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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."
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 dunno... In the first paragraph, they manage to claim that the formula is--get this--"E mc2". That's right, not squared--just doubled. And who really needs an equal sign in a formula? Go Yahoo! If I had a dog, its blog would have more scientific credibility than this article.
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Since the program is intended for all audiences, including elementary school students and other non-computer science degree holders, yeah, it is useful.
You geeks are always upset when people explain technical details like "squared". That's why the business majors of the world have to tell you what to do! If you majored in business, you would not have learned useless concepts like "squared" and you would understand why the general public needs this explained to them.
As to why would someone be interested in E=mc^2 without knowing the concept of "squared", you obviously don't understand business. We can't limit the target audience of our movie to only the few people who know about "squared".
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Your desk is all squared away. Yep, all squaaaaaaaaaaaared away. (I couldn't find an image to link to--sorry!
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Here's the guy (horrendous quality):
http://www.autodynamics.org/einstein_wrong.html
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The fact that such an explanation is necessary is quite saddening. Knowlege of something so basic as what it means to square a number should be commonplace.
It shows the willingness of people to remain ignorant of so many things, and concern themselves utterly with the trivial.
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..
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.
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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.
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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.
The torrent is here.
I checked this out a few weeks ago. It's really an interesting show depicting some of the greats that preceeded Einstein as well.
Let's play video games with mailmanZERO
The torrent is here.
I checked this out a few weeks ago. It's really an interesting show depicting some of the greats that preceeded Einstein as well.
Let's play video games with mailmanZERO
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.
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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.
It shows the willingness of people to remain ignorant of so many things, and concern themselves utterly with the trivial.
Well thank goodness slashdot is here to educate us all, otherwise I would be off doing something completely trivial! Where's that link to the "Intelligent Door Handle" thread... Oh wait....
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!"
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
"It shows the willingness of people to remain ignorant of so many things, and concern themselves utterly with the trivial."
... said the guy bitching on Slashdot.
"Derp de derp."
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.
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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
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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
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Is this the nova episode that's going be broadcast on tuesday?
Thanks for the link.
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Of course, get it wrong at just the right time.
E^(Pi * i)+1=0
(plus, not minus)
I always though E^(iPi)=-1 fit more tightly, or even E^(iPi)=i^2.
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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?
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What if Einstein discovered that the Universe is hourglass shaped?
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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.
That website makes me want to cry :( For example:
As we all know, perpetual motion machines are impossible,
and claims of such devices are a clear sign of bad science.
No device (or natural phenomenon) can operate endlessly
without draining a power source, and certainly no device can
operate without a power source at all. Yet, our science states
that an object dropped into a tunnel cut through the Earth would
oscillate back and forth endlessly from one end of the planet
to the other.
Pretty much anything can sustain perpetual motion if you neglect forces like friction which remove energy...
And he doesn't seem to understand the difference between force and energy, or even the basic CONCEPT of a black hole (he explains the fact that light can't escape in terms of the fact that the black hole doesn't produce it's own light).
And this is just in the first couple of blurbs from that page you linked.
And not to mention, his 'simple' derivation is based entirely on conclusions which arise from relativity (i.e. Einstein's own derivation, which he also gleefully 'debunks' in many places) and is only applicable to light.
Once again: If an 'earth-shaking'/'revolutionary' theory is first published in a book, it's usually best to laugh and walk away.
For example: As we all know, perpetual motion machines are impossible, and claims of such devices are a clear sign of bad science. No device (or natural phenomenon) can operate endlessly without draining a power source, and certainly no device can operate without a power source at all. Yet, our science states that an object dropped into a tunnel cut through the Earth would oscillate back and forth endlessly from one end of the planet to the other.
Pretty much anything can sustain perpetual motion if you neglect forces like friction which remove energy... And he doesn't seem to understand the difference between force and energy, or even the basic CONCEPT of a black hole (he explains the fact that light can't escape in terms of the fact that the black hole doesn't produce it's own light...) And this is just in the first couple of blurbs from that page you linked.
Not to mention, his 'simple' derivation is based entirely on conclusions which arise from relativity (i.e. Einstein's own derivation, which he also gleefully 'debunks' in many places) and is only applicable to light.
Once again: If an 'earth-shaking'/'revolutionary' theory is first published in a book, it's usually best to laugh and walk away.
A theory... that you only tell your relatives. ;)
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Thanks Yahoo, and Slashdot (or is it Sesame Street?)
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.
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Well, the page you linked to appear to be a pile of steaming woo-woo crap, but on the up side, we're sig buddies!
Glad to see some other slashdotters have been Saved here. Praise spaghetti!
Curiosity was framed. Ignorance killed the cat.
If you business majors didn't learn about ^2 (squared) in middle school, or at least by freshman year of high school, how the fuck did you graduate?
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=
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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?
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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.
Of course, the more general form, exp(x) = cos(x) + i sin(x), is much more useful.
All it takes is nukes and nerves.
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.