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Interpretationen und Fehlinterpretationen der speziellen und der allgemeinen Relativit
... In this departure from the customary handling of the matter lies the high value of the book" (S. Hirzel Verlag 1920a;Hentschel 1990). As is well known, in the 1930s Lenard's account was expanded to the point of vicious caricature in his four volume depiction of Deutsche Physik, this time with a different publisher (Lenard 1936;Hentschel 1996, lxxlxxviii). ...
Argument
This paper examines some of the ways that machines, mechanisms, and the new mechanics were treated in post-World War I discourse. Spengler's 1919 Decline of the West and Hessen's 1931 study of Newton have usually been tied closely to Weimar culture in Germany, and Soviet politics. Linking them also to the writings of Rathenau, Simmel, Chase, Mumford, Hayek, and others, as well as to Dada and film studies of the city will indicate central features of a wide-ranging, international discourse on the machine and mechanization. I argue that machines were so thoroughly integrated into social and economic experience that we can treat this as a distinctive new phase in the cultural history of mechanics, what some contemporaries called the “machine age”: a period in which rather than the hand mill or steam engine, the city stands as an appropriate realization (and sometimes symbol) of the significance but also ambiguities and tensions of mechanical life; and concepts of mechanization were extended to encompass the economy and market mechanisms.
... Yet, by the 1950s the diversity of epistemological viewpoints, each of which aligned themselves with Bohr's view, actually contributed to the impression of a unitary Copenhagen interpretation. Whereas in the 1930s and 1940s the disagreements between Rosenfeld, Franck and Weizsäcker are best construed as a clash of different philosophical interpretations of quantum mechanics, as had been in the case with the theory of relativity (Hentschel 1990), by the mid-1950s in the context of the emergence of a new threat from the Bohm, de Broglie and Vigier, as well as Soviet physicists such as Blokhintsev and Alexandrov, the different schools of thought closed ranks in identifying themselves with Bohr-the canonical author-whose writings were was taken as a direct expression of the 'authentic' Copenhagen interpretation. ...
According to the standard view, the so-called ‘Copenhagen interpretation’ of quantum mechanics originated in discussions between Bohr and Heisenberg in 1927, and was defended by Bohr in his classic debate with Einstein. Yet recent scholarship has shown Bohr’s views were never widely accepted, let alone properly understood, by his contemporaries, many of whom held divergent views of the ‘Copenhagen orthodoxy’. This paper examines how the ‘myth of the Copenhagen interpretation’ was constructed by situating it in the context of Soviet Marxist critique of quantum mechanics in the 1950s and the response by physicists such as Heisenberg and Rosenfeld.
Between 1937 and 1953 the industrial physicist Herbert E. Ives pursued an extended research program with the aim of challenging the acceptance of relativity theories, and became the most important American opponent of Einstein during that era. As part of his anti-relativistic efforts Ives also performed the famous Ives-Stilwell experiment. Usually interpreted as the first direct confirmation of the time dilation formula of special relativity theory, this experiment was regarded by Ives as proof of what he called the Larmor-Lorentz theory. Ives’s heterodox views about relativity were mainly ignored by the scientific community during his lifetime. After his death, however, his criticisms of what the majority of physicists took for granted helped spark philosophical discussions in the late 1950s concerning the conventional stipulation of distant simultaneity in special relativity theory. Ives’s anti-relativistic beliefs and actions allow for an analysis of the heterodox efforts of an accredited member of the scientific community and the subsequent process of his professional marginalization in a specific historical and scientific context. This paper has three aims: to uncover the epistemic roots of Ives’s opposition to relativity; to analyze Ives’s rhetorical strategies and the reasons why he failed to persuade his peers; and to reveal the divergence between the public network of allies Ives built in scientific publications and the hidden network of allies present in his correspondence. It will become clear that the hardening of Ives’s tone against relativity and Einstein can be understood in light of his progressive marginalization and loss of recognized socioprofessional identity due to his unorthodox ideas. Ives’s case is illuminating for the historical, philosophical, and sociological perspectives it provides on the complex mechanisms by which the margins interact with the mainstream of science, both in the production of certified knowledge and in the contextually contingent redefinition and reconfiguration of the boundaries of acceptable scientific discourse.
Appeared as chapter 7, pp. 163-182 in Marco Mamone Capria (ed.)
Physics before and after Albert Einstein. An Historical Perspective,
Amsterdam, 2005
In this chapter, Klaus Hentschel first reviews Einstein's
general attitude towards experiments, much more positive than generally
believed, then reviews experimental tests of both special and general
relativity, focussing on tests during Einstein's lifetime, incl.
gravitational redshift, light deflection, perihelion motion. Among the
non-standard tests, time-delay measurements, gyroscope experiments, the
Nordtvedt effect, and gravitational waves are also discussed.
Contents: 1. Introduction. 2. The early career of Erwin Finlay Freundlich. 3. Freundlich and Einstein from 1911. 4. Freundlich's researches of 1915 - 16 on the statistics of fixed stars: statistical evidence of gravitational redshift? 5. Freundlich's solar eclipse expeditions: photographic evidence of gravity's influence on rays of light? 6. Freundlich's speculations on the photon-photon interaction, and conclusion.
The phenomenal response to Minkowski’s 1908 lecture in Cologne has tested the historian’s capacity for explanation on rational
grounds. What was it about Minkowki’s lecture that so schocked the sensibilities of his public? In this essay, Minkowski’s
spacetime theory is considered as a solution in search of a problem. After physicists rejected his four-dimensional formalism,
Minkowski made a point in Cologne of challenging their most cherished beliefs, piling provocation upon provocation in an effort
to stir them from their torpor, in pure modernist style.
Minkowski-Spacetime theory-Relativity theory-History of science-Philosophy of space-Conventionalism
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