Slashdot Mirror
PBS Features Einstein's Famous Equation
porp writes "On Tuesday, October 11th at 8PM EDT, PBS will feature a docudrama about Einstein's discovery of his famous E=mc^2 equation. The program will include details explaining those who came before him and the development of his miracle year. The pinnacle of which according to the program was his discovery that matter and energy are two sides of the same coin. Yahoo summarizes the program details in length." From the article: "Based on David Bodanis' best-seller 'E=mc2: A Biography of the World's Most Famous Equation,' the program explores the lives of the men and women who helped develop concepts behind each term: E for energy; m for mass; c for the speed of light; and 2 for 'squared,' the multiplication of one number by itself."
""The Miracle Year" documents the quest of a mother and her son as they enter the underworld of physics to take on relativity and the icon of 20th century physics."
http://www.themiracleyear.com/
E = [(p2c2) + m2c4]1/2
"If you put butter and salt on it, it tastes like salty butter." -Terry Pratchet, on Popcorn.
Does this mean it tells you how long the program lasts? Or does it perhaps indicate that E=mc^2 contains six characters? Surely the editors would have picked up on nonsense implying a lengthy precis of the program.
I'll be ordering that video as soon as possible.
"and 2 for 'squared,' the multiplication of one number by itself"
is that what that means?
how useful of them to explain that, i never learned that in the courses for my COMPUTER SCIENCE DEGREE. geeze.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
I remember seeing a torrent floating around the web by the same name for a while now. Is the PBS broadcast the same one? Have they simply licensed it from someone else or is it their own production? The one I saw was pretty cool, with re-enacments of lives of Davy, Lavoisser (spelling?) and a few others.
Slashdot is a TV Guide now huh?
If it's as informative and entertaining as Yahoo Serious's "Young Einstein," I'm sold!
Your desk is all squared away. Yep, all squaaaaaaaaaaaared away. (I couldn't find an image to link to--sorry!
OpenSource.MathCancer.org: open source comp bio
This is, ostensibly, a site which features news for nerds. If you can show me a true nerd who doesn't know what E=mc^2 represents, or even what ^2 means, then I will weep. Couldn't the submitter use something a little more interesting to us?
Anybody know off hand how/where I can buy this and other older PBS productions? Much obliged..
Didn't I see that advertised on a TV infomercial?
I seem to remember that a group of physicists disproved the formula. Can anyone remember whom?
Retired from software... maybe. Sort of.
Everyone knows that it was the Wacko Brothers and their sister Dot selling kid scout cookies to Einstein that helped him create E=mc^2, by singing the Acme song.
"Some days you just can't get rid of a bomb."
If I'm not mistaken, this is the same documentary as here.
It's a pretty interesting show.
Let's play video games with mailmanZERO
Pfff, everyone knows how he developed his famous formula: E=mA^2 ....No
E=mB^2 ....No
E=mC^2 ....Eureka
That or he stole it from the patent office
Given scientests have managed to make light go slower and indications that some of the universes constants have not been fixed thoughout its lifetime and are constantly changing albeit on such a small scale we dont notice. Could you get a different value for E from the same mass by varying the speed of light, and if light can get slower would that potentialy mean that Energy is being lost or is that touching into relativity.
--
If life was simple, there simply wouldn't be any life
--
When /. points to Yahoo for "news" about Einstein, and the next item is Y-news is "The Worlds Worst Bathrooms", I hope a few E, M, and C squared smite the editors.
If this is the same program as this Channel4 production, then I highly recommend it. Although undoubtedly it has nothing to offer the Slashdot crowd from a science standpoint, the human face it puts on scientists we all too often only know from their work is excellent.
Is it really that important, or is it because it's popular culture media-friendly?
It was on over here in Scotland a few weeks ago. Nothing to get worked up about, it's been hideously dumbed down as you'd expect of anything on TV these days.
The wind blew so cold
The fan won't turn any more
Files die in the heat
Why wasn't it mentioned on the program that relativity is "just a theory", and that there is "intense debate" over it, as it seems to happen in biology?
People should realize that the M in e=mc^2 is not the widely known idea of mass. Most people think that a bowling ball that weighs 10 pounds has a set mass no matter what. But in Einstein's equation mass is more like inertia. A moving bowling ball has more mass than one at rest. So you can not simply take a 10 kilogram object and multiply it by the speed of light squared to get its energy. This means you must first complete the equation for m first, which I do not know off hand.
So the idea of mass that most people know is called rest mass. It took me a while to realize that they meant an object could increase mass but gain no atoms or extra "material". Since most objects we can see and touch don't even go 1% the speed of light, we never notice this increase. For almost all practical cases(even a plan going mach 3) we can consider its mass to be rest mass and still be accurate to within many many decimal places.
The book in the original article comment is why this is a big deal. In the book, they dissect every point of it, and each points history. It's a fun history book, really. So, if the PBS thing follows the book, even nerds would have something to look forward to...
The symbol c in the subject equation, and generally, stands for the speed of light in a vacuum, 299792452 meters/second. In any other medium light travels slower than c, by a factor equal to the inverse of the index of refraction. Id est, for water the index of refraction is about 4/3, so light travels through water 3/4 as fast as it does through vacuum.
While people may have set up interesting media through which light travels at some odd speed, no one has ever observed light traveling through a vacuum at other than c. Indeed, it's a bedrock principle of relativity that it cannot.
Interestingly, the eerie blue glow you see coming from nuclear reactor cores that live at the bottom of pools of water (called Cerenkov radiation) is emitted by particles coming from the core that are traveling faster than the speed of light in water (although of course slower than c). The blue light is a sort of "optic boom" similar in its origin to the "sonic boom" you hear from aircraft exceeding the speed of sound.
Is it me, or have the PBS documentaries such as Nova and Nature been dumbed down over the past decade or so. I recently started watching Nova again and the sheer repetition of the main thesis, sometime three or four times in a one hour show, is annoying and pedantic. Nova especially seems to be cranked up on the *gee whiz* factor and less substansive on the actual science.
I had no idea about Faraday's background in poverty or that Lavoisier was the Paris tax collector and subsequently beheaded in the French Revolution.
Oh, and as a bonus, it's narrated by Christopher Eccleston. Half expected to hear a metal scream ring out at any moment. "Exterminate!"
Are An Idiot!
...and please update the story when you have a link to the bittorrent file.
;)
Rest of the world would like to see it too.
And please make a good quality HDTV rip.
Nah, the formula is right E=mc^2, except the mass m is the RELATIVISTIC mass, defined as m_0/sqrt(1-(v/c)^2). m_0 here is the mass of the body at rest. But indeed, the rest mass m_0 is a better quantity to use. See for example http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/Relativity/S R/mass.html
The Cerenkov radiation itself is just light. The light comes from particles moving faster than light moves in water.
If the core were in vacuum, there would be no Cerenkov radiation, because however fast the particles came out, they could not exceed the speed of light in a vacuum. Nothing can.
Which one? Second? I'm not sure.
x .htm
Anyway, it's a good complementary read:
http://www.pbs.org/opb/einsteinswife/science/inde
Is this episode of Nova brought to us by a grant by the Chubb Corporation?
D6 63 0D 70 89 81 BB 8E 7B 7C 5F 5D 54 EA AB 73
Wait, now numbers can be multiplied by themselves??? What a wild, fantastic world we live in!!!
Thank you Einstein for making such a marvelous discovery!!!
I'm still iffy about the name.. "square"? Is this geometry or astrologics? Get it straight, please.
We had it in the UK.
Its brilliant.
I wish at was Friday, but I dont want to wish my life away. So I wish it was last Friday.
Have you read that web site? It reads like cult propaganda with math added. Not to mention the horrible grammar, constantly misspelled words, gross misuse of math, horrible website design... we obviously aren't dealing with very smart people here.
They claim that frames of reference don't actually exist. I don't see why not, but that leaves you with a theory that is completely unable to meaningfully describe any phenomenon that is not standing still. Try to calculate the orbits of a moving Bohr atom, using Autodynamics... whoops, you can't, because the atom is moving, and you can't use the atom's frame of reference because it "does not exist".
I get the feeling they just can't wrap their puny brains around the concept of a frame of reference, so they outright deny it.
>>> "they could not exceed the speed of light in a vacuum. Nothing can."
n al.html
I think you'll find that the theories show nothing can traverse the s.o.l boundary, that still allows for superluminal particles but makes them hard/impossible to detect.
http://scienceworld.wolfram.com/physics/Superlumi
Tachyons aren't just a plot tool for StarTrek script writers!
So I have a question, in what units do we measure C? The reason I ask, is does the formula still work if C is measured in units of C? Because in that case C^2 == 1.
Or does C have to be in units relative to the resting state of the observer? And in that case does the energy in a given mass by another observer change . And still what is to say that an observer doesn't go around talking in stellar units rather than anything smaller than that (again c^2 1)?
This was on UK terrestrial a few weeks back - well worth watching
This perpetual motion machine Lisa made is a joke, it just keeps getting faster and faster. - Homer
Please remember the vis viva ("life force") = mv^2 of Gottfried Leibniz (1646-1716).
The AACS key is NOT 0xF606EEFD628B1CA427BEA93A9CA9773F
I've always wondered why the constant term is the square of the speed of light (in a vacuum). A square is almost like the "++" operator, indicating that the value is the same, but in "the next higher dimension". So the amount of energy is thereby exactly equivalent to the amount of matter, but in "the next higher dimension" of space, scaled up by a velocity of the very phenomenon that seems to straddle our matter/energy distinction. What is the geometric root of that enigmatic relationship?
--
make install -not war
What if Einstein discovered that the Universe is hourglass shaped?
--
make install -not war
That page is full of nonsense, and the derivation is nonsense as well. Where does 'p = E/c' come from?
Looks like that whole page is one big troll... someone has too much time on their hands.
Cheezy website and questionable gobbledy-gook. WOuld not be surpirsed to find some wack-job fundamentalist religious half-wit behind this 'production'.
'Cause it sure doesn't seem to be toungue-in-cheek...
Blar.
I checked the credits for the show, and this is the Channel 4 program available from digitaldistractions, but with the narrator replaced.
For Channel 4 the narrator was Chris Eccleston. I guess PBS figured that Americans wouldn't understand the humor of having Dr. Who narrate the show, and replaced Eccleston with John Lithgow.
A theory... that you only tell your relatives. ;)
PocketGamer.org - For the gamer on the go!
Thanks Yahoo, and Slashdot (or is it Sesame Street?)
With all due respect to the equation's importance, I suspect that "1 + 1 = 2" is probably better knowm.
I recently derived the famous equation in my slashdot journal entry. It can be found when starting from the assumptions Einstein had when Special Relativity was first proposed. That is:
From the second axiom, you can show that the speed of light only depends on the strength of electric and magnetic fields in space using Maxwell's equations. An interesting derivation that requires vector calculus, so I'll save the pain of it for you. ;-) From the first axiom, you can show that the speed of light violated Galilean Relativity.
Knowing that Galilean Relativity is still useful, Einstein proposed another assumption:
From that, you can derive the Lorentz Transformations. Then while examining how those transformations affect the conservation of momentum in collisions you can derive a more useful definition of momentum based on the old definition and that correction factor.
Finally using the new equations of Momentum and the Lorentz Transformations, you can redo Young's derivation of Kinetic Energy using the old definitions of velocity, force, and energy. The end result is a mass at rest still has some energy. This energy is called the rest energy and is related by the famous relation. That's what Einstein's equation says (no hokey about relativistic mass please).
Now you know why it was so . :-D
It is impossible to enjoy idling thoroughly unless one has plenty of work to do.
- Jerome Klapka Jerome
energy = mass is all there need be. speed of light squared was thrown in to make it obvious that it's a whole lot of energy from a little bit of matter (mass). Just in case you think there's some God-devined equation there. . . there isn't -- it's all man-made (up).
As I've pointed out before on
Einstein's contribution was to show that what these others derived from a dynamical theory could be understood in kinematic terms. Dynamics is the study of the causes of motion, and kinematics is the description of motion. In the pre-Einstein theory the resistance of the electron to motion--and the contraction of moving electrons in the direction of motion--was understood as due to electro-magnetic forces acting on it due to the aether. What Einstein showed was that the same phenomena could be understood in purely kinematic terms, as a consequence of the way motion must be described if the laws of physics are to be the same for all observers.
To get a sense of how profound this is, imagine that at one time the inverse-square law for light had been understood in terms of an absorbing medium. That is, the fact that lights appeared dimmer as the square of the distance to the observer was explained by empty space being filled with a substance that absorbed light. There would be many difficulties with such a theory, but I'm sure with sufficient mathematical prowess one could make it work. Then someone like Einstein comes along and points out that one can explain the phenomenon in purely geometric terms, as a consequence of the way the light is spreading out over the surface of a larger sphere as it gets further from the source. What previously required a complex, difficult mathematical description now becomes so trivial that even a philosopher can understand it.
That was Einstein's contribution, but it shouldn't completely eclipse the work of those who came before.
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
I've seen this already. Who wants a link to the torrent?
This program has already been on tv in either the UK or Canada (i'm not sure which). Anyway you can get the torrent of it right here:
/ E=mc2%20-%20Einstein%20And%20The%20Worlds%20Most%2 0Famous%20Equation.torrent
http://www2.digitaldistractions.org:8080/torrents
if the link doesn't work go to http://www2.digitaldistractions.org:8080/ and search for e=
Does the name Pavlov ring a bell?
I've always found it odd that in e=mc^2 the c^2 is (probably) a constant, and can be simplified to something else: e=mC. Now, anyone looking at that equation will see that what you are doing is simply converting between units. And units are not part of the physical world, but merely an arbitrary standard we pick to facilitate calculations. So the equation is really just E = M.
Why have the c^2 part at all? Is the energy contained in an object really variable based upon the speed of light in a particular material? Or is it just there to show school children that the energy contained is really, really big? Is there something that I'm missing?
The ______ Agenda
E = ma^2 ... nah
... feh!
E = mb^2
E = mc^2 !!!!!
A few years back there was a controversial suggestion that Einsteins first wife- fellow student Mileva- had made substantial contributions to his papers. Some even said they saw her handwriting in the paper drafts.
"2 for 'squared,' the multiplication of one number by itself."
Probably a good idea to mention that, given the idiots on this site.
Yup, I've already seen it in the UK (where the TV is somewhat better than the States!).
You will find that it's not so much an explanation of the famous equation (though it is that) as an appreciation of the history of the fundamental ideas which are encapsulated in it - matter, energy and relationship. There's something for everybody, including the girls!
I am not a physicist. :)
You sure aren't
Et=mcg
This equation of yours doesn't have correct units. The left hand side has units of action and the right hand side has units of power.
Secondly that equation doesn't conserve energy. That equation says that right now as I am sitting here, my energy is decreasing because time is preceding.
If you want an equation that encorporates gravity, then you have to solve the killing equation for the metric involved. I am not aware of any simple equation that does this.
I am a physicist and my field of study is gravity, and my advisor's advisor was Wheeler of MTW.
just as 1 mile = 1.6 x 1 km approximately, /.
E = (c^2) x m
Its just a conversion from one unit to another, the beautiful thing here being that it relates a unit of energy to a unit of mass (not energy to energy or mass to mass), showing that energy and mass are effectively two sides of the same coin.
If he were alive today, Einstein woulda got a +5 Insightful at
I can explain it for you, but I can't understand it for you.
It took an equation of Mass & Energy to start life. It took an equation of Mass & Energy to destroy life. It will take a 3rd equation of Mass & Energy to continue life. We began, we died, then we were content to just stay alive from day to day. Now it is the time for prospering, honing life to the fine edge. http://tinyurl.com/8p7r3