Natural Science Forum / Physics / Relativity / October 2006

http://www.androcles01.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/Rocket/Rocket.htm

Einstein did not discover anything.  He just rediscovered these
subjects of your interests.

The Lorentz transform is the very basis of SR.  It was already derived
before Einstein graduated from whatever institution.  Einstein in 1905
attempted to derive it, but the derivation was a total gibberish.
Realizing his mistake and already famou years later, Einstein would
attempt to derive the Lorentz transform again.  His 2nd attempt was
also nonsense.  Look for his trick of equating the 2 most important
equations of the Lorentz transform from two equations equating zero
with zero.

The Einstein field equations are the basis of GR.  They can only be
derived through a Lagrangian (which does not satisfy as a Lagrangian)
conjured up by Hilbert.

The principle of equivalence was already discovered by Galileo long,
long time ago.  It formed the basis for Newton to derive his law of
gravity.  Einstein Equivalence Principle was a dead end in the
development of GR.  Today, it serves no useful purpose.

You posted to the wrong NG. What Einstein was talking about falls under
the rubric of philosophy, which is dispised here. On the other hand,
few philosophers today care about what Einstein had to say about
philosophic issues.

The distinction Einstein made between the synthetic and analytic were
not in the same sense that Kant did. IIRC, by synthetic Einstein meant
that one assumes a model of matter and some rules on how it behaves
(together that's a set of postulates) and then one deduces
(synthesizes) behavior of the system from those axioms. And in the
analytic case, he meant that one induces general principles extracted
more or less directly from experience and then tries to combine
(analyze) them into a workable theory.

I think that the distinction between them is a bit clearer if you
realize that to the theorist trying to make a workable theory, moving
along the synthetic mode knows beforehand the general relationships
among the postulates from previous experience with them. For example,
in the effort to found classical thermodynamics on Newtonian theory (to
produce kinetic theory) one knows beforehand what the general ontology
is (point mass particles) and what the rules of interactions are among
these point particles.

On the other hand, to build a theory on analytic grounds, one collects
a set of empirically based principles and tries to combine them into a
workable theory, not knowing in advance the needful changes to one's
previoiusly held assumptions one might need to take to accomplish that
goal. For example, when Einstein pulled together the Light Principle,
the Principle of Relativity, and the general empirical knowledge one
has of Newton's mechanics and electrodynamics, his attempt to extend
mechanics to electrodynamics without using an ether forced him
eventually to conclude that time cannot be assumed to be absolute. (I
would have interchanged the terms 'synthetic' and 'analytic' myself! I
think that this makes his use of the two terms completely mystifying to
novices and philosophers alike.)

I find Einstein's use of the terms synthetic and analytic completely
unique and confusing, and philosophers can't follow him because he is
so nonstandard. If I'm correct about my analysis of how Einstein used
the two terms, he clearly didn't mean them in any strict sense to be
epistemic in nature, but rather to be procedural. In other words,
neither were meant to be a means of attaining truth per se.

In any case, I think Einstein did a poor job of delineating them from
each other. His synthetic notion corresponds to his 'constructive
theory' notion, and his analytic notion corresponds to his 'principle
theory' notion. [See his essay What is the theory of relativity?, p.
228 (Three Rivers Press)]. Again, I would have interchanged his two
terms for this identification. But that is a semantic issue.

He wrote about such things in his book Ideas and Opinions (physics
essays). For examples of his thoughts on the a priori, see Physics and
Reality, p. 292 (Three Rivers Press).

I do seem to remember Einstein claimed that Kant's synthetic a priori
is impossible because, as he argued, we have no knowedge of the world
prior to experiencing it. And on this point I'm being very careful.
Kant may have claimed that we can 'know' through intuitions (I'm not
sure about that), but Einstein would have never allowed for such a
claim in his own epistemology. Einstein was more in line with
Poincare's views on conventionalism.

See also Albert Einstein: Philosopher-Scientist Vol. 2.

This is correct although an oversimplification, gross one. Philosophy
cannot explain this subjects, it can only raise questions relating to
such subjects.

Good luck. If you find anything that makes sense please let us know.

Mike