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Experience shows that some people likes to rewrite history and make heroes, and when Steven Weinberg died in 2021, some obituaries could not resist the temptation. In 2005, Weinberg wrote an article titled "Einstein's Mistakes". I am not Weinberg and he was not Einstein, but I will write about Weinberg's mistakes in this post. Weinberg justified his review [1] of Einstein's mistakes in the following terms: "Perhaps most important, by showing that we are aware of mistakes made by even the greatest scientists, we set a good example to those who follow other supposed paths to truth. We recognize that our most important scientific forerunners were not prophets whose writings must be studied as infallible guides—they were simply great men and women who prepared the ground for the better understandings we have now achieved". I will not review all of Weinberg's mistakes, but only those which appear in the obituary written by Nima Arkani-Hamed: "How St

There is a myth, perpetuated in physics textbooks and popular treatises, that states that general relativity is the theory of a gravitational field. The myth was started by Einstein, who often used the term gravitational field during the development of the theory. The pioneers make a lot of mistakes because the territory is unknown, but there is no reason to continue perpetuating myths a century after Albert Einstein, Marcel Grossmann, and David Hilbert developed the theory of general relativity. Let me quote a recent tweet from cosmologist Will Kinney: in general relativity, the gravitational field doesn’t really exist . Understanding that general relativity is not a field theory is not only desirable for reasons of rigor and consistency, but has profound implications for research. For example, the sad status of quantum gravity research is partially because some physicists such as Feynman and Weinberg have tried to apply quantum field theoretic methods to a theory in which there is

The second law is one of the most popular laws of nature, because it is often discussed in popular science treatises and educative videos, but what is the more correct and general formulation of this law? According to P. W. Bridgman (1946 Nobel Prize in Physics) " There have been nearly as many formulations of the second law as there have been discussions of it ". We can find many historical verbal statements of the law, from when the science of thermodynamics was developing in the 19th century. Some examples: " A transformation whose only final result is to transfer heat from a body at a given temperature to a body at a higher temperature is impossible. " " It is impossible, by means of inanimate material agency, to derive mechanical effect from any portion of matter by cooling it below the temperature of the coldest of the surrounding objects. " " It is impossible to construct an engine which will work in a complete cycle, and produce no effect

I recently watched a talk by John Baez titled " Symmetric Monoidal Categories " [1]. Baez presents new mathematical material that he considers provides a common foundation for the description of different scientific and engineering topics, material that he considers to be a kind of " Rosetta stone ". Baez is correct that scientists and engineers like to describe processes or composite systems using diagrams: flow charts, Petri nets, electrical circuit diagrams, signal-flow graphs, chemical reaction networks, Feynman diagrams, etc. He claims that many of these diagrams fit into a common framework, the mathematics of symmetric monoidal categories, and that when we accept this achievement, we begin to see connections between seemingly different topics. Baez also claims that this new viewpoint introduces a paradigm shift in science. Let us go over all those interesting claims. My comments will focus on the scientific side of his talk. To get started, Baez says that s

This book does not offer an idealized view of physics, but a realistic view with its problems, inconsistencies, and limitations. Popular science books written by physicists, physics textbooks, and the professional physics literature contain misleading or easily misinterpreted claims, and such misconceptions and myths are preventing a fundamental understanding of Nature. This book identifies over two hundred common misconceptions in classical electrodynamics, thermodynamics, statistical mechanics, general relativity, quantum mechanics, and quantum field theory. The claims that the Coulomb gauge is not a physical gauge, that mass increases with velocity, that entropy is a quantity characterizing disorder, that general relativity is equivalent to the theory of a massless self-interacting spin-2 field, that molecular chaos is the source of irreversibility, that electrons and protons are sometimes particles and sometimes waves, and that relativistic quantum electrodynamics is a Lagrangian