MétaCan
Menu
Back to cohort
Record W3112994485 · doi:10.4006/0836-1398-33.4.380

Langevin's influence on relativity theories

2020· article· en· W3112994485 on OpenAlexvenueno aff
Douglas A. Staley

Bibliographic record

VenuePhysics Essays · 2020
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldEngineering
TopicGeophysics and Sensor Technology
Canadian institutionsnot available
Fundersnot available
KeywordsPhysicsTheory of relativityEinsteinSpeed of light (cellular automaton)Theoretical physicsSpecial relativityGeneral relativityEmission theoryClassical mechanicsQuantum mechanicsTest theories of special relativityFour-force

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

A century ago, Paul Langevin [C. R. 173, 831 (1921)], through his influence, convinced the scientific community that Einstein's theories of relativity were correct and could explain the Sagnac effect. A simple note in Comptes Rendus was all it took to silence many prominent skeptical scientists. The relativity skeptics had pointed to Sagnac's experiment [C. R. 157, 1410 (1913)] with the interference of counter rotating light beams as proof that the speed of light was not the same in both directions, contrary to the key postulate in Einstein's theory. Langevin showed that the result was also explained by relativity. The rest is history, and relativity has remained a center piece of theoretical physics ever since. Langevin had been captivated by solar eclipse observations of a shifted star pattern near the sun as reported by Eddington [Report on the Relativity Theory of Gravitation (Fleetway Press, Ltd., London, 1920)]. This was taken as proof positive for Einstein's General Theory of Relativity. The case of a light beam split into two beams, which propagate in opposite directions around a circuit, has an analog in a simple thought experiment—a speed test for runners. Two runners can be timed on a running track with the runners going around the track in opposite directions. Two stop watches will display the time for each runner's return to the starting position. The arithmetic difference in time shown on each stop watch will provide the differences in speed between the two runners. If the two speeds are the same, the time difference will be zero. It would not make any sense for one of the stop watches to measure a negative time, that is, time moving into the past. In fact, the idea is absurd! However, Langevin did just that, assigned the time for light to travel in one direction as positive while the time for the light to traverse in the opposite direction as negative, moving into the past! By so doing, Langevin reproduced Sagnac's expression and declared that relativity explains Sagnac's experiment. Langevin was wrong!

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame machine prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.009
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.022
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Theoretical or conceptual · Consensus signal: Theoretical or conceptual
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.009
Threshold uncertainty score0.060

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0090.022
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0020.001
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0020.003
Bibliometrics0.0030.002
Science and technology studies0.0030.016
Scholarly communication0.0050.010
Open science0.0020.004
Research integrity0.0050.019
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0060.003

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.011
GPT teacher head0.190
Teacher spread0.179 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designTheoretical or conceptual
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

Quick stats

Citations0
Published2020
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

Explore more

Same venuePhysics EssaysSame topicGeophysics and Sensor TechnologyFrench-language works237,207