About Einstein

Albert Einstein is a name synonymous with genius and groundbreaking scientific discovery. His theories of relativity revolutionized the way we understand the universe, fundamentally altering our concepts of space, time, and gravity. In this article, we’ll delve into Einstein’s life, his pivotal theories, and the lasting impact of his work on modern science.

Early Life and Education
Albert Einstein was born on March 14, 1879, in Ulm, Germany. His early years were marked by a curiosity about the natural world and a rebellious streak against traditional education methods. Despite struggling in a rigid school system, Einstein excelled in mathematics and physics, developing a passion that would shape his future.

Einstein’s family moved to Munich, where he attended the Luitpold Gymnasium. Later, he enrolled at the Swiss Federal Polytechnic School in Zurich, where he met several friends and mentors who recognized his potential. Despite not being the most diligent student, his brilliance in theoretical physics began to shine through.

The Miracle Year
1905 is often referred to as Einstein’s “Annus Mirabilis” or “Miracle Year.” During th
is time, while working as a patent examiner in Bern, Switzerland, he published four groundbreaking papers that would change the course of physics:

• Photoelectric Effect: Einstein proposed that light could be described as quanta of energy, or photons. This idea laid the foundation for quantum theory and earned him the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1921.
• Brownian Motion: He explained the random movement of particles suspended in a fluid, providing empirical evidence for the existence of atoms.
• Special Theory of Relativity: This theory introduced the concept that time and space are relative and not absolute, fundamentally altering our understanding of the universe.
• Mass-Energy Equivalence: Perhaps the most famous equation in physics, E=mc2E = mc^2E=mc2, established that mass and energy are interchangeable.

READ MORE...

The Physics of Immortality

From your own experiential perspective, the laws of physics are stacked against you if you ever hope to achieve immortality. From a thermodynamic perspective, every system tends toward increasing entropy-and-disorder, and the only way you can combat that is by constantly inputting an external source of energy; in other words, your body and mind will eventually break down. 

And although you might try to leverage the power of relativity to dilate time and slow its passage, that will never work from your individual perspective; time only dilates or slows relative to an observer in a different reference frame from your own.

While this may confine a human’s dream of immortality to solutions that rely on technological enhancements or science-fiction level technology that relies on novel physical laws and/or phenomena, there’s still plenty for relativity to say about living forever: at least, relative to the rest of the Universe. 

While nearly all of us living today will certainly be dead in another century, should we all remain on Earth, the lessons from both special and general relativity teach us that there are a few physical situations that we should strive for if we truly want to maximize the amount of time that we can spend as living creatures within our Universe. Here’s the key insight we all need to understand.

The foundation of relativity: spacetime

Even though we normally credit Einstein with overcoming the disparate ideas of space and time that had held sway since the time of Newton and coming up with the revolutionary concept of a four-dimensional fabric that weaves them both together — spacetime — it wasn’t Einstein at all that came up with that key insight. 

It’s true that 1905 was indeed a banner year for Einstein, with the two key insights that powered special relativity key among them:

1. That the laws of physics are invariant, or that they do not change, in all non-accelerating frames of reference.
2. And that the speed of light in a vacuum, c, is identical for all observers, regardless of their motion or of the motion of the light source in question.

READ MORE...

Einstein Was Right

According to Einstein's relativity, if you move relative to another observer and come back to their starting point, you'll age less than whatever remains stationary. Einstein also tells us that the curvature of space itself, depending on the strength of gravitation at your location, also affects how fast or slow your clock runs.

By flying planes both with and against Earth's rotation, and returning them all to the same starting point, we tested Einstein as never before. 

Here's what we learned.

In 1905, our conception of the Universe changed forever when Einstein put forth his special theory of relativity. Prior to Einstein, scientists were able to describe every “point” in the Universe with the use of just four coordinates: three spatial positions for each of the three dimensions, plus a time to indicate which moment any particular event occurred. 

All of this changed when Einstein had the fundamental realization that every single observer in the Universe, dependent on their motion and location, each had a unique perspective on where and when every event in the Universe would have occurred.

Whenever one observer moves through the Universe relative to another, the observer-in-motion will experience time dilation: where their clocks run slower relative to the observer-at-rest. 

Based on this, Einstein suggested that we could make use of two clocks to put this to the test: one at the equator, which speeds around the Earth at approximately 1670 km/hr (1038 mph), and one at the Earth’s poles, which is at rest as the Earth rotates about its axis.  READ MORE...

Lost in Spacetime

Einstein’s forgotten twisted universe

There’s a kind of inevitability about the fact that, if you write a regular newsletter about fundamental physics, you’ll regularly find yourself banging on about Albert Einstein. As much as it comes with the job, I also make no apology for it: he is a towering figure in the history of not just fundamental physics, but science generally.

A point that historians of science sometimes make about his most monumental achievement, the general theory of relativity, is that, pretty much uniquely, it was a theory that didn’t have to be. When you look at the origins of something like Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection, for example – not to diminish his magisterial accomplishment in any way – you’ll find that other people had been scratching around similar ideas surrounding the origin and change of species for some time as a response to the burgeoning fossil record, among other discoveries.


Even Einstein’s special relativity, the precursor to general relativity that first introduced the idea of warping space and time, responded to a clear need (first distinctly identified with the advent of James Clerk Maxwell’s laws of electromagnetism in the 1860s) to explain why the speed of light appeared to be an absolute constant.

When Einstein presented general relativity to the world in 1915, there was nothing like that. We had a perfectly good working theory of gravity, the one developed by Isaac Newton more than two centuries earlier. True, there was a tiny problem in that it couldn’t explain some small wobbles in the orbit of Mercury, but they weren’t of the size that demanded we tear up our whole understanding of space, time, matter and the relationship between them. But pretty much everything we know (and don’t know) about the wider universe today stems from general relativity: the expanding big bang universe and the standard model of cosmology, dark matter and energy, black holes, gravitational waves, you name it.

So why am I banging on about this? Principally because, boy, do we need a new idea in cosmology now – and in a weird twist of history, it might just be Einstein who supplies it. I’m talking about an intriguing feature by astrophysicist Paul M. Sutter in the magazine last month . It deals with perhaps general relativity’s greatest (perceived, at least) weakness – the way it doesn’t mesh with other bits of physics, which are all explained by quantum theory these days. The mismatch exercised Einstein a great deal, and he spent much of his later years engaged in a fruitless quest to unify all of physics.  READ MORE...

It's All Relative... I Suppose...

 BIRTH...  DEATH...  INFINITY

BEGINNINGS AND ENDINGS

THE PURPOSE OF THE ENORMITY OF THE UNIVERSE

Relativity -  The absence of standards of absolute and universal application...  and from the area of physics, the dependence of various physical phenomena on relative motion of the observer and the observed objects, especially regarding the nature and behavior of light, space, time, and gravity...

Well...  there you have it...

Everything in this lifetime is relative...

• Politics
• Wars
• Crime
• Ownership
• Thoughts and Feelings
• Understandings
• Knowledge
• Application

But, in all of this wisdom lies a tiny misconception in that it is not logical at all relative to our planet earth and that is the purpose of the universe...  its size...  and the relative fact that it is expanding and into what we know not but can only speculate since our knowledge is limited and only relative at best.

For EXAMPLE...  there are more stars in the universe than there are grains of sand here on EARTH...  and while that statement seems very profound indeed, it still does not explain why our UNIVERSE NEEDS TO BE SOOOO  BIG...

Relatively speaking things are out of proportion when it comes to planet earth and the universe or our solar system and the universe or even our Milky Way Galaxy and the universe when it comes to any kind of comparison.

And...  well into the future of the existence of our universe, I suppose there will be space travel as well as time travel and beings can move back and forth at their leisure and for whatever relative reasons and purposes that they might have...  but it still does not explain what this damn universe has to be so big, relatively speaking that is to say or ask.