Posted on 01/02/2005 1:30:09 AM PST by snarks_when_bored
Not a quibble at all. People have built vast castles in the sky from this misstatement.
There is not a single manufactured product, other than hand crafts, that does not depend on the application of quantum theory. Quantum theory is essential in the design and manufacture of solid-state electronics, so without it, kiss all computers, stereos, radios and televisions goodby. Not to mention most medical equipment and most medical research.
I couldn't even begin to catalog the everyday products that would not exist without quantum theory.
That would make GPS one of the few consumer products that embeds general relativity into its workings.
I believe Archimedes was very close to developing a kind of integral calculus, Newton coddified the differential calculus. (and the integral calculus?).
There's also my Time Machinetm, but it's not ready for production yet. I can't get it to budge from today.
If you're interested,
http://www.dannen.com/chronbio.html
I did several google searches using such terms as teller, hungarian physicist etc.
After reading a bunch of them, I am almost certain he said "John Von Neuman". The reason I think so is a couple of sites mentioned them being close friends and I recall Teller saying that he was a fellow Hungarian and a close friend.
Still can't be certain but I would bet on it.
It is indeed a great post.
BTW....I just got back from the TriState Freeper New Year's Party in NY.
You were the subject of some discussion...as a matter of fact...I was the one who brought you up. I said nothing good about you...going to the length, that I thought you were evil.
Wishing you a healthy and prosperous 2005....your good friend....FP.
It is also fascinating how a group of Hungarian Jews born in the late 19th century became some of the greatest minds science has ever known.
Bump!
Thanks for the ping!
Not quite, Brownian motion was know to be "random" even if the "hypothetical molecules" striking particles were deterministic. Einstein (again) put this on a firm footing.
It's good to see at least one biographer note that Einstein was a superb probabilist. Einstein was one of the first physicists to really use theories of fluctuations.
You are typing on a computer using semi-conductors and a light-emiting screen and you ask this?
Perhaps it was this guy: Eötvös Loránd.
Methods of getting volumes and areas (integrals) and of obtaining tangents (derivatives) were around for centuries. Fermat even remarked that these were actually inverse operations.
What Newton (and Leibniz) did was to provide a "calculus" for these operations and make them mechanical (as addition and other elementary operations are.) (Their methods are an "algebra of calculus" so to speak.) Their contribution was to provide a notation that made taking of derivatives and integrals easy. The power of good notation cannot be underestimated.
1) Heaviside showed that a charge in motion has a distorted em field. He corresponded with Fitzgerald of the Lorentz-Fitzgerald effect. Heaviside also derived the correct effective mass increase with speed (based on Thomson's earlier attempt). This was in the 1880-90s. What I'm saying is that Einstein didn't just pop up with SR. Others had slogged through the difficult theories for decades. Heaviside's comment on Einstein's SR: "now to explain the explanation".
You're right, the mathematics behind SR (the Lorentz transformations) already existed before Einstein published his first relativity paper. Indeed, some have suggested that Henri Poincaré actually discovered the key parts of SR before Einstein did.
But (and it's a big 'but', so to speak), none of Einstein's predecessors (including Poincaré) understood that SR was an immediate consequence of the invariance of the speed of light (the article rightly emphasizes this aspect of Einstein's thinking). So this wonderful symmetry principle yields the most extraordinary kinds of results about the behavior of rapidly moving objects, and, more deeply, about the intertwined natures of space and time. Fascinating.
As it turns out, the 20th century became the century in which physics discovered the fundamental character of symmetry principles (and their spontaneous breaking).
2) Heaviside also showed that em waves carry energy and momentum in the 1880s (this is common knowledge). The Compton Effect shows that a billiard ball-like collision between a photon and an electron works. It's now known that classical em theory + Special Relativity can produce the same result. I wrote a summary of the derivation:http://users.adelphia.net/~mikegi/compton/
The advantage of the classical approach is that you can see how the process works.
Sounds interesting. I'm going to try to take a look at that in the next day or so.
I guess genius and morality are not connected.
There was a biography of him (I think it was the history channel), and I was surprised what a creep he was in his personal life.
He obviously was incredibly smart, but I recall a question asked of Dr. Teller at a meeting I was able to attend. When asked who was the greatest physicist of all time, Teller said he thought it was some guy I never heard of. I do remember he was from Hungary tho.
Einstein hasn't lacked for hagiographers. But his faults of personal character and political judgment, which would appear to have been many, can't obscure the fundamental and far-reaching quality of his physics work. This article focussed strictly on the latter.
The list of brilliant Hungarian physicists and mathematicians (and chemists and ...) is long. Eugene Wigner was among the greatest of the physicists; John von Neumann was the greatest of the mathematicians (and a good physicist, too). I don't think Teller would have spoken of either Wigner or von Neumann as a greater physicist than Einstein (and, if he had, he would've been mistaken). Szilard is slightly farther down the list, but Teller might have spoken of him because they worked together on the bomb.
Just a small thing.
Isaac Newton invented calculus
I think he discovered calculus.
There's a Platonist born every minute. (smile)
Great pic. Hadn't seen that.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.