From: George Murphy (gmurphy@raex.com)
Date: Tue Jul 15 2003 - 07:18:06 EDT
D. F. Siemens, Jr. wrote:
>
> On Mon, 14 Jul 2003 16:26:22 -0400 George Murphy <gmurphy@raex.com>
> writes:
> > 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."
> > >
> >
> > 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.
>
> George,
> Despite the apparent similarity, I wasn't quoting the earlier claim that
> only 3 men understood Einstein. Eddington was dead several years before
> the event I noted. I recall a report ca. 1953 that Hlavaty had
> meticulously worked through the mathematics of what was then recent work
> by Einstein. I don't doubt that later the specific math became more
> familiar, for what is taught changes. Feynman, in connection with his
> lecture proving the elliptical planetary orbits, noted that the earlier
> proof involved some geometry that was familiar at the time but which he
> did not understand, and did not expect others to recognize. Historically,
> the calculus which is now part of the undergraduate curriculum could only
> be learned, about a century after Newton and Liebnitz, if one could
> wangle an invitation to live with one of the Bernoulli brothers. Things
> change.
Dave -
By the time Einstein developed his last theory, tensor calculus was quite
familiar. What Einstein did was basically to remove the previous condition that the
metric tensor be symmetric. This made the equations more complicated but not
conceptually more difficult. (Hlavaty's work, BTW, is in his _Geometry of Einstein's
Unified Field Theory_ [P. Noorhoff, 1957].)
The main reason why not more was done with that last theory of Einstein was that
by that time most physicists concerned with basic forces had become convinced that the
whole approach via a classical unified field theory was the wrong way to go & were
working with quantum field theories. & at that time (early 50s) not a lot new had
happened in general relativity for ~30 years & the field was kind of dormant.
Shalom,
George
George L. Murphy
gmurphy@raex.com
http://web.raex.com/~gmurphy/
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