Title: The Four Biggest Mistakes Of Einstein's Scientific Life
Headings: The Four Biggest Mistakes Of Einstein's Scientific Life
The Four Biggest Mistakes Of Einstein's Scientific Life
Content: This one is still controversial, likely primarily due to Einstein's stubbornness on the subject. In classical physics, like Newtonian gravity, Maxwell's electromagnetism and even General Relativity, the theories really are deterministic. If you tell me the initial positions and momenta of all the particles in the Universe, I can -- with enough computational power -- tell you how every one of them will evolve, move, and where they will be located at any point in time. But in quantum mechanics, there are not only quantities that can't be known in advance, there is a fundamental indeterminism inherent to the theory. The wave pattern for electrons passing through a double slit. If you measure "which slit" the ... [+]
electron goes through, you destroy the quantum interference pattern shown here. Image credit: Dr. Tonomura and Belsazar of Wikimedia Commons, under c.c.a.-s.a.-3.0. The better you measure and know the position of a particle, the less well-known its momentum is. The shorter a particle's lifetime, the more inherently uncertain its rest energy (i.e., its mass) is.