Slashdot Mirror
100 Years of Einstein
spacerabbits writes "A century after Einstein's miracle year, most people still do not understand exactly what it was he did. The Economist tries to elucidate what AE did in a recent article."
← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)
Your desk is all squared away. Yep, all squaaaaaaaaaaaared away.
If you really want to get a handle on what Einstein did and what his work has influenced, I would recommend buying The Elegant Universe by Brian Green. Somehow it found it's way onto my Amazon wishlist a few years ago (I don't remember putting it there), and my mom bought it for me for xmas. I've read about half of it so far and it's amazing stuff. It's about the (super)string theory, which essentially ties together Einstein's theory of relativity and quantum physics. I can feel my brain get bigger as I read it.
Einstein speaks!
A blog like any other.
Albert Einstein's Theory of Relativity
... well, from what? You'd have to say that you don't even get to use a word like "move" when you are the only body in that void. Sure. Okay.
In Words of Four Letters or Less
[ 0 ]
So, have a seat. Put your feet up. This may take some time. Can I get you some tea? Earl Grey? You got it.
Okay. How do I want to do this? He did so much. It's hard to just dive in. You know? You pick a spot to go from, but soon you have to back up and and go over this or that item, and you get done with that only to see that you have to back up some more. So if you feel like I'm off to the side of the tale half the time, well, this is why. Just bear with me, and we'll get to the end in good time. Okay?
Okay. Let's see....
[ I ]
Say you woke up one day and your bed was gone. Your room, too. Gone. It's all gone. You wake up in an inky void. Not even a star. Okay, yes, it's a dumb idea, but just go with it. Now say you want to know if you move or not. Are you held fast in one spot? Or do you, say, list off to the left some? What I want to ask you is: Can you find out? Hell no. You can see that, sure. You don't need me to tell you. To move, you have to move to or away from
Now, let's add the bed back. Your bed is with you in the void. But not for long -- it goes away from you. You don't have any way to get it back, so you just let it go. But so now we have a body in the void with you. So does the bed move, or do you move? Or both? Well, you can see as well as I that it can go any way you like. Flip a coin. Who's to say? It's best to just say that you move away from the bed, and that the bed goes away from you. No one can say who's held fast and who isn't.
Now, if I took the bed back but gave you the sun -- just you and the sun in the void, now -- I'll bet you'd say that the sun is so big, next to you, that odds are you move and not the sun. It's easy to move a body like ours, and not so easy to kick a sun to and fro. But that isn't the way to see it. Just like with the bed, no one can say who's held fast.
In a word, you can't find any one true "at rest". Izzy was the one who told us that. Izzy said that you can't tell if you move or are at rest at any time. You can say that you go and all else is at rest, or you can say that you are at rest and all else goes. It all adds up the same both ways. So we all knew that much from way back when.
Aha, but now wait! The sun puts off rays! So: why not look at how fast the rays go past you? From that you'd see how fast you move, yes? For you see, rays move just the same if what puts them off is held fast or not. (Make a note of that, now.) Izzy had no way to know that, back then, but it's true. Rays all move the same. We call how fast that is: c. So, you can see how fast the rays go by you, and how far off that is from c will tell you how fast you move! Hell, you don't even need the sun for that. You can just have a lamp with you -- the one by your bed that you use to read by. You can have that lamp in your hand, and see how fast the rays go by you when you turn it on. The lamp will move with you, but the rays will move at c. You will see the rays move a bit more or less than c, and that will be how fast you move. An open-and-shut case, yes?
Well, and so we went to test this idea out. Hey, you don't need to be in a void to do this test. We move all the time, even as we sit here. We spin, in fact. So they shot some rays off and took note of how fast they went east, and how fast they went west, and so on. Well, what do you know? The rays went just as fast both ways. All ways, in fact. They all went at c, just the same. Not an iota more or less.
To say that we were less than glad to find that out is to be kind. It blew the mind, is more like it. "What is up with that?" we said. And here is when old Al came in.
[ II ]
Old Al, he came out the blue and said, "Not only do rays move at c if what puts them out is held fast or not: they move at
I asked 7 people in my office what elucidate meant. Only one person knew, some shrugged, and one asked me if that was really a word *sigh*
Another good book is 'Relativity and Common Sense'. It explains the logical progression from Newton to Einstein. It starts off with Gravity, newtonian principles and then starts adding twists. However, I think that quantom mechanics probably was a bigger discovery than Einstein. The concept of chance at the atomic level was a revelation, and even Einstein had trouble accepting it. However, we can only hope that within our lifetime, someone will succeed in crafting the 'THeory of Everything' which combines theory of large objects such as Planets, galaxies of Einstein with the theory of small things such as atoms of quantam mechanics. Maybe M (string theory) is the answer, maybe not. But these are exciting times we live in!
Grandson (who hasn't a clue, but can't admit it): Well, you see, relative to me, you're old, but relative to a sea turtle, you're young...
(Long silence.)
Old Man: So. From this, your Einstein makes a living?
...I can certainly appreciate Einstein's sheer genius, particularly when it came to relativity. It was Einstein who postulated that, essentially, absolutely everything was relative. You hear all the examples about going around the sun in a spaceship really fast, or the twins paradox, but it doesn't really just stop there. There are all kinds of weird things that happen when you go really fast; for example, your size changes. If I'm driving my car really really fast (and of course, we're talking close to the speed of light), my vehicle actually becomes shorter. Then as I slow down, it stretches out again. At the beginning of the 20th century, no doubt what a lot of Einstein proposed sounded like sheer madness.
In his later years, though, Einstein became increasingly conservative and very resistant to the idea of uncertainty, formulated by Bohr and Heisenberg. Einstein, from a generation of research before these two scientists, was still a determinist; he believed that you could not only discover both the position and velocity (speed and direction) of a particle, but that if you knew all such properties of all particles, you could accurately predict the state of things far in the future. I became disappointed with Einstein when I learned that, in the late 30s and 40s, even when faced with overwhelming evidence to support the ontic and epistemic uncertainty principles, Einstein tried lots of clever thought experiments to prove them wrong, even though they all relied on knowing more than one mutually incompatible property at once. I think Einstein contributed a lot, but he also made a lot of mistakes later in his life.
Take off every sig. For great justice.
This works if your browser doesn't insert spaces after each line. Otherwise you'll have to remove them by hand. If I remember correctly it's a couple hundred megs.
a 1a1afb6ae049ae214fc034aad839a9198\f 362d841a61948bf2688f01f87fb\b /nova_eu_30[12-14]c[01-\
:)
curl -f "http://a768.g.akamai.net/5/768/142/3f9e\
9589/1
5ea187bea5786
6fdf0e7ceb61c22186f
08]_mp4_300.mov" -O
The joys of curl | strings
It's not surprising that you had a professor who hated Einstein. Scientists are notorious for hating one another- often for absurd reasons- but also often out of jealousy or simply from a difference of "professional" opinion. I once knew two research engineering professors, from the same department, who would try to get each others research grants cancelled simply because they disagreed on some theories.
Here are some Einstein quotes from Wisdomtoday.com - a daily quote e-mail:
Strange is our situation here on earth. Each of us comes for a short visit, not knowing why, yet sometimes seeming to divine a purpose. From the standpoint of daily life, however, there is one thing we do know: that man is here for the sake of other men - above all for those upon whose smiles and well-being our own happiness depends.
- Albert Einstein
I cannot imagine a God who rewards and punishes the objects of his creation, whose purposes are modeled after our own - a God, in short, who is but a reflection of human frailty. Neither can I believe that the individual survives the death of his body, although feeble souls harbor such thoughts through fear or ridiculous egotisms.
- Albert Einstein
As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.
- Albert Einstein
Make things as simple as possible, but no simpler.
- Albert Einstein
Technological progress is like an axe in the hands of a pathological criminal.
- Albert Einstein
The significant problems we face can not be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them.
- Einstein
It is easier to denature plutonium than to denature the evil spirit of man.
- Albert Einstein
Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity opinions which differ from that of their social environment.
- Albert Einstein
The important thing is not to stop questioning.
- Albert Einstein
Space tells matter how to move. Matter tells space how to curve.
The best definition I've found till date. If you can wrap your head around that, you're in the clear!
it's not that physicists hate Einstein, it's more they hate how people view Einstein. it's mostly because Einstein became the poster-boy for the media about modern physics. as we know, the media tends to simplify things and so it suggests that Einstein did relativity, photoelectric effect, etc. by himself.
given that Newton said he had seen far only because he stood on the shoulders of giants, Einstein is even more indebted to others before and during his time.
look, i'm not saying that he wasn't a remarkable physicist- when i read some of his papers, i do feel like i'm reading something that's very close to 'god'- so clear, so elegant, so beautiful.
yes, i am a physicist. and yes, i do find myself using Einstein's results. i'm glad when it happens, because i *feel* i'm close to reality.
From the article:
Abraham Pais, a physicist who wrote what is generally regarded as the definitive scientific biography of Einstein, said of his subject that there are two things at which he was "better than anyone before or after him; he knew how to invent invariance principles and how to make use of statistical fluctuations."
This is a great one-line summary of what made Einstein an outstanding physicist.
The use of invariance principles is still finding its way slowly into other subjects. Jaynes' work on probability is an excellent example of the power of invariance principles--he derives all of probability theory from a few basic postulates, including the condition that conclusions be invariant under transformations in the path used to reach them.
--Tom
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
Note: "Herb" actually refers to Hermann Minkowski. (And "Izzy" and "Ari" are, of course, Isaac Newton and Aristotle.)
http://www.muppetlabs.com/~breadbox/txt/al.html
I'm so confused......
For laypeople, I think the best book introducing Einstein's theories in an understandable way is Relativity Visualized by L. Epstein.
http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosop hy/works/fr/poincare.htm
What he describes in his paper is quite similar to the Special Relativity of Einstein, although he does not explain it as clearly and as completely as Einstein does. But why history keeps him the shadow I'll never understand.
It appears to come from here.
First off, I'm a physics grad student with nothing but the utmost respect for Einstein's work, and I make use of it's consequences frequently. He did some of the most beautiful stuff in the history of physics. Nonetheless, I think that his mythos may have arguably had a detrimental effect on theoretical physics and its public perception.
When asked what he would have thought if solar eclipse had not confirmed general relativity, Einstein famously responded something like he "would have been sorry for the dear Lord - the theory is correct!". The general picture people have is that Einstein sat in a room, thought really hard, and figured out how the world was supposed to be without ever needing to go out and LOOK at it. This idea has inspired generations of young physicists to think that the "real" route to truth about the world is mathematical insight. Over the ensuing century, however, this has essentially never been the case - the biggest breakthroughs generally come when an experiment sees something weird (i.e. discovers new particles or behaviors) and a theorist comes up with a mathematical picture that makes all the weird observations fit together. Experiments are still important - it's not just Plato sitting in his cave imagining how the world ought to be. Beautiful mathematical models of fundamental physics very frequently turn out to be experimentally wrong!
Outside of physics, the public image of Einstein has arguably breathed life into the legions of crackpots who think they know the theory of everything, claim that quantum mechanics is "obviously" wrong, etc. Everyone learns in school that Einstein was terrible at mathematics growing up and that he did his best work as a patent clerk, not at a university. Many people are encouraged by this, thinking that the best work comes from "outside the system" and need not involve a thorough understanding of the details of current science.
Unfortunately, this is not true. Einstein was quite good at mathematics (had he been a bit more versed in fancy Reimannian geometry, however, general relativity might have happened faster). He had a Ph.D. from one of the world's most prestigious grad schools. He was working as a patent clerk to pay the bills simply because he hadn't yet gotten a teaching job (they were scarce, and even in later years Einstein never did much teaching).
The point is that he knew his stuff (experimental results and current theory). Too many people think they can walk in off the street with no substantial knowledge of physics or mathematics and give a "common sense" alternative to modern physics that doesn't involve any of the "hard stuff". It usually turns out that their work contradicts some experimental result that they never bothered to learn about. I often see e-mails about such ideas that cite Einstein as an example of how an outsider with no knowledge can change a field. In principle, a gifted outsider with a new insight can change any field. In practice (as Einstein shows), it's good to know what others know first.