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Talk:Theory of relativity (view source)
Revision as of 23:05, September 3, 2018
, 23:05, September 3, 2018→"Household name" claim
What made someone a "household name" is not of scientific interest. The [[fake news]] of the 1919 eclipse, and how media ran with it, hardly seems to be of encyclopedic value in a scientific entry. The implication that [[fake news]] must be true if people believe is not enlightening.--[[User:Aschlafly|Andy Schlafly]] ([[User talk:Aschlafly|talk]]) 16:46, 3 September 2018 (EDT)
What made someone a "household name" is not of scientific interest. The [[fake news]] of the 1919 eclipse, and how media ran with it, hardly seems to be of encyclopedic value in a scientific entry. The implication that [[fake news]] must be true if people believe is not enlightening.--[[User:Aschlafly|Andy Schlafly]] ([[User talk:Aschlafly|talk]]) 16:46, 3 September 2018 (EDT)
:Information about Einstein's rise to fame is admittedly not appropriate for an actual science textbook. A physics textbook would describe Galileo's accomplishments in mechanics (leading to what we now call "Galilean relativity") and astronomy (telescope, moons of Jupiter, etc.) but would probably not discuss in any detail his problems with the Catholic Church.
:However, this an encyclopedia, not a physics textbook, and a certain amount of "fluff" or or societal material appears in many CP articles. For example, the articles on Madonna Ciccone, Taylor Swift, Elvis Presley, Johannes Kepler, Stephen Hawking, Marie Curie, William Herschel, Wolfgang Mozart, and Ludwig van Beethoven, to name just a minuscule fraction of our articles, all have "soft" material on why they are famous.
:Like it or not, Einstein is a household name. If it weren't, would you be fighting so hard against him? And he got that way in 1919 because of the eclipse. I happen to disagree that that's his signature achievement. But it's the achievement that, for better or worse, got the headlines and made him a superstar.
:If the eclipse observations had been wrong, that fame would have been taken away. But Eddington's result was right while his methods were wrong.<ref>''Einstein's Luck'', John Waller, Oxford University Press, ISBN 0-19-860719-9</ref> Eddington lucked out and got away with it, and the flaws in his analysis weren't discovered until decades later with the advent of more precise methods for analyzing experiments.
:It is far better to say that people believed the eclipse news (else how could we explain how Einstein became a household word?) but Eddington's methods were wrong (This is exactly what the article says!) than to censor that information and leave people in the dark about Einstein's fame.
:[[User:SamHB|SamHB]] ([[User talk:SamHB|talk]]) 19:05, 3 September 2018 (EDT)
== References ==
== References ==
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