Next year will be the 100th birthday of E=mc2. <\/p>\n
I tripped over another article about Einstein <\/a>this morning (thank you, Arts and Letters Daily, couldn’t live without you!!) – and wanted to pass it on.<\/p>\n The article begins:<\/p>\n Everybody has a good day from time to time, but what happened to Albert Einstein in 1905, when he was just 26 years old, was extraordinary: He wrote five powerful papers in one year \u0097 any one of which would have been worthy of the Nobel Prize, laying the foundation for the modern pharmaceutical industry, quantum mechanics and the theory of relativity. He even came up that year with the beguilingly simple formula \u0097 E=mc2 \u0097 that has done so much to transform our century.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n 26 years old? Jeez. When I was 26, I was hovering over random jukeboxes in Wrigleyville, drinking beer, and flirting with blurpy Chicago boys like a manic Lorelei.<\/p>\n I love this section on what happened to Einstein, while working in that patent office – the job that gave him the necessary time and leisure to reflect and question:<\/p>\n Two beliefs kept Einstein motivated in those years at the patent office. The first was that there were great truths waiting to be discovered. He felt, as he once put it, like a little boy standing in a big, dark room lined with books with titles that were hard to distinguish \u0097 but with enough concentration and humility, a few of the waiting pages could be read.<\/p>\n His second motivating belief was that the universe was simple, and the same for everyone. If I, standing still, view a light beam as moving at a certain rate of speed, I have no right to say that this is the “true” rate, and that what you, running along beside the beam, might measure about its speed is wrong. Rather, there had to be a way to make any two such views be seen as just one aspect of a deeper, common truth. From that reasoning \u0097 and with just a few lines of high school algebra \u0097 much of relativity, as well as the formula E=mc2, could be deduced.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n “great truths waiting to be discovered”<\/p>\n How utterly exciting.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Next year will be the 100th birthday of E=mc2. I tripped over another article about Einstein this morning (thank you, Arts and Letters Daily, couldn’t live without you!!) – and wanted to pass it on. The article begins: Everybody has … Continue reading