From xkcd comic.
Lorentz did publish a detailed paper on how transforms explain the connection between velocity and time, in 1895, ten years before Einstein. FitzGerald and Voigt even had some similar ideas before that. Lorentz got the Physics Nobel Prize in 1902. When Einstein published something similar in 1905, no one was too impressed. Idolizing Einstein came later.
I find it entertaining when a child who doesn't understand something they have drilled and memorized places themselves above the understanding of the people who discovered what they have merely regurgitated.
ReplyDeleteLearning something by wrote in an expensive degree mill does not lend comprehension. That comes only with time and effort, not impatient youth or hubris.
They all missed the point: there was an aether. Deser elegantly showed how to extend Yang-Mills theory to gravity by flatspace self-interaction. The transformation laws ignore the big picture. Water waves have a finite speed, so why is it surprising that field dynamics have a finite speed? Special relativity can be described by ordinary wave mechanics, where rods and clocks get distorted but the underlying classical field PDEs of gravity and the SM don't change. Time is simply a parameter in QFT. You can understand modern field theory in terms of classical random fields, if you admit Lorentz-invariant noise.
ReplyDelete