon the house of fraud that Maxwell built. Einstein’s alleged great achievement, that “triumph of 20th century physics,” was that he saved the appearances of the (then well-known) fraud which the great British faker, James Clerk Maxwell, had constructed over the dead bodies of Ampère, Gauss, Riemann, and, finally, Weber.This is the story of how I came to recognize the swindle Einstein perpetrated. Like most great liars, Einstein tells you what he is doing, albeit in a devious fashion. Like most discoveries, mine came about through an indirect path. Yet, each step is important in its own way. Bear with me, and you too shall see, if you dare.First StepsAbout two months ago, I read in a column by Jeffery Kooistra in Infinite Energy magazine (Issue 27, 1999) of a simple and paradoxical experiment, originally proposed by Dr. Peter Graneau, the author of Ampère-Neumann Electrodynamics in Metals and other works. The result so fascinated me that I decided to reproduce the experiment on my own.  (&hellip

Posted by daniel_rey_m</DIV>This thread needs to be moved to The Unexplained, or the trash. <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> </div>

daniel_rey_m · Nov 25, 2008

I wanted to encourage someone to point at the flaws in the arguments of all those unorthodox points of view, not to vex anyone.  I`m surprised at this turn of events....  <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> </div>

KickLaBuka · Nov 26, 2008

Replying to: <DIV CLASS='Discussion_PostQuote'>Let’s start with the swindle called The Special Theory of Relativity. Here we have a roof of wastepaper shingles, set upon the house of fraud that Maxwell built. Einstein’s alleged great achievement, that “triumph of 20th century physics,” was that he saved the appearances of the (then well-known) fraud which the great British faker, James Clerk Maxwell, had constructed over the dead bodies of Ampère, Gauss, Riemann, and, finally, Weber. Posted by daniel_rey_m</DIV>I agree with Dr. Rocket.  Einstein's work was completely different than maxwell's and this accusation is baseless.  Completely different thought processes and completely different mathematics. <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> -KickLaBuka </div>

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