How Lorentz arrived at the deformation hypothesis

Much of Albert Einstein's fame is based on claims that his presentation of the Lorentz transformations was somehow superior to what had been done previously.

Philosopher Harvey R Brown wrote in 2001 about how FitzGerald and Lorentz brilliantly and correctly analyzed the Michelson-Morley experiment in The origins of length contraction: I. The FitzGerald-Lorentz deformation hypothesis:

In a letter to Einstein written in 1915 and unearthed many years later by A.J. Kox 64, Lorentz admitted that he had arrived at the deformation hypothesis shortly before he developed the plausibility argument based on molecular forces. But he expressed regret that he had not emphasised the dynamical argument more from the beginning: had he done so “the hypothesis would have made less an impression of having been devised ad hoc.”

The most startling part of relativity is that motion affects space and time. Brown traces the origin of this concept to 1889, long before Einstein. As Brown shows, both FitzGerald and Lorentz arrived at the contraction hypothesis as a logical consequence of the MM experiment showing that the speed of light is the same in all frames, together with other experiments rejecting the aether drift theory.

Brown notes that the MM experiment only showed that the length is contracted relative to the width. FitzGerald and Lorentz were not sure whether the length is contracted, or the width is expanded, or some combination. Lorentz eventually concluded that the deformation was purely a length contraction, and published that in 1904. FitzGerald died in 1901, without knowing that his 1889 letter was published in AAAS Science, or that it contained what would later be considered one of the greatest insights in the history of science.

Einstein wrote his first relativity paper in 1905. He relied on Lorentz's analysis of the MM experiment, but did not mention the experiment and later denied that he even knew about it. His main argument was that the Lorentz transformations can be deduced from the speed of light being the same in all frames, without mentioning experiments. Anti-positivist philosophers have praised Einstein largely for ignoring the experiments. He did not mention the dynamically argument because he could not get it to work, and he explained many years later.

Thus FitzGerald and Lorentz discovered (independently) the length contraction using the speed-of-light argument, and then tried to support it with a dynamical argument. 13+ years later, Einstein published a paper presenting the length contraction using the speed-of-light argument, and did not mention the dynamical argument.

Google uses quantum computer for global warming

MIT professor Scott Aaronson writes about the latest quantum computer hype:

according to an article by Victoria Woollaston in the Daily Mail, Google hopes to use its D-Wave quantum computer to “solve global warming,” “develop sophisticated artificial life,” and “find aliens.”  (No, I’m not making any of this up: just quoting stuff other people made up.)  The article also repeats the debunked canard that the D-Wave machine is “3600 times faster,” and soberly explains that D-Wave’s 512 qubits compare favorably to the mere 32 or 64 bits found in home PCs (exercise for those of you who aren’t already rolling on the floor: think about that until you are).  It contains not a shadow of a hint of skepticism anywhere, not one token sentence.  I would say that, even in an extremely crowded field, Woollaston’s piece takes the cake as the single most irresponsible article about D-Wave I’ve seen.  And I’d feel terrible for my many friends at Google, whose company comes out of this looking like a laughingstock. 

This is more hype than usual, but none of the quantum computer admit that there has been very little progress making such computers and they will probably be impossible.

Paradigm shift thinking led to fraud

The philosophy of science is dominated by silly and destructive ideas about Kuhnian paradigm shifts.

A Finnish philosopher writes:

Research ethics and philosophy of science meet in one of the most disturbing and wideranging scientific frauds to date, the Stapel Case of the Netherlands. I will argue that, beyond the obviously blatant violation of research ethics concerning data cooking and deceit, the nature of the case raises issues about the implications of some relatively widespread issues in the philosophy of science. In particular, I want to point my finger at Kuhnian philosophy of science, or rather its later and largely derailed interpretations that came to be allied with the strong version of the underdetermination thesis. ...

What I want to argue here is that the overall increase in fraudulent practices that we have witnessed of late have become a symptom of two largely questionable and in many respects faulty ideas in philosophy of science having gone into their extremes: Kuhn's or his posse's willingness to displace facts and evidence with subjective interests and points of views, and Quine's thesis of underdetermination of theory by evidence under its strong interpretation. Stapel's case fits in with the pattern of strong underdetermination, and no more blatant and direct example of subjective interests driving the inquiry can be found. According to his own assertion, “the freedom we have in the design of our experiments is so enormous that when an experiment does not give us what we are looking for, we blame the experiment, not our theory. (At least, that is the way I work). Is this problematic? No” (Stapel 2000, quoted in LNDC 2012, p. 40). What goes under such freedom here? This guy in fact had directly admitted early on that he has no qualms accepting the strong thesis of underdetermination. ...

But unfortunately, philosophy of science has been contaminated by movements that do not strive to the understanding of the real content of scientific work.5 Courses in philosophy of science are often taught by scholars who do not endeavour to explain the nature of scientific practice, or the methodological tools employed, or the semantics of the key terms involved in the investigation. I feel that philosophers, sociologists or historians of sciences may in fact not the best persons to achieve that knowledge. Kuhn and Quine were outsiders to real science.

Different explanations for the length contraction

There is some disagreement as to how to best explain special relativity. The original approach of FitzGerald and Lorentz was to interpret the Michelson-Morley experiment as requiring a contraction, and then the deducing the Lorentz transformations while looking for an electromagnetic explanation. Einstein's approach was the same, except that he accepted Lorentz's analysis of Michelson-Morley and said that he failed to find a constructive electromagnetic explanation.

Poincare and Minkowski found a spacetime geometry explanation, and that has been the preferred explanation ever since.

Some philosophers have been debating the merits of these approaches. A new paper, Matter or geometry as fundamental in relativity theory: How not to teach special relativity, reviews them:

In this paper, I review a number of interpretational frameworks for relativistic phenomena like length contraction and relativity of simultaneity. Of central focus is the book Physical Relativity by Harvey Brown, where Brown advocates a view in which matter takes ontological priority over geometry. I discuss Brown’s claims and examine some of the criticisms they have received. I discuss the nature of simultaneity in particular, sketching the historical context and commenting on its relation to some of Brown’s broader arguments. Finally, I examine the consequences that Brown’s thesis has for what constitutes good pedagogy when teaching special relativity. ...

The lesson, then, from all this talk of kinematics vs. dynamics, principles vs. constructions, and so on, can be concisely stated: relativity, viewed as part of a broader investigation into the quantum field theoretic nature of particles, is fundamentally a theory about matter and how it interacts. While it may be formulated in terms of space-time geometry, viewing it as a theory about space-time geometry is putting the cart before the horse [5, p. 12]. Building a picture of relativistic physics from the bottom-up in this manner does, admittedly, lack some of the elegant conciseness of Minkowski's geometric formulation. Nonetheless, as John Bell said: "The longer road sometimes gives more familiarity with the country [1, p. 77]."

Lots of phenomena have multiple explanations. Something can be learned from each one.

It is sometimes said that Lorentz had a different view from Einstein, but Einstein denied that there was any such difference:

In 1911 Vladimir Varićak asserted that length contraction is "real" according to Lorentz, while it is "apparent or subjective" according to Einstein. Einstein replied:

The author unjustifiably stated a difference of Lorentz's view and that of mine concerning the physical facts. The question as to whether length contraction really exists or not is misleading. It doesn't "really" exist, in so far as it doesn't exist for a comoving observer; though it "really" exists, i.e. in such a way that it could be demonstrated in principle by physical means by a non-comoving observer.[16]

Source: Einstein, Albert (1911). "Zum Ehrenfestschen Paradoxon. Eine Bemerkung zu V. Variĉaks Aufsatz". Physikalische Zeitschrift 12: 509–510. Original: Der Verfasser hat mit Unrecht einen Unterschied der Lorentzschen Auffassung von der meinigen mit Bezug auf die physikalischen Tatsachen statuiert. Die Frage, ob die Lorentz-Verkürzung wirklich besteht oder nicht, ist irreführend. Sie besteht nämlich nicht „wirklich“, insofern sie für einen mitbewegten Beobachter nicht existiert; sie besteht aber „wirklich“, d. h. in solcher Weise, daß sie prinzipiell durch physikalische Mittel nachgewiesen werden könnte, für einen nicht mitbewegten Beobachter.

The above paper uses the term "Larmor dilation" for the relativistic slowing of clocks, and maybe that is a good way of crediting his early work on what we now call Lorentz transformations.

Here is a 2010 paper that wrongly alleges a difference between Lorentz and Einstein:

On the face of it, Lorentz and others make factual claims about physics: there is a luminiferous aether; the rod’s contraction is intrinsic, caused by motion through it, as described by Maxwell’s equations. The sentence “A moving rod contracts” is semantically like “A cooling rod contracts”: i.e. no reference to another relatum is implied.3

On the face of it, still, Einstein dissents, countering with different claims about the facts of physics: there is neither an aether nor an absolute motion to cause the contraction; it is not intrinsic, but a relation between a thing and an inertial frame of reference. If that first-face comparison is correct, then Lorentz and Einstein do differ over physical facts; the difference obliges us to choose between them for the purposes of physics.

But all of this is false, as Lorentz and Einstein did not disagree about any factual claims about the aether, nor did they disagree about whether the rod's contraction is intrinsic.

The paper does cite Lorentz:

Earlier in his book, Lorentz puts length contraction on a par with the expansion of an object or a gas upon heating it: “We may, I think, even go so far as to say that that, on this assumption [i.e., the contraction hypothesis], Michelson’s experiment proves the changes of dimension in question, and that the conclusion is no less legitimate than the inferences concerning the dilatation by heat or the changes of the refractive index that have been drawn in many other cases from the observed positions of interference bands” (Lorentz 1916, p. 196).

I doubt that Einstein would have disagreed with this statement.

Lloyd gives opinion on free will

MIT professor Seth Lloyd just posted his opinions on free will with A Turing test for free will. But he goes wrong in his discussion of quantum mechanics:

Moreover, one of the central questions of free will – Is the universe deterministic or probabilistic? – is a scientific one whose answer lies at the foundations of physics. ...

No, it is not a scientific one. There is no theory or experiment that can resolve the issue, and there never will be.

From Newton up to the twentieth century, the philosophical debate over free will by and large assumed that the world is deterministic. In such a deterministic world, there are two antagonistic philosophical positions [3]. Incompatibilism claims that free will is incompatible with a deterministic world: since all events, including our decisions, were determined long ago, there is no space for freedom in our choices. Compatibilism, by contrast, asserts that free will is compatible with a derministic [sic] world.

This is the Standard argument against free will.

In contrast to classical mechanics, the theory of quantum mechanics that emerged as the fundamental physical framework at the beginning of the twentieth cnetury [sic] predicts that the world is intrinsically probabilistic. Despite Einstein’s opinion that ‘God does not play dice,’ experiment and theory have repeatedly confirmed the probabilistic nature of events in quantum mechanics. For example, the Kochen-Specher theorem [18] shows that certain types of deterministic hidden-variable theories are incompatible with the predictions of quantum mechanics, a result extended by the Conway-Kochen ‘free will theorem’ [19].

No, the theory of quantum mechanics does not predict that the world is intrinsically probabilistic. The fallacious reasoning is that deterministic hidden variable methods do not work, so the world is not deterministic. But the non-deterministic (probabilistic) hidden variables do not work either, so the conclusion does not follow. Attempts to prove randomness have failed. A recent survey found that 64% of physicists believe that randomness is a fundamental concept in nature, but that is just an unproven belief.

Not that Lloyd is alone. Today's NY Times article starts:

Quantum theory tells us that the world is a product of an infinite number of random events. Buddhism teaches us that nothing happens without a cause, trapping the universe in an unending karmic cycle.

Reconciling the two might seem as challenging as trying to explain the Higgs boson to a kindergarten class.

No, quantum theory does not teach that. And there is no evidence that anything ever happens without a cause.

None of this resolves whether or not we have free will.

Feynman textbook now online

The great textbook, The Feynman Lectures on Physics, is being put freely online. Here is what it says on special relativity:

However, the Maxwell equations did not seem to obey the principle of relativity. ...

When the failure of the equations of physics in the above case came to light, the first thought that occurred was that the trouble must lie in the new Maxwell equations of electrodynamics, which were only 20 years old at the time. It seemed almost obvious that these equations must be wrong, so the thing to do was to change them in such a way that under the Galilean transformation the principle of relativity would be satisfied. When this was tried, the new terms that had to be put into the equations led to predictions of new electrical phenomena that did not exist at all when tested experimentally, so this attempt had to be abandoned. Then it gradually became apparent that Maxwell’s laws of electrodynamics were correct, and the trouble must be sought elsewhere.

In the meantime, H. A. Lorentz noticed a remarkable and curious thing when he made the following substitutions in the Maxwell equations:... Einstein, following a suggestion originally made by Poincaré, then proposed that all the physical laws should be of such a kind that they remain unchanged under a Lorentz transformation. In other words, we should change, not the laws of electrodynamics, but the laws of mechanics. ...

As mentioned above, attempts were made to determine the absolute velocity of the earth through the hypothetical “ether” that was supposed to pervade all space. The most famous of these experiments is one performed by Michelson and Morley in 1887. It was 18 years later before the negative results of the experiment were finally explained, by Einstein. ...

It was ultimately recognized, as Poincaré pointed out, that a complete conspiracy is itself a law of nature! Poincaré then proposed that there is such a law of nature, that it is not possible to discover an ether wind by any experiment; that is, there is no way to determine an absolute velocity.

The physics is excellent but the history is incomplete. Yes, Einstein follows Lorentz and Poincare, as his famous 1905 paper alludes to their work without mentioning them:

Examples of this sort, together with the unsuccessful attempts to discover any motion of the earth relatively to the “light medium,” suggest that the phenomena of electrodynamics as well as of mechanics possess no properties corresponding to the idea of absolute rest. They suggest rather that, as has already been shown to the first order of small quantities, the same laws of electrodynamics and optics will be valid for all frames of reference for which the equations of mechanics hold good.1 We will raise this conjecture (the purport of which will hereafter be called the “Principle of Relativity”) to the status of a postulate, and also introduce another postulate,

The paper does not explain or even mention the Michelson-Morley experiment, and historians now
agree that it played no part in Einstein's reasoning. Einstein's contribution was to postulate what Lorentz and Poincare had deduced from Maxwell and Michelson-Morley.

Book cover threatened by Einstein estate

I have a picture of Albert Einstein on the cover of my book, How Einstein Ruined Physics. Nobody threatened me, but physicist Tony Rothman was not so lucky:

Several years ago I had a book in press, Everything’s Relative and Other Fables From Science and Technology. Given the title, the publisher’s house artist not unreasonably designed a cover that included a photographic image of Albert Einstein. The publisher (Wiley) had properly licensed the photo from Bill Gates’ firm Corbis. One would have thought that would end the matter.

One would have thought. Six weeks before publication I received a frantic email from the editor. Albert was to be stricken from the cover. Why? For fear of being sued by the “Einstein estate.”

I am not worried, as Einstein is now in public domain.