User talk:De kludde

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Licorne = De Kludde = 69/66?
De kludde, can you give me any reason not to think that you're the same person as the one who's using the Licorne account, and also posting from 69.22.98.146 and 66.194.104.5? --Alvestrand 23:43, 15 February 2006 (UTC)

While it is probably always difficult to disprove such assertions (eg, could you prove that you are not fastfission? or E4mmacro), I would like to stress: a) I am not Licorne nor Anon69 nor Anon66, nor am I currently using another name on Wikipedia. b) Anon69 represents a point of view which is more radical than my own: He thinks GRT belongs to Hilbert, while I only think that the field equations belong to Hilbert and that GRT should be shared. (However, I share the view that SRT belongs to Poincare/Lorentz, with the possible exception of mc2, but even this belongs to mc2 Poincare to a large extent.) c) My responses tend to be longer than Anon69's, and I have contributed to the dispute page while Anon69 didn't. I usually write responses the same way I would write material intended for the dispute article. d) I came up with material from the Wuensch/Sommer page several times, while Anon69 didn't. e) So far I have never flamed anyone participating in this discussion.


 * Thanks De kludde! Keep your response around - the question will probably be asked again. --Alvestrand 06:08, 16 February 2006 (UTC)

Cory paper article
For some reason I can add any edits to the talk page of your new article on CRS.

BTW, before, I start I was going to say to Alvestrand that I would be very surprised if you were Licorne/66/69. The evidence of your CRS page indicates you can argue rationally. And you don't just repeat yourself, and appear to be reasonable.

I like the CRS piece (which I haven't finished reading) but it probably violates NPOV and NOR policies of wiki, so you might consider just stating the facts and leaving out your opinions.

On a point which I think we discussed on the Einstein page. I don't think you have to attack the magazine Science. You can say what Science did, but you have inserted your opinion that what they did was not normal. You have confused what is normal for a normal paper being referred in the normal way. But when someone submits a paper that seems to go out of its way to attack the author and methods of a previous aper, I believe (from my experience in resolving such a dispute for a journal) that it is absolutely normal to send the new attacking paper to the attacked authors and ask for comments - i.e. a chance to defend oneself is the first thing to offer. If the editors then got back a flamming piece from CRS (which they appeared to) which escalates the name-calling and accusations, they could then send it all to referees, but I have every sympathy for them washing their hands of the whole affair, and saying that it should go to a history of Science journal. Having read what Winterborg finally published I have to say that if I were a referree I would have insisted he delete a few accusations and irrelevancies which did not to advance our knowledge on the topic. I can only imagine the original submission to Science was even worse. So why not just say what Science did and leave your opinion of their behaviour out - there is nothing to gain by attacking Science Magazine editors. E4mmacro 03:33, 18 February 2006 (UTC)

And yes, perhaps Science should never have published the CRS paper in the first place, but advised a history of science journal (I bet they regretted it). E4mmacro 03:38, 18 February 2006 (UTC)


 * OK I have read further and see it is not the balanced article I thought it was going to be. I also see why I couldn't edit it - it is part of white nationalist wikipedia (duh! i didn't realise). E4mmacro 22:00, 18 February 2006 (UTC)
 * Why do you think it is not "balanced"? You probably don't like the political line of WN wiki, and you may not like the conclusion. But is there anything in the main body of text which you see as biased? Btw, it is of course possible to add comments to it. All you have to do is to register.De kludde 09:07, 26 February 2006 (UTC)
 * I can't remember exactly how I got this impression, but it seemed to me that you were more concerned with proving "Stachel and that crowd" are bad guys, than in finding what equation might be missing from the proofs. Similar to your desire to prove the editors of Science are bad guys. Perhaps this is what the article was meant to be about, but I thought it was going to be about the missing equation (and btw I thought the missing equation was easy to guess from the final paper, since we have the next equation in both the proofs and the final paper). Also I had the impression that you often assert things are "obvious" when it appears to me far from obvious. As I say, I haven't gone back to check the article, so you can dismiss this criticism, but you did ask. E4mmacro 20:26, 6 March 2006 (UTC)

You seem to think that I disagree with CRS? I said (or meant to imply) only that Science was not the place to publish a "history of science" article (perhaps). I think Winterberg's response is bad, an unbalanced view, and not the sort of thing I would expect to see in a refereed journal (It contains unsourced assertions, for example). I think the first half of the CRS response to Winterberg's response (which seems to be directed at Winterberg personally) is bad because it is off the topic. However, I agree with the second half of their response, and consider it a more than adequate refutation of Winterberg's case. For example, they point out that Winterberg said nothing about the fact that Hilbert's proof presents a non-covariant set of equations as "the fundamental equations of physics". These non-covaraint conditions came from Einstein, based on the causality principle (a belief that the theory would HAVE to be non-covariant, because of the physical conditions implied by causulaty). It was Einstein, Dec 25, who dropped this condition. This same point is made by Sauer, as well as Todorov, and in my view (and these others) weakens, crucially, any claims that Einstein plagiarised Hilbert. They also point out that Winterberg gives no explanation of why the relevant equation for the variational derivate, if it appeared in the missing bit of the proofs, would have been moved to a different part of the paper. They also mention that Hilbert chaged his argument about how to calculate the variational derivative in the 1924 reworking of the 1916 paper. I think that is highly relevant to Winterberg's "wise after the event" claim that it is trivial to derive it from what is in Hilbert's proofs (with the implication that Einstein could have derived it trivially from whatver Hilbert sent him on 16 Nov). Sauer also says it is non-trival. In other words I think the Licorne oft-repeated claim that the "field equations in equivalent form" are in the proofs is silly; being wise after the event.

If you want to know more of what I think is unbalanced about Winterberg, then (apart from the gratitious and unsourced assertion that Einstein couldn't solve it, and Grossmann couldn't help so he asked Hilbert and Klein to solve it for hem) I would mention the negative way he writes the history of Dec 1915 as Einstein presents the wrong equations, Einstein presents the still wrong equations, without mentioning that the "wrong equations" are within a whisker of the correct equations (my opinion), and correct enough to give the correct perehelion advance for mercury (a fact). And with no discussion that subtracting the trace term to his "wrong" equations" is not a big step for Einstein, one that is suggested by the fact that the Dec 18 assumption of zero trace, gave correct equations (correct enough to calculate the perihelion advance) ("not a big step" is my opinion, but I think that is worth some discussion by Winterberg) E4mmacro 22:57, 30 March 2006 (UTC)

Response to E4mmacro, concerning CRS
Yes, I regarded your 03:33, 18 February 2006 remark as a sign of disagreement with CRS. -De kludde 08:51, 1 April 2006 (UTC)

Non-covariance
Your claim that Hilbert's first set of equations is non-covariant is a bit exaggerated. He even calls his axiom II "Axiom der allgemeinen Invarianz" and then proceeds to derive energy conservation. The third axiom of the original version is only added after this, and singles out certain coordinate systems in which energy conservation takes a simple form. But the equations resulting from the principle of least action are the same for both versions, which means that Einstein could have plagiarized them if Hilbert made them explicit in his November 16 letter or in the talk given the same day. -De kludde 08:51, 1 April 2006 (UTC)

Wuensch thinks that Hilbert rewrote this part of his paper because he found a better treatment of energy conservation, allowing him to eliminate one axiom. The two theories are of course otherwise equivalent if one assumes a local existence theorem for coordinates satisfying Hilbert's gauge condition, but Hilbert had to discuss causality (something which Einstein did not do at all) in a separate paper. -De kludde 08:51, 1 April 2006 (UTC)

The difference to Einstein's non-covariant November 4 theory is of course that Einstein's November 4 equations are only of restricted covariance and cannot be made generally covariant by just dropping the condition g=-1. Also, Einstein himself seems to acknowledge that Hilbert sent him a covariant set of equations: He starts with "The system you furnished" which means that Hilbert did not just send the action functional, and makes it relatively likely that the system was in explicit form. Then Einstein continues saying the main difficulty was not to get a covariant system of equations, which makes it clear that he regarded Hilbert's system as a covariant one. -De kludde 08:51, 1 April 2006 (UTC)

For me, the underlying idea of Hilbert's paper was that conservation of energy is automatic from the relation between symmetries and conservation laws if the field equations are derived from a covariant functional by the principle of least action. This cannot be belittled as a mere mathematical game (which some authors do), and of course this has never changed throughout the versions of his paper -De kludde 08:51, 1 April 2006 (UTC)

The formula for the variational derivative.
You are of course right that Winterberg did not explain why Hilbert moved the line containing the formula for the variational derivative. But possible explanations for this (that the lines immediately after H=K+L were a natural place for it in the first version, and why it was moved in the second) can of course be given. See my WN Wiki article, to which I added my own speculation about the content of the missing piece in response to your question. Scroll to "The author would like to give his own opinion". And it is perfectly possible that Winterberg was aware of such considerations. -De kludde 08:51, 1 April 2006 (UTC)

In any case, CRS failed to inform their readers that their version involves a speculation about the content of the missing piece of text they did not mention, in a clear breach of good practice for historians. For this reason I think they have a far bigger problem than Winterberg, who makes it clear that some speculation about the missing piece is required. -De kludde 08:51, 1 April 2006 (UTC)

Now concerning the difficulty of the calculation. This is of course relative, it may have been difficult for Einstein and not so difficult for Hilbert or vice versa. In any case I would argue that doing the calculation is probably not more difficult than guessing the correct field equations, which you assume was done by Einstein. -De kludde 08:51, 1 April 2006 (UTC)

You should not forget that Lorentz was, as far as I know, able to do the calculation by himself. Lorentz certainly was a clever man, but probably had little previous exposure to Riemannian geometry, where Hilbert was one of the most powerful mathematicians of his time. Todorov (second footnote on page 12) says it is easy. By the way, you are quoting Todorov but you should be aware that Todorov DISAGREES with CRS. According to Todorov: "On 20 November Hilbert presents to the Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften in Göttingen his work. He derives the correct equations from the variational principle assuming general covariance (we would say to day reparametrization invariance) and a second order equation for $$g_{\mu\nu}$$." (p. 9), "the unfounded accusations in (CRS 97)" (p. 12), "It is this type of overtly prejudiced [against Hilbert, -De kludde ] attitude that provokes uncommonly angry reactions as (LMP 04) and gives credibility to extremist publications as (Bje 03)." (p. 12). What Todorov defends is certainly not the CRS view. -De kludde 08:51, 1 April 2006 (UTC)

The alleged "mistake" in Hilbert's calculation of the derivative has been explained by Logunov et al. in [LMP04]. CRS make a lot of fuss about the possibility of non-linear terms arising, but it is clear that this is not the case if one takes into account that R is the sum of a linear form in the second and a quadratic form in the first derivatives of the gkl. Perhaps Hilbert should have pointed this out to his readers, but it must have been obvious to him, just as it was obvious to him that second order field equations are only obtained if non-linear functions of R are excluded (same argument, also not given in detail by Hilbert but clear, as the non-linearity destroys the above structure). Do you really want to insinuate that it takes the cooperation of a dozen Fields medalists and the use of a supercomputer (CRS compare it to the calculation of a billion digits of &pi;) to see this? -De kludde 08:51, 1 April 2006 (UTC)

Your other arguments
I agree that Einstein was "within a whisker" of the correct field equations. But then, Poincaré was also within a whisker of E=mc² as formulated by Einstein. Having been within a whisker of Hilbert's result does not justify taking this result and publishing it as his own. -De kludde 08:51, 1 April 2006 (UTC)

I don't see why you want to consider CRS' nit-picking of omissions in Hilbert's calculation of the variational derivative as a serious argument while at the same time you consider Winterberg's pointing out that the November 4 and 11 field equations were wrong as "unbalanced", unless you yourself are biased against Hilbert. -De kludde 08:51, 1 April 2006 (UTC)

As for the Mercury paper, there are certainly more flaws in its arguments than in Hilbert's argument about how to calculate the variational derivative. And it is clear from the paper that Einstein believed in his wrong field equations until November 17 or 18, when Hilbert's letter arrived. In the introduction Einstein says that he still believes in T=0 and adds the bizarre claim that "durch diese Hypothese Raum und Zeit der letzten Spur objektiver Realität beraubt werden", and on p. 834 he also (wrongly) says that T=0 is responsible for the difference between his November 18 calculations and his previous ones. But then he added a footnote claiming that T=0 is not necessary. This indicates that Einstein changed his opinion about T=0 at the last moment, as he could have removed all references to T=0 by retyping only two pages. And while it is true that his argument can be saved, the reason which he gave in the footnote is also wrong. -De kludde 08:51, 1 April 2006 (UTC)