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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".
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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?
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."
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.
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.
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