Get your Geek On.
This is a great article. It made my lunch extreemly enjoyable today. It’s an article from the Science and Technology section of the Economist about Albert Einstein’s miracle year, 1905. Basically in 1905 he released 5 papers regarding research and discovery that he had made in the previous years and was ready to unleash them onto the world. So basically in 18 months he “he showed that atoms are real (it was still controversial at the time), presented his special theory of relativity, and put quantum theory on its feet.”
If you have a flare for science and discovery I think you’ll really enjoy the article. Even if you don’t have a large amount of technical knowledge you should still be able to understand and be amazed at what Einstein accomplished and how it’s been influencial even today.
My three favorite quotes:
“The second consequence is that the world is “non-local”. That is to say, quantum interactions occur instantaneously over arbitrarily long distances. What is more, there is no mechanism in quantum mechanics which explains how particles “communicate” to match up their quantum properties in this way. For example, if one particle is spinning in one direction, its partner must spin in the opposite. However, the first particle does not have a definite direction until it is measured (Schrödinger’s cat again), so the second particle cannot “know” how to point until a measurement is performed on the first particle, by which time the second particle may be millions of kilometres away. Einstein termed this “spooky action-at-a-distance”.”
…
“The idea of an invariant, which, largely because of Einstein, became central to physics in the 20th century, is something that stays constant under various transformations. A circle is invariant under rotation, because it looks the same no matter how it spins. A square, on the other hand, is invariant only under rotations of 90°. Rotate it through a right angle, or a multiple of a right angle, and it is indistinguishable from its unrotated self. Rotate it by any other angle, and it will appear different.”
…
“Ultimately, it was the same skill in discernment that led Einstein to the general theory of relativity. One of the consequences of the speed of light being invariant is that nothing can travel faster than it. Einstein realised this in his first relativity paper of 1905. He did not immediately see another consequence, that the invariant also implied that mass and energy are interchangeable, the rate of exchange being defined by the speed of light and governed by the one equation in physics that most people have heard of: E=mc2, in which “E” represents energy, “m” mass and “c” the speed of light. This equation, whose consequences were played out in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, occurred to him a few weeks later, and he published it in another paper, which he wrote up in November 1905.”
