[Vision2020] Quantum Debate (Final)

[nickgier at adelphia.net]

Greetings:

Can someone on the list drop by Phil Nisbet’s house with a six-pack or a couple of tranquillizers?  I’m down here in Mexico until March 13; otherwise I would do it myself.

The whole idea of having the potluck was meet each other face to face and defuse some of the tension that has built up on the list.  After shaking Phil’s hand and listening respectfully about his views of the Naylor controversy, I would have hoped that we would have built a little trust and that we would be more charitable towards one another.

I made a mistake when I did not copy Phil when I sent out the text of the quantum mechanics debate.  But I thought he would trust me to send the posts verbatim and that I would conceal the participants’ identities.  I did stipulate that the question at hand was “Is X correct in stating that Einstein developed quantum mechanics.”  One referee did not respond but the two that did reported “No.”  My hope was that they would have agreed to write something, but they chose not to.

As to the referees guessing the identities, I have no idea what they thought.  They know me as a feisty, verbose, scholarly type, so it is certainly possible that they thought that Phil’s (X’s) long winded responses, which one referee said were interesting but mainly irrelevant to the question at hand, were actually mine.

With regard to Einstein and Heisenberg relying on others to do their mathematics, my wording could have been more clear.  But far worse was Phil’s lack of charity in giving my words the worse possible interpretation.  I do not reject the facts that Phil found out about Heisenberg’s lack of mathematical acumen.  My only point is that Phil then should criticize Einstein just as hard as he did Heisenberg for not doing the math for general relativity.  Will you agree to parity of criticism on this question, Phil, or will Heisenberg’s membership in the Nazi party discount every positive thing that he might have done?

With all of your apparent knowledge about physics, Phil, I’m surprised that you do not know of Grossmann, a childhood friend of Einstein’s, who gave him his class notes so that he could pass his exams, whose father got him the job at the Bern patent office, and who came up with the Riemannian geometry that described the bending of light around gigantic celestial bodies predicted by general relativity.  Most scientists rejected this idea until an international team went out in the middle of the South Atlantic in 1919 and measured the light of the sun during a total solar eclipse.  Sure enough it bent according to Riemannian geometry, a geometry that assumes, among other odd things, that parallel lines do actually meet.

As I sent out the text of our debate, I predicted that both sides would be judged to have made mistakes.  We can now see that Phil chooses to go ballistic if someone suggests that such human limitations could possibly be attributed to him.  The right thing to do, Phil, is to defer to the experts. This amateur is done on this topic.

Yours for civil, charitable, and trust filled dialogue,

Nick Y. Gier