MNb wrote on 08/17/10 at 19:24:22:
sloughter wrote on 08/16/10 at 18:39:19:
Anybody know why Einstein got a lot of press with respect to general relativity and Poincare practically none?
I already have told you - and you typically neglected it - that Poincare is honoured among physicists and mathematicians.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henri_Poincaré and scroll down to look up how many theorems bear his name.
Concerning the press - well it's the press. It always simplifies and looks for heroes. Not Einstein's fault, as others already have remarked.
Who originated the ridiculous "miracle year" nonsense? The press? or physicists? Unlike any discipline where conceptual rigor is valued, in physics if your batting average is over 200, you must be a genius.
Look the boondoggle at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory where we really must spend billions of dollars to upgrade our nuclear weaponry and pursue the asinine implosion fusion program.
At LLNL physicists/engineers plan to harness the explosive equivalent of a 100 pound stick of dynamite going off every second. The engineering should be a breeze, just like the Tokomak, where it should be easy to create a long-term plasma and convert that easily into cheap, reliable electricity. Did I fail to mention? The hot fusion research program has cost over $15 billion, has been a gravy train for physicists for over 40 years and has yet to generate one kilowatt of power.
The trade literature in the 1960's said we would have hot fusion power plants by the turn of the century. Now we are told that commercialized hot fusion reactors will be available 40 years from now.
The shear la la land that phycisicts live in is exemplified by the fact that they equate fission and it being commercialization in only ten years and this will result in a similar time frame for fusion power. This is convenient specious reasoning by physicists. With fission, you just heat water, something that is well known in traditional power plants. With hot fusion the basic process is known. What isn't known is just how much sputtering will place in the reactor cladding and dozens of similar problems like what do you do with waste products of fusion?
Try explaning to the American public on the one hand that there are no waste products from hot fusion only to realize that the radioactive material from the hot fusion high-energy neutrons creates radioactive waste that is more deadly than that from fission reactors.
The American public may not know the difference between fission and fusion but they will know bull**** when they see it.
How much effort went into the supporting engineering before one dime was spent on building the tokomak? Was there a clear plan at the start to prove that even if the plasma was confined that it might pose unsolvable engineering problems or were physicists just content to play with the plasma?
None of these would have occurred (and we wouldn't have the big hole in the ground in Texas) without big physics riding the coattails of Einstein.
Do you really think that the average American cares about whether we can find eentsee weenstee particles inside the eentsee weentsee particles? This is a wet dream for physicists only.
If $1 billion+ had been spent on medical research, battery research, hurricane studies (by the way, you should read in "Infinite Energy" magazine why hurricanes intensify so rapidly---they pick up energy from hydrogen bonding) , and earthquake prediction studies we could save and could have saved hundreds of thousands of lives.
Of course, if you believe Senator John Kerry, we are better off studying phenemena that has no hope of practical application after 40 years of research, than pursue one that had hundreds of reactor years under its belt, was nearing completion and was largely an engineering rather than a physics problem. Then it got shut down just to please the hot fusion crowd.
I digress. Where and when does the phrase the "miracle year" appear and who coined the phrase and why? Was the media spoon fed this phrase by big physics to give the illusion of Einstein the "genius"? Did anyone prior to coining the phrase dissect the 1905 papers the way Ohanian did in the book, "Einstein's Mistakes The Human Failings of Genius"?
Somehow this garbage got elevated to the status of a "Miracle Year".
Did the press magically get interested in the 1905 papers or where they fed a pile of crap by physicists trying to create a hero just like Eddington did with the Eclipse data from 1919?
Ohanian didn't prove Einstein was a genius (yessiree Bob that Cosmologic Constant paper was a sure act of "genius"). I have yet to see anyone disprove my rejection of the equivalence principle. Now it appears that spacetime is dead not to mention that Einstein flip-flopped on the ether, general relavity and the cosmologic constant. It helps when you're right part of the time.
Einstein was the Inspector Clouseau of the scientific community. He stumbled, he fumbled and he bumbled along, occasionally getting something right when only the good Inspector knew how incompetent he was.
Einstein brought with him a "research" style that ignored primacy of ideas, where sleaze wins, and is, systemic in astrophysics, nuclear physics and theoretical physics. Believe it or not (gasp!) some scientists actually have ethics. It is my privilege to have worked with a true scientist who was awarded a Lifetime Achievement award from the Geological Society of America. He was first a teacher, then a mentor, and now a friend. Even though he wrote a book on geology mathematics (tensor transformations, stress and strain, etc.), when I showed him a new coordinate system, it was so mathematically complex, he couldn't solve it to find stress at a point.
If that man had been Einstein, he would have stolen this new coordinate system and presented it has "his" idea.
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