In article <1157494759.362608.114850@d34g2000cwd.googlegroups.com>,

In article <1157489578.070669.268890@m73g2000cwd.googlegroups.com>,

In article <zSkLg.127373$FQ1.125363@attbi_s71>, Sam Wormley <swormley1@mchsi.com> writes:

E = mc2: A Biography of the World's Most Famous Equation

If it is the most famous, it is for all the wrong reasons. It is but
a corollary of far more important relationships. Keeping propagating
the notion that this is, somehow, a key result of physics does a
disservice to the public's science education.

Mati Meron | "When you argue with a fool,

What is your opinion re: the Ajay Sharma's claims of "completing"
Einstein's work?

He's gibbering.

Mati Meron | "When you argue with a fool,

Yep, but he's pretty pushy. He paid his way into a lot of conferences
(they always need some clowns to entertain them) and he managed to fool
the reviewers of Physics Essays (looking a little more carefully at
what PE is publishing it may not have been difficult at all).

Yes, indeed.

The idiot does not understand how Einstein set up his derivation, changed
it to something else and now claims that he's found "errors" in
Einstein's work. A dork!

He's not the first one, and for sure not the last. To me, anyway,
just the fact that somebody consideres E = mc^2 the key point of
relativity is a dead giveaway that his knowledge is on the "coffee
table books" level. Also, the original derivations by Einstein are of
historical interest but for the most part they've already been
replaced by more modern and more general ones. Same as with Newtonian
mechanics, we may read the Principia for historical interest but for
actual derivations thee are more modern sources.

Mati Meron | "When you argue with a fool,

In article <1157494759.362608.114850@d34g2000cwd.googlegroups.com>,

In article <1157489578.070669.268890@m73g2000cwd.googlegroups.com>,

In article <zSkLg.127373$FQ1.125363@attbi_s71>, Sam Wormley <swormley1@mchsi.com> writes:

E = mc2: A Biography of the World's Most Famous Equation

If it is the most famous, it is for all the wrong reasons. It is but
a corollary of far more important relationships. Keeping propagating
the notion that this is, somehow, a key result of physics does a
disservice to the public's science education.

Mati Meron | "When you argue with a fool,
meron@cars.uchicago.edu | chances are he is doing just the same"

What is your opinion re: the Ajay Sharma's claims of "completing"
Einstein's work?

He's gibbering.

Mati Meron | "When you argue with a fool,
meron@cars.uchicago.edu | chances are he is doing just the same"

Yep, but he's pretty pushy. He paid his way into a lot of conferences
(they always need some clowns to entertain them) and he managed to fool
the reviewers of Physics Essays (looking a little more carefully at
what PE is publishing it may not have been difficult at all).

Yes, indeed.

The idiot does not understand how Einstein set up his derivation, changed
it to something else and now claims that he's found "errors" in
Einstein's work. A dork!

He's not the first one, and for sure not the last. To me, anyway,
just the fact that somebody consideres E = mc^2 the key point of
relativity is a dead giveaway that his knowledge is on the "coffee
table books" level. Also, the original derivations by Einstein are of
historical interest but for the most part they've already been
replaced by more modern and more general ones. Same as with Newtonian
mechanics, we may read the Principia for historical interest but for
actual derivations thee are more modern sources.

Mati Meron | "When you argue with a fool,
meron@cars.uchicago.edu | chances are he is doing just the same"

mmeron@cars3.uchicago.edu wrote:

In article <1157494759.362608.114850@d34g2000cwd.googlegroups.com>,

mmeron@cars3.uchicago.edu wrote:

In article <1157489578.070669.268890@m73g2000cwd.googlegroups.com>,

mmeron@cars3.uchicago.edu wrote:

In article <zSkLg.127373$FQ1.125363@attbi_s71>, Sam Wormley <swormley1@mchsi.com> writes:

E = mc2: A Biography of the World's Most Famous Equation

If it is the most famous, it is for all the wrong reasons. It is but
a corollary of far more important relationships. Keeping propagating
the notion that this is, somehow, a key result of physics does a
disservice to the public's science education.

Mati Meron | "When you argue with a fool,
meron@cars.uchicago.edu | chances are he is doing just the same"

What is your opinion re: the Ajay Sharma's claims of "completing"
Einstein's work?

He's gibbering.

Mati Meron | "When you argue with a fool,
meron@cars.uchicago.edu | chances are he is doing just the same"

Yep, but he's pretty pushy. He paid his way into a lot of conferences
(they always need some clowns to entertain them) and he managed to fool
the reviewers of Physics Essays (looking a little more carefully at
what PE is publishing it may not have been difficult at all).

Yes, indeed.

The idiot does not understand how Einstein set up his derivation, changed
it to something else and now claims that he's found "errors" in
Einstein's work. A dork!

He's not the first one, and for sure not the last. To me, anyway,
just the fact that somebody consideres E = mc^2 the key point of
relativity is a dead giveaway that his knowledge is on the "coffee
table books" level. Also, the original derivations by Einstein are of
historical interest but for the most part they've already been
replaced by more modern and more general ones. Same as with Newtonian
mechanics, we may read the Principia for historical interest but for
actual derivations thee are more modern sources.

Mati Meron | "When you argue with a fool,
meron@cars.uchicago.edu | chances are he is doing just the same"

Mati, you are one of the few physicists who appreciates the
unimportance to Einstein of E = mc^2. The statement I just made
probably sounds absurd to a layman, which only underscores the point
you made about poor physics education.

Einstein was not duplicitous or unclear about his bragging rights. In
his many physics essays (which appear in the book Ideas and Opinions)
and his book, The Evolution of Physics, which he coauthored with
Infeld, he was quite clear about what relativity really accomplished in
his mind. His bragging rights fall into three basic categories:
1) simplicity
2) harmony
3) ontology (formal or theoretical existence)/metaphysics (actual
existence)

Looking back over his relativity theories and comparing and contrasting
them to comparable theories of others, and taking a pragmatic viewpoint
Einstein drew these conclusions:

1) relativity, despite its more complicated mathematics, was simpler
than its competitors because, by unifying mass and energy, energy and
momentum, electric and magnetic fields, space and time, had, as a
result, fewer independent postulates. It's a sort of mathematician's
viewpoint, but a valid one in any case, since we are talking about
Einstein's own opinion, and people are entitled to their own opinions.

2) A. Apparently the thought to Einstein that absolute velocity should
exist in electrodynamics, which was considered to be a generalization
of Newtonian mechanics, but not in Newtonian mechanics was
disharmonious in Nature. (Who ordered that?!)

B. PoR. Why would Nature go to all the trouble to create absolute
spaces, but then hide their explicit evidence of existence (e.g., we've
never measured our absolute velocity)?

C. Absolute acceleration in Newtoninan mechanics means that there
exists an absolute space in which absolute acceleration exists, so to
speak. Now, this space has the property, in violation of Newton's Third
Law, to be able to affect matter, yet remain unaffected by matter (to
account for matter's inertial properties). Such a property is
ghostlike.

3) All the heuristic arguments above lead us to these two questions: A.
Does absolute motion exist (meaning, do there exist spaces in which
absolute motion is meaningful)? and B. Apart from whatever answer one
gives to A., do we need to use the concepts of absolute motion to build
successful theories of physics?

To the latter question, Einstein answered (with Infeld) in The
Evolution of Physics (p. 222):

The ghosts of absolute motion and inertial CS [coordinate system]
can be expelled from physics and a new relativistic physics built.

And that, friends, is Einstein's main bragging rights in relativity!

So, what about this question of the existence of the inertial
coordinate system? Its very existence is problematical, even in
practice, and thus is a problem for all of physics. One solution is to
try to find a clever way to prove its existence, but another way, the
way which Einstein took in GR, was to make its existence irrelevant in
physics, by making all reference frames equally valid for the
formulations of the general laws of physics. So, you see that in
everything Einstein was doing in relativity he was addressing what was
to him highly important philosophical questions of his day, which
popular physics treatments of his work either overlook (as either
irrelevant to the outcome or as unsensational for the jaded audience)
or get wrong.

Einstein and Infeld said (The Evolution of Physics, p. 209) :

There still remains one point to be cleared up.
One of the most fundamental questions has not
been settled yet: does an inertial system exist?
We have learned something about the laws of nature,
their invariance with respect to the Lorentz
transformation, and their validity for all inertial systems
moving uniformly, relative to each other. We
have the laws but do not know the frame to which
to refer them.

Ironic and humorous, huh? I once read a quote attributed to a famous
physicist, whose name I can't remember (damn!), who said something like
this: The problem of motion is one of the most subtle of all.

In any case, the popular treatments of Einstein's accomplishments and
the portrayal of his accomplishments by physics textbooks usually
mislead the public about what Einstein was really trying to accomplish
in his relativity.

I have a beautiful poster of the face of Einstein, a stylized
rendition, set against a background of a starry sky, with lightening
bolts coming out of his head (very Tesla-esque), and at the bottom it
says (what else): E = mc^2. Maybe what it should say is this:

The ghosts of absolute motion and time have been expelled from
physics.

A common theme which keeps coming up with increasing experience (the
one thing guaranteed to increase, even as reason erodes) is that words
and expressions long taken to be figurative eventually are seen to have
a literal meaning: I have met a child actually afraid of its own
shadow, I have heard a boy snivel. I shudder to think I may some day
actually hear an individual "gibber": I guess that's what public
madhouses were for.

Alas, they were mostly shut down, with the denizens being set free, to
fend for themselves on the streets.

Mati Meron | "When you argue with a fool,
meron@cars.uchicago.edu | chances are he is doing just the same"