Einstein's mistakes

Physics Today

Volumn 58, Issue 11, 2005, Pages 31-35

  Weinberg, Steven ^a,b,c  

^a UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT AUSTIN   (United States)

^b Physics and Astronomy Departments   (United States)

^c Theory Group   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

COSMIC RAYS;

COSMOLOGICAL CONSTANT;

PROFESSIONAL ASPECTS;

EID: 27544472288     PISSN: 00319228     EISSN: None     Source Type: Trade Journal    
DOI: 10.1063/1.2155755     Document Type: Review

References (6)

1. The set of mistakes discussed in this article is not intended to be exhaustive. They are a selection, mostly chosen because they seemed to me to reveal something'of the intellectual environment in which Einstein worked. In PHYSICS TODAY, March 2005, page 34, Alex Harvey and Engelbert Schucking have described an erroneous prediction of Einstein regarding the rates of clocks on Earth's surface, and in his book Albert Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity, Addison-Wesley, Reading, PA (1981), p. 328, Arthur I. Miller has discussed an error in Einstein's calculation of the electron's transverse mass.
2. G. Gamow, My World Line - An Informal Autobiography, Viking Press, New York (1970), p. 44. I thank Lawrence Krauss for this reference.
3. A. Einstein, Sci. Am., April 1950, p. 13.
4. Oddly enough, at a conference in Warsaw in 1939, Klein presented something very like the Yang-Mills theory, on the basis of his five-dimensional generalization of general relativity. I have tried and failed to follow Klein's argument, and I do not believe his derivation makes sense; it takes at least two extra dimensions to get the Yang-Mills theory. It seems that scientists are often attracted to beautiful theories in the way that insects are attracted to flowers-not by logical deduction, but by something like a sense of smell.
5. E. Hubble, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 15, 168 (1929).
6. A. G. Riess et al., Astrophys. J. 607, 665 (2004).