Talk:Problems with Einstein's general theory of relativity

Suggestions?

This is a slightly ... ambitious ... article. :)

Sensible, constructive suggestions as to how to improve it will be constructively received.

There may be some subtopics that could be split out, like the [[relativity of inertia]].

I've used rather more direct quotes than is normal - my experience with physics folk has been that unless you give them the actual quote, they tend not to believe that the reference is valid. Happily, a lot of this stuff is now online, indexed, searchable and directly linkable, courtesy of the Princeton "Collected Papers of Albert Einstein" project: https://einsteinpapers.press.princeton.edu/ ErkDemon (talk) 01:06, 10 September 2024 (UTC)

The article treats Mathematics as an ethereal discipline in which theorems flow inexorably from axioms. The reality is quite different. At graduate and professional levels, key concepts are intuition and elegance. Had Einstein pursued a career in Mathematics, I believe that he would have been quite comfortable with that mindset. A working mathematician devises conjectures and tries to prove them. -- Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz Username:Chatul (talk) 15:57, 7 October 2024 (UTC)

If PROD fails, send to Wikipedia:Articles for deletion

Delete. The article is not a summary of sources but an original research point of view essay. I checked some of the seemingly impressive list of sources. Most are primary sources taken out of context to support a point in the article unrelated to their content. Presenting Einstein as a sloppy bumbling story teller is completely ridiculous. Johnjbarton (talk) 17:00, 11 November 2024 (UTC)

@Johnjbarton, Please consolidate your unsupported claim by identifying a primary source in this article that is taken out of context, or or that is being used to support a point in the article unrelated to its content.  

Provide factual examples. If you cannot, I suggest that this criticism is factually untrue, is made in bad faith, and that your recommendation for deletion is not being conducted honestly. The words that you use, "sloppy", and "bumbling", also do not appear in the article. The characterisation of Einstein as being a "storyteller" comes directly from Lee Smolin, at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, and is properly quoted and referenced. If your side of the argument is correct, then you should not have to make up false facts to support it. ErkDemon (talk) 02:49, 13 November 2024 (UTC)

Sorry, @ErkDemon, but I've decided to make an AfD for this. This article is original research, which Wikipedia does not allow. By taking quotes from the papers of Einstein and others, you are using them to present a viewpoint of there being problems with the theory. The purpose of the encyclopedia is to publish thought that has already been published, not to interpret it. Sorry, but this is just not the right place for this content. That Tired Tarantula^Burrow 05:40, 13 November 2024 (UTC)

@ErkDemon I make a couple of edits to give you the sense of how much of the article is off base. I only took on two sections, but every section of this essay has similar problems.

The real issue here is what is the notable topic? Is the article about "Einstein's 1915 theory"? Then it should trace the enormous historical impact of that theory as well as the changes that physicist have found necessary since then. But we already have articles like general relativity and history of general relativity. Is the article about "Problems in the general theory of relativity"? We already have alternatives to general relativity. Please contribute to those articles.

The title is immediately a red flag, an indication that this article intends to present a point of view. It is not a summary of sources, but a collection of sources and quotes designed to accomplish an agenda. Johnjbarton (talk) 19:11, 13 November 2024 (UTC)

"Disputed" tag removed

User @Soumyapatra13 added the "disputed" tag without following the correct procedure:

" ... First add a new section named "Disputed" to the article's talk page, describing the problems with the disputed statements. ... "

Since Soumyapatra13 is not prepared to identify any specific disputed factual statements in the article, I'm removing the tag.  

If anybody here HONESTLY believes that any of the statements in the article are untrue, please identify them here on the chat page, and I'll try to address your concerns. So far, in more than two months, nobody has been able to identify any actual factual errors in the article. ErkDemon (talk) 02:56, 13 November 2024 (UTC)

Quotation-heavy ...

I do actually accept that the article contains more quotations than is normal for a WP article. This is specifically because of "bad faith" actors within the physics community who, if they are not confronted with specific sourced quotes, will try to pretend that various things are untrue, or misrepresented, or being used out of context. Most of the quotes in this article are not just sourced, they have clickable links in the references section that take you directly to the documents themselves, hosted at reputable non-paywall sites such as the Princeton Digital Einstein Papers Project. Even so, Johnjbarton has claimed that the quotes are not what they appear to be and used out of context.

So was my mistake here instead that I should have included even more, or longer quotes? I can do if necessary. ErkDemon (talk) 03:05, 13 November 2024 (UTC)

The quotes in this article are surrounded by unsourced commentary that is almost all negative with respect to Einstein. The quotes are not necessary or convincing because the commentary is clearly personal opinion. Quotes of primary sources add interest but have no impact on the verifiability of the associated commentary. Johnjbarton (talk) 23:05, 13 November 2024 (UTC)

PROD template removed, on the basis that removal is contested:

" Anyone can remove the PROD template at any time if they disagree with the deletion to stop the process. Only uncontroversial articles and files may be deleted using proposed deletion. Do not re-list an item if someone has removed the PROD template; instead, list it on articles for deletion or files for discussion, and seek a consensus to delete it. "

ErkDemon (talk) 03:08, 13 November 2024 (UTC)

Not a hoax. Check the references.

@Soumyapatra13 has said,

" Hoax/crackpot article. Whoever wrote this article seems to be trying to claim that GToR is fundamentally incorrect. "

Well, these are the verifiable, documented facts:

According to Einstein's own 1913 criteria, satisfying the "Relativity of Inertia" is a base requirement for any full theory of relativity (it's basically another way of stating the relativity of acceleration). After he'd presented his finalised 1915/1916 theory (whose 1915 derivations he privately described as "abominable") he then realised that his 1916-published system still didn't conform to the RoI, and quickly brought out his 1917 amendments to try to fix the problem. This still didn't do the job. By 1921, he was saying that his system still only had partial support for the RoI, and then in 1924, he simply gave up trying, and dismissed the RoI altogether, as something we no longer talked about.

If anyone knows of an Einstein-based solution to the RoI since 1924, which I've missed, please do share, and I'll update the article accordingly! :) Otherwise, to the best of our knowledge, Einstein's theory fails to make acceleration a relative property.

And then it gets worse:

• In 1952, Christian Møller proved geometrically that if we start with the SR relationships, it's geometrically impossible for an accelerated mass to warp spacetime. Versions of this result are now in GR textbooks such as MTW, and I'm not aware of anyone disputing its correctness. But if the relative acceleration of distant stars generates a field, but the relative acceleration of nearby masses doesn't, then we do not have a consistent theory. Without accelerative gravitomagnetism (which Einstein said in 1921 was part of his gravitational equations), we once again cannot have the relativity of acceleration, and we cannot have a general theory of relativity. This amounted to a geometrical disproof of Einstein's architecture.
• Then, in late 1960, the American Journal of Physics published Alfred Schild's response to the crisis earlier in the year, with Schild's definitive statement that a larger system cannot logically support both special relativity and the principle of equivalence, in rotating-body problems. The AJP's mission is to try to publish papers that represent our best knowledge on a subject, and is published by the American Association of Physics Teachers and the American Institute of Physics. So by this point we had theoretical proofs that Einstein's SR-centric system could not possibly fully support either the relativity of acceleration or the relativity of rotation. That meant that Einstein's system violated both aspects of the general principle of relativity that gave it its name.
• In the early 1970s, MTW produced three credibility criteria that they said that any new gravitational theory had to meet in order to be considered viable and worth testing. Those aren't my criteria, they are in a GR textbook, and Einstein's system fails two out of the three. That means that if Einstein's system was a new theory, MTW's rules would have meant that it shouldn't be considered good enough to pass peer review as a valid theory.
• Finally, we have Einstein's 1950 article in Scientific American, where he says that the "SR first, GR second" approach to constructing a general theory (which is how he'd described his own theory's architecture in 1919) is no longer something that he believes to be defensible. He no longer believes that it is legitimate to start with a foundation of non-gravitational physics (SR) and to try to build a gravitational theory on top of that foundation. He now believes that gravitational effects need to be there from the outset. He is rejecting his own two-stage 1916 architecture, his own two-stage 1916 approach to the more general subject of general relativity, and the implementational basis of his own theory.

Given these issues and geometrical incompatibilities, why would anyone with an analytical mind think that Einstein's 1916 system is NOT fundamentally incorrect? I mean, the idea of a general theory of relativity is brilliant, the pure gravitational side of it, and the GPoR, and the principle of equivalence of inertia and gravitation are all wonderful things ... but Einstein's own architecture ... the theory that he produced as an attempted implementation of the GPoR ... violates all of those lovely things!

Given that the theory's author then went very publicly on the record in 1950 in a popular science magazine to publicly disavow the 1916 architecture, can anybody explain to me why anyone should disagree with Einstein and still think it was correct? I've asked around and nobody knows. It just seems to be a social taboo in theoretical physics, that this is something that we are never supposed to mention.

So, I suppose that we have an awkward question: Is Wikipedia supposed to honor the taboo? Or is it supposed to document and present the results of the best analytical geometrical research that the community has been able to come up with, to date, on the subject of whether or not GR1916 is internally consistent? Because so far, all of the relevant research that I've been able to find, all the actual analysis, and all the expert opinions of the people who did that analysis, including Einstein, seems to say that the thing basically doesn't work and never did. ErkDemon (talk) 03:57, 13 November 2024 (UTC)

Article bias?

At least one person has said that the article is biased, because it focuses only on the alleged problems with Einstein's general theory.

I'm aware that a lot of people in the physics community believe that Einstein's framework is perfect and has no problems (despite the published literature). So I tell you what: if you can find any first-division theoretical physicist (and YOU get to define who YOU think is first-division) who has ever claimed to have personally audited the logic of Einstein's 1916 framework, and found that everything agrees the way that it's supposed to ... that the theory is logically coherent ... then by all means, append a new section to the end of the article documenting this work and providing a link to where it can be found. If you can find more than one, maybe two or three or more, then give every one of those researchers their own section. The more the merrier. Let's document the counter-case, in favour of Einstein's framework.

The reason I didn't include any counter-analyses that certify the 1916 framework as valid is because nobody in the physics world seems to know where any such analysis can be found. Lots of people seem to be certain that it exists, but nobody seems to be able to quote a paper or an author.

If you can find any peer-reviewed papers at all, published in the last hundred or so years that claim to have analysed the structure of Einstein's system and found that it works, and that are not written by Einstein himself, then please do share. I'm quite serious. ErkDemon (talk) 04:42, 13 November 2024 (UTC)

Ok, here read the preface to "General Relativity The Theoretical Minimum" By Leonard Susskind, André Cabannes or the foreword to Thorne, Kip; Hawking, Stephen (1994). Black Holes and Time Warps: Einstein's Outrageous Legacy. New York: W. W. Norton. ISBN 0-393-03505-0.. Or any of dozens other books.

Did you get those references from AI? Because I have my copy of the Thorne book right here, and I'm looking at the Hawking foreword, and it's a gushy intro praising the "power and depth" of Einstein's theory, but it really doesn't claim that the thing is without problems, or that it's been audited and found to be logically consistent. I know that with the "Google AI" system, it produces absolutely compelling references, complete with ISBNs and chapter headings and page numbers ... but if you actually look them up, "Google AI"'s lovely appropriate quote usually doesn't actually appear in the text. The software makes stuff up.

I can't check the preface of Lenny Susskind's book, because it only came out in 2022, and your "helpful" Google Books link throws up an alert saying that the book doesn't allow snippet previews. The "Theoretical Minimum" lecture videos are all available online, but there's a huge number of them, so if you could please tell us in which lecture and roughly when Lenny says that Einstein's framework has been audited and found to be logically consistent, supporting SR physics, the GPoR, the principle of equivalence of inertial and gravitational mass, and the relativity of acceleration, rotation and inertia ... then that would be nice.

(and that's ignoring the fact that I asked for a peer-reviewed paper, not an author's personal opinion).

Otherwise this is turning into every other conversation I've had on this subject for the last thirty years, where the other person says "you can find this stuff anywhere - just check any physics book!" ... and then can't produce a single supporting quote. If you can find a peer-reviewed quote, then by all means add it to the article, perhaps in a "defences of GR" section.

I already gave the MTW quote that GR has no known problems at all ... but that's rather undermined by a previous chapter that describes total collapse as the greatest crisis in physics of all time... <grin> ErkDemon (talk) 01:19, 18 November 2024 (UTC)

Your concept that some nitpicking details of the 1916 paper are of monumental importance is simply not true. Johnjbarton (talk) 23:19, 13 November 2024 (UTC)

Hardly "nitpicking details". The "total collapse" problem means that GR is technically not valid as classical theory, and has been described by MTW as "the greatest crisis in theoretical physics of all time". The inability to mesh with QM was listed by MTW as sufficient reason to dismiss competing theories as junk not even worth testing ... just before the community realised that Einstein's theory itself didn't mesh with QM. (oopsie!)

The problem of how to reconcile QM and GR has occupied some of our greatest minds for half a century. The reason the two don't work together is that "Einstein's GR" isn't a valid form of GR. ErkDemon (talk) 01:19, 18 November 2024 (UTC)

These details are clearly not notable in the vast sea of important implications of the core ideas. Johnjbarton (talk) 23:19, 13 November 2024 (UTC)

The GR core ideas are (mostly) beautiful, and wonderful. The problem is that Einstein's SR-centric attempt to construct a theory that implemented and incorporated them, never worked. The relativity of acceleration and rotation is great, but Einstein's architecture violates it. The principle of equivalence of inertia and gravitation is great, but Einstein's architecture violates it. The idea of geometrical physics is great, but Einstein's architecture violates it. If you want a general theory of relativity ... the 1916 theory is not what you're looking for.

The main obstacle to our having a real general theory of relativity is folks such as yourself insisting that we don't need to do the work because we already have one. ErkDemon (talk) 01:19, 18 November 2024 (UTC)

Merge with General Relativity

Problems with General Relativity should be presented in the article General Relativity. If there is any valid content in this article it should be merged there. Of course false claims and original reserach should be neither there nor here. 2001:14BB:15A:FB5F:242D:AA08:158E:9C1A (talk) 10:32, 13 November 2024 (UTC)

There's already an article about that at Criticism of the theory of relativity. This other article's just OR; all of the quotes are being used to promote a user's theory. That Tired Tarantula^Burrow 11:59, 13 November 2024 (UTC)

"Criticism" is a human activity, and the "criticisms" article has a remit that addresses historical opponents of the theory, and how the theory was received. Things like antisemitism, politics, social factors, and the awful Deutsche Physik movement. "Criticisms" includes old criticisms that are now known to be wrong.

However, if one is a physics researcher, and wants to have a go at fixing Einstein's GR, there is a case for having a convenient listing of structural problems with the theory, with references outlining the timeline of how and when each problem began to be appreciated. Presumably everybody knows about the problem of total collapse, and the incompatibility with QM. The failure to support the relativity of inertia, and the failures to fully implement the relativity of acceleration and rotation are less generally known. The modern tendency to refer to Einstein's system as a theory of covariance rather than a general theory of relativity seems to be due to people realising that the thing doesn't actually properly implement the GPoR. If it's not technically correct as a general theory, they have to find something else to call it. ~~~~ ErkDemon (talk) 23:22, 17 November 2024 (UTC)

This article is your own interpretation of the theory. There is information about relativity and acceleration in the other article. Maybe some historical debates about how the theory of relativity applies could be added over there, but the vast majority of this article is commentary about things that scientists have said, not just documenting them. That Tired Tarantula^Burrow 01:25, 18 November 2024 (UTC)