Slashdot Mirror
Einstein Unveiled
John_Renne writes "One of the most well known scientists in the near history is Albert Einstein. Pictures of him can be found on allmost everything varying from lunchboxes to t-shirts and cartoons. On the other hand there's little knowledge of who Einstein really was and the human being behind the genius. This article tries to create a view of the inner Einstein. A nice read for everyone interested in the person inside the phenomenon."
The Einstein Scrapbook is also a very good read on the life of Einstein. It is mostly just a printing of all of his personal papers/essays/letters that he left to be archived at The Hebrew University.
Mine is "Imagination is more important than knowledge".
In any case, I found this site a while back. It's somewhat of a tutorial on Einstein, allowing you to do "Easy" or "Advanced", and fairly informative.
Theory of Relativity
I read a book on Einstein's life (i think it may simply have been called 'Einstein').
Well, the article forgets a whole lot of things, unless i have totally messed recollection of that book.
First, they don't even tell us Einstein got a Nobel Prize... and not even for relativity itself ! IIRC, he got it for explaining some optical phenomena (dual particle / light nature of photons)
Second, article forgets to tell that Israel did propose him to run for presidency there, which he declined.
Third, the 1919 experiment actually had MESSED UP results (that was found later) !!! So it didn't confirm Einstein's theory... which, granted, was confirmed later.
Fourth, Einstein introduced some constant in the relativity's equations so that the universe is static, which was his deep belief.
And don't forget his fun quote: God doesn't play with dice (i do think it's from him)
Tsuyoikoto ha taisetsu da ne, dakedo namida mo hitsuyousa (Strength is an important thing, but tears too are necessary)
First, they don't even tell us Einstein got a Nobel Prize... and not even for relativity itself ! IIRC, he got it for explaining some optical phenomena (dual particle / light nature of photons)
Actually, the photoelectric effect was one of the basis of "old" QM and is well-deserving of a Nobel all by itself.
In fact, A.E. deserved at least 3 seperate Nobels : photo-electric effect, SRT, GRT (in reverse order of importance) are all Nobel-worthy just by themselves.
These are the ones I know of , very probably there are more.
However since they never give the Nobel more than once, indeed the Nobel should have been given to relativity theory.
Working for necessity's mother.
Don't forget his fun quote: God doesn't play with dice
And don't forget this little uncertainty gem either:
"A mouse cannot change the universe just by looking at it." -A.E.
Or this beauty from his wife (Speaking with an astronomer boasting about his new telescope with which he "examines the workings of the universe"):
"Really? My husband uses the back of an old envelope."
A 2-page article is hardly going to make you a know-it-all on this man. It's a good overview, but please don't go away from it thinking you're an expert on his life. (That's just a pet peeve of mine, like people who saw a Ken Burns series and now think they're Civil War experts).
What the article barely touches on, for example, is that (like Russell) he turned from science and philosophy to political activism later in life, complete with a heaping FBI file. Read his own words if you want to. There's also an interesting story about Einstein's brain!
Woah there, you're mixing up autism (a mental disorder originating characterized by self-absorption, inability to interact socially, repetitive behavior, and language dysfunction) with synaesthesia (a condition in which one type of stimulation evokes the sensation of another, as when the hearing of a sound produces the visualization of a color). While it is possible that Einstein was slightly autistic, savants are not usually as charismatic and witty as he seems to have been; the savant pays a huge price from other cognitive areas for their heightened ability in one area.
"I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it."
[from Albert Einstein - The Human Side,Selected and Edited by Helen Dukas and Banesh Hoffman, Princeton University Press, 1979]
This certainly doesn't make Einstein a devout Jew - the Jewish religion is very much about a personal god. His god is the same as Spinoza's, and Spinoza was excommunicated by his fellow Jews.
For more about Einstein and religion, see this.
Ubi dubium ibi libertas: Where there is doubt, there is freedom.
There are some interesting memories of Einstein in John Archibald Wheeler's Geons, Black Holes, and Quantum Foam: A Life in Physics. Wheeler was also Feynman's thesis adviser.
You can only drink 30 or 40 glasses of beer a day, no matter how rich you are.
-- Colonel Adolphus Busch
Marie Curie has also won two Nobel Prizes (Physics 1903, Chemistry 1911)
Also, the Peace Prize granted to Pauling could have just as easily gone to Einstein, as they were both very active in ensuring that mankind did not nuke himself. Both were very strong advocates of peace. However, the noble prize is not awarded posthumorously.
The significant problems we face cannot be solved by the same level of thinking that created them. -Einstein
There is right now a huge exhibit on Einstein at the American Museum of Natural History in NYC. Worth checking out if you're in the area over the next few months.
No, Einstein never denied that Quantum Mechanics fits the known experimental data perfectly or claimed that further experiments would show that QM was wrong. Einstein was himself one of the founding fathers of QM and a master in using the predicting powers of the theory, predicting QM-phenomena like LASERs and Bose-Einstein condensation, decades before they were seen in any lab.
What Einstein never accepted was the interpretation given to the mathematical framework of QM by Bohr, Heisenberg, Born and others. Einstein was not alone in resisting the philosophical/physical interpretation by the "Copenhagen school" , he was joined by people like Planck, Schroedinger, and de Broglie who all knew a bit about QM. (But as always, the old generation dies out and the new generation have gotten used to the new world view.)
Einstein believed in a deterministic universe (just as Newton, Laplace and the other classic mechanics guys before), where when you knew the starting conditions perfectly, you could calculate what happened. This is how to understand the statement "God does not play with dices". "God" knows what is going to happen, He does not only know the odds are for something to happen. This is contrary to Bohr who claim that "God" (or the physicist) can only know the different possible outcomes from some given starting condition and the probability of the different outcomes. According to the uncertainty principle "God" can not even hope to know the starting conditions perfectly.
The answer to QM by Einstein was the so-called "hidden variables" theory, variables that behave in a deterministic way but lead to behaviour that looks random in the experiments that were used to "prove" QM. Einstein also made famous thought experiments to show the inconsistency in the logic of the Copenhagen school, like the EPR paradox.
Today most physicist believe Einsteins objections to QM has been shown to be wrong, and Bohr's interpretation has become the dogma. But who knows? Newton thought light consisted of particles, but was proven wrong. Then Einstein showed that light can be seen as both waves and photon-particles. So, maybe in some hundred years Einstein's objections to QM can be shown to be a "bit" correct :-).
--- guns don't kill people, people with guns kill people ---