I have seen this man in many professional documentaries (not like history channel shit). He seems extremely
intelligent and knowledgeable. It would be an honor to learn under someone as genius as this man

lol what's wrong with national geographic? and let me guess your professional documentary is " What the bleep do we know? "

The history channel is full of nonsensical, pseudoscience garbage. Everything pertains to 2012, some kind of religious intervention, aliens, or the Alamo.

And no, but good try. I've seen him in several; two that I remember. One was a discussion of quantum physics, and one was a discussion of the applications of E=mc².

Butthurt over his new book the grand design apparently

Einstein wasn't much for the statistical interpretation of QM, you're right, but that's not the comparison I was making. Matrix2591 was denouncing Stephen Hawking for being a theoretical physicist, as if that somehow makes him less of an authority than he would be otherwise. The fact that Einstein was also a theoretical physicist doesn't mean his ideas on relativity and Brownian motion were completely ludicrous or off-base. That's more to the point of what I was saying.

yeah i get that. however i just assumed since we were talking about him QM was given as the discipline in question.

by your original definition of theoretical physicists, everyone who studies physics would be included. all of physics is still theoretical. take gravity for instance. we have no clue what it is. however we perform tests to determine how objects react to it. with that we develop statistical probabilities.

in this regard all physicists are theoretical ones. however there are many subsets from this particular discipline and some (QM) are much more theoretical than the others. it was for this reason that einstein expressed his dislike for the subject matter, it was too theoretical and not based off even indirect observations.

This post was edited by zeratul87 on Dec 7 2010 05:11pm

Well, there are theoretical physicists and there are experimental physicists. Some physicists only need a pad of paper, a pen, and an infinite supply of coffee to do their work. Others needs multi-million dollar labs to perform experiments. Clearly Hawking couldn't possibly be an experimental physicist because that'd require too much movement for what he's capable of doing. There is a lot of overlap between these two classes of physicists, of course, since every experimental physicist is also capable of interpreting their results. A lot of the time though, people design experiments to perform only after they have a theory to test, and that's where the theoretical physicists come in to play.

I don't know enough about Einstein to know why he didn't like QM specifically. I just know he didn't like the idea that quantum particles didn't have definite properties until they were measured, and even then the results of a measurement depended on a statistical model. That's different from the way we approach gravity. Based on current theories, we know pretty very well how objects will react on the macro scale. This theory is incomplete due to the fact that it doesn't mesh with quantum mechanics, and I'm sure you already know that.

In the future, some theoretical physicist will come up with the theory that can describe quantum gravity as well as be extended to the macro scale. After he releases the theory, experimental physicists will find ways to test the theory and determine how accurate it is or not. In the mean time, I'm sure there will be many other theories that end up being disproven.

about ten minutes ago i told a friend to turn that aliens wwII jesus ghosts crap off.. forgot about the 2012

Yeah guys, trust him.