Article—answer on Quora below.
Since Einstein shares the honor (with Newton) as the greatest theoretical physicists of all time, let me give some examples of his mistakes.
(1) He wrote a paper showing that gravitational radiation is impossible, that it does not exist. The paper was turned down by a referee who claimed it had mistakes; we now know the referee was Robertson, one of the great theoreticians of cosmology. Einstein was furious, and he said he would never again submit an article to that journal, but Robertson turned out to be right, as Einstein later acknowledged, and now we are directly detecting the kinds of waves that Einstein thought didn’t exist.
(2) Einstein also published an incorrect answer for the deflection of light by the sun. Fortunately (for him) he later published a different result, one that Eddington then verified with an experimental measurement. That catapulted both Einstein and Eddington into prominence. (Once Eddington was asked, “Is it true that there are only three people in the world who understand general relativity?” He purportedly answered, “Who’s the third?”)
(3) And, of course, Einstein wrote many papers explaining how the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics was wrong. Virtually all modern day theorists believe that Einstein was wrong in this work. Technically, he was simply raising issues that he considered to be paradoxical or ridiculous; I don’t believe anything he wrote on the subject actually contained a mistake.
No comments:
Post a Comment