Einstein’s Physics Crumbling Like An Old Building

Einstein’s Physics Crumbling Like An Old Building

If he had stuck with the Machian approach, Einstein might have attained the all-encompassing “theory of everything” that consumed the last decades of his life. He might have produced a version of his theory of gravity that would not conflict so fundamentally with quantum mechanics,” Barbour notes. But Einstein had lost his nerve.
- Zeeya Merali, in “Gravity off the Grid,” Discover, March 2012

Never has science been so devoted to praising a physicist as it has been over the past half century with Albert Einstein. Science’s love affair with Einstein was so pervasive that his philosophical thoughts about life were embraced as if heaven sent.
“e=mc2” may be quoted these days by everyone from school children to factory workers.
As everyone knows, “e” refers to energy, “m” to mass and “c” to the cosmological constant. That constant happens to be the same as the speed of light (in case we have trouble remembering, 186,000 miles per second or 300,000 kilometres per second). It was so easy to remember, only hard if you actually had to do the math for any calculation.
Here’s the catch. Light does not travel at exactly the same speed all the time. Therefore, the “constant” is not constant. Well, bear with me.
Who cares? The Bare Naked Ladies likely won’t change the lyrics of their song that is the theme for the TV series “The Big Bang Theory.” “Nearly 14 billion years ago” might not be accurate any more, but viewers will still keep watching as it’s (arguably) the best sitcom ever.
When Einstein devised his theories (special theory of relativity published first, then general theory of relativity) most people thought that space had nothing in it. It was even called a “vacuum.” The “ether” that was once considered to be out there, that accounted for the odd movement of planets in the earth-centred Newtonian universe, was more imagination than reality.
There was nothing out there, supposedly, between the planets and stars. But that didn’t work with the physics. Einstein’s theories wouldn’t work in nothingness. Then someone figured there must be dust from the original Big Bang, and neutrinos charging around as well. Still not enough.
Einstein must be right, so along came Dark Matter to patch up the theory. Still not enough. Cosmologists calculated that the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate, which didn’t fit with the theory. Let’s throw in Dark Energy. With the matter science knows exists, plug in Dark Matter, that left Dark Energy to make up 85 percent or more of the rest of the known universe, so that Einstein’s theory would work.
After all, as almost everyone agreed, Einstein was a genius--indeed “Einstein” and “genius” came to be synonyms--so any amount of creative imagination to make his theory work must be acceptable. Science hates it when religions tell people to “have faith” but it happily asked the same of people for its creations of imagination so that Einstein could continue to be the ideal of genius.
Here’s where it gets messy. Einstein’s theories depended on a fourth dimension, called space-time. Light--part of the “constant” remember--bends around large objects, just as river water bends around rocks in its way. Does light have to speed up to make up the extra distance required to divert around large objects, or does it slow down, thus throwing off calculations?
Time, as Einstein told us, is flexible. In relatively empty space, it speeds up, whereas in denser stuff such as galaxies it slows down. If light (the constant) travels at 186,000 miles per second and the length of a second can change depending on where it is being measured, what can be constant about the constant?
How accurate is the widely accepted belief that our universe is 13.7 billion years away from the Big Bang? That number was calculated based on the rate that supernovas great distances away were moving. The light from those supernovas bent around galaxies and changed speed as it travelled through larger ones. These were not considered in the calculations.
David Wiltshire, a New Zealand physicist at the University of Canterbury, claims that if the age of the universe were calculated based on light travelling through empty space, the age would be 18 billion years. If the light travelled at the speed it does passing through galaxies, the age would be 15 billion years.
Wiltshire’s “older” universe age results from his beginning from a different set of physical assumptions than those physicists who calculate it at 13.7 billion years.
Assumptions, you say? Exactly. Physical calculations change depending on which set of assumptions you begin with. What then should we believe?
To make things more awkward for Einstein’s legacy, CERN, the European Space Agency’s huge facility for studying super particles, recently reported that it had timed neutrinos travelling faster than light, a phenomenon that does not fit with Albert’s theories. While a few scientists search diligently for weaknesses in the CERN report, there is no doubt that many are still trying to find a way to travel faster than light. Like many other scientific marvels that came out of the original Star Trek classic TV series, time travel and faster-than-light space travel seem destined to come to pass some day.
I still believe in Albert Einstein, though his assumptions might have been inaccurate. I still believe in gravity, though no one at this point has any idea what it is or why objects attract each other--anyone who says he does is overconfident about his guess.
I am not certain what to believe about the age of our universe. Flexible time may be a problem. An undependable constant is troubling. Flexible space is still hard for me to wrap my head around.
Of one thing I have great faith. My wife has just called me to say that supper is ready and if I try to stretch time too much before completing this writing, my supper will be cold. I have confidence in that constant.

Bill Allin is the author of Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today’s Epidemic Social Problems, a book of big but simple ideas about how to change the material taught in our schools so we can all live longer, healthier and safer lives.
Learn more at http://billallin.com

Albert Einstein: Behind The Scenes With Science's Superstar

Without doubt, Albert Einstein stands as the only true superstar of science. Most educated people admire Socrates, Plato, Copernicus, Isaac Newton and others, but no one can dim the glare of fame that has developed around the name Einstein. It's known in every culture of the modern world.

Mild mannered, shy and, like many highly intelligent people, socially fairly inept, Einstein was more at home with his equations in his study than with people.

Mention the name Einstein and the first thing that pops into everyone's mind is his most famous equation e = mc2 Yet Albert wasn't the first to publish the equation. That dubious honour goes to Austrian physicist Friedrich Hasenöhrl.

So why isn't Hasenöhrl a household name, like Einstein? Hasenöhrl failed to connect the equation with relativity. In other words, in Hasenöhrl's hands the equation went nowhere.

Speaking of relativity, Einstein didn't. He disliked the word. In his 1905 paper On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies he never used the word "relativity," instead preferring to call it "invariance theory" because it looks the same to all observers, no matter where they may be. Nothing relative there.

Einstein had his own ideas about relativity. In his words: "Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute and it seems like an hour. Sit with a pretty girl for an hour and it seems like a minute. That's relativity."

Albert was photogenic from his earliest photographs. Even in his elder years girls were attracted to his pictures. He described himself as a young man to his cousin, Elizabeth Ney, as having a "pale face, long hair, and a tiny start of a paunch, In addition an awkward gait, and a cigar in the mouth..But crooked legs and warts he does not have and so is quite handsome."

His first paper about special relativity, published in 1905, may have had undisclosed help from his first wife, Mileva. He wrote "I need my wife, she solves all the mathematical problems for me." Some believe Mileva even did the heavy lifting for the theory. She was known for her brilliant mind as well as for her beauty.

By 1914 his feelings toward her had changed. He ordered her to "renounce all personal relations with me, as far as maintaining them is not absolutely required for social reasons." Albert and his second wife, Elsa, didn't have children, but they stayed together until parted by death. His offspring, all with wife Mileva, all had problems with social or emotional adjustment.

Another term associated with Einstein is space-time continuum. That's not his either. The concept of time as the fourth dimension began with Hermann Minkowski, one of Albert's professors, who once called him a "lazy dog." That may have been because he skipped so many classes, borrowing notes from his friend Marcel Grossman so he could pass the tests.

Einstein scribbled many of his notes for his 1905 paper while working in the Swiss patent office as a clerk. He wasn't exactly a lazy clerk because his mind never stopped. He crammed his notes into his desk whenever his supervisor came by.

Though Einstein was a lifetime teetotaler, when he completed his 1905 paper he and wife Mileva drank themselves into a stupor, at least enough to mess with their own concepts of space and time.

Albert was unhappy with the consequences resulting from his theories. Though he believed them to be true, he didn't like what they forecast. He said that nothing could go faster than the speed of light, yet immediately after the Big Bang whatever was expanding must have gone faster than light for at least a short period of time in order that the universe be as big as it is today.

He also didn't care for what came of his work with quantum mechanics. Nothing, he thought, should be able to be in more than one place at a time, then choose to be in another place when someone wants to look at it. "God doesn't place dice with the universe." However, quantum mechanics predicts some pretty strange stuff that would have Newton rolling over in his grave. Black holes, an expanding universe and entangled particles among them.

Speaking of graves, Einstein didn't have one. The pathologist who autopsied Albert Einstein's body removed the brain and the eyes. The rest was cremated and the ashes spread in an "undisclosed location," at Einstein's request. Thomas Harvey kept Einstein's brain for years, taking it with him on his travels in Tupperware so he could show special friends.

In recent years Harvey sliced off and distributed more than a thousand portions of Einstein's brain for scientists to study. The results? He had a thinner than normal cerebral cortex, a greater density of neurons than normal, decreased "interneuronal conduction time," which might have allowed him to think faster. Within each parietal lobe he seemed to be missing the parietal operculium, which may have accounted for his having more interconnections in the inferior parietal region.

The inferior parietal lobes--the areas related to visual imagery and mathematical thinking--were about 15 percent wider than a control group. In the part of the brain that managed language and mathematical skills he had 73 percent more glial cells per neuron than average.

However, Einstein's total brain weight tipped the scales at a mere 2.7 pounds, notably less than the normal weight of 3.1 pounds, indicating "that a large brain is not a necessary condition for exceptional intellect," according to neuroscientist Sandra Witelson, of McMaster University, who did a major study of her portion of the brain.

Einstein's eyes had features that may have allowed him to see and understand things quicker than average.

Special relativity, the central theme of Einstein's 1905 paper, deals with objects moving at a constant speed. General relativity, the focus of his paper a decade later, deals with accelerating objects and it explains how gravity works.

At the time of Einstein's death in 1955, science had little evidence to support his theories, at least general relativity. However, so much evidence has accumulated in the past 50 years that it's now used to calculate the mass of galaxies and to locate distant planets by the way they bend light passing around them.

Finally, that famous picture of Albert with his tongue stretching down over his chin was taken on his 72nd birthday. A photographer asked him for a "birthday pose." That picture along with the rest of the Einstein iconography earn his estate an estimated US$18 million per year, making him the fifth highest paid dead celebrity in the world in 2007.

Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a handbook for parents and teachers who want to understand child development and to know what to teach kids and when.
Learn more at http://billallin.com

[Primary source: Discover, March 2008]