Dwarkesh Patel: evaluation

Transcript context

…Can I just interrupt? You used the word process, and it’s interesting to think about that term. Process carries connotations of something set in advance. It’s much more complicated in practice. You have people like Lorentz, who Einstein absolutely and utterly admired, and Poincaré, one of the greatest scientists who ever lived, and Michelson, another truly outstanding scientist, who never reconciled themselves. It’s not as though there’s some standard procedure that we’re all using to reconcile these things. Great scientists can remain wrong for a very long time after the scientific community has broadly changed its opinion. But there’s no centralized authority or centralized method. That is the interesting thing. There’s progress even though it is hard to articulate the process by which it happens, the heuristics that are used. You mentioned Poincaré. Lorentz has the math right, but the interpretation wrong. It seems like Poincaré had the opposite, where he understood that it’s hard to define simultaneity because it requires a circular definition with time, or velocity of something that might arrive at a midpoint together, but velocity is defined in terms of time. I find this interesting. There are a couple of other examples we could call on. There is this phenomenon in the history of science where somebody asks the right question, but then they don’t clinch it. I’m curious what you think is happening in those cases. You actually do want to go case by case and try to understand. It’s not necessarily clear that they’re doing the same thing wrong in all of the cases. The Poincaré case is amazing. He seems to have understood the principle of relativity, the idea that the laws of physics are the same in all inertial reference frames. He seems to have understood that the speed of light is the same in all inertial reference frames. He doesn’t phrase it quite that way, but it is my understanding, though I don’t speak French. These are basically the ideas that Einstein uses to deduce special relativity. But then he also has this additional misunderstanding where he thinks that length contraction is a dynamical effect, that somehow particles are being pushed together by some external force, something is going on dynamically. He doesn’t understand that it’s purely kinematics. That actually space and time are different from what we thought, and you need to fundamentally rethink those things. It’s almost like he knew too much. He had almost too grand a vision in mind. Einstein subtracts from that and says, “No. Space and time are just different than what we thought, and here’s the correct picture.” There’s a paper in, I think it’s 1909, where Poincaré still has this dynamical picture of what’s going on with the length contraction. This is just not necessary. This is a mistake from the modern point of view. Why is he doing this? Why is he clinging onto this idea? I don’t know. I’ve obviously never met the man. It would be fascinating to be able to talk it over and try and understand. His expertise seems to be getting in the way. He knows so much, he understands so much, and then he’s not able to let go of these things. A really interesting fact is that a few years prior, in the 1890s, Einstein’s a teenager and he believes in the ether too. He knows about this stuff. But he’s not quite as attached as these older people were. Maybe they were a little bit prisoners of their own expertise. That’s my guess. Some historians of science would certainly disagree.…

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