Unique universe was not the hope

Physicist Alan P. Lightman writes in the current Harper's magazine:

An example of a fundamental principle in physics, first proposed by Galileo in 1632 and extended by Einstein in 1905, is the following: All observers traveling at constant velocity relative to one another should witness identical laws of nature. From this principle, Einstein derived his theory of special relativity. An example of a fundamental parameter is the mass of an electron, considered one of the two dozen or so “elementary” particles of nature. As far as physicists are concerned, the fewer the fundamental principles and parameters, the better. The underlying hope and belief of this enterprise has always been that these basic principles are so restrictive that only one, self-consistent universe is possible, like a crossword puzzle with only one solution. That one universe would be, of course, the universe we live in. Theoretical physicists are Platonists.

No, the underlying hope was not for a unique self-consistent universe. Here is Galileo's ship from 1632:

Shut yourself up with some friend in the main cabin below decks on some large ship, and have with you there some flies, butterflies, and other small flying animals. ... With the ship standing still, observe carefully how the little animals fly with equal speed to all sides of the cabin. ... When you have observed all these things carefully (though doubtless when the ship is standing still everything must happen in this way), have the ship proceed with any speed you like, so long as the motion is uniform and not fluctuating this way and that. You will discover not the least change in all the effects named, nor could you tell from any of them whether the ship was moving or standing still.

This is an argument against uniqueness. He was arguing that we would not notice the motion of the Earth, and this only implies that geocentric and heliocentric models are indistinguishable.

Here is Poincare's 1900 relativity paper, where he addresses his previous criticisms of Lorentz's relativity theory:

t would no doubt seem strange that in a monument raised to the glory of Lorentz I would review the considerations which I presented previously as an objection to his theory. I could say that the pages which follow are rather in the nature of an attenuation rather than a magnification of that objection.

But I disdain that excuse, because I have one which is 100 times better: Good theories are flexible. Those which have a rigid form and which can not change that form without collapsing really have too little vitality. But if a theory is solid, then it can be cast in diverse forms, it resists all attacks, and its essential meaning remains unaffected. That's what I discussed at the last Congress of Physics.

Good theories can respond to all objections. Specious arguments have no effect on them, and they also triumph over all serious objections. However, in triumphing they may be transformed.

The objections to them, therefore, far from annihilating them, actually serve them, since they allow such theories to develop all the virtues which were latent in them. The theory of Lorentz is one such, and that is the only excuse which I will invoke. ...

It appears that the principle of relativity of motion, which is not clearly true a priori, is verified a posteriori and that the principle of reaction should follow. ... It is the case that, in reality, that which we call the principle of relativity of motion has been verified only imperfectly, as shown by the theory of Lorentz.

Einstein's famous 1905 relativity paper called Poincare's relativity principle a "postulate", but that was not how relativity was discovered. Poincare says that it is "clearly" not a postulate, and was not motivated by a search for a unique theory.

Lorentz at the end of his Latin

Among the arguments for crediting Einstein over Lorentz and Poincare for relativity is that Einstein was such a true believer that he ignored experiment. By contrast, Lorentz and Poincare used reasoning that was firmly rooted in the Michelson-Morley experiment, and they were willing to abandon the theory if newer experiments contradicted it.

The smoking gun is this letter from Lorentz to Poincare (using automated translation, grammar not fixed):

Leiden, March 8, 1906
Mr. and honored colleague
It is already too long since I neglected to thank you for the important paper on the dynamics of the electron you kindly sent me. Needless to say I have studied with great interest and I was very happy to see my conclusions confirmed by your considerations. Unfortunately my hypothesis of the flattening of the electrons is in contradiction with the results of new experiments of Kaufmann and I think being forced to abandon it, so I'm at the end of my Latin and it seems impossible to establish a theory which requires the complete absence of an effect of translation on the electromagnetic and optical phenomena.
I would be delighted if you could clarify the difficulties that arise again.
Please accept, dear colleague, the assurance of my sincere devotion.
HA Lorentz

Max Planck criticized the accuracy of Kaufmann's results, and a couple of years later, the experiments were shown to be consistent with relativity.

I think that it is to Lorentz's credit that he recognized Poincare's contribution to relativity, and accepted that an experiment could disprove it. This is good physics, not proof of an inability to accept new ideas.

No empty space in atoms

The Bad Astronomer writes about a UK BBC TV video:

Why are atoms mostly empty space?

Professor Brian Cox is a physicist in England, very well-known there as a popularizer of science. ...

I like to use the example of sitting in a tub, and rhythmically pushing your body along its length with your toes. ...

Electrons around an atomic nucleus work the same way. It’s more complicated than your bathtub, but the principle is the same. The electrons can only exist where the wave crests and troughs add up correctly. They literally cannot exist anywhere else. They’re like standing waves, as Brian shows.

It is bad science to say that atoms are mostly space. If electrons are like standing waves, as Cox and Plait say, then most of the volume of atoms consists of standing waves, not empty space.

Saying that an atom is empty space suggests that something could be put in that empty space without affecting the atom. But that cannot be done. The explanation that atoms are mostly empty space assumes electrons are particles that can be isolated. But that is contrary to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle and the rest of quantum mechanics.

The latest post from the Bad Astronomer wants to stop a certain type of vaccine information, and make an emotional appeal about a dead baby. Maybe he is a little out of his expertise.

See also the defense of becox of this statement from the video:

The Pauli exclusion principle means that no electron in the universe can have the same energy state as any other electron in the universe, and that if we does something to change the energy state of one group of electrons (rubbing a diamond to heat it up in his demo) then that must cause other electrons somewhere in the universe to change their energy states as the states of the electrons in the diamond change.

He is talking about a theoretical effect that is not measurable unless the electrons are very close. I think that it is a bizarre and unscientific point. It is like saying that my finger has a graviational effect on Venus. If so, it is negligible and unobservable.

Cox replies:

The more "presentational" question posed by some on the forum - namely that one shouldn't say that everything is connected to everything else for fear of misinterpretation - is interesting. In my view, the interpretation of quantum theory presented above is not only valid, but correct in the absence of new physics - and therefore everything IS connected to everything else. I was very careful to point out in the lecture that this does not allow any woo woo shite into the pantheon of the possible, as I think I phrased it.

My general position is that when communicating with the public we shouldn't spend our time triangulating off nutters. I'm having to deal with this in spades in my current series, Wonders of Life, where it is tempting to try to give creationists no ammunition at all by avoiding areas of doubt when describing the origin of life and the evolution of complex life on Earth. My strategy is to ignore such concerns, because these people shouldn't occupy any of our time! If we tried to take account of every nob head on the planet, we wouldn't have time to make the programs or write the books.

What is he saying here? The idea that everything is connected to everything else seems contrary to causality. If that is what Cox means to say, then he ought to say whether it is contrary to causality. Otherwise, what does it mean, but to hint at woo woo?

I guess I agree that a TV show on the Wonders of Life should not censor facts favorable to creationists, but why is he even tempted? Scientists should not be at all bashful about saying what they do not know, even if the creationists have an explanation.

Suppression of science alleged

The NY Times reports:

The most famous case of scientific suppression remains that of Galileo, who in 1633 was forced by the Roman Catholic Church to disavow his finding that the Earth revolves around the Sun. But over the centuries, the big clashes between science and the authorities came to center on highly destructive arms.

The story was prompted by the US govt not wanting to publish details of some research it funded on how to engineer a deadly bird flu virus.

But it is just not true that Galileo was ever forced to disavow any scientific finding. He was free to publish any evidence he had for the motion of the Earth. He was even invited to publish a book with the arguments for and against the motion of the Earth. He just was told not say that the motion of the Earth was proved unless he really had the proof. And he did not. He had faulty arguments that were shown to be wrong by Church scientists.

In 1953, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were executed after being convicted of passing bomb secrets to Moscow.

But atomic lore kept leaking. Today, nine nations have nuclear weapons, and dozens more are said to possess the secretive information, the technical skills and — in some cases — the materials needed to make them.

A new field came under scrutiny in the mid-1970s, when Washington tried to clamp down on publications in cryptography — the creating and breaking of coded messages. A breakthrough threatened to make it easer for the public to encrypt messages and harder for federal intelligence agencies to decipher them.

Washington did not try very hard to clamp down. No papers were supressed. The field exploded after the US govt put the Data Encryption Standard into the public domain. It was the first time a state-of-the-art encryption system had been published.

Popular story on vacuum energy

Nature magazine listed its most popular stories of 2011, and this story was emailed more than any other story in its history:

A team of physicists is claiming to have coaxed sparks from the vacuum of empty space1. If verified, the finding would be one of the most unusual experimental proofs of quantum mechanics in recent years and "a significant milestone", says John Pendry, a theoretical physicist at Imperial College London who was not involved in the study.

This is what has always been called the aether, and I commented on these results before.

Einstein crowdsourced relativity

Ron Rosenbaum attacks new catchphrases in Slate:

Crowdsourcing: Hasn’t it occurred to anyone—especially the new media genius types who abuse the concept — that the archetypal crowd is a lynch mob? A Nuremberg rally? And, really, no matter how many studies you cite, you’re not going to convince me you get smarter by asking a lot of ignorant people questions. Did Einstein “crowdsource” the Special Theory of Relativity? Or was that just the General Theory?

Einstein was crowdsourcing, a lot more than people realize.

When Einstein published his first relativity paper in 1905, he was supporting the leading electron theory of the day. Lorentz used it to explain the 1887 Michelson-Morley experiment, and to predict relativistic mass in 1899. That mass prediction was confirmed in 1901-1903, and Lorentz got the Nobel prize in 1902. Poincare perfected Lorentz's theory. Abraham had in alternate theory in 1902-1904, but Lorentz and Poincare were the leading theoretical physicists in Europe, and Einstein was just endorsing their view. See History of special relativity for details.

While some Einstein historians argue that Einstein worked in isolation in 1905 and independently reinvented some of what Lorentz and Poincare had done, they all agree that his development of general relativity was based on him picking the brains of the leading experts in differential geometry and tensor analysis. He got the Ricci tensor from Levi-Civita, the covariant field equations from Grossmann, the Lagrangian from Hilbert, the solar system model from Schwarzschild, the cosmological models from de Sitter and others. Einstein biographers even describe him as being tutored on these subjects that formed the core of what he soon called general relativity.

I cannot expect a Slate columnist to know this. I am just pointing out the popular image of Einstein being an iconoclast loner who invented revolutionary ideas, and how that image is completely wrong. For more details, see How Einstein Ruined Physics.

Poincare supposedly did not understand his theory

I criticized a new paper by Emily Adlam. Her conclusions are strange:

In summary, Poincaré’s use of the Lorentz transformations differed from Einstein’s in two key ways. First, for Poincaré, the transformations are not used to give relations between any two inertial frames of reference - they are defined only relative to the ether rest frame, so that the velocity v appearing in the formula must always refer to a velocity with respect to the ether rest frame, i.e. an absolute velocity.

Poincare stress that the Lorentz transformations form a group. The first fact about groups is that any group element is just like any other. He never mentions the aether because the group makes any particular reference frame irrelevant. So Adlam is wrong -- Poincare knew that Lorentz transformations connect any two frames.

Moreover, even if we restrict ourselves to transformations involving the ether rest frame, Poincaré’s usage does not coincide with Einstein’s, since for Einstein the transformations express a relationship between coordinate systems, whereas for Poincaré they are merely a means of predicting the physical changes that a system undergoes when set in motion relative to the ether.

So I guess that she is trying to say that Einstein's transformations act only mathematically on the coordinates, while Poincare's act physically. But then she says:

Thus Poincaré not only failed to give a physical interpretation to the Lorentz transformations, he also failed to appreciate the full range of situations in which they can be applied.

This is weird. She says that Poincare's transformations were physical, and then says that he had no physical interpretation.

1.3 Assessment
In light of Poincaré’s limited understanding of the relativity principle and the Lorentz transformations, it seems inaccurate to say that he had any significant intimations of special relativity before Einstein’s 1905 papers.

Except for Einstein's rivals, I don't know of any other scientists who get insulted in this way. Usually historians just give them credit for what they did, and do not concoct explanations for how they did not understand what they were doing.

She goes on to concede that, while Poincare did not understand what he was doing, his discoveries were essential to all further developments in relativity:

This is not to deny that he made extremely important contributions to the development of the theory, but his achievements in this area were largely mathematical: formulating the notion of the Lorentz group and finding its invariants, formulating the notion of a four-vector and finding quantities that transform like four-vectors, interpreting the Lorentz transformations as rotations in four-dimensional space. These are results that follow from the mathematical structure of the equations, not from any physical understand-ing of their significance; they paved the way for the powerful mathematical formalism developed by later workers in the field, but did not provide the essential physical insight that provides the formalism with its application.

She is describing the core of special relativity. Poincare published this, and neither Einstein nor anyone else, except for Minkowski and others who got it from Poincare. She is saying that the modern mathematical formulation of relativity was discovered by someone who did not have any physical understanding of the significance of the formulas. This is like saying that Shakespeare wrote great plays, but he did understand the content of what he wrote. Adlam concludes:

Special relativity is first and foremost a physical theory, and in the absence of an understanding of the physical significance of the Lorentz transformations, Poincaré cannot be said to have formulated a theory approximating special relativity.

Wow. So Adlam not only gives Poincare less credit than Einstein, she denies that Poincare had any physical understanding or relativity theory.

Poincare's 1905 relativity theory was superior to Einstein's. The only way to explain it away is to argue that Poincare somehow did not understand what he was saying. Adlam does this by alternately arguing that Poincare's papers were too mathematical or too physical. Her argument does not even make any sense.

Even if she were right that Poincare's explanation had some philosophical defect, the reasonable thing is to just describe the defect and give him credit for the rest. But that won't leave much credit for Einstein, and no one has been able to find any defect in Poincare's work. So Adlam has to somehow claim that Poincare did not understand what he was doing with a very contrived argument.