从他的建议去那样建立一个理论。

世界上这样的言论很多，根本教育不过来。

我可以给你Subtle is the Lord的电子版，不过没有兴趣去考证和写点什么。

不过有人已经写了，说得远比我好。
"Einstein chose a better strategy than Lorentz's permanent interaction with the experimenters who are often clever about minor things but intellectually limited about major issues [...]"
Lubos, I often enjoy your blog,
but the statement above is pure arrogance.

LM: I don't know whether it is "arrogance" but it is a true statement, and an essential one for a good organization of sociology of science, for that matter, and the Lorentz-Einstein story is pretty much one of the numerous proofs of my statement. It would be extremely bad if someone didn't learn the lesson from this important episode from the history textbooks of science. The Michelson-Morley experiments were great in various technical details - how to construct the interferometers - but the overall picture was just misleading because the MM guys didn't really understand the big picture.

If someone understood the nature of Maxwell's equations (extracted from dozens of previous experiments) well, it was not really wise to assume the kind of phenomena they were trying to find: the speed of light can be derived to be a particular constant from the equations, and the equations have been tested to work in the Earth's reference frame. So there was never any direct or indirect reason to assume that we should observe the aether wind etc. The very existence of these experiments helped to reinforce the belief that the aether was there and it was important - and Lorentz and others were buying into this story. It is very similar as with global warming today - many people think it is important just because billions of dollars are wasted for research of (and writing about) this issue.

But these things don't follow from each other and the aether was unimportant and it wasn't really there, a key fact that can be easily masked by sophisticated interferometers. It was very wise from Einstein not to look into these experiments because they couldn't really tell him anything qualitatively new.

My second most favorite story about the crucial necessity for theorists not to be affected by experimenters' big statements is the story about the Feynman-Gell-Mann theory. The (famous) experimenters claimed that the weak interactions were S-T (scalar-tensor) while FG knew because of theoretical reasons that they had to be V-A (vector-axial-vector). The error in the experiment was a technicality - the whole big conclusion was effectively based on one point at the end of the range that could be measured (and that was therefore unreliable) - but anyway, it is a demonstration of an experiment where too much theoretical work was expected from the experimenters (to deduce from an experiment whether something was S-T or V-A) which often works badly because they were not selected to be good at this business, and they were not trained to be good at this business. As we know today, they were indeed not good at this business.

Einstein, Feynman, Gell-Mann are just three examples of physicists who chose the sensible approach to these matters. There had been clearly enough data to make wise conclusions in both of these cases. Special relativity did follow from the principles that had been proven before 1905 and the FG V-A theory of weak interactions did follow from the data - and theoretical knowledge about quantum field theory - that were known when FG were writing the theory.

Too much experimenting may artificially make certain wrong assumptions look more likely than they are - especially because sometimes various people are affected by the very decision to make an experiment, not just by its result (which often shows that the very experiment was stupid to pay for), which is an irrational strategy that often leads to irrational conclusions and slow progress in science. As long as one follows the scientific method, the experiment can - and must - influence the theoretical reasoning only once the results are known. The fact that someone is trying to find the aether or a catastrophic global warming doesn't make it any more plausible that the aether or a catastrophic global warming actually exists.

I insist that whoever does make these implications is an irrational simpleton and I don't care whether someone finds this important truth inconvenient or arrogant. And I insist that many people are making wrong conclusions about "big picture" questions simply because they are not good in this activity - and others should be able to know that there is no reason why those people should be good theorists.

Dear Sergei,

first of all, a psychological point. It is normal to say that theorists are less skillful (and usually worse in the "manual intelligence") than experimenters, and no sane person would protest against it because it is obviously true, at least statistically, and theorists usually admit it freely, and so do I.

I think that the corresponding true statements about the experimenters are more "politically incorrect", probably because theorists are the "politically incorrect ones" while the experimenters are the "politically correct ones". Or more precisely, because theorists - with their passion for the truth - don't need to pretend something that they are not.

I don't think that the real difference between theorists and experimenters in their approach to theories has much to do with "new vs. old" ideas. I am talking about "right vs. wrong" ideas and who is able to tell them apart. When it comes to questions that exceed a lab arrangement, experimenters are worse, and not just because of the training but also because the innate aptitude because the groups have already been preselected.

To clarify why I think so, let me use the very same example again. There was nothing conservative about the aether whatsoever. In the 19th century, the aether was a relatively new idea and the new aether theories were really hot and fashionable at the time. There was no historical/scientific support for such new theories. Nevertheless, they were enthusiastically accepted by typical experimenters such as Edward Morley.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edw...i/ Edward_Morley

Incidentally, Morley never accepted that their experiments have falsified the aether hypothesis, and he continued on similar "positive aether" experiments for many years afterwords (without Michelson, a guy mentioned below).

Is that a conservative approach, for a fashionable hypothesis that has never been a part of the real physics cannon and that has never led to any successful outcome? If you think it is, how do you exactly define what is a conservative hypothesis and what is not? Our definitions would clearly disagree. It may be a very subtle thing. Note that "conservatives" have been hardcore communists in the Soviet Union and Islamofascists, while U.S. socialists label themselves "liberal", a term used to refer to freedom. These things often depend on conventions but I can't see a convention in which the aether wind theories were "conservative". If someone ever presented them in this way, it was pure propaganda.

Albert Michelson was a famous physicist, too - the first U.S. scientific Nobel prize winner.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Alb...raham_Michelson

But would you really disagree that his own viewpoint on sciences was intellectually limited, if judged as a theorist? Virtually all of his career may be defined as a passion to measure the speed of light. He did it very well, after all, but do you really doubt that the set of ideas behind his work was limited relatively to various theorists? It's about a better type of sticks to measure the length and good clock. The result is 299 792 458 and nothing else ever.

I think that the comparison of his ideas' breadth e.g. with Newton, Einstein, Weinberg, Feynman or anyone of this caliber would be dramatic... Lorentz was arguably at a comparable level to Einstein but he just couldn't jetison too much of the old excess baggage. But Michelson and Morley could only be trusted with their answers to well-defined pre-agreed questions, not far-reaching idiosyncratic interpretations of their gadgets (that we almost uniformly wrong).

Best
Lubos

"Too much experimenting may artificially make certain wrong assumptions look more likely than they are"

Yeah, like sterile neutrinos. Good luck with that

LM: Dear Euroguy, I completely agree that this is another good example. The very belief that (many) neutrinos around us should be sterile is a shallow, unmotivated, ad hoc, contrived speculation without a rational justification (and solving no problems in science), and I am convinced that no sterile neutrinos exist until the multi-TeV scale (because such stuff would naturally get huge masses, being unprotected; the only "reason" why people propose them today is "why not"). But certain people succeed in their efforts so that many experiments are organized as "tests of sterile neutrino theories" which is why these theories are given more weight in the public - including the scientific public - than what they would rationally have. People begin to view it as a 50:50 question even though the probability that detectably light neutrinos exist is much much smaller than 50%.

Sterile neutrino theories - and all other theories - should only become more acceptable if they are supplemented by direct or indirect evidence that is based on the actual *results* of some experiments, not the decision to *make* these experiments before they're made. But this is still the same debate. Some people think that something is "more real" just because they can imagine how to "look at it" experimentally - but they actually don't care what they would see. But in science, whether something is true or not has nothing to do with the question how easy it is to make tests (or how eager you are to make them; or how much you like to flatter experimenters, or whatever): it is only about the results of these tests if some of them have been made.

Whether an agency pays for an experiment is a sociological question and it is unreasonable to use this question to form your own opinion unless you know that those who really understand the particular topic best have been consulted and approved it was sensible.