Einstein or Newton

[Chaboo_Cleric]

Originally Posted by Saludeen [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

I'll quote his words instead so you can interpret it how you want:

"I hold that space cannot be curved, for the simple reason that it can have no properties. It might as well be said that God has properties. He has not, but only attributes and these are of our own making. Of properties we can only speak when dealing with matter filling the space. To say that in the presence of large bodies space becomes curved is equivalent to stating that something can act upon nothing. I, for one, refuse to subscribe to such a view."

Okay I'll bite.


In the nineteenth century, there was only one known geometry of space, which Euclid had described two millennia before. Synthetic geometers were picking at the Euclid's parallel postulate, looking for ways to deduce it from his other postulates, when they realized that perfectly reasonable non-Euclidean geometries do actually exist. These are the elliptic and hyperbolic geometries of Gauss, Lobachevsky, Bolyai and so forth. Each is characterized by a single length scale, the curvature radius. Analytic geometers, including Gauss again and especially Riemann, then realized that actually there were infinitely many different geometries whose curvatures vary from one point to another. Curvature, and spatial geometry in general, is like a physical field: it can vary from place to place.

Riemann was the first to point out the immediate implication of his realization of the infinite variety of geometries space might have. Namely, the geometry of the physical space we live in is a question _for_experiment_. We may no longer blithely assume it to be Euclidean for simplicity, as Newton did. Einstein forty years later or so identified the physical effect of spatial curvature with the gravitational field.

I would argue that Tesla's assertion that space has no properties is itself hopelessly metaphysical. If one fixes spatial geometry out of aesthetics and denies from the beginning that it can be dynamical, how can one possibly probe the question scientifically? Plus, general relativity works so very well to describe things we actually observe. Curved spacetime, to the best of our current scientific knowledge, is simply a fact.

I mean I can start listing various experiment showcasing general relativity; such as when scientists measured starlight coming from behind the sun during a full eclipse...if space did not curve the light would not have curved around the sun and we would not have seen it).

What Tesla was mainly opposed to Einstein about was "Special relativity", and theirs plenty of articles and documentation explaining why.


The list goes on. Did you just want to try to troll with Tesla's infamous quotes? Let's be real here , Tesla was a great inventor , but Einstein has the best sound system to use to understand what we do in that field. Soon as someone can prove Tesla's Rays , maybe I'll open up a little bit more.