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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.
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".
Avoid Missing Ball for High Score
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
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?
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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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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If life was simple, there simply wouldn't be any life
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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.
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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.
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
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 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.
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
Which one? Second? I'm not sure.
x .htm
Anyway, it's a good complementary read:
http://www.pbs.org/opb/einsteinswife/science/inde
"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."
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.
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.
Think about it this way: if you measure c the way you'd normally measure velocties, say in meters / second, then you get c^2 in units of meters^2/seconds^2. (IIRC, c ~= 3 * 10^8 m/s, so c^2 ~= 9 * 10^16 m^2/s^2). But let's say you want to measure velocity in units such that c = 1 -- say, measure it in light-seconds/second. Then c^2 = 1 ls^2/s^2, this is true.
But a light-second is huge, and a light-second squared is even huger. In fact, of course, 1 ls ~= 3 * 10^8 m, and thus 1 ls^2 ~= 9 * 10^16 m^2. (Again, IIRC.) Try translating that into units that make sense on an earthly scale: if I throw a 1 kg weight at you at 1 m/s, you're going to feel the impact when you catch it. Now think about that scaled up by almost 17 orders of magnitude.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.