Re:Ask PG: What has changed since you wrote Hackers and Pain...
by zohebv on Sunday September 11, 2011 @04:57AM
(#2983509)
> This is an urban legend
This is true, I stand corrected. However outside of Hilbert and Einstein no one was looking at Reimannian Geometry for answers.
> The physics community was already converging on the special theory of relativity
They had the Lorentz equations for decades but were not getting anywhere close to the final result apart from Poincare. And even Poincare inspite of getting almost all equations lined up, seemed to miss the fact that there is no absolute time and that time is only partially and not totally ordered. Einstein hit the nail on the head inspite of the fact that Lorentz/Poincare had been working on the problem for possibly decades. It still seems likely that Poincare could have arrived at the result.
This is the reason I cited GR. As far as I know, no one apart from Einstein/Hilbert seemed to ave been working on it.
In hindsight special relativity was "obvious", but Maxwell's equations had been around for decades and the Lorentz transforms emerged in 1887 and yet no one was able to make the mental leap required to re-interpret the nature of Time. SR could have ended up taking decades more to sort out. Einstein hit the ball out of the park in his 20s when the scientists working on the problem had spent decades on it. And GR could have only followed after SR.
This is true, I stand corrected. However outside of Hilbert and Einstein no one was looking at Reimannian Geometry for answers.
> The physics community was already converging on the special theory of relativity
They had the Lorentz equations for decades but were not getting anywhere close to the final result apart from Poincare. And even Poincare inspite of getting almost all equations lined up, seemed to miss the fact that there is no absolute time and that time is only partially and not totally ordered. Einstein hit the nail on the head inspite of the fact that Lorentz/Poincare had been working on the problem for possibly decades. It still seems likely that Poincare could have arrived at the result.
This is the reason I cited GR. As far as I know, no one apart from Einstein/Hilbert seemed to ave been working on it.
In hindsight special relativity was "obvious", but Maxwell's equations had been around for decades and the Lorentz transforms emerged in 1887 and yet no one was able to make the mental leap required to re-interpret the nature of Time. SR could have ended up taking decades more to sort out. Einstein hit the ball out of the park in his 20s when the scientists working on the problem had spent decades on it. And GR could have only followed after SR.