<blockquote id="quote"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"><i>Originally posted by Larry Burford</i>
<br />It's possible to imagine that he started all of this as a practical joke. But when everyone began taking him seriously he was too embarrassed (for us , not for himself) to say anything ...
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Hi Larry, I’ve been researching his early papers for some time, and there is quite an element of fantasy in them. He seems to have woven fantasy ideas in with some reality to come up with a surreal world of make-believe that a lot of people took seriously back then, mainly (it seems) because of the new advent of rather amazing breakthroughs in physics, such as with X-Rays (light that could travel through human skin to reveal a person’s bones) and radio waves (that could send the human voice around the world and penetrate solid walls of stone).
It was clearly H.G. Wells, the si-fi writer, who first published the information about time being the “fourth dimension,” in his 1895 book “The Time Machine”. In 1914 Wells also published a book about how the Germans used modern atomic physics to invent “atomic bombs” which they used against London and Paris in a big world war. Entire cities were destroyed by single bombs, and readers of the book were ready to believe anything any scientist said about new discoveries, no matter how fantastic it might be.
Some people think Einstein got the idea for the “flat beings on the surface of a sphere” (as mentioned in his 1916 book) from the “Flatland” fairy tale, written by Edwin Abbot in 1884, but I’ve finally tracked down the original source of the flat beings, and it was a theoretical mathematician named Arthur Cayley who first spoke about four dimensions of space with little flat 2-dimensional beings living on the curved surface of a sphere. His speech was published in 1883 as a popular magazine article. That was 33 years before Einstein used the idea for his 1916 book. This article was what prompted Abbott to write the satire about “Flatland”.
It amazes me how naive people are to have ever believed the SR theory or the 1916 book, with its flat 2-D creatures. In the GR theory Einstein was trying to claim that the universe was spherical in shape but did not expand or contract, and that light beams traveling from a star would travel throughout the entire universe and curve around and return to their original source. This nonsense was believed by hundreds of physicists until Lemaitre invented the big bang theory in 1927 and Hubble confirmed the expansion of the universe in 1929.
I’ve also learned that it was actually H.A. Lorentz who invented some of the main principles that are now attributed to Einstein, such as length contraction, mass increase, and time dilation. The prediction about light bending as it passed the sun is contained in the 1704 edition of Newton’s Opticks. In fact, Newton suggested in some letters that the universe might be either contracting or expanding, which it would have to be if it was not “infinite” in scope, since the gravity fields would not allow a static universe, unless the universe were rotating or revolving about a center. This information was known in the early 19th Century since his letters were published in book form, and in fact Edgar Allen Poe wrote an essay about the possible expansion or contraction of the universe in 1848. See:
xroads.virginia.edu/~HYPER/poe/eureka.html
What Einstein did in his early years, from high school on, was read a lot of 19th Century information and theories about the overall universe and atomic theory and this was where he got many of the ideas that are attributed to him today. There are NO investigative reporters in science today, so there is no one out there trying to find the origin of some of his goofy ideas. I’m retired and I do it as a hobby.
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