XPost: soc.culture.indian, alt.fan.jai-maharaj, sci.physics
XPost: sci.energy, alt.philosophy, alt.politics
XPost: talk.politics.misc, soc.culture.india, rec.sport.cricket
XPost: soc.culture.usa, soc.culture.china, soc.culture.russian
XPost: soc.culture.german, soc.culture.uk, sci.physics
XPost: sci.chem, sci.astro, alt.math
From: alt.fan.jai-maharaj@googlegroups.com

In article <iTspE.97160$Y49.61982@fx46.iad>,
FBInCIAnNSATerroristSlayer <FBInCIAnNSATe...@yahoo.com> posted:

Western Christian Media Manufactures and Maintains Celebrity Status of Scientists including Albert Einstein

Filthy Western Christian Media Manufactures and Maintains Celebrity Status of Scientists including Albert Einstein.

This is just "ONE OF THE REASONS" why hardly any western white christian can claim they live in "real reality".

https://physicstoday.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/PT.3.4183#.XKQJe_2Cidk.twitter

Albert Einstein, celebrity physicist
In Einstein's later years, although his contributions to physics became increasingly marginal and abstract, the press continued to trumpet his far- flung unification schemes as if they were confirmed scientific breakthroughs.
Paul Halpern is a professor of physics at the University of the Sciences in Philadelphia. He is the author of Einstein's Dice and Schrödinger's Cat (2015) and The Quantum Labyrinth: How Richard Feynman and John Wheeler Revolutionized Time and Reality (2017).
What is a scientific revolution? The answer depends on whom you ask. According to most historians of science, true revolutions or major breakthroughs are rare -- something as profoundly distinctive as quantum mechanics would likely make the cut, but countless other developments would fall short. On the other hand, the press has maintained its own ideas. Driven by the pressure for headlines, journalists have advanced their own notions of what is important and newsworthy. In the case of Albert Einstein (see figure 1), who became a familiar household name in the 1920s, practically anything he said or did publicly drew headlines.
Early in Einstein's career, the press attention he garnered was an outgrowth of a true breakthrough: the eclipse observations of 1919 that helped confirm his general theory of relativity. The scientific community and the press agreed that Einstein's work altered perceptions of space, time, mass, energy, and gravitation. Moreover, during a time of xenophobia, globally minded Americans gravitated to him as an outspoken foreign scientist expressing an international outlook.1 From that point on, Einstein was a celebrity, heralded for his quirky personality and passionate activism in addition to his scientific achievements.2
That celebrity status inspired the media to continue publicizing Einstein's theoretical meanderings, even when they had little support from other scientists. The scientific community largely ignored his idiosyncratic search for a unified field theory, which increasingly veered from the mainstream consensus and which other physicists came to view as unproductive and outré. The press, however, continued to trumpet his supposed breakthroughs, depicting Einstein as the quintessential eccentric scientific genius.
The relationship between Einstein and the press is a case in which a scientist's fame triumphed over the substance of his work. Einstein's unified field theory attempts were discredited again and again because of the lack of viable solutions, let alone experimental evidence. But they received far more coverage than many of the important experimental and theoretical results by other physicists during the same period, such as advances in nuclear and particle physics. Exaggerated reporting misled readers about the value of Einstein's research.
The eclipse that changed the world
Aside from a few brief stories about his advocacy of pacifism during World War I, the first mention of Einstein in the international press coincided with the announcement of the solar eclipse results obtained on 29 May 1919. Two British expeditions went to observe the eclipse: one to Sobral, Brazil, and the other to Príncipe, an island off the coast of western Africa. Noted astronomer Arthur Eddington headed the latter group.
At a meeting on 6 November of that year, the Royal Society deemed both teams' findings consistent with the gravitational light-bending predictions of Einstein's general theory of relativity. The next day, the Times of London trumpeted the results with the front-page headline, "Revolution in science. New theory of the universe: Newtonian ideas overthrown."
The story soon spread around the world. The first New York Times story, with the relatively subdued headline "Eclipse showed gravity variation: Diversion of light rays accepted as affecting Newton's principles. Hailed as epochmaking," appeared on 9 November. But it was followed by a piece on 10 November with a more alarming headline, "Lights all askew in the heavens: Men of science more or less agog over results of eclipse observations. Stars not near where they seemed or were calculated to be, but nobody need worry." More than a dozen other articles or reports about Einstein and his work appeared later that month in the New York Times, mainly debating whether the results were valid, if they affected daily life, and whether they were understandable by mere mortals.
After the war, science coverage in general had dramatically increased in the US mainstream press. Although specialized science publications such as Scientific American and Popular Science Monthly had attracted readers for decades, the rise of chemical warfare and other military uses of science had spurred a push among scientists for greater newspaper reporting of its benevolent side. In 1919 the American Chemical Society started its News Service, which began issuing press releases about the field.
Two years later newspaper publisher E. W. Scripps and noted biologist William Ritter launched Science Service, an agency designed to promote a positive image of science through news stories and photos.3 By 1927 the New York Times had hired its first designated science editor, Waldemar Kaempffert, lending even greater prestige to that branch of journalism. Science journalism had become an integral part of press coverage, and Einstein's rise to fame coincided with a greater hunger for science pieces.
But almost no science journalists were schooled in contemporary theoretical physics. How could they get a handle on Einstein's more abstruse work? In practice, they couldn't, so they needed to improvise. They touted the importance of Einstein's theories while only vaguely interpreting them for the public. Readers began to perceive Einstein's work as fundamentally enigmatic -- not even fully understandable by science journalists. That mystique bolstered his fame even further.
Einstein's celebrity status landed him many speaking engagements around the world, including a spring 1921 visit to the East Coast of the US. He spoke at Columbia, Princeton, and other universities and was invited to the White House to meet with President Warren Harding. Princeton University Press published a popular book, The Meaning of Relativity, from the scientific talks Einstein delivered during that tour. The 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics only added to his reputation as a superstar.
What affine, fine theory!
By the early 1920s, Einstein had already started to consider extensions of general relativity, including three variations proposed independently by Hermann Weyl, Theodor Kaluza, and Eddington. The goal was to combine electromagnetism and gravitation into a unified field theory that would geometrize both phenomena. As historian Jeroen van Dongen has written, Einstein hoped to extend the mathematical methods he applied so successfully to gravitation and develop a single set of equations describing a geometric field theory.4
After pondering the three theories, Einstein became most intrigued by Eddington's so-called affine theory, which changed the definition of the Christoffel connection (also known as the affine connection), the mathematical entity that represents how parallel lines are transported through spacetime along a curved manifold. That definition gave the connection additional flexibility, hypothetically allowing it to describe electromagnetic potentials.
Finding Eddington's model incomplete, Einstein aspired to develop his own version. In March 1923 Einstein submitted a draft of his new theory, which he had developed on a sea voyage to Japan, to the Prussian Academy of Sciences in Berlin. The New York Times trumpeted his submission in a 23 March article, "Einstein to announce theory 'surpassing even relativity.'" The piece falsely suggested that Einstein had found a way of explaining terrestrial magnetism, a complex mechanism that was not fully understood at the time.
Einstein worked on the affine theory for two more years. By the end of 1925, he realized that he could find no singularity-free solutions (a singularity is a point or region at which physical parameters become infinite) to the field equations he had developed. He decided to scrap his extension of Eddington's work. For the next several years, he explored different options, including an investigation of Kaluza's theory.
Kaluza's work added a fifth dimension to Einstein's field equations. An extra mathematical restraint, called the cylindrical condition, forbade direct observation of it. But that undetectable fifth dimension allowed room in the equations to house electromagnetic terms. Those components could be shown under certain circumstances to obey Maxwell's equations and thus offered tantalizing hints of unification. However, the theory was not invariant under general transformations of coordinates, and having to impose a particular coordinate system for the theory to work seemed artificial. It also didn't have physically realistic solutions. Nevertheless, motivated in part by Swedish physicist Oskar Klein's publication of an independent five- dimensional unification attempt, Einstein spent parts of 1926 and 1927 exploring ways to bring Kaluza's notion to fruition.
Distant parallelism
In 1928 Einstein was diagnosed with heart disease and his physician urged him to rest. As he recovered, he worked on an idea for unification called distant parallelism, which proposed an independent web of connections between each point in spacetime that supplemented the standard relationships of general relativity. In early January 1929, Einstein submitted a paper to the Prussian Academy and issued an announcement. Though the paper was extremely preliminary, lacking any inkling of experimental evidence, the New York Times published a front-page story about it on 12 January, proclaiming that "Einstein himself considers it by far his most important contribution to mankind --scientifically more important than his original theory."
Einstein's article "Zur einheitlichen Feldtheorie" ("On unified field theory") was published in Sitzungsberichten der Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften (Proceedings of the Prussian Academy of Sciences) on 30 January. Within three days, the first printing of the journal offprint -- a thousand copies -- sold out, and another thousand copies were soon printed. Soon thereafter, Nature's News and Views section published a more accessible account of the work, including a quote by Einstein: "Now, but only now, we know that the force which moves electrons in their ellipses about the nuclei of atoms is the same force which moves our earth in its annual course about the sun, and is the same force which brings to us the rays of light and heat which make life possible upon this planet."5
With Einstein's 50th birthday approaching, his new idea rapidly caught fire, at least in the popular press. The New York Times published almost a dozen articles that year about distant parallelism, rivaling its coverage of the 1919 eclipse results. Although by then the bulk of the physics community was focused on quantum mechanics and related fields and had no interest in Einstein's attempts at unification, reporters managed to gauge the reaction of at least a few physicists. Harold Sheldon, chair of New York University's physics department, opined that "such things as keeping airplanes aloft without engines or material support, as stepping out of a window into the air without fear of falling, or of making a trip to the moon... are avenues of investigation suggested by this theory."6
One of the few knowledgeable physicists who kept up with Einstein's unified models was Wolfgang Pauli (see figure 2). Einstein saw Pauli as an important sounding board --honest, thorough, critical, but often right. To Einstein's dismay, Pauli found many flaws in distant parallelism, including its inability to match key predictions of general relativity, such as gravitational light bending. It also did not match the expected features of electromagnetism as mapped out by Maxwell's equations. Finally, it did not take into account key electron properties gleaned from the Dirac equation.
In December, Pauli wrote to Einstein, "I would take any bet with you that you will have given up the whole distant parallelism at the latest within a year from now, just as you had given up previously the affine theory. And I do not want to rouse you to contradiction by continuing this letter, so as not to delay the approach of the natural decease of the distant parallelism theory."7
Privately, Pauli told Pascual Jordan, "Einstein is said to have poured out, at the Berlin colloquium, horrible nonsense about new parallelism at a distance. The mere fact that his equations are not in the least similar to Maxwell's theory is employed by him as an argument that they are somehow related to quantum theory. With such rubbish he may impress only American journalists, not even American physicists, not to speak of European physicists."8
Pauli's perceptions that American journalists would be the ones most interested in Einstein's work were right on the mark. More than in European journalism, there was a tradition in US journalism of using hype to sell papers. Newspapers in the US did not even seem to notice the failure of Einstein's earlier attempts at unification, their lack of viable solutions

[continued in next message]

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: www.darkrealms.ca (1:229/2)