UPDATE: The culture of incoherence!

MONDAY, APRIL 18, 2016

Looking ahead to next week: Doggone it.

Last Friday, we ran into a bit of a miscalculation. We set out to summarize Walter Isaacson's take on Einstein's famous "thought experiment"—the thought experiment which led to the special theory of relativity.

Summarizing Isaacson's presentation took longer than we anticipated. For today, we thought we'd list the key takeaways from his presentation.

Isaacson was trying to explain Einstein's thought experiment about the two lightning strikes and the fast-moving train. Last November, Nova reviewed the same material, offering this basic nugget:

"Simultaneity...depends on how you're moving."

For ourselves, we'd have a hard time explaining Nova's nugget. When we watched the Nova broadcast, we thought they offered one of the most obvious non-explanation explanations we had ever seen.

Eight years earlier, Isaacson had tackled the same material in his best-selling biography, Einstein: His Life and Universe. Isaacson's presentation wasn't as brief as Nova's. On pages 123-128, he offered a somewhat repetitive list of nugget statements, as shown below.

All these statements come straight from Isaacson's text. In statement 5, Isaacson is quoting Einstein:

Isaacson's basic nuggets:
1) Two events that appear to be simultaneous to one observer will not appear to be simultaneous to another observer who is moving rapidly. (Isaacson refers to this as "the key insight.")

2) (In the situation described above), there is no way to declare that one of the observers is really correct. In other words, there is no way to declare that the two events are truly simultaneous.

3) There is no way to say that any two events are “absolutely” or “really” simultaneous.

4) This means that there is no absolute time.

5) “Two events which, viewed from a system of coordinates, are simultaneous, can no longer be looked upon as simultaneous events when envisaged from a system which is in motion relative to that system.” (Direct quotation from Einstein)

6) In other words, there is no such thing as absolute simultaneity.

7) With no such thing as absolute simultaneity, there is no such thing as “real” or absolute time. (Isaacson describes this as "the obvious yet still astonishing conclusion.")

Last November, Nova offered this nugget:

"Simultaneity...depends on how you're moving."

Back in 2007, Isaacson made a similar claim, spelling things out with a bit more precision:

"Two events that appear to be simultaneous to one observer will not appear to be simultaneous to another observer who is moving rapidly."

We don't know why he said that. In our own thought experiment, Woman B (the woman in the caboose of the train) would be moving very rapidly. But to her, the two lightning strikes would appear to be simultaneous, as they did to the man who was standing stock still on the railway platform.

It also isn't clear to us why you'd say "there is no way to declare that one of the observers is really correct" in the case of disputes about the two lightning strikes.

As we noted, Einstein describes "the most natural definition" of simultaneity in his own 1916 book. If we apply that "most natural definition," it's easy to say that the lightning strikes in the thought experiment actually are simultaneous, even if they don't appear to be simultaneous to various observers.

We don't know why Isaacson stated those nuggets. We don't know why Nova reached its nugget conclusion in last November's broadcast.

That said, tell the truth. Once you've imagined Woman B, you can't explain it either!

Starting next Monday, we'll look at what Einstein said about this material in his own Einstein-made-easy book.

Einstein wrote that book in 1916. One hundred years later, we're still getting muddy explanations of its historic text.

Confronted with a century of incoherence, we're supposed to nod our heads and politely pretend that we understand what's being said. After all, Isaacson consulted eighteen different physics professors! And Nova is one of our brainiest news orgs!

For those reasons, we're supposed to nod our heads and politely pretend that we understand what we've been told. As we noted last week, this is precisely what Einstein himself always refused to do.

Coming next week: Einstein's own words

After that: The later Wittgenstein beckons