From: George Murphy (gmurphy@raex.com)
Date: Mon Jul 14 2003 - 16:26:22 EDT
D. F. Siemens, Jr. wrote:
>
> George,
> Thanks for filling in the information.
>
> As for Glenn's note that alternates are hard to find, this may be in
> large measure because the theories are so complex. For example, sometime
> about 1950, Einstein produced a theory, probably unified field, which
> involved some complex math. There were supposedly only three persons
> capable of understanding the math. One (Havarti ?) reported that, after a
> year's very difficult work, he had found the math correct, but could not
> comment on its application. He was quoted as saying something like, "I am
> only a mathematician: Professor Einstein is a genius."
>
> As to producing alternatives, Whitehead was arguably the greatest
> geometer of the century, if not of all time. He mapped the Riemannian
> geometry used by Einstein onto Euclidean. I suspect that the mapping
> would now be easier in one sense since the universe apparently is flat.
> But there is no point in merely producing an equivalent theory,
> especially since someone bright enough to do that task can better expend
> his talent searching other matters. I note that, since Newton's
> interpreted Euclidean geometry down to the present, the gravitational
> theories have involved geometry. There are other areas of mathematics, I
> believe, that would allow a mapping of any of these theories onto a
> different mathematical calculus. I believe that there are also other
> calculi which have not yet been thought of. Complexity theory is one of
> the more recent discoveries.
>
> Were the phenomena simple, there is no reason why there would not be many
> alternatives. For example, for the sequence 1, 2, 3, 4, I can come up
> with a pattern allowing the generation of an infinite number of formulas
> producing that series. If a matrix is presented, I'd need to know more
> math. But mathematicians should have no problem. Getting into scientific
> theories, I'm quickly over my head, though others understand them to a
> greater degree. Most scientists, however, reach a point where they become
> overwhelmed by the complexity. Some time back I talked to a group of
> physics grad students at Berkeley. They told me that they were told that
> they could expect to understand about one in five of the articles in the
> /Journal of Physics/, which fifth depending on their area of
> specialization. With mere understanding that limited, how many will
> produce alternate theoretical structures--unless they join the lunatic
> fringe?
>
> I think another area of duplication of theories involves quantum theory
> and wave mechanics. They were first shown equivalent and then combined
> because of dealing with "wavicles."
The statement that "only 3 men in the world understand Einstein" was made after
the eclipse verifications of the bending of light got general relativity worldwide
publicity. Eddington said jokingly, "Who is the third?" But in fact the statement was
never true. GRT made use of math that most physicists of the time weren't familiar with
but they quickly learned, & while the equations of GRT are difficult because of, inter
alia, their nonlinearity, so are those of classical hydrodynamics. I've never made a
detailed survey of the literature but a quick count of references in Pauli's book gives
19 authors (besides Einstein) who published on GRT before 1919 - & that was with the
limited communications due to WWI.
What Hlavaty did was to find how to solve one of the basic equation sets of
Einstein's last attempts at a unified field theory. I worked on this theory - actually
on a closely related attempt by Schroedinger - & learned, among other things, that most
of the people then interested in it (in the 70s) were mathematicians with little feel
for physics. (One was unfazed by my pointing out to him that his cosmological model had
blueshifts instead of redshifts.) I published a few paper, had some fun with it, &
still think that it has some attractive features. But I also convinced myself that it's
very unlikely to represent the real world.
Whitehead thought that space-time had to be of uniform curvature - a good
example of the dangers of a priori philosophizing in science. "Behold they have their
reward."
Shalom,
George
George L. Murphy
gmurphy@raex.com
http://web.raex.com/~gmurphy/
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