Einstein hated referees

A reader recommends an article by physicist John Moffat:

It is interesting to note that the most famous physicist of the 20th century, Albert Einstein, only faced the anonymous peer-review system once, for a 1936 paper he wrote, with his collaborator Nathan Rosen, disputing the existence of gravity waves in general relativity, Einstein's famous theory of gravitation. This paper, considered controversial at the time, was submitted to the Physical Review, the premier American physics journal then and now, and was duly rejected by the anonymous referee. Einstein wrote an angry letter to the editor, complaining that he had not been warned that he would have to face an anonymous review system when he submitted the paper for publication, and declaring that he would never submit a paper to Physical Review again. He was good to his word, sending future papers only to journals in which the editor made the decision to accept or reject papers. Unfortunately, there are no such journals remaining today. An obvious question arises: Would Einstein have succeeded so phenomenally as a physicist with his typically iconoclastic approach to physics, in which he was usually outside the box of mainstream physics of the day, if he had been subjected to the peer-review system of publication as it exists today? In my opinion, the answer is no.

That Einstein paper was rejected for good reason, as the anonymous referee wrote a detailed analysis showing that it was wrong. While Einstein complained about it, he ultimately decided that the referee was right, and stole his analysis for the revision that was published.

Very few of Einstein's famous papers were really outside the box. His special relativity papers were affirming the theory of the leading physicists of the day.

A large part of Einstein's success was his ability to steal the ideas of others and publish them as his own. Perhaps better refereeing and editing would have forced him to cite the previous work in his papers. If that had happened, he would not have been such a phenomenal success.

Most of Einstein's later papers on unified field theory were garbage, unfit for publication.

Maffat has his own complaints about refereees. He got his start by writing letters to Einstein in the 1950s. He has published a number of far-fetched theories, but none of them have any experimental verification, as far as I know.

The reader has his own theories for going faster than light. I do not see how that is possible.

The special theory is more fundamental

Physics bloggers Sabine Hossenfelder and Lubos Motl quibble about the definition of special relativity (SR). They agree on this:

Is SR applicable to phenomena in which objects accelerate?

The answer is, of course, Yes. Special relativity would be useless if it were requiring all objects to move without any acceleration; after all, almost everything in the real world accelerates, otherwise the world would be useless. The correct claim similar to the proposition above is that special relativity has the same, simpler form in coordinate systems associated with non-accelerating observers. But that doesn't mean that we can't translate the predictions of a special relativistic theory to an accelerating frame. Yes, we can. It's as straightforward as a coordinate transformation. Fictitious forces will appear in the description. All of them are fully calculable.

The earliest papers on SR considered accelerating electrons, so there is no good reason to exclude acceleration.

Acceleration might be excluded because Einstein's 1905 paper had a section on kinematics, and that is sometimes regarded as the simplest and purest version of the theory. With that view, general relativity (GR) is the real theory, and SR is just a special and idealized case of little practical significance.

As Lubos explains, SR is the big theory. Its change to physics was broad and deep. GR is just the logical extension to gravity. GR is a lot more difficult mathematically, but most of the physics is in SR.

Book on big questions in science

A UK newspaper asks The 20 big questions in science, based on a new book. The list is not too bad, but some are silly:

8 Are there other universes?

Our universe is a very unlikely place. Alter some of its settings even slightly and life as we know it becomes impossible. In an attempt to unravel this "fine-tuning" problem, physicists are increasingly turning to the notion of other universes. If there is an infinite number of them in a "multiverse" then every combination of settings would be played out somewhere and, of course, you find yourself in the universe where you are able to exist. It may sound crazy, but evidence from cosmology and quantum physics is pointing in that direction.

11 What's so weird about prime numbers?

The fact you can shop safely on the internet is thanks to prime numbers – those digits that can only be divided by themselves and one. Public key encryption – the heartbeat of internet commerce – uses prime numbers to fashion keys capable of locking away your sensitive information from prying eyes. And yet, despite their fundamental importance to our everyday lives, the primes remain an enigma. An apparent pattern within them – the Riemann hypothesis – has tantalised some of the brightest minds in mathematics for centuries. However, as yet, no one has been able to tame their weirdness. Doing so might just break the internet.

No, this is not a scientific question and a solution will not affect the internet.

17 What's at the bottom of a black hole?

It's a question we don't yet have the tools to answer. Einstein's general relativity says that when a black hole is created by a dying, collapsing massive star, it continues caving in until it forms an infinitely small, infinitely dense point called a singularity. But on such scales quantum physics probably has something to say too. Except that general relativity and quantum physics have never been the happiest of bedfellows – for decades they have withstood all attempts to unify them. However, a recent idea – called M-Theory – may one day explain the unseen centre of one of the universe's most extreme creations.

No, relativity teaches that we can never know what happens inside a black hole. M-theory cannot tell us anything about it.

20 Is time travel possible?

Time travellers already walk among us. Thanks to Einstein's theory of special relativity, astronauts orbiting on the International Space Station experience time ticking more slowly. At that speed the effect is minuscule, but ramp up the velocity and the effect means that one day humans might travel thousands of years into the future. Nature seems to be less fond of people going the other way and returning to the past, however some physicists have concocted an elaborate blueprint for a way to do it using wormholes and spaceships. It could even be used to hand yourself a present on Christmas Day, or answer some of the many questions that surround the universe's great unknowns.

Time travel to the past is science fiction. Simple thought experiments show that the concept does not make sense.

Paradigm argument for quantum interpretation

Papers on crackpot physics often start by invoking Kuhnian paradigm shifts, Galileo, and Einstein.

A new paper on a peculiar interpretation of quantum mechanics, Rovelli's relational quantum mechanics, monism and quantum becoming, starts:

According to Kuhn (1996, p. 85), a radical change in our physical worldview is not just due to the invention of a mathematical formalism or to new empirical information coming from novel experiments, but it also implies a thorough modification of the fundamental concepts with which we interpret the world of our experience. This is particularly evident in the scientific revolution ushered by Galileo (Koyré 1978), which consisted essentially in the discovery of the equivalence between uniform motion and rest, two notions that had always been sharply contrasted, but whose indistinguishability is essential to attribute our planet a counterintuitive state of motion.

The same moral applies to Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity (STR). Not by chance, Rovelli’s relational interpretation of quantum mechanics (Rovelli 1996, 1998) draws inspiration from the latter theory, by correctly claiming that Einstein’s 1905 paper did not change the existing physics, but provided a new interpretation of an already available formalism. As is well-known, this interpretation was obtained via a critique of an implicit conceptual assumption - absolute simultaneity - that is inappropriate to describe the physical world when velocities are significantly close to that of light. It is important to note that it was only thanks to the abandonment of such an assumption – that depends on the “manifest image of the world” (Sellars 1962), and in particular on that belief in a cosmically extended now that percolated in Newton’s Principia - that Einstein could postulate the two axioms of the theory, namely the invariance of the speed of light from the motion of the source and the universal validity of the principle of relativity. What is relevant here is to recall that not only do these axioms imply the relativization of velocity, already theorized by Galilei, but also that of the spatial and temporal intervals (separately considered), a fact that became particular clear with Minkowski (1908) geometrization of the theory.

The historical theme of the relativization of quantities that were previously regarded as absolute is central also in Rovelli’s relational approach to quantum mechanics (RQM), whose metaphysical consequences, strangely enough, have not yet been explored in depth,

Because of arguments like this, we ought to get the history right. The above history is confused.

It is true that Einstein's 1905 paper did not change existing physics. But it did not provide a new interpretation either. That was done by Poincare in 1905, and extended by Minkowski in 1908. Einstein's theory was called the Lorentz-Einstein theory, and neither Einstein nor anyway else saw any significant difference between Lorentz's and Einstein's interpretation.

The author is promoting a new interpretation as a Kuhnian paradigm shift. The advantage of this is that no evidence, experiment, or logical argument is needed. No change to existing physics is needed. According to Kuhn, scientists jump on these shifts as big fads, as the new paradigm is not comparable to the old.

Galileo's main argument for the motion of the Earth was that the motion caused the tides. If he had accepted the relativity of motion, he never would have had his dispute with the Catholic Church. The Pope even asked him to write a book that describes theories of the Earth in motion and at rest, without advocating either as correct. Galileo wrote a book making fun of the Pope as Simplicio, and ridiculed the idea that the Earth could be at rest.

Causalist-Statisticalist Debate

Physicists debate whether the laws of physics are deterministic or not. My impression is that most believe that quantum mechanics has proved that nature is inherently random, while a few (like Einstein) believe in determinism and that quantum mechanics must be replaced by a deterministic theories. I posted some polls here. I believe both view are wrong, as explained in my FQXi essay.

The July 24 episode of Through the Wormhole on the Science TV channel argued that we do not have free will.

A similar debate occurs in biology. Darwin was a determinist, and did not appreciate statistics. Evolution is usually described today in terms of random mutations and natural selection. A new paper on The Early History of Chance in Evolution says:

For those who have been following contemporary philosophy of biology in the last decade, the novel question I posit here will not seem so novel after all. Precisely the same worry about the relationship between statistical theories and biological processes has been hotly debated, under the guise of the “causalist/statisticalist debate.” On the one side, we have “causalists,” who argue that natural selection and genetic drift describe causally efficacious processes (e.g., Brandon, 1978; Mills and Beatty, 1979; Hodge, 1987; Stephens, 2004; Ramsey, 2006; Abrams, 2009; Otsuka et al., 2011). They are opposed by the “statisticalists,” who claim on the contrary that these theories are merely statistical summaries of genuinely causal events at the level of the individual organism (e.g., Matthen and Ariew, 2002; Walsh et al., 2002; Ariew and Lewontin, 2004; Krimbas, 2004; Walsh, 2007; Ariew and Ernst, 2009; Walsh, 2010).

Here is an example of confusion about randomness:

This modern view was summarised by one of the greatest ever advocates for neo-Darwinism, Richard Dawkins, when in an article in New Scientist magazine he wrote, ‘Natural selection is quintessentially non-random, yet it is lamentably often miscalled random. This one mistake underlies much of the sceptical backlash against evolution. Chance cannot explain life. Design is as bad an explanation as chance because it raises bigger questions than it answers. Evolution by natural selection is the only workable theory ever proposed that is capable of explaining life, and it does so brilliantly.’

Dawkins disagreed with S.J. Gould on this and other points. Here is a recent blog with a confused argument about whether mutations are random in biological evolution. I listed other confusions about randomness last week.

Ball State censors intelligent design

One topic is being censored from science:

Ball State University president Jo Ann Gora announced that the school would no longer teach intelligent design in science classes following a complaint about the curriculum at the public university.

In a statement released Wednesday, Gora said "intelligent design and creation science do not qualify as science," and that it would no longer be a part of the university's science classes.

"Intelligent design is overwhelmingly deemed by the scientific community as a religious belief and not a scientific theory,” Gora said. “Therefore, intelligent design is not appropriate content for science courses.” ...

"Incredibly, Gora insists that her university's 'commitment to academic freedom is unflinching,' even while she imposes a gag order on science faculty who think there is evidence of intelligent design in nature," West wrote on the institute's blog. "Memo to President Gora: Academic freedom was designed to protect dissenting and unpopular views among faculty."

Apparently intelligent design was one of many topics in an interdisciplinary course on "The Boundaries of Science". The supplementary reading list had books for and against intelligent design.

I have no idea whether this was a worthwhile course, but I wonder about all the other unscientific topics being taught in physics departments today. In particular, I wonder about anthropic principle, fine-tuning, many worlds, other multiverses, string and M-theory, black hole firewalls, Laplace's demon, quantum cryptography, scalable quantum computing, Bohmian mechanics and other nonlocal theories, hidden variable theory, Boltzman brains, cold fusion, intelligent extraterrestial life, supersymmetry, quantum gravity and other unified field theories, etc.

And of course other departments are loaded with pseudoscientific courses on Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx, Margaret Mead, Immanuel Kant, Jacques Derrida, Stephen Jay Gould, feminist studies, etc. If I were Gora, I would be more interested in getting rid of some of those classes.

Physics is the study of symmetry

Physicist Dave Goldberg writes in SLate, plugging his book:

The history of physics, in fact, is a marvel of using simple symmetry principles to construct complicated laws of the universe. Einstein quite famously was able to construct his entire theory of special relativity—the idea that ultimately gave us E=mc² and explained the heat of the sun—from nothing more than the simple idea that there was no measurable distinction to be made between observers at rest and observers in uniform motion.

The long-overlooked 20^th-century mathematician Emmy Noether proved the centrality of symmetry as a physical principle. And what is symmetry—at least as scientists understand it? The mathematician Hermann Weyl gave perhaps the most succinct definition:

“A thing is symmetrical if there is something you can do to it so that after you have finished doing it, it looks the same as before.”

Which sounds innocuous enough until you realize that if the entire universe were made symmetric, then all of the good features (e.g., you) are decidedly asymmetric lumps that ruin the otherwise perfect beauty of the cosmos.

The seemingly simple idea that the laws of the universe are the same everywhere in space and time turns out to yield justification for long-observed properties of the universe, like Newton’s first law of motion (“An object in motion stays in motion,” etc.) and first law of thermodynamics (the conservation of energy).

As the Nobel laureate Phil Anderson put it:

“It is only slightly overstating the case to say that physics is the study of symmetry.”

I do agree that the application of symmetry to physics is the biggest and most pervasive accomplishment of 20th century physics.

So who introduced symmetry to physics? Noether's theorem, published in 1918. Hermann Weyl invented gauge theory, and applications of group theory to quantum mechanics.

Einstein did notice in 1905 that the inverse to a Lorentz transformation is a Lorentz transformation. Lorentz credited Einstein for detailing this. This fact would seem to be implicit in Lorentz's explanation of the Michelson-Morley experiment, but Lorentz had not stated or proved it.

The mathematics of symmetry was central to Henri Poincaré's 1905 relativity paper, and that is largely why he deserves the credit for creating special relativity.

The relativity principle and Lorentz group were both named by Poincare. The relativity principle expresses the symmetry between different moving frames of reference, and was defined by Poincare at the 1904 St. Louis Worlds Fair as:

The principle of relativity, according to which the laws of physical phenomena should be the same, whether for an observer fixed, or for an observer carried along in a uniform movement of translation; so that we have not and could not have any means of discerning whether or not we are carried along in such a motion.

Einstein took this as one of his postulates in 1905. The Lorentz group is the mathematical expression of those symmetry operations, and Poincare was the first to point out that it was a symmetry group.

These facts are widely acknowledged, even by Einstein scholars. What is not so well known is how much further Poincare took his symmetry analysis. He used the symmetry group to define a non-Euclidean geometry on 4-dimensional spacetime. He proved that Maxwell's equeations for electromagnetism respected those symmetries, and thus could be geometrically realized on spacetime. He looked for a law of gravity that was similarly invariant under the symmetries. For decades afterwards, physicists followed Poincare's example, and used Lorentz invariance as a guiding principle for finding laws of physics.

Einstein has none of this, and showed no sign of even understanding it until hafter Minkowski spelled in out more clearly in 1908. The closest he got was to understand that the Lorentz transformations in one particular direction formed a 1-dimentional group, altho he probably got that from Poincare as Einstein had access to Poincare's first 1905 paper before submitting his own.

Noether, Weyl, and Poincare are three of the most important theoretical physicists of the 20th century. These three are primarily known as mathematicians who only occasionally dabbled in physics, but their theoretical physics was some of the most profound of the time.

This is all detailed in my book, How Einstein Ruined Physics.