Saturday, September 1, 2012

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Questioning the Foundations
The submission deadline for this year’s FQXi essay context on the question “Which of Our Basic Physical Assumptions Are Wrong?” has just passed. They got many thought-provoking contributions, which I encourage you to browse here.
The question was really difficult for me. Not because nothing came to my mind but because too much came to my mind! Throwing out the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, Lorentz-invariance, the positivity of gravitational mass, or the speed of light limit – been there, done that. And that’s only the stuff that I did publish...
(Continue to read on BackReaction)                                                                                                                                  

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Good post, but I want to make a clarification: concerning the sentence "Einstein was heavily guided by Michelson and Morley’s failure to detect the aether" I strongly disagree since, even if it is strange that Einstein before 1905 did not know Michelson's result, every historical reference tell us that Einstein was not aware of it (and even if he was it was not heavily guided). From Abraham Pais's book "SUBTLE is the LORD, the science and the life of ALBERT EINSTEIN" page 116-117 "[...] We know this from discussions between Shankland and Einstein in the 1950s and from an address entitled 'How I Created the Relativity Theory' given by Einstein on December 14, 1922, at Kyoto University (and referred to in what follows as the Kyoto address). Let us first note two statements made by Einstein to Shankland, recorded by Shankland right after they were pronounced, and published by him some time later, as well as part of a letter that Einstein wrote to Shankland. a) Discussion on February 4, 1950. 'When I asked him how he had learned of the Michelson-Morley experiment, he told me that he had become aware of it through the writings of H. A. Lorentz, but only after 1905 had it come to his attention! "Otherwise," he said, "I would have mentioned it in my paper." He continued to say that experimental results which had influenced him most were the observations on stellar aberration and Fizeau's measurements on the speed of light in moving water. "They were enough," he said'. b) Discussion on October 24, 1952. 'I asked Professor Einstein when he had first heard of Michelson and his experiment. He replied, "This is not so easy, I am not sure when I first heard of the Michelson experiment. I was not conscious that it had influenced me directly during the seven years that relativity had been my life. I guess I just took it for granted that it was true." However, Einstein said that in the years 1905-1909, he thought a great deal about Michelson's result, in his discussion with Lorentz and others in his thinking about general relativity. He then realized (so he told me) that he had also been conscious of Michelson's result before 1905 partly through his reading of the papers of Lorentz and more because he had simply assumed this result of Michelson to be true'. c) December 1952, letter by Einstein to Shankland. 'The influence of the crucial Michelson-Morley experiment upon my own efforts has been rather indirect. I learned of it through H. A. Lorentz's decisive investigation of the electrodynamics of moving bodies (1895) with which I was acquainted before developing the special theory of relativity. Lorentz's basic assumption of an ether at rest seemed to me not convincing in itself and also for the reason that it was leading to an interpretation of the Michelson-Morley experiment which seemed to me artificial'."