Cosmology Curiosity

Einstein's advice to aspiring scientists

Here's a hot tip for aspiring scientists, from no less than Einstein himself.

The advice is at the last sentence of the quote below, from Amir D. Aczel's God's Equation: Einstein, Relativity, and the Expanding Universe (2000):

"On June 16th 1902, Albert Einstein now a Swiss citizen for over a year was hired to work at the Swiss patent office in Bern. A position was arranged by the father of his good friend, Marcel Grossmann. The position was at first temporary, but in 1904 it became permanent. He was named a Technical Expert, and his job was to evaluate the merits of patent proposals. The previous two years had seen changes in Albert's life - the death of his father in Milan in 1902 and Albert's marriage to Mileva in 1903. Mileva had followed him to Bern and they married despite Einstein's mother's objections and her dislike for his fiancée. The Swiss patent office presented an interesting opportunity for the young scientist. He seems to have enjoyed his work. Throughout his life, Einstein reveled in tinkering with devices invented for particular purposes and trying to evaluate their usefulness. The position left him some free time, time he used well for study and research. Later in life, he suggested to young researchers that the best situation for a creative scientist is to have a menial or unintellectual job that allows some free time for research, rather than a traditional university position requiring teaching, service to the institution, and campus politics." [emphasis supplied]

Einstein must have really been a pretty relaxed person, taking his own sweet time on whatever. Like how could have Einstein chanced upon seeing a neighbor fall off the roof? Or why would one of his professors [Hermann Minkowski] call him a "lazy dog"?

So if the lifehack is good enough for Einstein ...

Technorati Tags: Albert Einstein, Einstein, Minkowski, lifehack, relativity, special relativity

1919: Einstein in The New York Times

Rewind to 1919.

The above is a sampling of The New York Times articles on Albert Einstein's then newly discovered theory of relativity.

The full text of the three sample articles above can be found here, here, and here.

You can almost feel the excitement at the time.

And we should thank The New York Times for opening up its archives to the public --

"In addition to opening the entire site to all readers, The Times will also make available its archives from 1987 to the present without charge, as well as those from 1851 to 1922, which are in the public domain. There will be charges for some material from the period 1923 to 1986, and some will be free."

Back to the theory of relativity, in one of the articles cited above, "Dr. Einstein" relates how he got the idea on the equivalence of gravitation to acceleration.

Whereas Newton had a falling apple as his inspiration for his theory of gravitation, in Einstein's case it was a neighbor falling off a roof. In Einstein's own words:

"This man told Dr. Einstein that in falling he experienced no sensation commonly considered as the effect of gravity, which according to Newton's theory, would pull him down violently toward the earth. This incident, followed by further researches along the same line, started in his mind a complicated chain of thoughts leading finally, as he expressed it, 'not to a disavowal of Newton's theory of gravitation, but to a sublimation or supplement of it.' "

Makes one wonder whether the next Einstein will likewise get his groundbreaking insight from observing a falling object. If I were a physicist then ...

Albert Einstein, Einstein, equivalence principle, Isaac Newton, New York Times, Newton, NYT, relativity, special relativity, The New York Times

[Off-topic] History of the Middle East in 90 sec.

From Maps of War: Who has controlled the Middle East over the course of history? Pretty much everyone. Egyptians, Turks, Jews, Romans, Arabs, Persians, Europeans ... the list goes on.

The larger version of the video can be seen here. The video is also downloadable, from here.

Technorati Tags: ancient history, Assyria, Babylon, Egypt, history, Hittite, Israel, Judah, Macedonia, maps, Middle East, Persia, Maps of War, Rome, wars

'Dangerous Knowledge': The tragic story of Cantor, Boltzmann, Gödel and Turing

BBC's description of the documentary, Dangerous Knowledge (1h30min):

In this one-off documentary, David Malone looks at four brilliant mathematicians - Georg Cantor, Ludwig Boltzmann, Kurt Gödel and Alan Turing - whose genius has profoundly affected us, but which tragically drove them insane and eventually led to them all committing suicide.

The film begins with Georg Cantor, the great mathematician whose work proved to be the foundation for much of the 20th-century mathematics. He believed he was God's messenger and was eventually driven insane trying to prove his theories of infinity.

Ludwig Boltzmann's struggle to prove the existence of atoms and probability eventually drove him to suicide. Kurt Gödel, the introverted confidant of Einstein, proved that there would always be problems which were outside human logic. His life ended in a sanatorium where he starved himself to death.

Finally, Alan Turing, the great Bletchley Park code breaker, father of computer science and homosexual, died trying to prove that some things are fundamentally unprovable.

The film also talks to the latest in the line of thinkers who have continued to pursue the question of whether there are things that mathematics and the human mind cannot know. They include Greg Chaitin, mathematician at the IBM TJ Watson Research Center, New York, and Roger Penrose.

Dangerous Knowledge tackles some of the profound questions about the true nature of reality that mathematical thinkers are still trying to answer today.

Technorati Tags: Alan Turing, BBC, Dangerous Knowledge, David Malone, Georg Cantor, Greg Chaitin, infinity, Kurt Godel, Ludwig Boltzmann, mathematicians, suicide, Roger Penrose