The set of mistakes discussed in this article is not intended to be exhaustive. They are a sele
ction, mostly chosen because they seemed to me to reveal
something of the intellectual environment in which Einstein worked. In PHYSICS TODAY, March 2005, page 34, Alex Harvey and Engelbert Schucking have described an erroneous prediction of Einstein regarding the rates of clocks on Earth’s surface, and in his book Albert Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity, Addison-Wesley, Reading, PA (1981), p. 328, Arthur I. Miller has discussed an error in Einstein’s calculation of the electron’s transverse mass.
2. G. Gamow, My World Line—An Informal Autobiography, Viking Press, New York (1970), p. 44. I thank Lawrence Krauss for this reference.
3. A. Einstein, Sci. Am., April 1950, p. 13.
4. Oddly enough, at a conference in Warsaw in 1939, Klein presented something very like the Yang–Mills theory, on the basis of his five-dimensional generalization of general relativity. I have tried and failed to follow Klein’s argument, and I do not believe his derivation makes sense; it takes at least two extra dimensions to get the Yang–Mills theory. It seems that scientists are often attracted to beautiful theories in the way that insects are attracted to flowers—not by logical deduction, but by something like a sense of smell.
5. E. Hubble, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 15, 168 (1929).
6. A. G. Riess et al., Astrophys. J. 607, 665 (2004). See
www.pt.ims.ca/6088-18
يوللىغان ۋاقتى 2013-9-29 16:55:12
