Original Einstein Manuscript Discovered 325
vinlud writes "The original manuscript of a paper Albert Einstein published in 1925 has been found in the archives of Leiden University's Lorentz Institute for Theoretical Physics. The German-language manuscript is titled "Quantum theory of the monatomic ideal gas," and is dated December 1924. It is considered one of Einstein's last great breakthroughs. High-resolution photographs of the 16-page manuscript are posted on the institute's web site."
Coral Cache Link (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.lorentz.leidenuniv.nl.nyud.net:8090/his tory/Einstein_archive/ [nyud.net]
Re:Amazing (Score:5, Informative)
And as such, an image of what Einstien actually wrote is the ONLY way to present it in a way that hasn't been available before.
Re:Handwriting (Score:3, Informative)
Case in point: Here in Switzerland (bastion of psycho-analysts and -therapists that it is), applying for a job sometimes requires the applicant to submit a hand-written test. Not quite sure but must've been in the early 90's when the head of the Swiss Psychologist's Association went on to say in an interview that the whole handwriting analysis is a hoax and is mainly used by dumb-ass PHBs to appear smarter than they are.
Please stop furthering this meme. It's a hoax. Kthxbye!
Re:Article in full (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Article in full (Score:5, Informative)
Original Einstein Manuscript Discovered
By TOBY STERLING
Associated Press Writer
The original manuscript of a paper Albert Einstein published in 1926 has been found in the archives of Leiden University's Lorentz Institute for Theoretical Physics, scholars said Saturday.
The handwritten manuscript titled "Quantum theory of the diatomic ideal gas" was dated December 1925. Considered one of Einstein's last great breakthroughs, it was published in the proceedings of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow in January 1926.
High-resolution photographs of the 160-page, German-language manuscript and an account of its discovery were posted on the institute's Web site.
"It was quite amazing" when a student working on his master's thesis uncovered the delicate manuscript written in Einstein's distinctive scrawl, said professor Carlos Beenakker. "You can even see Einstein's thumbprints in some places, and it's full of notes in the margins and underlining from his editor."
"We're going to keep it as a reminder of his work here, which is quite a pleasurable memory for us," Beenakker said.
The German-born physicist, who was Jewish and part Gypsy, taught in Berlin between 1910 and 1933, fleeing to the United States after Adolf Hitler came to power.
Einstein, whose name is now synonymous with science, was a frequent guest lecturer at Laden in the 1920s due to his friendship with physicist Paul Oppenheimer, among whose papers the manuscript was found.
The paper predicted that at temperatures near absolute zero - around 560 degrees below zero - particles in a gas can reach a state of such low energy that they clump together in one larger pair, a "di-atom."
The idea was developed in collaboration with Indian physicist Satyendra Nath Boshe and the then-theoretical state of matter was dubbed a Bose-Einstein condensation.
In 1985, University of Colorado at Boulder scientists Eric Cornell and Carlos Wiemann created such a condensation using a gas of the element rubidium and were awarded the Nobel peace prize for physics in 2000, together with Wolfgang Amadeus Ketterle of the Californian Institute of Technology.
Beenakker said the student who found the manuscript, Rowdy Boeyink, was painfully reviewing documents in the archive for a thesis on Oppenheimer when he came across the Einstein paper and immediately recognized its importance.
He said Boeyink had found other interesting documents during his search, including a letter from Dutch physicist Niels Bohr, and was all but certain to receive top marks on his thesis.
Re:Handwriting (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Other than (Score:2, Informative)
If you take a look at the Yalta conference, you have to wonder if Roosevelt was the most incompetent President ever, or just liked getting fucked up the ass by "Uncle Joe" Stalin.
Consider: in exchange for declaring war on Japan (which they did at the last possible moment), USSR got
Re:Amazing (Score:3, Informative)
absolute zero, or below zero? (dept nitpicking) (Score:4, Informative)
The paper predicted that at temperatures near absolute zero - around 460 degrees below zero -
So absolute zero is 460 degrees below zero, but I have been tought that it was 273 degrees below zero.
So if Toby Sterling is reading: The absolute zero is:
- zero Kelvin
- minus 273.15 degrees Celcius
- minus 460 degrees Fahrenheit
Feel free to properly describe it next time!
Re:Other than (Score:3, Informative)
I don't suppose you authored the policy on Cuba, huh?
If you took the time to do a proper blocade,
1. The Japanese Atomic bomb program, which was more advanced than the German Atomic bomb program, might have resulted in usable Japanese atomic weapon. Japan had bases on the Asian mainland free from the steady bombing that Germany was subjected to, which maked enrichment feasible.
2. China and Russia were waiting in the wings to invade, and get revenge on Japan for all the pain it had caused those countries. The US wanted to deal with postwar Japan. Things would have been worse for the Japanese if the Chinese and Russians had invaded instead of the Japanese surrenduring to the US.
Re:Other than (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Other than (Score:5, Informative)
The military commanders weren't even consulted before the bomb was dropped.
Eisenhower recommended against dropping the bomb.
Admiral Lehay opposed the bombings, stating that they achieved nothing.
The vice chairman of US bombing survey said that the a-bombs were not necessary.
However the most damning evidence came from the Director of Naval Intelligence.
Ellis makes it clear beyond reasonable dispute that the a-bombs were dropped for POLITICAL reasons, not MILITARY reasons.
These repeated restrospective justifications that the a-bombs were dropped to "save lives" are lies. They are lies that you wish to believe because otherwise you might have to face up to the reality that sometimes the USA has done evil things. It's better to accept that the USA is fallible - just like every other democracy - and admit that the a-bombs were a MISTAKE.
PS: all credit goes to DABANSHEE [slashdot.org] for the research.
Re:For Japanese attrocities in China ... (Score:5, Informative)
What, no one studied during history class? The Japanese believed that they were being pushed into a corner by Roosevelt and felt that they had to act to protect the Empire. They were thinking that the US was going to slap them with a trade embargo, which we did, in retaliation for Japan's expansionist efforts in China.
They were thinking that, if they eliminated the threat posed by the 7th fleet, strictly a military target, the US would be unable to enforce the embargo, and they'd have an additonal 6 months to a year in which to continue their expansion and seize the resource areas they thought they needed. After which, they'd present us with a fait accompli, and at the worst, sue for peace with their new borders intact.
In short, they did what quite a few people do. They went after what they wanted, and rationalized that no one would be in a position to stop them.
Unfortunately, the American people were outraged by the sneak attack and loss of life, made worse by the mistiming of the diplomatic note announcing the state of war between Japan and the US, which arrived well AFTER the attack took place.
Re:Amazing (Score:3, Informative)
Was to be expected, this is one of the oldest surviving Universities in the world (8th. Feb. 1575), all these centuries they have done fine with just a quil and inkwell.
Re:Post fact reasonement ? (Score:1, Informative)
The objective was to destroy Dresden's manufacturing capability, and to that end the death of civilians was inevitable but not an actual goal. It was a delicate decision, but one many said they'd have taken again in the same circumstances.
In different wind conditions the Dresden raid would have killed far fewer civilians, it would have shut down industrial production for a shorter period and we'd not be discussing it now. Just another German city damaged by area bombardment in the European theater, no different from a British city like Southampton, where German bombs fell on houses and schools.
It wasn't until the war was nearly over that Allied commanders realised their precision bombing techniques had improved so much that area bombing was no longer necessary. The lesson early in the 1940s that precision bombing "doesn't work" was hard to shake off even in the light of improved technique. Long after specialist units trained on new navigation techniques had hit individual German military facilities (e.g. a radar control center, or a V1 test site) the main bomber force continued to waste resources on hitting large towns and cities.
Re:Other than (Score:3, Informative)
To make this more clear, Truman was a politician and he knew that he could never be reelected if it ever became known that he had sat on a weapon that could have finished the war at once while American soldiers died in the Pacific theatre.
All the same this does not negate the fact that dropping the bomb was (i) convenient politically and (ii) resulted in all likelihood in a lower number of deaths in Japan.
In other words, any way one looks at it, dropping the bomb made sense: in terms of internal politics, in terms of global politics, and in saving deaths.
Remember the battle for Berlin, entirely surrounded and isolated had a death toll of over 70,000 Soviet soldiers and 150,000 German soldiers. And that was just one battle! Imagine how many would have been lost in the battle for Honshu, before reaching Tokyo and then in Tokyo itself.
Re:Not exactly (Score:3, Informative)
Your parent post was referring to atomic warfare, however, which I think was less of a contentious subject for him.
Re:Other than (Score:3, Informative)
Keep in mind that the US was not then the superpower that it is now. IIRC, at the start of the war Japan's military was larger than the US's. They probably didn't think they had so much to lose.
Re:Plagiarism (Score:3, Informative)
It is true, however, that a lot of the ideas we commonly attribute to Einstein were thought of by others. Poincare and Lorentz, for example, did think a lot about the synchronization of moving clocks and come up with ideas later used in relativity (e.g. Lorentz transforms). Einstein did not attribute all of these sources in his paper, and I believe there was some debate over to what extent he was aware of that work (or of the result of the Michelson-Morley experiment which cast doubt on the idea of the ether). Einstein might even be in some trouble today if he published a paper without references to such things.
Einstein's original contribution was to some extent his way of looking at these problems. Earlier thinkers had noticed practical problems of clock synchronization, but by and large they believed that these were just experimental issues (due to the wind of the ether, for example) that you needed to correct for to obtain the true, absolute time. It was Einstein who declared that different people's clocks actually run differently, and that there is no absolute time (or ether)! His radical idea was that space and time were not absolutes that every observer could agree upon, not that clock synchronization was hard.
I recommend Galison's book "Einstein's Clocks, Poincare's Maps" for a discussion of the lead-up to these sorts of ideas.
Title? (Score:3, Informative)
Huh? No, it's not. It's titled "Quantentheorie des einatomigen idealen Gases", and considering that it's written in German, that shouldn't be much of a surprise, either. What you gave above is the translation of the title, not the title itself.
Sheesh. Slashdot editors. :)
Mix of both (Score:3, Informative)
For example, his small type 'z' and the capital 'E' look like Sütterlin.
I think it was quite common to use a mix of both at that time;
I looked into an inherited "Poesiealbum"(*) from that time and it contained very different writing styles:
Completely Sütterlin, completly Latin and very often mixtures of both - some very similar to Einstein's (using Sütterlin 'z' and 'E').
(*autograph book with little poems/remembrances by your friends and relatives)