100 Years of Relativity -- Sir Albert Einstein

Einstein's Legacy -- Where are the "Einsteinians?" from Logos Journal [via ALDaily]
An excellent write up on Einstein. There is another article on him regarding the situtaion of Nazi Germany and him being a Jew. That is a good read too.

"For more than two centuries after Newton published his theories of space, time, and motion in 1687, most physicists were Newtonians. They believed, as Newton did, that space and time are absolute, that force causes acceleration, and that gravity is a force conveyed across a vacuum at a distance. Since Darwin there are few professional biologists who are not Darwinians, and if most psychologists no longer often call themselves Freudians, few doubt that there is an unconscious or that sexuality plays a big role in it. So as we celebrate the 100th anniversary of Einstein’s great discoveries, the question arises: How many professional physicists are Einsteinians?"
...
"After 1930, virtually all of Einstein’s colleagues were certain the revolution was over and that physics was nearly complete. Nearly alone in his stance, Einstein saw the quantum as only a stepping stone to the real thing, which he searched for the rest of his life. Quantum theory was not the only theory that bothered Einstein. Few people have appreciated how dissatisfied he was with his own theories of relativity. Special relativity grew out of Einstein’s insight that the laws of electromagnetism cannot depend on relative motion and that the speed of light therefore must be always the same, no matter how the source or the observer moves. Among the consequences of that theory are that energy and mass are equivalent (the now-legendary relationship E = mc2) and that time and distance are relative, not absolute. Special relativity was the result of 10 years of intellectual struggle, yet Einstein had convinced himself it was wrong within two years of publishing it. He rejected his theory, even before most physicists had come to accept it, for reasons that only he cared about. For another 10 years, as the world of physics slowly absorbed special relativity, Einstein pursued a lonely path away from it. "
...
(It took us hundred years to catch up to him)
"One way to understand this story is to say that theoretical physics has finally caught up to Einstein. While he was shunned in his Princeton years as he pursued the unified field theory, the Institute for Advanced Study where he worked is now filled with theorists who search for new variants of unified field theories. It is indeed a vindication of sorts for Einstein because much of what today’s string theorists do in practice is play with unified theories of the kinds that Einstein and his few colleagues invented."
...
"Let us be frank and admit that most of us have neither the courage nor the patience to emulate Einstein. We should instead honor Einstein by asking whether we can do anything to ensure that in the future those few who do follow Einstein’s path, those who approach science as uncompromisingly as he did, have less risk of unemployment of the sort he suffered at the beginning of his career and less risk of the marginalization he endured at the end. If we can do this, if we can make the path easier for those few who do follow him, we may make possible a revolution in science that even Einstein failed to achieve."

thought

subtle changes that people make in their behavior don't go unnoticed...

What will you name your child?

We get letters (3) from google blog

"Walid Elias Kai, a Ph.D. in search engine marketing, is, it must be said, an avid fan of our company. Dr. Kai, who is Lebanese, and his Swedish wife Carol live in Kalmar, Sweden, where their son was born on September 12. His name? Oliver Google Kai."

And here is the website of Google-Kai

funny quote

"There cannot be a crisis next week. My schedule is already full."
-- Henry A. Kissinger

what!!!!!

Body hanging from tree mistaken for Halloween decoration from CNN

"The apparent suicide of a woman found hanging from a tree went unreported for hours because passers-by thought the body was a Halloween decoration, authorities said."

hmmmm

China, India Superpower? Not so Fast! from YaleGlobal Online
"Both China and India are still desperately poor countries. Of the total of 2.3 billion people in these two countries, nearly 1.5 billion earn less than US$2 a day, according to World Bank calculations. Of course, the lifting of hundreds of millions of people above poverty in China has been historic. Thanks to repeated assertions in the international financial press, conventional wisdom now suggests that globalization is responsible for this feat. Yet a substantial part of China's decline in poverty since 1980 already happened by mid-1980s (largely as a result of agricultural growth), before the big strides in foreign trade and investment in the 1990s. Assertions about Indian poverty reduction primarily through trade liberalization are even shakier. In the nineties, the decade of major trade liberalization, the rate of decline in poverty by some aggregative estimates has, if anything, slowed down. In any case, India is as yet a minor player in world trade, contributing less than one percent of world exports. (China's share is about 6 percent.)
What about the hordes of Indian software engineers, call-center operators, and back-room programmers supposedly hollowing out white-collar jobs in rich countries? The total number of workers in all possible forms of IT-related jobs in India comes to less than a million workers – one-quarter of one percent of the Indian labor force. For all its Nobel Prizes and brilliant scholars and professionals, India is the largest single-country contributor to the pool of illiterate people in the world. Lifting them out of poverty and dead-end menial jobs will remain a Herculean task for decades to come."

quote

The dance is a poem of which each movement is a word.
-- Mata Hari