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."

Comments

Neat but one burning question

[zenst]

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
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Re:Get the formula right.

[aktzin]

The anonymous post above already mentioned that p is for momentum and the equation is framed in a way that accounts for quantum mechanics, not just classical (Newtonian) physics. I found a good explanation here:

http://encyclopedia.laborlawtalk.com/Mass

Scroll about halfway down to the section header "Relativistic relation among mass, energy and momentum".

By the way, IANAP (I am not a physicist) but I had fun taking physics in college as part of my computer science requirements. And by funny coincidence this post is actually related to my sig. I don't remember where I first saw that (it was in college many moons ago). I always thought it was funny and clever, a good tip of the hat to Mr. Shakespeare, and a good way to describe the universe.

I've seen this already I think

[FunkyRat]

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.

"varying" speeds of light

[Quadraginta]

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.

It's a semantics, the formula WAS right

[Newton IV]

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

Einstein's Wife

[Donny Smith]

Which one? Second? I'm not sure.

Anyway, it's a good complementary read:
http://www.pbs.org/opb/einsteinswife/science/index .htm

Re:Einstein's Wife

[ArcSecond]

From what I have heard, there is a lot of controversy over Einstein's first wife and her contributions to his early work. I don't believe he ever acknowledged her help publicly, and although her name apparently was attached to his earlier papers, it mysteriously vanished when they were published.

Not that I am an Einstein hater, but he really was a rotten husband and father.

-1 Pseudoscience

[cynical kane]

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.

Re:WTF @ summary

[Anonymous Coward]

So you complain when the editors edit and complain when they dont.

We complain when they don't edit, and complain when they edit poorly.

Heaviside's Equation

[radtea]

As I've pointed out before on /., Oliver Heaviside was the first person to write down E = mc^2, in 1892 or thereabouts. He did so based on an electro-mechanical model of the electron, where the mass of the electron was due to the resistance of the electric field to motion as the electron travelled through the aether. The same approach is what let Lorentz and Poincare' write down the full expression of what would eventually be known as Special Relativity several years before Einstein.

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.