Albert Einstein was not as good at math as Henri Poincare, but he did better at understanding relativity, because his physical insight was completely unmatched.No, this is backwards. Einstein had no relativity physical insights that were not already articulared by Poincare. Not until after Poincare died, anyway. Those who credit Einstein for relativity often point to the lack of experimental justification in Einstein's 1905 paper. While Poincare and other derived relativity from the Michelson-Morley experiment, Einstein does not mention it. Einstein's approach is to postulate what Lorentz and Poincare proved.
One of Poincare's key 1905 insights was that realtivity was a spacetime theory, ano not just an electromagnetism theory. So Poincare recognized the need for relativistic gravity, while Einstein ignored the issue.
Carroll also says a lot of nonsense about many-worlds, simulation, etc. At 2:01:00, he says Einstein was right to rail against Copenhagen because Copenhagen is terrible. He says Bohm and Everett interpretations are much better, as they are well-posed scientific theories.
It is sometimes said that QM is the most successful theory ever, as there is a trillion dollar industry based on it. And it is 100% Copenhagen. No one has ever used Bohm or Everett for a practical application.
Carroll advocates canceling a physicist because he believed in eugenics a century ago, but then advocates eugenics himself at 2:41:00.
Sean Carroll always seems to pivot between naive and stupid, and at this point I don't think it matters which, as he's an adult who should know better and grow up. Like many shallow NIMBY intellectuals, he likes to entertain ideas and then gloss over niggling details and consequences like someone who has never given much thought between the words 'can' and 'should'.
ReplyDeleteOddly, he names the excellent movie GATTACA, which is a pretty damning indictment against the type of casual tinkering he is advocating openly, for reasons I don't think Sean really paid attention to. Another film which I enjoy exposing my left leaning friends to is The Twilight of the Golds. In this film a progressive Jewish family is confronted with the actual moral consequences of their own ideology playing out. The protagonist discovers she is pregnant with a boy who will turn out to be *gasp* gay. She starts to consider aborting the child merely because of this. The delicious irony is, she has a gay brother, so she realizes if her mother was empowered as she is, he might not even exist. Where did the precious tolerance go when the ability to delete the 'inconvenient' somebody in the womb is available? And what does it mean when a Jewish expectant mother can casually commit eugenics on a level that even Adolf would have envied?
'Never Again' my ass. Give them half a chance and a progressive leftest will embrace eugenics like a lover. History shows they have before, and will no doubt do so again.