George+Week+Eight

Einstein's theory of relativity is amazing because his discovery was not based on mathematics or observations, but instead on pure thought. Very few scientific breakthroughs are based on pure thought and later reassured when we have the necessary tools for measuring. What also makes it so interesting is the breadth of knowledge he derived from just using two pieces of information. Einstein has a unique cultural standing that sets him far apart from other scientists. I knew who Einstein was and how smart he was as a child without even understanding the science behind what he was famous for. People have a respect for him without even understanding why they should respect him.

The difference in how Poincare and Einstein approached the theorum of relativity shows that even though engineering and science overlap in many respects that the approach for engineering and science are very different and are better used for their respective fields. Poincare's biggest flaw was that he did not want to redefine Newtonian laws, but rather "he was only trying to fix things" (Galison). He didn't care about how it worked so long that it worked for him. On the other hand, Einstein approach to dealing with relativity was much more all encompassing. He had to make sure that his theory has no contradictions and attempted to look for the truth.

I find a lot of respect for the ambition of Michelson in he search for the effects of the aether. The experiment he set up required unbelievable amounts of precision and hard calibrations. Especially for the time period in which he did his experiments. At the end of the Nineteenth Century, he must have had a lot of faith in his own abilities to try and split light into two perpendicular beams, recombine it precisely and then measure the differences in the two waves of light. Even though what he was trying to find did not exist, his experiments produced data which were a staple of Einstein's theory that rocked physics to the core.