
How I found glaring errors in Einstein's calculations (2009) - ColinWright
http://www.cognitionandculture.net/home/blog/35-pascals-blog/435-how-i-found-glaring-errors-in-einsteins-calculations
======
maaaats
I used to discuss these kind of theories online. Or, rather, these kind of
people would visit the forums/boards I used to visit, and then present their
"great ground shaking theories". As the author here states, most of these
theories had fundamental flaws. New particles named after themselves that
didn't explain anything the model of physics does today. Or the theories
weren't consistent with observations, for instance they failed to explain how
pushing one object of 1kg into another object would end up.

Most of these people were old, many engineers (edit: which the article agrees
with) with a former basic knowledge of physics. They kinda reminds me of the
old professor in the movie "Proof", that has lost grip on reality and invented
his own "proofs". Or the movie "A beautiful mind" when he's on his worst. It's
a bit sad, really.

~~~
bitJericho
I tried to argue with a crackpot once and even recommended psychiatric help if
needed and all it did was make me feel terrible, it did not convince the
crackpot. Needless to say I've now resigned to just ignoring them altogether.

~~~
vixen99
Nice segue from 'a crackpot' to 'them'. They have labels pasted all over them
so no difficulty in crossing to the other side of the street.

~~~
bitJericho
Well crackpots are different from me, in that I don't believe I'm one, so yes
there is indeed a difference between myself and "them". Sorry if I'm not
politically correct enough for you. Just to clarify, I have no issue with
crackpots, mentally ill people, whatever you want to call them. My only point
is that trying to convince someone that they are a crackpot is not going to
work, at least over the internet!

~~~
JadeNB
I think the claim is not so much that you are or might be a crackpot, as that
it's too easy to misdiagnose a genuine revolutionary as a crackpot. The
canonical example for mathematicians is Ramanujan
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Srinivasa_Ramanujan);](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Srinivasa_Ramanujan\);)
Hardy would have been perfectly justified in thinking him a crackpot and
throwing away his letters, and one of the most valuable collaborations in
number theory would never have happened.

------
iorrus
I am interested in alternative explanations even including nonrelativistic
ones... as the current ones we have are largely unsatisfactory so I guess this
makes me a 'crackpot'. This is how science is done not blindly answering 'easy
questions' (which is what I do in my real life academic job, well not easy..).

Personally I just disregard the whole article it is written by someone who is
neither a physicist nor engineer, in fact someone without any background in
the physical sciences at all.

What intellectual right this social scientist has to pontificate on matters he
knows nothing about is unknown to me. He seems to disregard the opinion of
those who are trained engineers with a PhD as damaged goods or delusional.
What right has he to say this with absoloutely no knowledge in the field?
Maybe after 8 years of daily academic grind he can come back and write
something with a bit more humility.

For instance "without actually studying maths and physics - which would show
the crackpot why he’s misguided." \- How does he know this?? Although my
academic background is in EE I have reviewed the physics curriculum at my alma
mater and there is little there that I do not already know to an advanced
level. Most learnt during my PhD in physics.

'Regular interaction' is important and the textbooks are outdated/immaterial,
it's not possible to understand papers unless you are talking to the people
involved. This is a man who simply doesn't understand what working in the
physical sciences involves. He is totally ignorant of the field. Does he think
major advances are happening on a 6 monthly basis?

------
smegel
I also find this "crackpot" quite entertaining:

[http://www.sjcrothers.plasmaresources.com/PhD.html](http://www.sjcrothers.plasmaresources.com/PhD.html)

~~~
madez
It saddens me that one who seems to have technical talent in science can fail
so miserably at social interaction, with probably fatal consequences for his
scientific career.

At the same time the behaviour of the professors gives me hope. Several kindly
and patiently tried to help him despite him being rude, offending and
egocentric.

Finding his behaviour positively entertaining is sadistic, and I'd find it
contemptible and disgusting.

I agree that what crackpots are missing is not scientific method or technical
talent but social integration and interaction. An early, informal and honest
"this idea is non-sense" can help a lot.

------
bitwize
My favorite is Louis Savain, who would go full mad scientist when his theories
were challenged and even laugh like Mandark in his correspondence. Example:
[http://users.telenet.be/vdmoortel/dirk/Physics/Fumbles/Insan...](http://users.telenet.be/vdmoortel/dirk/Physics/Fumbles/Insanity.html)

------
seanhandley
Published on Wednesday, 01 April 2009 08:17

~~~
MichaelCrawford
Your comment appeared, disappeared then reappeared. It seems to be here to
stay now.

Perhaps this is some bug in HN's CMS.

~~~
mhuffman
Schrödinger's comment!

~~~
kokey
That's the guy who invented distributed NoSQL databases?

------
opium_tea
Sometimes these crackpots are people of high social status (well, sort of...)

[http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2006/nov/14/science...](http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2006/nov/14/science.comment)

~~~
DanBC
Mocton is a hereditary peer. It's worrying that those people have some power,
but it could be worse.

The previous English minister for energy and climate change (Matthew Hancock)
is a climate change denier who refuses to discuss anything related to climate
change and who accepts large donations from other prominent climate change
deniers.

[http://rt.com/uk/248605-climate-skeptic-donations-
hancock/](http://rt.com/uk/248605-climate-skeptic-donations-hancock/)

------
kokey
This is fascinating and I think I can understand why he finds it so
interesting, and useful, to study people who disagree with probably the most
testable, established, unquestionable parts of science. I hope it will help
identify bias and groupthink in less testable, established science.

------
nthcolumn
Clickbait title - boring article about amateur scientists.

------
mkagenius
really Offtopic: but does time really slow down or just the clock we use are
dumb? I never believed it.

~~~
zamalek
I'll try lay-mans this for you. Time doesn't really slow down.

You have a reference frame, your reference frame simply describes something
along the lines of "where you are". "Where you are" could be how close you are
to something massive (a star, a planet) or how fast you are moving.

If you have a watch on your own wrist it will always tick at 1 second from
your own perspective (ignoring extreme cases like black holes, where your hand
could be in a very different reference frame from your face). It will always
be correct and time will never slow down or speed up. It will be exactly the
same 1 second that everyone in the universe experiences from their own
perspective. However, if someone looked at your watch with a telescope from
another reference frame it would be ticking faster or slower than their own
watch.

This is where relativity gets its name from "something in RELATION to
another." Without checking your relation to something else you can't determine
that time flows at different rates.

Think of time as a smooth river. The further along the river you are the more
time you have experienced (our classical notion of time does not exist, it has
been replaced by distance). If you move into the area of the river that has a
strong current you will move through the river faster but from your own
perspective the water and people directly around you will still be the same.
You would only be able to tell that you are in a strong current if you could
see someone who is in the weaker current.

Therefore our clocks do exactly what they should be doing, measuring 1 second
by ways of our own frame of reference.

~~~
baytrailcat
Yep, this was the most difficult thing to grasp when I started learning this
stuff. I thought that somehow the body knows to slow things down when it is in
motion. But when you think through it, it is easy. Its all in the reference
frames. Imagine yourself going from Earth to Alpha Centauri in a constant
velocity. In SR terms, this means you are in motion with respect to earth. Now
imagine there is nothing else in the universe except you. Take away Earth,
Alpha Centauri, all stars, galaxies, etc. Nothing but infinite empty space.
Imagine yourself doing the same movement (I know it is a stretch and I am
butchering physics here, since I asked to take away your source and
destination, but you can form a mental picture). Now, in SR terms, I cannot
say anything about your motion. You are neither moving nor stationary and it
is pointless to say anything. But based on old Newtonian model, you can be
considered "moving" in this big empty room of Universe (which later became
theorized into Ether). When you grasp this and understand that motion is
relative, also understand that time is relative. There is no giant universal
clock which dictates what time it is for this giant room (which is again what
Newton imagined). Einstein simply said there is no such thing (aka special
reference frame). Once this is grasped, other concepts like time dilation will
flow from it.

------
MichaelCrawford
That's not actually hard to do. I would be completely unsurprised were I to
learn that Einstein would be unable to get consistent answers were he to
repeatedly count on his own toes.

There is a great deal of difference between symbolic mathematics - calculus
and the like - and arithmetic.

While not as bad as Einstein, I'm very poor at arithmetic as well.

~~~
dalke
The article characterizes crackpots who claim there are serious problems with
the underpinnings of science that can be rectified with college level or even
high-school level math.

It doesn't actually find a calculation flaw in Einstein's work.

~~~
MichaelCrawford
I wasn't criticizing Einstein's theories, I was criticizing Einstein's
arithmetic.

In a letter to Mt. Wilson observatory, he requested that they point their
telescope just off the edge of the sun in full daylight - NOT during an
eclipse - to determine whether the stars whose light passed through the sun's
gravity would be out of place with respect to the positions of those stars
when the sun was not nearby.

He was apparently unaware that to point an observatory scope that close to the
sun - I don't recall whether it was the 100" or the 60" \- would melt the
glass photographic plate.

His calculations of where the stars would be, was wildly inaccurate.

Someone - a Mt. Wilson astronomer I expect but don't really know - had to
point out to Einstein that he required an eclipse. I expect someone else had
to do the arithmetic for the African eclipse expedition.

In my original post I clearly distinguished symbolic mathematics from
arithmetic. I've studied some tensor calculus, while straightforward in
principle it is conceptually quite difficult to follow.

Einstein had his tensors right what he did not have correct was "2 + 2". I
mean like he'd try that computation then come up with "5".

~~~
Luc
Here's a much, much more accurate article about Einstein's correspondence with
astronomers:

[http://huntingtonblogs.org/2015/03/einstein-and-the-
astronom...](http://huntingtonblogs.org/2015/03/einstein-and-the-astronomers/)

Also, by the way, the first result on Google when I searched for it.

As you will see (if you care to read the article) his first calculation was
made in 1911, only 3 years after his special relativity publication, and
before he even knew about differential geometry.

His second calculation was based on general relativity, and the fact that it
predicts twice the angle of his previous calculation is hugely important in
the history of science.

~~~
MichaelCrawford
I expect the letter Dr. Goldberger referred to, was the one to Dr. Hale.

Goldberger was quite specific that Einstein asked that the telescope be
pointed right at the edge of the sun. I've studied german but not in enough
depth that I could translate Einstein's letter.

One arc second is not far from the limit of the resolution of an amateur
telescope. While in principle the larger telescopes could resolve finer
detail, atmospheric turbulence leads them not to resolve much better - they
can see dimmer objects, but not more clearly. It is only in recent years that
adaptive optics, faster imaging sensors and more-sophisticated image
processing algorithms enable better resolution.

I don't know but expect that when the 1919 expedition confirmed GR, it was
done by measuring the positions of multiple stars to determine that their
positions were, on the average, out of place. The scope they used was not that
big, as they had to carry it out into the African countryside.

The tensor calculus used in GR is quite complex. To reduce that to specific
predictions of the star locations would require quite a lot of arithmetic.
Back then they would have used logarithm tables and adding machines.

I am willing to concede the Einstein could balance his checkbook, but
numerical analysis is hard enough to get right on a modern computer, it is
quite hard when done the old-fashioned way, with logarithms and the like. It
would be easy to write down a single digit incorrectly, or to not carry the
computation out to enough significant figures.

Dr. Goldberg was also quite specific about Einstein's computations - not his
theory - being "wildly inaccurate".

Finally, that article brought back many memories for me, some good some bad. I
love the Huntington, I love Mt. Wilson but I had a rough time at Caltech.

I was, for a very brief time, a solar astronomer, but at Big Bear Lake.

~~~
Luc
Last paragraph, quick transcription:

'Es ware deshalb von grosstem Interesse, bis zu wie groszer Sonnennahe helle
Fixsterne bei Anwendung der starksten Vergrosserungen _bei Tage_ (ohne
Sonnenfinsternis) gezehen werden konnen.'

My translation:

'It would therefore be of the greatest interest [to know], until how near to
the sun bright fixed stars could be observed, under the largest magnification
and by day (without solar eclipse).'

~~~
MichaelCrawford
Einstein may have been unclear that to get so much as that one arc second of
displacement, you have to point the scope right at the edge of the sun.

One can see venus with the naked eye during the day - but not when it is near
the sun.

I expect that a red filter would get rid of some of the scattered atmospheric
light. A telescope should be able to see some of the brighter stars during the
day.

But to get the scope so near the edge of the sun that you can measure that
arc-second displacement, you'd have quite a lot of sunlight entering the
telescope. The atmospherically scattered light in that region is quite
intense.

One can use an "Occulting Disk" but they are of limited effectiveness. When
the sun is in the sky, hold your hand out at arm's length, then block the sun
with your thumb; you'll see that the skylight is quite bright around your
thumb. That's not from the solar corona - not much of it - but from
atmospheric scattering.

