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Discussion on the article: When a 22-year-old corrected Albert Einstein, he caused a stir around the world
I must specify that it was a man named Lev Davidovič Landau.
Tomas Kafonek
Well, it was still possible back then, Einstein's calculations were still allowed to be corrected. Today, if you wanted to do that, no mainstream physicist would talk to you at all, they would say you are a hypocrite and put you in a box as a dissident at best. Most uninitiated people would certainly recommend the appropriate treatment for you. Physics is already conserved.
Tomas Klas
Einstein also corrected his predecessors and they were not happy about it. This is a general human trait - no famous professor wants to admit that what he has been teaching for 30 years is actually a little different and he has been teaching it wrong all this time.
Nowadays, we have rather the opposite problem: some idiot claims to be a "scientist". There are a lot of all kinds of bizarre theories and even stupid things that real experts don't have time to refute. Young scientists who really come up with something then have a very hard time making their way in a crowd of screaming morons.
Tomas Kafonek
I just think that in this direction, we were more benevolent towards new opinions a hundred years ago than today.
It is certainly due to the fact that relativity and quantum mechanics were relatively new and there were a lot of inconsistencies in them. By listening to other opinions, recognized scientists actually enriched their theories.
Today we know "how it behaves" about a lot of phenomena, but we don't know "why". And that, it seems, is enough for us to feel like we know almost everything.
What should be the good opinions - as you write - of any fools and shouted idiots who come up with stupid things?
With such an approach, however, we will never find a theory of everything
Some time ago I read a story somewhere about scientists who created software to simulate chemical reactions. It worked great for them, except for one specific property of the benzene core. They wanted to verify the real reaction in the chemical laboratory, but they didn't have it and no one wanted to help them with it - they said they should read the textbook. Well, only after a long time did they convince someone and he found out that in reality it behaves the same as in their simulation and on the contrary there is an error in the textbook.
Well, I can't find this interesting discovery.
On the contrary, the Internet is full of theories about a flat Earth, or, conversely, about a hollow Earth with another Earth inside, about chemtrails sprayed from airplanes, about the spread of respiratory diseases via 5G networks and similar bullshit. The really interesting stuff gets lost in that.
In other words, respected scientists keep explaining over and over that the earth is not flat, it doesn't float on water, and the firmament isn't really supported by four gigantic elephants. They have no time or mental capacity for the subtleties of quantum mechanics.
Tomas Kafonek
Okay, I'll give you an example.
The Schrodinger equation is still used for the mathematical formulation of quantum phenomena. However, if we want to use it for atoms, which are certainly quantum in nature, then we start and at the same time end with the hydrogen atom. You can't calculate anything else from it. If you want to calculate something with other atoms, you have to use the VSEPR theory or other theories that have arisen to sort out the measured values.
But back to Einstein. It is commonly written that he originally used a thought experiment in which he imagined himself traveling at the speed of light and then realized that time had stopped. This is nice, but there is also a problem called the twin paradox. And here, he says, his special theory can no longer be used, because it does not include acceleration.
Why it is permissible to imagine that we are moving at the speed of light and not permissible to imagine that we immediately start moving at, say, 100 km/h, is not clear to me.
And there are a lot of such question marks, but these theories are simply preserved, as I already wrote.