“I have to find an actual physicist to discuss this with, but there appears to be nothing wrong with Einstein’s quest for a unified theory; he simply didn’t have the prerequisite information of QM at the time (Feynman, Dyson, etc. didn’t develop renormalization until the 1940s). MWI wasn’t proposed until several years after Einstein’s death.”
I can’t recall what renormalization is. I think there is something wrong with Einstein’s quest; he was akin to Aristotle’s atom theory. The Sung Dynasty was about the earliest atoms could be empirically uncovered, and a GUT is about as far away from Einstein in terms of knowledge base. I actually think Einstein’s biggest accomplishment was political: writing to FDR about the possibility of a nuke. Einstein is responsible in this regard for a year of robotics, car, and computer progress along with tens of millions of present Japanese and American lives.
I think the two characteristics that allowed Einstein to make 3 huge discoveries (Brownian motion, SR, GR) were his rich family that got him his patent clerk job and his willingness to be aloof and not follow the Popper-ian knowledge base of the time. I doubt he was the first to notice something wrong with phlogistan, but no one had the spare time and the determination to retool the knowledge base from ground zero (has anyone else ever taken an eight year diversion into mathematics to solve a single physics problem?).
I don’t think he had the same respect for quantum theory, despite founding it, that he did for GR. It seemed like he was trying to graft “quantum effects that functioned as non-local wormholes” onto GR, rather than genuinely finding a GUT by respecting quantum theory. No doubt he would have immediately championed MWI, but it seems like he was genuinely trying to undercut Copenhagen Interpretation rather than building upon it (this is in response to EY’s MWI comment in the thread starter).
All I’m saying is that if he would’ve realized the limits of his deductive method, he might’ve made even more contributions in his latter years and been the greatest thinker ever, instead of sharing the mantle with a handful of others.
Maybe the most cutting edge scientific field is genetics. Someone might be able to deduce a science of the behaviour of animal-human hybrids studying the input animal temperaments and physiologies, but a better avenue would be to be a protein folding scientist and learn how to cure cancer or diabetes or something. I don’t want to speak for Einstein’s study strengths and weaknesses, but maybe we’d have optical computers now if Einstein would’ve transitioned to optics instead of lasers. I can’t think of any physical knowledge areas now that are in as bad shape as cosmology was pre-Einstein. The next Einstein will come from social science fields, probably (is why I mentioned M.Yunus). With computers, everything physics is research teams nowadays. Maybe M.Lazaridis funding a quantum computer research park, is the closest anyone now can come to advancing a theoretical physics field as much as Einstein (cosmology) did.
“I have to find an actual physicist to discuss this with, but there appears to be nothing wrong with Einstein’s quest for a unified theory; he simply didn’t have the prerequisite information of QM at the time (Feynman, Dyson, etc. didn’t develop renormalization until the 1940s). MWI wasn’t proposed until several years after Einstein’s death.”
I can’t recall what renormalization is. I think there is something wrong with Einstein’s quest; he was akin to Aristotle’s atom theory. The Sung Dynasty was about the earliest atoms could be empirically uncovered, and a GUT is about as far away from Einstein in terms of knowledge base. I actually think Einstein’s biggest accomplishment was political: writing to FDR about the possibility of a nuke. Einstein is responsible in this regard for a year of robotics, car, and computer progress along with tens of millions of present Japanese and American lives. I think the two characteristics that allowed Einstein to make 3 huge discoveries (Brownian motion, SR, GR) were his rich family that got him his patent clerk job and his willingness to be aloof and not follow the Popper-ian knowledge base of the time. I doubt he was the first to notice something wrong with phlogistan, but no one had the spare time and the determination to retool the knowledge base from ground zero (has anyone else ever taken an eight year diversion into mathematics to solve a single physics problem?). I don’t think he had the same respect for quantum theory, despite founding it, that he did for GR. It seemed like he was trying to graft “quantum effects that functioned as non-local wormholes” onto GR, rather than genuinely finding a GUT by respecting quantum theory. No doubt he would have immediately championed MWI, but it seems like he was genuinely trying to undercut Copenhagen Interpretation rather than building upon it (this is in response to EY’s MWI comment in the thread starter). All I’m saying is that if he would’ve realized the limits of his deductive method, he might’ve made even more contributions in his latter years and been the greatest thinker ever, instead of sharing the mantle with a handful of others. Maybe the most cutting edge scientific field is genetics. Someone might be able to deduce a science of the behaviour of animal-human hybrids studying the input animal temperaments and physiologies, but a better avenue would be to be a protein folding scientist and learn how to cure cancer or diabetes or something. I don’t want to speak for Einstein’s study strengths and weaknesses, but maybe we’d have optical computers now if Einstein would’ve transitioned to optics instead of lasers. I can’t think of any physical knowledge areas now that are in as bad shape as cosmology was pre-Einstein. The next Einstein will come from social science fields, probably (is why I mentioned M.Yunus). With computers, everything physics is research teams nowadays. Maybe M.Lazaridis funding a quantum computer research park, is the closest anyone now can come to advancing a theoretical physics field as much as Einstein (cosmology) did.