Search Ideas

Germs cause infectious diseases, and they pass from one person to the next by touch, in water or food, and through the air, on droplets so small that they float. Tuberculosis spreads that way.

Quantum theory applies to everything, observers included, and nothing ever collapses. An observer measuring something branches: each branch sees one definite outcome, and every outcome the equations allow is seen in some branch. All the branches are actual, none more real than the rest.

General relativity can’t be the whole truth about gravity. Together with quantum theory, it implies that gravity can’t be measured precisely in tiny regions of space. So the smooth spacetime of general relativity must break down there.

The planets go around the Sun, as Kepler said, but the Sun isn’t at rest either. Carrying them along, it circles the far-off center of the Milky Way, as the stars around us do, those nearer the center faster.

Light is a quantum field. Its energy comes in quanta, photons, each taken up whole at one place. But the chance of finding a photon here or there spreads and interferes like a wave: each photon interferes only with itself. So light makes interference stripes and knocks out electrons alike.

X-rays bounced off electrons come back with longer waves, the longer the more sharply they’re deflected. A wave would come back with its wavelength unchanged. The shift is just what it should be if each quantum collides with a single electron, like one billiard ball with another.

The eclipse photos of 1919 show starlight bent by between about 1.6 and 2.0 arcseconds at the edge of the Sun, as general relativity predicts.

Starlight passing the Sun is bent about twice as much as Newton’s law allows.

Einstein’s prediction that the Sun bends starlight by 1.7 arcseconds hasn’t been tested yet. The eclipse of May 29, 1919, can test it, since the Sun will be among the many bright stars of the Hyades.

Einstein’s equation fits my measurements of light knocking electrons out of metals, for every color I tried. But quanta can’t explain how light interferes and bends into shadows, which waves explain so well. The equation still lacks a sound theory.

General relativity explains it. It makes Mercury’s perihelion move 43 arcseconds per century more than Newton’s law does, with no hidden matter needed.

General relativity has to explain the extra movement of Mercury’s perihelion, which Newton’s law can’t.

Gravity isn’t a force pulling across empty space. It’s the bending of space and time by matter and energy. Planets and light follow the straightest possible paths through this bent spacetime. Starlight passing the edge of the Sun is bent by about 1.7 arcseconds.

My calculation of 1911 only counted how gravity slows time. It left out how gravity bends space, which bends light just as much again. So starlight passing the edge of the Sun is bent by about 1.7 arcseconds, not 0.83.

Clouds covered the Sun during the eclipse, so we couldn’t measure how much the starlight was bent.

Gravity bends light. Starlight passing the edge of the Sun is bent by about 0.83 arcseconds.

Photographs from the eclipses of 1901, 1905, and 1908 show no planet inside Mercury’s orbit big enough to explain its motion. Whatever moves Mercury’s perihelion, it isn’t a planet, or anything else bright enough to photograph.

Lenard found that brighter light knocks more electrons out of a metal, but not faster ones. A spreading wave would shake the electrons harder the brighter it is, and send them out faster.

Light’s energy comes in packets, quanta, each with an energy proportional to the light’s frequency, so bluer light has more energetic quanta. Each quantum is taken up whole, by one electron.

In Hamburg’s epidemic, the town of Altona next door was largely spared, on the same soil and under the same sky. Only its water differs: Altona filters it. The germ in the water decides it, not the soil.

Not everyone who swallows a germ falls ill, as with any infection. One man’s mild illness doesn’t show that the germ needs anything more.

I drank a culture of the cholera germ and got nothing worse than diarrhea. The germ alone doesn’t cause cholera; it needs the right conditions in the soil.

The cause of cholera is a comma-shaped bacterium, which I found in 1883 and 1884 in the intestines of its victims.

Anthrax comes from one particular germ. Grown outside any animal for eight generations, it still gives mice anthrax. Its spores survive in the soil for years, which is why some pastures stay deadly, whatever their air.

Decay doesn’t come about by itself. As Pasteur showed, it’s the work of germs, living things that get in from outside and multiply. What spreads infection is the germs, not decaying matter as such.