onsdag 10 april 2013

Einsteinian Contradictions 6

                 Einstein's last attempt to formulate a unified field theory on his death bed. 


Einstein worked on a unified field theory combining electromagnetics with gravitation during the major part of his scientific life until a few hours before his death in 1955, without any success at all.

After presenting his special theory of relativity in his "miraculous year" in 1905 as patent engineer without scientific training and his struggle with the mathematics of general relativity up to 1915, Einstein lost momentum as recorded in Einstein's Struggle with Quantum Mechanics:
  • It may be remarked that many would believe this change in Einstein’s mode of working was highly regrettable. In a meeting to celebrate the centenary of Einstein’s birth, Isidor Rabi commented that: ‘When you think of Einstein’s career from 1903 or 1902 on to 1917, it was an extraordinarily rich career, very inventive, very close to physics, very tremendous insights; and then, during the period in which he had to learn mathematics, particularly differential geometry in various forms, he changed.…The great originality for physics was altered, well I won’t say gone; but it was a different Einstein after 1916 than the 15 or 16 years before that. Whether, perhaps, he had lost interest in physics and had an unfortunate love of mathematics or something else happened…this original creativity that one gets when one is first introduced to the subject appeared to be absent.’ 
Einstein thus did not produce much of science during the 40 years from 1915 to 1955 as a mature scientist, only during the 10 years from 1905 to 1915 as immature scientist.    

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