Matthew McIrvin on Achenbach on Global Warming Denial...

The highly-intelligent Matt McIrvin has a good and thoughtful take:

mmcirvin: Achenbach on global warming denial: I think this is the first time I've ever sparked a non-negligible political-blog controversy, over the merits of Joel Achenbach's Washington Post Sunday magazine article on global-warming skeptics.... I'm somewhat more sympathetic.... It's a Sunday magazine piece, not written according to the inverted-pyramid rule with conclusions up at the top. Achenbach's aim, as he explains, is to give the people he's profiling enough rope to hang themselves, and a fairly sophisticated reader will come away from reading the whole piece realizing that they've done so.

But... [h]e engages the people much more than he does the arguments, and that's a problem because their rhetoric is often pretty good. Somebody thinking, "OK, these guys are a little kooky and/or dishonest, but I never heard these points they bring up before. What about all those anomalies? What about the thickening ice, the Medieval Warm Period, the historical lag between temperature and CO2 levels? Might there actually be something in it?" still isn't going to get much of an answer from the Post Magazine piece.... [I]t's possible to do better without turning the whole thing into agitprop. For me, the gold standard for this kind of piece is John Farrell's outstanding 2000 Salon article "Did Einstein Cheat?" about the even more bizarre world of advocates against the theory of relativity. It doesn't just show you how kooky these people are, it also provides a fairly definite idea of just how they're wrong. By taking the ideas it's knocking more seriously than Achenbach did, it actually ends up being far more convincing.

And, of course, an unsophisticated reader who does not read Achenbach's whole piece with attention...

Comments

[A. Zarkov]

"Did Einstein Cheat?"

No Einstein didn’t cheat, but Eddington did (maybe). We now know that the light deflection measurements from Sobral in Brazil and Atlantic island of Príncipe were at best inconclusive, and certainly not definitive proof of the predictions general relativity at that time. For details go here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predictive_power#Relativity_and_the_1919_eclipse

If Eddington had been more fastidious about this data analysis, or perhaps more honest, it’s likely that Einstein would not have become a celebrated physicist, at least not in 1919. Of course the General Theory of Relatively has stood the test of time, surviving every challenge. Still one can’t help but wonder if it took an extra 10 or 20 to confirm the theory, would Einstein be as famous with the lay public as he is?

[Something Polish]

Perhaps Achenbach should have instead written the piece in bullet points that clearly indicated that the outlier GW skeptics are totally full of shit. Or what about some sort of star system? Thumbs up, thumbs down?

[Brian Boru]

The medieval warm period was followed by the Little Ice Age, and the Roman Imperial Warm period (starting ca. 200 BC) was followed by the Vandal Minimum. It appears that, over the last 800K years or so, cold is the default position and warm the aberration; while the increasing global warming is a scary prospect, the subequent cold period is even more scary. A couple of years ago, in a program on mammoths, Discovery channel had a computer simulation which put Boston again under a glacier in the not-too-distant future.

[Barkley Rosser]

Given the focus on Pat Michaels in the preceding post, I would note that he shows up in the quite interesting Achenbach piece. There the separateness and distinctiveness of his position from other "deniers" (and the fact that he is no longer a "denier," strictly speaking) is noted.

While there is some making fun of some of the older meteorologists who criticize computer modeling, it remains a hard fact that models need to be tested against reality. This was exactly the issue between Michaels and Hansen discussed on the other thread. The model Hansen used in 1988 did not predict subsequent reality very well, as Michels pointed out. Again, those models have been adjusted since.

Those of us in economics should be a bit more sensitive about this very matter. One of the more pungent jabs at our econometric models is that they are not much better than a lot of the climate forecasting models. Actually in terms of forecasting near term changes of situations, I think the meteorologists do better than us economists (when was the last time an economist accurately forecast the exact timing of the beginning of a recession or the moment of a market crash?).

[liberal]

"But... [h]e engages the people much more than he does the arguments, and that's a problem because their rhetoric is often pretty good."

Emblematic of journalism.

[Dave]

Brad,

Why do you cut Mankiw so much more slack than Achenbach? I'm serious; with Mankiw, you talk about have readers "connect the dots" and that's good. With Achenbach, that's bad. Shouldn't you, as an economist, hold Mankiw to a higher standard?

[John]

Someday read up on Newton. For over 100 years after his death, he was "disproved" over and over again by people with an ax to grind, especially the Jesuits.

[Tim Lambert]

The model Hansen used in 1988 did, in fact, predict reality quite well. Which is why Michaels lied about it in 1998.

[Ed]

"Why do you cut Mankiw so much more slack than Achenbach?"

Yeah, it's pretty noticible. Brad's buddies are benignly misguided. Everyone else is in the "stupidest man in the world" crew.

[Auros]

Barkley: The meteorological models are very bad at predicting this week's weather, but they're actually surprisingly good at predicting, say, the total amount of precipitation for the next three months. When you extend them to predicting averages over the course of a few years, they get better still.

The models predicted things like "the middle of the antarctic ice sheet will get thicker while the edges retreat", and "we will get more frequent Cat 4-5 hurricanes", and so on. Criticizing them for getting the exact dates wrong utterly misses the point.

I suspect you know this, but it's worth pointing out, because this angle of attack is standard for the deniers, and we should be more careful not to lend them ammunition.

[John Emerson]

Mr. Polish, your joke was stupid already yesterday, the first time you made it.

There's actually nothing extreme about saying that the important points should be made clearly and explicitly in a prominent place in a piece (beginning or end). It's actually the normal way of writing journalism, except under conditions of censorship.

Nor does the fact that it was a human interest story preclude telling the reader in a prominent place that the deniers are all wrong. This could easily have been made one of the main points of the story.

A clear statement of this kind, unavoidably and unmistakably understandable by every single reader, would have offended the hard-right commissars, and the Post wants to avoid that kind of trouble. So we got a nice little piece that liberals like because it subtly lets us know that the deniers are wrong, and conservatives like because a careless reader thinks it makes the deniers look good.

[jonathan goldberg]

Threads like this one often get into the definition of objectivity, as practiced by the press. I have heard that Gore taught a course at Columbia Journalism school in which he criticized the concept of objectivity being taught there, which is apparently something like "get out of the way and let the parties to the dispute have their say." Gore suggested that fairness, rather than this kind of objectivity, was the preferable goal.

This caused considerable cognitive dissonance, and he did not repeat the course.

But Gore is, in a broad sense, right, and the journalism professors wrong. I think that this definition is adopted to avoid controversey (as was suggeted above).

Quine, in Word and Object, has this to say: "Within our own TOTAL evolving doctrine, we can judge truth as earnestly and absolutely as can be; subject to correction, but that goes without saying."

The stress on "total" is mine. It's there to emphasize that the claim that reporters should pretend that they don't know anything but what their sometimes lying informants are telling them is false. Objectivity does not require a reporter (or an editor) to check his brain at the door; nor do his ethical obligations to his readers permit it.

[anne]

Nicely argued, Jonathan :)

[david]

I'll go with Tim Lambert and say it's a good piece.

John Emerson, aside from lightening up, you also need to allow for different kinds of writing, even in journalism. It'd be a tired world, full of more crap than's already there, if Joel Achenbach wasn't allowed to gently mock a pack a loons because John Emerson's all cranky and afraid for the dimwits in the midwest who just won't get it.

It's not as if you got it -- you missed Achenbach's clear statement of belief in global warming, because you couldn't be bothered to read.

[John Emerson]

David, I don't like you either. I do lighten up from time to time, but hopefully not when you're around. You'd kill my buzz for sure.

You are proving my point. Achenbach lets you feel good because you get the point, and you also feel good because dimwits in the Midwest don't. What a smart guy you are.

Global warming is still a live issue in the actual political world you're too fine to live in, so it would really be a good thing if journalistic writing touching on global warming stated the truth (that this is NOT a controversial issue to anyone who understands it) directly in a prominent place rather than burying it in a paragraph on page 3.

Achenbach could have written an entertaining human-interest story while still producing a piece which global-warming skeptics could not take as vindication. And they did take this as vindication.

DeLong's site has been infested by proud sillies like yourself as long as I've been here, and I haven't got used to the bunch of you yet.

[david]

That's funny, John. I like you, I'm far less proud than you, I'm much more of crank, and way to your left. I live in the world. You're just being a piece here, and your response is further demonstration of it.

[John Emerson]

Sorry, man, you're wrong. I may have guessed wrong about the reasons, but your post was annoying.

In my most recent post on the other thread, I explained that I know lots of people who would consider the piece to make the deniers look good. Perhaps that makes me a low-class person, but people here have to know that, and they don't. One shinypenny has testified similarly.

The piece could have been written only slightly differently in order to make that response impossible. It wasn't because the Post has been intimidated by organized complaints.

The organized complaints come from Republican hacks who don't care what well-informed people think. They're only care about thoughtless whim voters (a big chink of the so-called swing vote.) If the piece had been written clearly enough to wise up the whim voters, there would be hell to pay. But it wasn't and I doubt that there will be.

I sincerely doubt that you're far to my left.

[CapitalistImperialistPig]

I am very dissapointed in your response to Achenbach's superb piece on the Climate Skeptics. The core of objections you quote approvingly is that Achenbach:
1) Let's the skeptics speak in their own voices, and
2) Doesn't beat the reader over the head the point of view you favor.
3) Doesn't dumb down his points enough to suit you.

What he does do is clearly expose the thought of the skeptics in a way that is sympathetic yet extremely revealing. That fact is that we don't need any more people chanting "global warming bad" - there are a lot of them already - we need thoughtful pieces that reveal the thinking and motivations of the protagonists.

Frankly, I doubt that any of you are competent to criticize the science of the skeptics. Would any of you recognize a Kelvin-Helmholtz wave if it bit you on the nose? Do you know the difference between the stable and unstable manifolds of a nonlinear dynamic system?

The CEI guy is good for some comic relief, but Gray is a somewhat tragic figure - a genuinely important scientist whose science has left him behind - somewhat like Einstein in his last 30 years.

[John Emerson]

Einstein in his last years was not a malicious, ignorant hack.

I would love to live in a country where the media were not afraid to routinely treat the wrongness of the global warming skeptics as a common-sense truth. In such a country, with a baseline established, a neutral little piece like Achenbach's would be fine. But I don't live in a country like that. (And as far as I know, the Post's coverage of GW isn't like that).

But the baseline hasn't been established. As someone said, in the scientific literature global warming is a generally-accepted idea, whereas in the journalistic literature it is a controversial idea which is under serious debate. (The intro sentence to Achenbach's piece, not written by him, effectively treated it as a controversy).

The only reason that journalism treats GW as a debate is because if they don't, they'll receive a flood of attacks from wingers. Achenbach alludes to this, but he doesn't express it accurately. He talked about it as if both sides were equally bad, and he was this nice person in the middle. That's the cliche of neutrality, and that's a big part of the problem. Achenbach IS getting flak, and he deserves it because he (or his editor) chickened out.

People talk about "bullet points", "beating people over the head", etc. All I'm saying is missing would is a clear, unmistakable statement of the thesis that the debate is almost entirely fake either in the initial exposition or in the conclusion. Not buried demurely and tactfully somewhere in the middle. All I'm asking for is an article which could not be taken as sympathetic by GW neutrals and GW skeptics.

The veiled expression of news under censorship probably is more subtle and literarily more interesting than the direct statement of actuality, but in a free country the news shouldn't be reported that way.

I think that I have an important point here, and hat this is an important issue, and I've hung around knocking down people's pet ideas on the subject one after another. I will never understand people who think that it's vulgar to insist on direct statements of fact in pieces touching on factual matters.

So I guess I'll take my humorless elitist Stalinist ass back to my Stalinist bastard hut now. It's been a pleasure.

[anne]

John Emerson, thank you so much :) Please do continue along your and our way.

I am astonished at the idea that in some way by any absurd measure Albert Einstein could ever have been found to have been left behind by science or by the moral sense of science. There was never a time when Einstein was not active and contributing as a thinker who defined critical science and moral aspects of a century. Never a time.

[anne]

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/08/opinion/08greene.html?ex=1270612800&en=c87d6bab356df279&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland

April 8, 2005

One Hundred Years of Uncertainty
By BRIAN GREENE

JUST about a hundred years ago, Albert Einstein began writing a paper that secured his place in the pantheon of humankind's greatest thinkers. With his discovery of special relativity, Einstein upended the familiar, thousands-year-old conception of space and time. To be sure, even a century later, not everyone has fully embraced Einstein's discovery. Nevertheless, say "Einstein" and most everyone thinks "relativity."

What is less widely appreciated, however, is that physicists call 1905 Einstein's "miracle year" not because of the discovery of relativity alone, but because in that year Einstein achieved the unimaginable, writing four papers that each resulted in deep and formative changes to our understanding of the universe. One of these papers - not on relativity - garnered him the 1921 Nobel Prize in physics. It also began a transformation in physics that Einstein found so disquieting that he spent the last 30 years of his life in a determined effort to repudiate it.

Two of the four 1905 papers were indeed on relativity. The first, completed in June, laid out the foundations of his new view of space and time, showing that distances and durations are not absolute, as everyone since Newton had thought, but instead are affected by one's motion. Clocks moving relative to one another tick off time at different rates; yardsticks moving relative to one another measure different lengths. You don't perceive this because the speeds of everyday life are too slow for the effects to be noticeable. If you could move near the speed of light, the effects would be obvious.

The second relativity paper, completed in September, is a three-page addendum to the first, which derived his most famous result, E = mc2, an equation as short as it is powerful. It told the world that matter can be converted into energy - and a lot of it - since the speed of light squared (c2) is a huge number. We've witnessed this equation's consequences in the devastating might of nuclear weapons and the tantalizing promise of nuclear energy.

The third paper, completed in May, conclusively established the existence of atoms - an idea discussed in various forms for millenniums - by showing that the numerous microscopic collisions they'd generate would account for the observed, though previously unexplained, jittery motion of impurities suspended in liquids.

With these three papers, our view of space, time and matter was permanently changed.

Yet, it is the remaining 1905 paper, written in March, whose legacy is arguably the most profound. In this work, Einstein went against the grain of conventional wisdom and argued that light, at its most elementary level, is not a wave, as everyone had thought, but actually a stream of tiny packets or bundles of energy that have since come to be known as photons.

This might sound like a largely technical advance, updating one description of light to another. But through subsequent research that amplified and extended Einstein's argument (see Figures 1 through 3), scientists revealed a mathematically precise and thoroughly startling picture of reality called quantum mechanics.

Before the discovery of quantum mechanics, the framework of physics was this: If you tell me how things are now, I can then use the laws of physics to calculate, and hence predict, how things will be later. You tell me the velocity of a baseball as it leaves Derek Jeter's bat, and I can use the laws of physics to calculate where it will land a handful of seconds later. You tell me the height of a building from which a flowerpot has fallen, and I can use the laws of physics to calculate the speed of impact when it hits the ground. You tell me the positions of the Earth and the Moon, and I can use the laws of physics to calculate the date of the first solar eclipse in the 25th century. What's important is that in these and all other examples, the accuracy of my predictions depends solely on the accuracy of the information you give me. Even laws that differ substantially in detail - from the classical laws of Newton to the relativistic laws of Einstein - fit squarely within this framework.

Quantum mechanics does not merely challenge the previous laws of physics. Quantum mechanics challenges this centuries-old framework of physics itself. According to quantum mechanics, physics cannot make definite predictions. Instead, even if you give me the most precise description possible of how things are now, we learn from quantum mechanics that the most physics can do is predict the probability that things will turn out one way, or another, or another way still....

[anne]

http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2005/11/just_what_was_e.html

Spetember 2, 2005

Just What Was Einstein's Theory of Relativity?
By Steven Weinberg - Cambridge University

Most advances in the history of science have been marked by discoveries about nature, but at certain turning points we have made discoveries about science itself. These discoveries lead to changes in how we score our work, in what we consider to be an acceptable theory.

For an example look back to a discovery made just one hundred years ago. As you recall, before 1905 there had been numerous unsuccessful efforts to detect changes in the speed of light due to the motion of the earth through the ether. Attempts were made by Fitzgerald, Lorentz, and others to construct a mathematical model of the electron (which was then conceived to be the chief constituent of all matter), that would explain how rulers contract when moving through the ether in just the right way to keep the apparent speed of light unchanged. Einstein instead offered a symmetry principle, which stated that not just the speed of light but all the laws of nature are unaffected by a transformation to a frame of reference in uniform motion. Lorentz grumbled that Einstein was simply assuming what he and others had been trying to prove. But history was on Einstein's side. The 1905 Special Theory of Relativity was the beginning of a general acceptance of symmetry principles as a valid basis for physical theories.

This was how Special Relativity made a change in science itself. From one point of view, Special Relativity was no big thing — it just amounted to the replacement of one 10 parameter spacetime symmetry group, the Galileo group, with another 10 parameter group, the Lorentz group. But never before had a symmetry principle been taken as a legitimate hypothesis on which to base a physical theory...

Steven Weinberg, Physics Department, University of Texas at Austin.

[anne]

Imagine at such as time as we are passing through a scientist who was till the end of life was concerned with how we might live peacefully and how science might so contribute. This was Einstein.

[anne]

The Washington Post magazine article was not worth the reading, as teaching "religious alternatives" to evolution is not worth the teaching. We have trouble enough caring for and learning about basics and nuances of legitimate and era changing science advances, to begin to master politically driven non-science non-rational alternatives.

[CapitalistImperialistPig]

Anne - I admire the passion with which you express your views, but I think you are wrong on two points. Einstein was the greatest physicist of the twentieth century, but after 1920 or so he stopped contributing at the frontiers. He devoted his efforts to trying to attack the consensus interpretation of quantum mechanics and to searching for a unified field theory. Physics between 1920 and Einstein's death was an incredibly vital science, much of it devoted to exploiting ideas Einstein had pioneered, but Einstein never accepted the quantum mechanical synthesis created by Bohr, Heisenberg, Born, Dirac and others, and did not contibute significantly to that enterprise.

Bill Gray is not a "malicious ignorant hack" as Mr. Emerson put it. He was a true pioneer in the creation of the science of hurricanes. Achenbach's piece is above all a portrait of him and a portrayal of how a man can get left behind by his science. There is no way an intelligent reader of his piece can interpret Joel's piece as "teaching the religious alternatives" to climate science.

If you haven't read it, you really should. There is very little danger that you might be converted to a climate skeptic.

[John Emerson]

"There is no way an intelligent reader of his piece can interpret Joel's piece as 'teaching the religious alternatives' to climate science."

No one has said that anyone could.

What I have said all along is that Achenbach has written a split-level, nuanced piece which tells intelligent people one thing, and, by not stressing certain important points enough, tells thoughtless people quite a different thing. It's already been used as support by GW skeptics.

Rove doesn't need and can't get the intelligent readers, and the article doesn't do him any harm with the careless readers who are an integral part of the Bush coalition. The Post dodged a bullet, but they fell down on the job.

Two or three sentences at key points would hhave made misunderstanding impossible, along the lines of "There's no scientific controversy about the reality of global warming -- but some claim that there is".

And in addition, the introductory paragraph talks about "serious blowback". But GW skepticism is not serious.

Newspapers should be able to make straightforward, forthright statements of fact, even when the fact is politically controversial. But because of organized, funded, rightwing pressure, they're reluctant to do so.

[anne]

http://www.calvorn.com/gallery/photo.php?photo=6570&exhibition=7&u=99|0|...

Blue-winged Warbler
Doodletown, New York.

Thank you both for the explanations, which help me understand better each stance :)

[Barkley Rosser]

I am going to jump in and defend Einstein here (having worn myself out trying to defend Pat Michaels). Yes, it is true that after about 1920 Einstein was running against the mainstream of physics, and in particular his efforts to disprove or limit quantum mechanics were probably a waste of his time and powerful intellect.

However, some of what he worked on, especially ideas related to the unified field theory, have in fact been revived and are playing roles in such current areas as string theory. In that regard, at least some of what Einstein worked on later can be viewed as prescient and useful, even if it was out of synch with what was in while he was working on it.

[CapitalistImperialistPig]

Einstein indeed remained active in his attempt to find a unified field theory. I am not aware of any of his unified field theory ideas that have found their way into string theory. What are they?

[anne]

Forgive my lack of proper understanding, but the sense I have is that the way in which Albert Einstein understood and portrayed symmetry from 1905 forms a basis for string theory :)

[anne]

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/01/science/01eins.html?ex=1267851600&en=255ed5ddf8734523&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland

March 1, 2005

The Next Einstein? Applicants Welcome
By DENNIS OVERBYE

Part of Einstein's legacy was an abyssal gap in the foundations of reality as conceived by science. On one side of the divide was general relativity, which describes stars and the universe itself. On the other side is quantum mechanics, which describes the paradoxical behavior of subatomic particles and forces.

In the former, nature is continuous and deterministic, cause follows effect; in the latter nature is discrete, like sand grains on the beach, and subject to statistical uncertainties.

Einstein to his dying day rejected quantum mechanics as ultimate truth, saying in a letter to Max Born in 1924, "The theory yields much but it hardly brings us closer to the Old One's secrets. I, in any case, am convinced that he does not play dice."

Science will not have a real theory of the world until these two warring notions are merged into a theory of quantum gravity, one that can explain what happens when the matter in a star goes smoosh into a dense microscopic dot at the center of a black hole, or when the universe appears out of nothing in a big bang.

String theory is one, as yet unproven, attempt at such a quantum gravity theory, and it has attracted an army of theorists and mathematicians.

But, Dr. Witten speculated, there could be an Einsteinian moment in another direction. Quantum gravity presumes, he explained, that general relativity breaks down at short distances. But what, he asked, if relativity also needed correction at long distances as a way of explaining, for example, the acceleration of the universe?

"Relativity field theory could be cracked at long distances," Dr. Witten said, adding that he saw no evidence for it. But when Einstein came along, there was no clear evidence that Newtonian physics was wrong, either. "I would think that's an opportunity for an Einstein," he said.

Another Einsteinian opportunity, Dr. Witten later added in an e-mail message, is the possibility that Einstein's old bugaboo quantum mechanics needs correcting, saying that while he saw no need himself, it was a mystery what quantum mechanics meant when applied to the universe as a whole.

Dr. Smolin of the Perimeter Institute said it should give physicists pause that their leader and idol had rejected quantum mechanics, and yet what everybody is trying to do now is to apply quantum mechanics to Einstein's theory of gravity.

"What if he were right?" asked Dr. Smolin, who said he also worried that the present organization of science, with its pressures for tenure and publications, mitigates against the appearance of outsiders like Einstein, who need to follow their own star for a few lonely years or decades.

But as Dr. Krauss said, it only takes one good idea to change our picture of reality.

Dr. Smolin said, "When somebody has a correct idea, it doesn't take long to have an impact."

"It's not about identifying the person who is about to be the new Einstein," he went on. "When there is someone who does something with the impact of Einstein, we'll all know."

[anne]

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/01/science/01eins.html?ex=1267851600&en=255ed5ddf8734523&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland

One reason nobody stands out is that physics has been kind of stuck for the last half-century.

During that time, Dr. Witten said, physicists have made significant progress toward a unified theory of nature, not by blazing new paths, but by following established principles, like the concept of symmetry - first used by Einstein in his relativity paper in 1905 - and extending them from electromagnetism to the weak and strong nuclear forces.

"It was not necessary to invent quantum field theory," said Dr. Witten, "just to improve it." ...

[CapitalistImperialistPig]

Anne - Symmetry has indeed proven one of the most powerful ideas in physics (and mathematics), and Einstein, like Maxwell before him, made intuitive use of it in development of his relativity principle. The recognition and formalization of the power of symmetry was done by others though - Poincare, Minkowski, and Weyl, among others.

The claim of superstring theory is to combine General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics and so it owes its existence to ideas Einstein played huge roles in developing. Einstein's role in that work, though, was largely complete by 1916.

[anne]

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/25/science/25eins.html?ex=1264654800&en=8ed7a909d2a3e87f&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland

January 25, 2005

Brace Yourself! Here Comes Einstein's Year
By DENNIS OVERBYE

What are you up to, you frozen whale, you smoked, dried, canned piece of soul?"

So did Albert Einstein, then a 26-year-old patent clerk in Bern, Switzerland, begin a letter to his pal Conrad Habicht in the spring of 1905.

Whatever Habicht, a math teacher in Schaffhausen, had been up to was not much compared to his irreverent friend, who had been altering the foundations of physics during the few free hours left to a young father, husband and government worker. As he related to Habicht, Einstein had just finished writing three major physics papers.

One showed how the existence of atoms, still a debatable proposition, could be verified by measuring the jiggling of microscopic particles in a glass of water, a process known as Brownian motion; in another, his doctoral dissertation for the University of Zurich, he deduced the size of molecules. In still another, which he described as "very revolutionary," Einstein argued that light behaved as if it were composed of particles, rather than the waves that most physicists thought.

That paper, which won him the 1921 Nobel Prize, helped lay the foundation for quantum theory, a paradoxical statistical description of nature on the smallest subatomic scales that he himself later rejected, saying that God did not play dice with the universe.

But he wasn't done. There was a fourth paper, he told Habicht, still just a rough draft that employed "a modification of the theory of space and time."

That, of course, was relativity, the theory that set the speed of light as the universal speed limit and loosened space and time from their Newtonian rigidity, allowing them to breathe, expand, contract and bend, and led to the expanding universe and the apocalyptic marriage of energy and mass in the famous equation E=mc2....

[Barkley Rosser]

I cannot claim to be an expert on string theory, and so am probably erroneously shooting off my mouth, but in at least two areas there seems to be an Einstein touch.

While Einstein did not invent the idea of considering more than four dimensions, I gather that some of his attempted formulations did involve Kaluza-Klein extra dimensions. This is certainly a part of string theory.

I have also read (forgot the source) that at some very deep level, string theory reintroduces a continuous concept of the cosmos again, a level somewhere below that at which quantum mechanics operates, but I could be wrong on this one.

[anne]

http://www.calvorn.com/gallery/photo.php?photo=6537&exhibition=7&u=99|0|...

Mourning Warbler
New York City--Central Park, The Great Hill.

Well, I can at least trace a significant contribution in modern physics to 1935 :)

[anne]

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/27/science/27eins.html?ex=1293339600&en=caf5d835203c3500&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss

December 27, 2005

Quantum Trickery: Testing Einstein's Strangest Theory
By DENNIS OVERBYE

Einstein said there would be days like this.

This fall scientists announced that they had put a half dozen beryllium atoms into a "cat state."

No, they were not sprawled along a sunny windowsill. To a physicist, a "cat state" is the condition of being two diametrically opposed conditions at once, like black and white, up and down, or dead and alive.

These atoms were each spinning clockwise and counterclockwise at the same time. Moreover, like miniature Rockettes they were all doing whatever it was they were doing together, in perfect synchrony. Should one of them realize, like the cartoon character who runs off a cliff and doesn't fall until he looks down, that it is in a metaphysically untenable situation and decide to spin only one way, the rest would instantly fall in line, whether they were across a test tube or across the galaxy.

The idea that measuring the properties of one particle could instantaneously change the properties of another one (or a whole bunch) far away is strange to say the least - almost as strange as the notion of particles spinning in two directions at once. The team that pulled off the beryllium feat, led by Dietrich Leibfried at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, in Boulder, Colo., hailed it as another step toward computers that would use quantum magic to perform calculations.

But it also served as another demonstration of how weird the world really is according to the rules, known as quantum mechanics.

The joke is on Albert Einstein, who, back in 1935, dreamed up this trick of synchronized atoms - "spooky action at a distance," as he called it - as an example of the absurdity of quantum mechanics.

"No reasonable definition of reality could be expected to permit this," he, Boris Podolsky and Nathan Rosen wrote in a paper in 1935.

Today that paper, written when Einstein was a relatively ancient 56 years old, is the most cited of Einstein's papers. But far from demolishing quantum theory, that paper wound up as the cornerstone for the new field of quantum information.

Nary a week goes by that does not bring news of another feat of quantum trickery once only dreamed of in thought experiments: particles (or at least all their properties) being teleported across the room in a microscopic version of Star Trek beaming; electrical "cat" currents that circle a loop in opposite directions at the same time; more and more particles farther and farther apart bound together in Einstein's spooky embrace now known as "entanglement." At the University of California, Santa Barbara, researchers are planning an experiment in which a small mirror will be in two places at once.

Niels Bohr, the Danish philosopher king of quantum theory, dismissed any attempts to lift the quantum veil as meaningless, saying that science was about the results of experiments, not ultimate reality. But now that quantum weirdness is not confined to thought experiments, physicists have begun arguing again about what this weirdness means, whether the theory needs changing, and whether in fact there is any problem....

[anne]

CIP, you are obviously knowledgeable in the history of physics :) Please do continue to argue.

[CapitalistImperialistPig]

Einstein did indeed play a role in Kaluza-Kline theory, but not an entirely positive one. He was the reviewer for Kaluza's 1919 (published 1921) paper, and sat on it for two years. He quite reasonably wondered where the extra dimension Kaluza proposed *was*. Kline proposed an answer in 1926 (it is curled up very small) that is indeed central to string theory today.

The 1935 (or so)Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paper played an important role in clarifying the foundations of quantum mechanics, but Einstein had believed that the "spooky weirdness" he had detected in the implications of quantum theory would discredit it. Experiments since Einstein's death have in fact shown just the opposite. That "spooky weird" behavior that Einstein thought discredited QM is in fact just what experiments see. Brian Greene's excellent book "The Fabric of the Cosmos" has a nice popular level discussion of the subject.

[anne]

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/11/books/review/11NEWTONT.html?ex=1149480000&en=df4abcfdb6f30db0&ei=5070

April 11, 2004

Weird Science
By ROGER G. NEWTON

THE FABRIC OF THE COSMOS
Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality.
By Brian Greene.

How did the universe get started and develop? Could there be others? What is the nature of space and time? These questions have engaged thinkers of many civilizations for thousands of years, giving rise to religious faiths, myths, superstitions and philosophies, and eventually to science. Their hold on people's imaginations is as strong as ever. The tools for answering them, both the technical instruments available for the needed observations and the physical theories within which to frame any convincing explanations, have changed over the years, and ''The Fabric of the Cosmos,'' by Brian Greene, ably presents the latest relevant astronomical data as well as the current paradigms to help us make sense of them.

The two greatest achievements of theoretical physics in the 20th century, the general theory of relativity and quantum mechanics, constitute the framework and provide the intellectual tools for any attempt at approaching answers to the ''ultimate'' questions. (Next year will be the centennial of the magical year, 1905, when Albert Einstein first laid the seeds for both.) But the 20th century also bequeathed to the 21st a problem no one has been able to solve: how to reconcile these two theories with each other. Reconciled they will have to be, of course, if they are to serve as the script in which the story of the cosmos is to be understood.

Unfortunately, both quantum mechanics, a general theory of the behavior of all physical objects, and the general theory of relativity, a theory of gravity, contain many counterintuitive features that defy unambiguous description or explanation without using heavy mathematical machinery. Since the same is true of the theories that compete for the prize of unifying them, this presents a real challenge to anyone attempting to explain them to readers without the appropriate technical background.

Greene's book describes all the parts of physics needed for making the story of cosmogony and cosmology understandable. The first is the second law of thermodynamics, or as Greene usually refers to it, ''the arrow of time.'' A tape of Humpty Dumpty's fall, run backward, would look phony: the time arrow points from his orderly sitting on the wall -- low entropy -- to the disorder of his broken pieces -- high entropy. (The book's implication notwithstanding, the arrow of time is not really identical to the second law; there is more to time direction than increasing entropy.) The mystery to be explained here is why the universe started out with a very low entropy and thus, while its entropy continually increased as decreed by the second law, managed to hand out low entropies to its components. This inheritance of order enabled galaxies, stars and planets to possess the arrow of time pointing to increasing disorder, eventually making life possible on earth.

Because at cosmological distances gravity is the dominant force, the second ingredient needed is Einstein's general theory of relativity, which writes the tune to which the universe dances....

[anne]

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/30/opinion/30greene.html?ex=1285732800&en=75072acd6902749d&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss

September 30, 2005

That Famous Equation and You
By BRIAN GREENE

DURING the summer of 1905, while fulfilling his duties in the patent office in Bern, Switzerland, Albert Einstein was fiddling with a tantalizing outcome of the special theory of relativity he'd published in June. His new insight, at once simple and startling, led him to wonder whether "the Lord might be laughing ... and leading me around by the nose."

But by September, confident in the result, Einstein wrote a three-page supplement to the June paper, publishing perhaps the most profound afterthought in the history of science. A hundred years ago this month, the final equation of his short article gave the world E = mc².

In the century since, E = mc² has become the most recognized icon of the modern scientific era. Yet for all its symbolic worth, the equation's intimate presence in everyday life goes largely unnoticed. There is nothing you can do, not a move you can make, not a thought you can have, that doesn't tap directly into E = mc². Einstein's equation is constantly at work, providing an unseen hand that shapes the world into its familiar form. It's an equation that tells of matter, energy and a remarkable bridge between them.

Before E = mc², scientists described matter using two distinct attributes: how much the matter weighed (its mass) and how much change the matter could exert on its environment (its energy). A 19th century physicist would say that a baseball resting on the ground has the same mass as a baseball speeding along at 100 miles per hour. The key difference between the two balls, the physicist would emphasize, is that the fast-moving baseball has more energy: if sent ricocheting through a china shop, for example, it would surely break more dishes than the ball at rest. And once the moving ball has done its damage and stopped, the 19th-century physicist would say that it has exhausted its capacity for exerting change and hence contains no energy.

After E = mc², scientists realized that this reasoning, however sensible it once seemed, was deeply flawed. Mass and energy are not distinct. They are the same basic stuff packaged in forms that make them appear different. Just as solid ice can melt into liquid water, Einstein showed, mass is a frozen form of energy that can be converted into the more familiar energy of motion. The amount of energy (E) produced by the conversion is given by his formula: multiply the amount of mass converted (m) by the speed of light squared (c²). Since the speed of light is a few hundred million meters per second (fast enough to travel around the earth seven times in a single second), c² , in these familiar units, is a huge number, about 100,000,000,000,000,000....

[Jonathan Goldberg]

I second the plug for The Fabric of the Cosmos, in which Greene also gives his view of the relation between Einstein's Unified Field Theory efforts and current developments.

Einstein had more free time than his co-workers at the Patent Office. His job was to apply Maxwell's Equations to the evaluation of patents. He would habitually finish a day's work by lunch, and devote the afternoon to physics. Since both involved scribbling equations the difference was not apparent to the unaided eye. This was an early anticipation of the current situation, where anyone staring at a computer screen looks busy. Here, as so often, Einstein was in the forefront...

[Kery Beauchrt]

"Gore suggested that fairness, rather than this kind of objectivity, was the preferable goal.
But Gore is, in a broad sense, right, and the journalism professors wrong. I think that this definition is adopted to avoid controversey (as was suggeted above)."
A strange being who claims that objectivity isn't fair. I'd love to see a legal system in which "fairness" (whatever that may actually entail) directs courtroom events. An unmitigated disaster. Journalism's goals are the same as science's and must likewise be objective. The journalist is also often just that , a journalist, not an expert on every subject he writes about and in no position to enforce some "fairness" doctrine, even if desirable. Nor would "Avoiding controversy" be achieved by adopting "fairness" standards. That would obviously best be achieved by avoiding the subject altogether, which the press has done on numerous occasions. Putting Al Gore in front of a journalism class, rather than in a seat in the back of one with a notepad is quite the mystery.

[Kerry Beauchrt]

"JUST about a hundred years ago, Albert Einstein began writing a paper that secured his place in the pantheon of humankind's greatest thinkers. With his discovery of special relativity, Einstein upended the familiar, thousands-year-old conception of space and time."
As I recall, Leibniz pointed out to Newton the assumption that he made - that time and space was everywhere the same. Newton replied yes, to which Leibniz replied that he wasn't sure at all that that was true.
In fact, he doubted it. So Einstein wasn't so original in his thinking after all, it appears. By several hundred years. In the end Einstein's career paralleled Newton's - early big discoveries followed by many decades of failed attempts to produce a unified theory.

[Kerry Beauchrt]

"Barkley: The meteorological models are very bad at predicting this week's weather, but they're actually surprisingly good at predicting, say, the total amount of precipitation for the next three months. When you extend them to predicting averages over the course of a few years, they get better still."
If that were really so, the grain commodities market would certainly be less volatile than it is. There is also the
fallacy here that the implication is being made that because meteorological models
are good at predicting precip, so too are models that predict global temperatures.
That hardly follows.
One can also obtain pretty accurate predictions simply by predicting that what happened here last year during this three month period will happen once again.

[anne]

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/einstein/relativity/
http://www.amnh.org/exhibitions/einstein/

Relativity and the Cosmos
By Alan Lightman - Nova

What was general relativity? Einstein's earlier theory of time and space, special relativity, proposed that distance and time are not absolute. The ticking rate of a clock depends on the motion of the observer of that clock; likewise for the length of a "yardstick." Published in 1915, general relativity proposed that gravity, as well as motion, can affect the intervals of time and of space. The key idea of general relativity, called the equivalence principle, is that gravity pulling in one direction is completely equivalent to an acceleration in the opposite direction. A car accelerating forwards feels just like sideways gravity pushing you back against your seat. An elevator accelerating upwards feels just like gravity pushing you into the floor.

If gravity is equivalent to acceleration, and if motion affects measurements of time and space (as shown in special relativity), then it follows that gravity does so as well. In particular, the gravity of any mass, such as our sun, has the effect of warping the space and time around it. For example, the angles of a triangle no longer add up to 180 degrees, and clocks tick more slowly the closer they are to a gravitational mass like the sun.

Many of the predictions of general relativity, such as the bending of starlight by gravity and a tiny shift in the orbit of the planet Mercury, have been quantitatively confirmed by experiment. Two of the strangest predictions, impossible ever to completely confirm, are the existence of black holes and the effect of gravity on the universe as a whole (cosmology).

Collapsed stars

A black hole is a region of space whose attractive gravitational force is so intense that no matter, light, or communication of any kind can escape. A black hole would thus appear black from the outside. (However, gas around a black hole can be very bright.) It is believed that black holes form from the collapse of stars. As long as they are emitting heat and light into space, stars are able to support themselves against their own inward gravity with the outward pressure generated by heat from nuclear reactions in their deep interiors.

Every star, however, must eventually exhaust its nuclear fuel. When it does so, its unbalanced self-gravitational attraction causes it to collapse. According to theory, if a burned-out star has a mass larger than about three times the mass of our sun, no amount of additional pressure can stave off total gravitational collapse. The star collapses to form a black hole. For a nonrotating collapsed star, the size of the resulting black hole is proportional to the mass of the parent star; a black hole with a mass three times that of our sun would have a diameter of about 10 miles.

The possibility that stars could collapse to form black holes was first theoretically "discovered" in 1939 by J. Robert Oppenheimer and Hartland Snyder, who were manipulating the equations of Einstein's general relativity. The first black hole believed to be discovered in the physical world, as opposed to the mathematical world of pencil and paper, was Cygnus X-1, about 7,000 light-years from Earth. (A light-year, the distance light travels in a year, is about six trillion miles.) Cygnus X-1 was found in 1970. Since then, a dozen excellent black hole candidates have been identified. Many astronomers and astrophysicists believe that massive black holes, with sizes up to 10 million times that of our sun, inhabit the centers of energetic galaxies and quasars and are responsible for their enormous energy release. Ironically, Einstein himself did not believe in the existence of black holes, even though they were predicted by his theory.

The start of everything

Beginning in 1917, Einstein and others applied general relativity to the structure and evolution of the universe as a whole. The leading cosmological theory, called the big bang theory, was formulated in 1922 by the Russian mathematician and meteorologist Alexander Friedmann. Friedmann began with Einstein's equations of general relativity and found a solution to those equations in which the universe began in a state of extremely high density and temperature (the so-called big bang) and then expanded in time, thinning out and cooling as it did so. One of the most stunning successes of the big bang theory is the prediction that the universe is approximately 10 billion years old, a result obtained from the rate at which distant galaxies are flying away from each other. This prediction accords with the age of the universe as obtained from very local methods, such as the dating of radioactive rocks on Earth.

According to the big bang theory, the universe may keep expanding forever, if its inward gravity is not sufficiently strong to counterbalance the outward motion of galaxies, or it may reach a maximum point of expansion and then start collapsing, growing denser and denser, gradually disrupting galaxies, stars, planets, people, and eventually even individual atoms. Which of these two fates awaits our universe can be determined by measuring the density of matter versus the rate of expansion. Much of modern cosmology, including the construction of giant new telescopes such as the new Keck telescope in Hawaii, has been an attempt to measure these two numbers with better and better accuracy. With the present accuracy of measurement, the numbers suggest that our universe will keep expanding forever, growing colder and colder, thinner and thinner.

General relativity may be the biggest leap of the scientific imagination in history....