finally made it to the website after finding Straight Dope years ago.
Hoping others can point me to some information. I’ve heard that in his work, Einstein was playing fast and loose with mathematics, dividing by zero and whatnot. True? Also, I am wondering if Einstein stipulated that his theories would only work in a closed environment, so to speak, an environment where there are no other factors to influence the results. A vacuum taken to the extreme. Light may have a constant speed but maybe only in a “world” where there is nothing else to influence it, therefore making the whole E=mc2 useless in the real world.
The only places where Einstein’s theories begin to become inconsistent with the real world are those where QM becomes significant, that is at very small scales or where gravity overwhelms all other forces, as in inside a black hole. These are conditions that we cannot experience directly anyhow, so as far as we’re concerned, Einstein’s theories apply perfectly well to anything we can experience.
They apply well to the large scale world but not to the atomic level. Just as quantum mechanics works well at the atomic level but fails in the macroscopic level.
Just finished reading *Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea * by C. Seife. He gives a fairly readable explanation of the problems with Einstein.
Also see Scientific American “The Future of String Theory: A Conversation with Brian Greene” (11/2003) and the PBS show on string theory - both by Brian Greene.
Einstein only played “fast and loose” with mathematics to the same extent (or less) that most physicists do: By and large, we tend to make assumptions about the “reasonableness” of the things we’re working with, and we care more about whether a mathematical shortcut works than why it works.
As for influences of the rest of the world, relativity is fine with that. Sometimes the situation can be complicated enough that the equations are unsolveable, but the (unsolved) equations are still valid. I suspect that the particular example you’re wondering about is the speed of light, but relativity doesn’t actually say anything directly about the speed of light. It says plenty about c, and it so happens that c is, as near as we can determine, the speed of light in a vacuum, but even if light travelled at some other speed, relativity would be unchanged.
Q.E.D.
What makes you say that Einstein’s theories are inconsistent in situations (black holes) that we cannot experience? I would think that being unable to take measurements would make such a statement difficult to justify.
(I am not attacking your statement, just asking for clarification.)
When we apply Einstein’s equations to those situations, things like infinities suddenly pop out at us. An infinity in an equation tells us that our equations aren’t capable of dealing with the situation properly. However, when we apply the equations of QM to those same situations, the infinities disappear. Brian Greene discusses this in some detail in his book, The Elegant Universe. I highly recommend it, as he explains things much better than I can.
That’s not how adirondack_mike’s post should by interpreted.
It’s not a simple case of concrete laws that are either right or wrong, or that either apply or don’t apply.
Some things that we have, like Maxwell’s equations and the Lorentz transformations (which together make up the Special Theory of Relativity), work well to describe the way the universe works at a macroscopic level. Other things, like Feynman’s quantum electrodynamics, work well (sort of) to describe things on a smaller scale. You can’t say that one is right and the other is wrong, or that one applies and the other doesn’t.
All that you can say about them is that they are useful predictors of the way things work in certain circumstances.
Well QED, QCD and QFD (quantum electrodynamics, quantum chromodynamics and quantum flavordynamics aka the electroweak theory, really just an extension of QED) are all relativistic theories, so you can use special relativity to describe the very small (AFAIK no-one has ever found got a result that contradicts the stnadard model). The problems comes when you try to introduce gravity and general relativity into the mix.
Actually, quantum electrodynamics (QED) is consistent with special relativity (SR). As far as we know, SR applies on the micro level just as well as it does on the macro level. Whether general relativity also applies on the micro level is still unknown; gravity is too weak to look for its quantum effects.