ellauri097.html on line 163: Mencken ridiculed Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity, believing that "in the long run his curved space may be classed with the psychosomatic bumps of [Franz Josef] Gall and [Johann] Spurzheim." In his private letters, he said:
ellauri219.html on line 480: Barely visible above John Lennon’s right shoulder (No.62), Albert Einstein was a physicist whose theory of relativity was light years ahead of its time and changed the world forever.
ellauri266.html on line 325: General semantics, a philosophy of language-meaning that was developed by Alfred Korzybski (1879–1950), a Polish-American scholar, and furthered by S.I. Hayakawa, Wendell Johnson, and others; it is the study of language as a representation of reality. Korzybski’s theory was intended to improve the habits of glib upper-class response to hostile low-class environment. Drawing upon such varied disciplines as relativity theory, quantum mechanics, and mathematical logic, Korzybski and his followers sought a scientific, non-Aristotelian basis for clear understanding of the differences between symbol (word) and reality (referent) and the ways in which they themselves can influence (or manipulate) and limit other humans´ ability to think.
xxx/ellauri113.html on line 45: There are zero contradictions between quantum mechanics and special relativity; quantum field theory is the framework that unifies them.
xxx/ellauri113.html on line 46: General relativity also works perfectly well as a low-energy effective quantum field theory. For questions like the low-energy scattering of photons and gravitons, for instance, the Standard Model coupled to general relativity is a perfectly good theory. It only breaks down when you ask questions involving invariants of order the Planck scale, where it fails to be predictive; this is the problem of "nonrenormalizability."
xxx/ellauri113.html on line 52: With gravity, this high-energy/short-distance correspondence breaks down. If you could collide two particles with center-of-mass energy much larger than the Planck scale, then when they collide their wave packets would contain more than the Planck energy localized in a Planck-length-sized region. This creates a black hole. If you scatter them at even higher energy, you would make an even bigger black hole, because the Schwarzschild radius grows with mass. So the harder you try to study shorter distances, the worse off you are: you make black holes that are bigger and bigger and swallow up ever-larger distances. No matter what completes general relativity to solve the renormalizability problem, the physics of large black holes will be dominated by the Einstein action, so we can make this statement even without knowing the full details of quantum gravity.
xxx/ellauri113.html on line 56: None of this is really a contradiction between general relativity and quantum mechanics. For instance, string theory is a quantum mechanical theory that includes general relativity as a low-energy limit. What it does mean is that quantum field theory, the framework we use to understand all non-gravitational forces, is not sufficient for understanding gravity. Black holes lead to subtle issues that are still not fully understood. But not contradictions, just lacunae.
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