So What is the Big Deal With This Einstein Guy

8/3/2019 So What is the Big Deal With This Einstein Guy

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So what is the big deal with this Einstein guy?

Im a humanities guy, but Ive never lost my childhood love of math and science. Im

looking forward to theLarge Hadron Colliderbeing fired up next year the way

normal male Americans look forward to the NBA playoffs. I like to be an informedfan, and sinceEinsteinis the Michael Jordan of scientists, I wanted to know what itis exactly that he figured out, and why its so important. Beyond the physics, I wantedto know what put Einstein into the pop pantheon alongside Bob Marley and JohnLennon. You never see dorm room posters of Henry Clerk Maxwell or Neils Bohr.The only other scientist who comes remotely close in pop stature is Darwin, but asidefrom hisdramatic beard,Darwin the person doesnt register much beyond histheories. Why is Einstein such a rock star?

Lets start with the face. Einsteins iconic white hair and wrinkles coexisted with an

unusually childlike face. Einstein had large, widely-spaced eyes on a large head. Thecombination of infantile and ancient is psychologically intense. I wasnt surprised to

find out that Einsteins face inspired the design of Yoda and ET.

Einsteins parents worried about his intellectual development as a child. He didnt

start speaking until he was three, and he wasnt completely fluent until nine. A

picture emerges of an eccentric and inward kid, with a lot of attention devoted to his

own imagination and thoughts, and not much attention left over for everything else. Idont believe that Einstein was born with a superior brain. His spectacular spatial
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reasoning and mental imaging abilities came at the expense to his social skills andhis personal happiness. History remembers his achievements and tends to gloss overhis failed marriage and depression.

Einstein loved to tell the story of being five years old and being shown a small pocketcompass by his father. He was elated to discover that something in empty spaceacted on the needle. Einstein would later describe his first brush with the Earths

magnetic field as one of the most revelatory events of his life. As a kid, he builtmodels and mechanical devices for fun, and he showed mathematical ability early on.In 1891, he taught himself Euclidean geometry from a school booklet (for fun, whee!)and began to study calculus. The teenage Einstein sounds like the consummate mathnerd, antisocial and hostile to authority. He only completed one term of theequivalent of high school before dropping out in the spring of 1895.

Einsteins family was Jewish, but not observant, and he went to a Catholicelementary school. Im guessing that the contradictions he experienced there were asource for his later outspoken secular humanism.

The same year he dropped out of school at age sixteen, Einstein performed a famousthought experiment with the speed of light. He was trying to wrap his head aroundone ofhis eras most baffling scientific problems. There were these equations, theMaxwell equations, that describe electricity and magnetism extremely accurately.The equations predict that the speed of the light (around 667 million miles per hour)is always the same, regardless of how fast youre moving when you observe it. If

youre sitting still and you turn on your flashlight, the light zips away from you at 667million mph. No mystery there. But the Maxwell equations say that if youre zipping

along in a spaceship at 666 million mph and you turn on your headlights, the beamswill still race away in front of you at 667 million mph. Scientists in 1895 were makingthe first really accurate measurement of the speed of light under various conditions,and they were hoping to prove this prediction wrong. Much to their horror, everyexperiment proved the Maxwell equations right. Einstein was trying to figure out a

way out of the paradox by imagining himself to be in that spaceship and turning onyour headlights.

Like a lot of scientists, Einstein was a musical person. He frequently used musicalterms to express physics concepts. At the insistence of his mother, he took classical

violin lessons as a kid, and like most people, disliked them and eventually stoppedthem. Like dishearteningly few people, Einstein returned to music in adulthood, and

became a dedicated amateur classical violinist.


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He once said:

If I were not a physicist, I would probably be a musician. I oftenthink in music.I livemy daydreams in music. I see my life in terms of music.

Einstein eventually attended university, where he studied math and science in thehopes of getting a science teaching gig. He managed to graduate, but his antagonisticrelationship with his professors didnt help with recommendations or job offers.

Instead, the father of a classmate helped him get an unglamorous position as anassistant examiner at the Swiss patent office. It turned out to be a good day job forhim. The pace was undemanding and it gave him the opportunity to ponder hisfavorite subject, the electromagnetic force, at length.

Heres afun Java appletthat lets you play with a simulated electromagnetic field. Wetake the fields physicality for granted in modern life, since were always walking

through metal detectors and such, but a hundred years ago you could have beenforgiven for doubting that such a weird idea could possibly be true. The field conceptis not an easy one, and if we werent intimately familiar with evidence of its existence,

it might sound like a paranoid delusion. The math isnt much help in making fields

more accessible to our common sense, because it requires frightening calculus. Itshumbling to consider Einstein trying to puzzle through electromagnetism for fun

while he worked his slacker job in the earliest years of the twentieth century.

During 1905, in his spare time and sometimes during work when no one was looking,

Einstein wrote four short articles for publication in Annalen Der Physik, then theleading journal in the field. He wrote them without much scientific literature to refer
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to or many fellow scientists to talk with. The only science library in town was closedon his only day off. People call them the Annus Mirabilis papers, from Latin formiracle year. The first was titledOn A Heuristic Viewpoint Concerning The

Production And Transformation Of Light. (Heuristic means hands-on or practical.)

It was a response to Max Plancks hypothesis that energy comes bundled in tiny littlediscrete chunks or particles called quanta (singular quantum.) Einsteins key

contribution was to say that energy quantization is a general, intrinsic property of allother electromagnetic energy, not just light. He showed how these little chunks ofenergy are mathematically related to the energys frequency. This later developed

into the concept ofphotons.So thats the first paper.

Einsteins second article of 1905 was calledOn the Motion, Required by theMolecular Kinetic Theory of Heat, of Small Particles Suspended in a Stationary

Liquid. It covered his study ofBrownian motion, the random jostling of dust motes

in the air, or the swirling of milk in coffee. Einstein used mathematical analysis ofBrownian motion to provide empirical evidence for the existence of atoms. Beforethis paper, atoms were recognized as a useful concept, but physicists and chemistsdebated whether they were real things or just mathematical abstractions. Einsteins

statistical discussion of atomic behavior gave experimentalists a way to count atomsby looking through an ordinary microscope.

The third paper was called On The Electrodynamics Of Moving Bodies, and itintroduced thespecial theory of relativity,of which you have probably heard but

whose content is probably mysterious to you. It was to me until I started reading

Brian Greene books. Relativity is extremely tripped out. Remember how the velocityof light is supposed to be the same, regardless of how fast youre moving when youmeasure it? Einstein interpreted this wildly counterintuitive fact as evidence thateverything is always moving through space and time at the speed of light. Moreaccurately, everything in the universe is always moving along the three spatialdimensions and the fourth dimension of time at the velocity of light. Whatever your

velocity through space is, your velocity through time is the difference between it andthe velocity of light. The faster you move through space, the slower you movethrough time. The slower you move through space, the faster you move through time.

No joke. For a photon zipping along through space at the speed of light, time isntpassing at all.

So if the theory of relativity is true, and every experiment confirms that it is, whyhadnt anyone noticed before 1905? Its mostly an accident of scale. We and most of

the things we encounter in the world move through space a lot slower than 667million miles an hour, and by cosmic scales we can only change our velocity byminiscule amounts, so our movement through time is barely affected. Its like the

way the curvature of the earth appears to be zero when were standing on it, because

its so much bigger than we are. We would have found out the earth was round much

sooner if it was only twenty-seven miles wide instead of twenty-seven thousand.Time dilation is trivial for our poky selves, but its a real fact of the universe. It has
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more serious consequences at higher speeds and energy levels, and larger time anddistance scales. Global positioning systems have to account for time dilation betweenthe different satellites as they hurtle around their orbits.

Heavy, right? It gets better (or worse, depending on your tastes.) Brian Greeneasksus to imagine the universe as a loaf of bread arranged along the time axis, where eachslice is a freezeframe snapshot of everything in space at a particular moment in time.If you and someone else are moving relative to one another, you slice the spacetimeloaf at different angles. Here on Earth, the difference in angle between my spacetimeslices and yours are imperceptibly tiny. But what a photon or a person on a far-distant planet considers to be the state of the universe now is going to be verydifferent.QuotingBrian Greene, italics his:

If you buy the notion that reality consists of the things in your freeze-frame mental

image right now, and if you agree that your now is no more valid than the now ofsomeone located far away in space who can move freely, then reality encompasses allof the events in spacetime. The total loaf exists. Just as we envision all of spaceasreally being out there, as really existing, we should also envision all of timeas really being out there, as reallyexisting too. Past, present and future certainlyappear to be distinct entities. But as Einstein once said, For we convinced physicists,

the distinction between past, present and future is only an illusion, howeverpersistent.

My first exposure to this idea was from Kurt Vonnegut inSlaughterhouse-Five. The

Tralfamadorans explain to Billy Pilgrim that humans perceive time passing the waywed perceive a landscape passing if we could only see it through a long cardboard

tube while being carried along on rails.

In this way of thinking, events, regardless of when they happen from any particularperspective, just are. They all exist. They eternally occupy their particular point inspacetime. There is no flow It is tough to accept this description, since our

worldview so forcefully distinguishes between past, present and future. But if westare intently at this familiar temporal scheme and confront it with the cold hardfacts of modern physics, its only place of refuge seems to lie within the human mind.

Im a little disturbed by BGs confrontational tone confront, cold hard facts,place of refuge but lets bracket that and move on.

The feeling that time flows is deeply ingrained in our experiences and thoroughlypervades our thinking and language But dont confuse language with reality.

Human language is far better at capturing human experience than at expressing deepphysical laws.

Does time have an arrow discernable somewhere in the universe outside ourcollective imaginations? Intuition says yes, since spilled milk doesnt unspill. But the
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basic physics equations dont specify a direction for time or depend on any

asymmetry to it. Post-Einstein, you can treat time as just anotherdirection, like left-right, up-down, forwards-backwards. Equations describing the moons orbit orelectrons in a molecule have time-reversal symmetry. In theory, you could

manipulate the particles into unspilling your milk; it would just be very very difficult,and its vanishingly unlikely to ever just happen by itself.

Maybe times arrow is just our interpretation of the strong overall tendency towardsentropy in the world around us, not a fundamental fact of the universe.TheWikipedia article on timesays:

Psychological time is, in part, the cataloguing of ever increasing items of memoryfrom continuous changes in perception. In other words, things we remember makeup the past, while the future consists of those events that cannot be remembered. The

ancient method of comparing unique events to generalized repeating events such asthe apparent movement of the sun, moon, and stars provided a convenient grid workto accomplish this. The consistent increase in memory volume creates one mentalarrow of time. Another arises because one has the sense that ones perception is a

continuous movement from the unknown (Future) to the known (Past). Anticipatingthe unknown forms the psychological future which always seems to be somethingone is moving towards, but, like a projection in a mirror, it makes what is actuallyalready a part of memory, such as desires, dreams, and hopes, seem ahead of theobserver.

Okay. So Einsteins third paper of 1905 undermined the concept of time. His fourthone was calledDoes The Inertia Of A Body Depend Upon Its Energy Content?Fromrelativity, Einstein showed how one can deduce the famous equation showing theequivalence between matter and energy, E=mc^2. To get the energy equivalence (E)of some amount of mass (m), you multiply the mass by the velocity of light (c), andthen you multiply it by the velocity of light again. A very small amount of massconverts to a very large amount of energy. When hydrogen in the sun fuses intohelium, part of its mass gets converted to the energy we receive here on Earth.

If Einstein had been hit by a bus in 1906, wed still be absorbing his output, but therewas more big stuff coming. In 1909, he presented a paper called The Development OfOur Views On The Composition And Essence Of Radiation. In this and an earlier1909 paper, Einstein showed that the energy quanta introduced by Max Planck alsocarry a well-defined momentum and act in many respects as if they wereindependent, point-like particles. This paper marks the introduction of the modernphoton concept (although the word itself was coined later). Being able tomathematically describe and predict the behavior of photons has made possible suchmodern conveniences as computers, TV and supermarket scanners. The behavior ofphotons suggests more deep weirdness going on behind the world we experience.

Einstein showed that light, like all other forms of mass-energy, must simultaneously
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behave like botha wave and a particle, a revolutionary idea at the time and still amajor head-scratcher.

In November 1915, Einstein unveiled his new theory of gravity, thegeneral theory ofrelativity.In general relativity, gravity is no longer a force, as it is in Newtonsconception of gravity. Instead, gravity is the warping of spacetime by matter andenergy. Empty space itself is the thing being warped in general relativity. As withrelativistic time dilation, this warping is a real thing. We dont notice it because ofthescale thing. If theres a huge amount of mass-energy, spacetime can get stretched likesilly putty. You can see it in Hubble Space Telescope photos of very distantgalaxies.

General relativity laid the theoretical framework for thebig bang theory.

Einsteins career from 1905 to 1917 was a lot like Paul McCartneys fromPleasePlease Me throughAbbey Road.Einsteins career after he moved to New Jersey wasmore like McCartney from Wings through the present: he was a highly visible figureon the landscape, but he didnt produce any new ideas that anyone cared about.

Mathematicians and scientists, like rock stars, are famous for burning out young.Einstein the scientist burned bright and fast, and then coasted amiably along to old

age. But Einstein the political figure was just coming into full flower. His authorityproblems as a kid turned into a principled opposition to fascism and violence as anadult. He was a member of the Rationalist Press Association and an admirerofEthical Culture.On the much-contested subject of his religious views, heres whatthe man himself had to say:

A human being is part of a whole, called by us the Universe, a part limited in timeand space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separatedfrom the resta kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kindof prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few

persons nearest us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening
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our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature inits beauty.

He published a paper in Nature in 1940 calledScience And Religion:

A person who is religiously enlightened appears to me to be one who has, to the bestof his ability, liberated himself from the fetters of his selfish desires and ispreoccupied with thoughts, feelings and aspirations to which he clings because oftheir super-personal value regardless of whether any attempt is made to unite thiscontent with a Divine Being, for otherwise it would not be possible to count BuddhaandSpinozaas religious personalities. Accordingly a religious person is devout in thesense that he has no doubt of the significance of those super-personal objects andgoals which neither require nor are capable of rational foundationIn this sense

religion is the age-old endeavor of mankind to become clearly and completely

conscious of these values and goals, and constantly to strengthen their effects.

The religious and atheistic alike claim him as a hero, but I think if he had to pick aside, he would have come down closer to Darwin and Dawkins:

If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unboundedadmiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it.

You will hardly find one among the profounder sort of scientific minds without apeculiar religious feeling of his own. But it is different from the religion of the naive

man.For the latter God is a being from whose care one hopes to benefit and whosepunishment one fears; a sublimation of a feeling similar to that of a child for itsfather, a being to whom one stands to some extent in a personal relation, howeverdeeply it may be tinged with awe.

But the scientist is possessed by the sense of universal causation. The future, to him,is every whit as necessary and determined as the past. There is nothing divine aboutmorality, it is a purely human affair. His religious feeling takes the form of a

rapturous amazement at the harmony of natural law, which reveals an intelligence ofsuch superiority that, compared with it, all the systematic thinking and acting ofhuman beings is an utterly insignificant reflection.

I believe in Spinozas God, who reveals Himself in the lawful harmony of the world,

not in a God who concerns Himself with the fate and the doings of mankind.

In 1939, Einstein sent a letter to Franklin Delano Roosevelt urging the study ofnuclear fission for military purposes, for fear that the Nazis would develop nuclear

weapons first. The letter prompted an investigation that eventually led to the

Manhattan Project. Einstein himself didnt end up working on the bomb, and,according to Linus Pauling, he later regretted having written his letter. Einstein
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considered himself a pacifist and humanitarian, and in later years, a committeddemocratic socialist.

I believe Gandhis views were the most enlightened of all the political men of ourtime. We should strive to do things in his spirit: not to use violence for fighting forour cause, but by non-participation of anything you believe is evil.

Einstein was a busy civil rights agitator, and a member the Princeton chapter of theNAACP. With Paul Robeson, he was a co-chair of the American Crusade To EndLynching. When the octogenarian WEB DuBois was frivolously charged with being acommunist spy, Einstein volunteered as a character witness in the case, which led tothe charges being dismissed. Maybe the biggest compliment America ever paidEinstein was the size of his FBI file: fourteen hundred pages on his activities andmovements. The FBI recommended that Einstein be barred from immigrating to the

United States under the Alien Exclusion Act, alleging that he believes in, advises,advocates, or teaches a doctrine which, in a legal sense, as held by the courts in othercases, would allow anarchy to stalk in unmolested and result in government in

name only. Israel offered Einstein the presidency, and he turned it down. He was a

supporter of Zionism in the cultural sense but he had some reservations about itsnationalistic aspect. In a speech he said:

My awareness of the essential nature of Judaism resists the idea of a Jewish statewith borders, an army, and a measure of temporal power, no matter how modest. Iam afraid of the inner damage Judaism will sustain.

Anytime I did something dumb in grade school, my friends would say sarcastically,Nice going, Einstein. Since then Ive said it myself more times than I can count.

Einstein serves a handy shorthand for the natural genius, the superhuman intellect.He offers the hope that any lazy and undisciplined student might secretly be a genius,one in a zillion. This fantasy isnt as far-fetched as it seems. People like Einsteinarent necessarily well-served by the way our society requires us to learn. Sitting atdesks in big groups just does not work for all kids. Kids learn a lot from school, butthey dont necessarily learn math and science, they just learn how to pretend to be

attentive while managing a lot of boredom.

Einstein donated his brain to science upon his death, and there has been a wholeghoulish cottage industry around its study. Steven Pinkers theory on Einsteins brainis that it showed rapid prenatal development of areas of the brain responsible forspatial and analytical reasoning which, in competing for finite bodily real estate,temporarily robbed resources from functions of the brain responsible for speechdevelopment. Pinker and others have extended this speculation to explain thedevelopment of other famously gifted late-talkers, including mathematician JuliaRobinson, pianists Arthur Rubinstein and Clara Schumann, and physicists Richard

Feynman and Edward Teller. These people were also said to have shared several ofEinsteins childhood peculiarities, like monumental tantrums, rugged individualism


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and highly selective interests. Whether or not this is true, it fits well with my largerhypothesis that a genius is basically an obsessive-compulsive whos lucky enough to

be obsessed with something constructive.

By the way, I didnt have a poster of Einstein in my dorm room, but as an adult Im

proud to have an Einstein action figure sitting on the shelf, above my computer, nextto my clock.

Albert Einstein is one of the most notable and influential scientists of the twentieth century. Although he becameknown as a genius of science, he was slow in learning to speak as a child. Einstein also rebelled in school, whichleft many teachers to believe he would amount to little. His interest in science and math was inspired by acompass, his "sacred little geometry book," and classical music. By the age of sixteen, he wrote his first researchscience paper.

Einstein attempted to skip the last few years of high school to enter the Swiss institute of Technology. But hefailed the entrance exam. His most famous discovery is the theory of relativity, E=mc2. This theory overturnedIsaac Newton's laws by explaining the relation of energy and mass as a consequence of space and time. It was

first introduced in a three-page paper in 1905. So ahead of its time, the theory could not be proven until yearslater.

Born in Germany and raised in the Jewish faith, Einstein strongly opposed injustices of race and religion. Hehelped out however he could. Einstein supported the American civil rights movement and efforts of the Zionistmovement to preserve and cultivate the Jewish faith. He played an important role in setting up the HebrewUniversity of Israel.

Many people have thought that Einstein was the creator of the atomic bomb. But this is not true. During WorldWar II, he wrote a letter to President Roosevelt warning of Germany's possible use of nuclear weapons. Einsteinwas actually barred from helping the United States to make the atom bomb.

Albert Einstein was more than a world-famous scientist. His name and image have come to represent genius andintellect.
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"With fame I become more and more stupid, which of course is a very common phenomenon."

"Why is it that nobody understands me, yet everybody likes me?"

"I'm doing just fine, considering that I have triumphantly survived Nazism and two wives."

"I have no special talents. I am only passionately curious."

"Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world."

Einstein wrote his first scientific paper, "On the Investigation of the State of the Ether in a Magnetic Field," in1895 at the age of 16. It was never published but sent to his uncle for critique.

Einstein was a member of the Princeton chapter of the NAACP and served as co-chair of the American Crusadeto End Lynching, which was headed by his friend Paul Robeson.

Efforts were made by reputable German scholars and government officials to debunk Einstein's work and to stop

the teaching of his theories because of his Jewish heritage.

While Einstein was considered a genius, at times he was more of an absent-minded professor. He was notoriousfor forgetting dates and numbers, losing things, and had problems spelling in the English language.

Einstein attributes his interest in science to a compass that his father gave to him when he was 10 years old.

From 1901 to 1954 Albert Einstein published more than 300 scientific works.

In 1944 a handwritten copy of Einstein's work on electrodynamics is sold for $6 million to finance war bonds.

In 1946 Einstein accepted an honorary degree from Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, the first school to grantcollege degrees to African Americans in the United States and gave a speech addressing racism.

In 1952 Einstein was offered the position of president of Israel, but he declined.

After his death, Einstein's brain was donated to the Princeton Medical Center.

Awarded the 1921 Nobel Prize for Physics (1922)

Awarded the Copley Medal of the Royal Society of London (1925)

Awarded a gold medal by the Royal Astronomical Society of England (1926)

Awarded the Max Planck medal for extraordinary achievements in theoretical physics (1929)

Awarded the Franklin Medal by the Franklin Institute (1935)

The 99th element, a metallic synthetic element is named "einsteinium" in honor of Albert Einstein. (1955)

The Albert Memorial, a bronze and marble sculpture, is erected in the Washington, D.C. National Mall by the U.S.National Academy of Sciences (1979)

So What is the Big Deal With This Einstein Guy

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