Re: the notion of counter-intuitiveness in relativistic physics

gharnagel <hitlong@yahoo.com> wrote:

On Sat, 10 Aug 2024 9:02:41 +0000, Richard Hachel wrote:

>
Le 09/08/2024 à 22:07, film.art@gmail.com (JanPB) a écrit :

>
Notice I didn't say "the problem is you" because it's not a problem
to have no talent for something in particular. The only time it

becomes

an emotional problem is when a person somehow falls into the trap of
convincing oneself that it's absolutely essential to "work with" the
domain one cannot possibly succeed in..
>
--
Jan

 
"Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb
a tree,
it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid." -- Albert
Einstein

You have a verifiable source for that of course?

It's not a question of science, I've never stopped repeating it.
It's like in many other areas a question of human power relations.
"We don't want this man to rule over us".
Always, always, always, the same phenomenon is reproduced, and on all
human knowledge (sociology, criminology, journalism, medicine, theology,
philosophy, politics, scientific theory).

 
At first, Einstein was ignored, and it took quite a while for the PTB to
come around.

Sorry, but that is complete nonsense.
Einstein 1905 (relativity) had an immediate impact
with those who mattered. (Planck, Lorentz, Abraham, Poincaré, etc.)
They saw that a fundamental breakthrough had been achieved,
whether they agreed with it or not,
and that relativity had to be reckoned with.

He was promoted at Bern, got a sabbatical,
and job offers for academic positions started coming.
First at Bern, but in 1909 Zurich lured him away from Bern
with a specially created professorship.
All this is hardly ignoring.

But it didn't happen until experimental evidence
prevailed.

Even worse nonsense. Einstein 1905 was primarily
a reinterpretation of what was known already,
tying it all togeter.
(Michelson, partial dragging, Maxwell's eqns. etc.)

And the only result that could be tested directly at the time
was the velocity dependence of the electron mass.
(as it was then called)
Here Einstein had nothing new to offer either,
for he reproduced the result already obtained by Lorentz 1904.
(albeit in a very different way)

The results of the experiments were a disaster:
Kaufmann 1905 claimed to have decisively falsified Lorentz,
hence Einstein, and hence the principle of relativity.
Lorentz was in despair, Einstein was not impressed.

It wasn't until 1909, when Einstein already held a professorship,
that the experiments were finally beaten into order.
(and in full agreement with Lorentz/Einstein)

Jan