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Science

100 Years of Einstein 378

Posted by michael from the learn-a-thing-or-two dept.
spacerabbits writes "A century after Einstein's miracle year, most people still do not understand exactly what it was he did. The Economist tries to elucidate what AE did in a recent article."
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100 Years of Einstein More

100 Years of Einstein

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  • Their you go, Mr. Einstein. (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 30, 2004 @01:16PM (#11220517)
    Your desk is all squared away. Yep, all squaaaaaaaaaaaared away.

  • I know this isn't a book review, but... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by The_Rippa ( 181699 ) * on Thursday December 30, 2004 @01:17PM (#11220531)
    If you really want to get a handle on what Einstein did and what his work has influenced, I would recommend buying The Elegant Universe by Brian Green. Somehow it found it's way onto my Amazon wishlist a few years ago (I don't remember putting it there), and my mom bought it for me for xmas. I've read about half of it so far and it's amazing stuff. It's about the (super)string theory, which essentially ties together Einstein's theory of relativity and quantum physics. I can feel my brain get bigger as I read it.

    • Re:I know this isn't a book review, but... (Score:5, Informative)

      by mOoZik ( 698544 ) on Thursday December 30, 2004 @01:20PM (#11220562) Homepage
      They also have the video programs [pbs.org] on PBS, for free viewing. :)

      • Curl oneliner (Score:5, Informative)

        by Carthag ( 643047 ) on Thursday December 30, 2004 @01:26PM (#11220621) Homepage
        This works if your browser doesn't insert spaces after each line. Otherwise you'll have to remove them by hand. If I remember correctly it's a couple hundred megs.

        curl -f "http://a768.g.akamai.net/5/768/142/3f9e\
        9589/1a 1a1afb6ae049ae214fc034aad839a9198\
        5ea187bea5786f 362d841a61948bf2688f01f87fb\
        6fdf0e7ceb61c22186fb /nova_eu_30[12-14]c[01-\
        08]_mp4_300.mov" -O

        The joys of curl | strings :)
    • Good book. If you like it get his next one, Fabric of the Cosmos. I thought it was much better then Elegent Universe, though they are both still superb books.
      • I agree, in fact I would almost recommend Fabric of the Cosmos before Elegant Universe. It seems to cover a wide range of subjects more loosely, while Elegant Universe dives deeper into the nuances of superstring theory.

        I also appreciated the first chapter of Fabric of the Cosmos, where Greene talks about the drive behind his life's work. It really spoke to me in a personal way.
    • I can highly recommend this book as well. By the way, it's actually Brian GREENE, not Green. But yes, definitely, definitely, check this book out. He mostly talks about string theory but there are also a lot of other ideas discussed, like hidden variable theory (particles which are virtually undetectable directly; the only way we know they're there is that the equations that accurately predict particle behaviour/properties require these variables) and all kinds of other weird things related to this (spar
    • Yeah, this is the first and only book I've bought on the subject of astro-physics theories, before I knew anything about them at all, and it was amazing. Tought me a hell of a lot, well laid out with little subsections within bigger sections, and it tries to explain things in such a way that you can skip to a part that sounds the most interesting and understand it almost completely externally of any other stuff, although clearly that cannot be done all the time. Some parts are hellish hard to get your head
    • Timothy Ferris is good in the cosmology realm as well, similar to Brian Greene in the theoretical physics arena.

    • Re:I know this isn't a book review, but... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by MightyMartian ( 840721 ) on Thursday December 30, 2004 @01:33PM (#11220682) Journal
      > If you really want to get a handle on what Einstein did and what his work has influenced, I
      > would recommend buying The Elegant Universe by Brian Green. Somehow it found it's way onto my
      > Amazon wishlist a few years ago (I don't remember putting it there), and my mom bought it for me for
      > xmas. I've read about half of it so far and it's amazing stuff. It's about the (super)string theory,
      > which essentially ties together Einstein's theory of relativity and quantum physics. I can feel my
      > brain get bigger as I read it.

      And I would recommend that you also take what Green says about string theory with a grain of salt. While he's a good scientist, he like all string theorists, tend to paste over the cracks in string theory. There is no experimental evidence to support string theory, at the moment it just isn't science. He also tends to handwave away difficulties with multiple theories. He is clearly biased towards string theory, and at points I'd say unreasonably biased.

      • Re:I know this isn't a book review, but... (Score:5, Informative)

        by ktulu1115 ( 567549 ) on Thursday December 30, 2004 @01:42PM (#11220755)
        Yes, string theory requires some assumptions to be made for their models to work. However, with these assumptions they do a remarkable job of representing the world of quantum physics and relativity. Nothing else we have even comes close.

        And you also have to keep in mind that these theories are extremely oversimplified. We do not possess the power or knowledge to understand the equations in their full form. This was very similar to Einstein's field equations when he first discovered them; I have a feeling in time we will start to grasp the ideas better. Witten himeself claimed that some cynics dubbed his new M-theory for "murky theory" since our understanding of it is so primitive.
        • They actually don't do a remarkable job. Only the framework of string theory has been laid down. The theory can't make any predictions yet. Right now they've basically been able to show that with more work this theory has the potential to be the TOE, but it's not there yet. It's not a failing though. The theory is really in it's infantcy as theories go. It could turn out to be the answer, or it could end up failing. But there's a lot of work to be done before anyone will know for sure.
        • As I was taught by my high school Christan Creationist science/astronomy teacher (who was a great science teacher, not a whacko in any respect) a hypothesis must do two things in order to be considered a theory: 1. explain the past and 2. make predictions.

          As I understand, no one has though up any predictions based on string 'theory'. Since we have no predictions, we have no experiments. If we have no experiments, we have no falsification. If we have no falsification, we do not have science.

          As it stands,

      • I think that's why it's called string theory instead of string fact.

    • Re:I know this isn't a book review, but... (Score:5, Informative)

      by ktulu1115 ( 567549 ) on Thursday December 30, 2004 @01:37PM (#11220713)
      I have the book as well, excellent read. I first saw the NOVA special on PBS and watched it over and over and over again. Fascinating stuff.

      But yes, Einstein's later years were spend on trying to develop a GUT/TOE (Grand Unified Theory/Theory of Everything), basically a way to combine the smooth gentle macroscopic world of space-time in relativity and the extremely chaotic unpredictible microscopic view of quantum physics. String theory is the closest thing we have to accomplishing that goal, and with geniuses like Ed Witten [ias.edu] working on it, I think we stand a good chance of actually discovering/creating such a theory given enough time.

      I digress, but I have to state... the PBS specials are very useful and well put together. Brian Greene does an excellent job hosting the show. I espcially like the part where they first mention Ed, one string theorist says something like "we all think we're pretty smart, and he [Ed Witten] is so much smarter." It's amazing how much raw intelligence you need to really comprehend the underlying mathematical principles behind string theory.
      • Wake me up when they've got some data. All the brains in the world won't save a theory that has no supporting evidence.
        • Well it's just a wee-bit difficult to try and prove/disprove in the laboratory a theory that works on the scale of billions and billions of times smaller then the known world of quantum mechanics. Until we can find some way to find traces of strings, it's just theoritical physics and not experimental.

          One hope is that if strings exist, they would have left impressions behind from the big bang, similiar to the microwave background radiation. If we can find such evidence it would strongly support the theor

    • Re:I know this isn't a book review, but... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by albn ( 835144 ) on Thursday December 30, 2004 @01:39PM (#11220731) Journal
      His theories have been the cornerstone of modern Physics, but he is not the only one that has contributed greatly in this field.

      Some notables that come to mind are James Clerk Maxwell for his eletromegnetism and electricity, Tullio Levi Civita for his Absolute Differential Calculus, Wolfgang Pauli, Max Born, and many others.

      The universe is a very interesting place that still holds many secrets that we try to unlock with invariants, tensor fields on manifolds, experiments with atom smashers, detecting gravity waves, metrics, Jacobians, etc.... but the bottom line is, no matter what we discover or think is out there, there will always be more questions than answers.

      Thank you Albert, you have helped open the door to the long question you had with a unified field theory. As with Pauli say himself the solution to a unified field theory is akin to a Titian painting that is still a blank canvas.
    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Sorry, but... (Score:2, Informative)

      by dsci ( 658278 )
      I haven't read the book you mention, but I did catch PART of the Nova on PBS.

      IMHO, it was overproduced drek. It was absolutely the worst NOVA I've ever seen. Dumbed down physics and cutesy graphics and music. I had to turn it off, I just could not take it. Certainly not of the standard I've come to expect from Nova.

      I had a string theorist on my Thesis Committee in grad school, and he asked some pretty interesting questions during my Oral Exam. It's a fascinating field, but if you have to dumb it

      • Re:Sorry, but... (Score:3, Insightful)

        by xtermin8 ( 719661 )
        I think they do have to dumb down modern physics that much. I bet most people watched it for the cutesy graphics and snob factor than to really learn anything about string theory. You quote the Simpsons in your sig- How do you think Matt Groening would try to present String Theory? How many would watch the Simpsons if he didn't dress his clever cynical insights with juvenile potty humor?

        • Re:Sorry, but... (Score:3, Insightful)

          by ViolentGreen ( 704134 )
          I think they do have to dumb down modern physics that much

          Well if they had gone through a bunch of calculations, I would have gotten nothing out of it and probably wouldn't have spent more than 5 minutes on it. This program was not meant to explain string theory to physicists; it was targeted at people who have a basic knowledge of physics or less. The intention was not to show how the theory was formed but to give an overview of it.
    • Somehow it found it's way onto my Amazon wishlist a few years ago (I don't remember putting it there)

      Everyone put it on their wishlist after /. linked to the PBS documentary, which was hands down one of the most entertaining and informative that I ever watched.
    • Another really great read on Einstein's life and work is "Einstein's Cosmos: How Albert Einstein's Vision Transformed Our Understanding of Space and Time (Great Discoveries)"
      by Michio Kaku. My brother picked that up and I read it after he finished. It has a lot of information similar to the article, but much more detailed.
    • I echo your endorsement of Brian Green's "Elegant Universe." I took me several years of periodic interest in physics to make it all the way through the book (which I recently finished about 8 months ago), but by the end I was thoroughly engrossed in the work he and his colleagues have done in the realm of theoretical physics, as well as the potential theoretical physics still has to reveal more amazing stuff to humanity. Even if you have only a passing hobbyist interest in physics and the universe, I think

  • Einstein has one thing to say... (Score:5, Funny)

    by mOoZik ( 698544 ) on Thursday December 30, 2004 @01:18PM (#11220542) Homepage
    Einstein speaks! [typepad.com]

  • Relativity In Words of Four Letters or Less (Score:5, Interesting)

    by The_Rippa ( 181699 ) * on Thursday December 30, 2004 @01:19PM (#11220553)
    Albert Einstein's Theory of Relativity

    In Words of Four Letters or Less

    [ 0 ]

    So, have a seat. Put your feet up. This may take some time. Can I get you some tea? Earl Grey? You got it.

    Okay. How do I want to do this? He did so much. It's hard to just dive in. You know? You pick a spot to go from, but soon you have to back up and and go over this or that item, and you get done with that only to see that you have to back up some more. So if you feel like I'm off to the side of the tale half the time, well, this is why. Just bear with me, and we'll get to the end in good time. Okay?

    Okay. Let's see....

    [ I ]

    Say you woke up one day and your bed was gone. Your room, too. Gone. It's all gone. You wake up in an inky void. Not even a star. Okay, yes, it's a dumb idea, but just go with it. Now say you want to know if you move or not. Are you held fast in one spot? Or do you, say, list off to the left some? What I want to ask you is: Can you find out? Hell no. You can see that, sure. You don't need me to tell you. To move, you have to move to or away from ... well, from what? You'd have to say that you don't even get to use a word like "move" when you are the only body in that void. Sure. Okay.

    Now, let's add the bed back. Your bed is with you in the void. But not for long -- it goes away from you. You don't have any way to get it back, so you just let it go. But so now we have a body in the void with you. So does the bed move, or do you move? Or both? Well, you can see as well as I that it can go any way you like. Flip a coin. Who's to say? It's best to just say that you move away from the bed, and that the bed goes away from you. No one can say who's held fast and who isn't.

    Now, if I took the bed back but gave you the sun -- just you and the sun in the void, now -- I'll bet you'd say that the sun is so big, next to you, that odds are you move and not the sun. It's easy to move a body like ours, and not so easy to kick a sun to and fro. But that isn't the way to see it. Just like with the bed, no one can say who's held fast.

    In a word, you can't find any one true "at rest". Izzy was the one who told us that. Izzy said that you can't tell if you move or are at rest at any time. You can say that you go and all else is at rest, or you can say that you are at rest and all else goes. It all adds up the same both ways. So we all knew that much from way back when.

    Aha, but now wait! The sun puts off rays! So: why not look at how fast the rays go past you? From that you'd see how fast you move, yes? For you see, rays move just the same if what puts them off is held fast or not. (Make a note of that, now.) Izzy had no way to know that, back then, but it's true. Rays all move the same. We call how fast that is: c. So, you can see how fast the rays go by you, and how far off that is from c will tell you how fast you move! Hell, you don't even need the sun for that. You can just have a lamp with you -- the one by your bed that you use to read by. You can have that lamp in your hand, and see how fast the rays go by you when you turn it on. The lamp will move with you, but the rays will move at c. You will see the rays move a bit more or less than c, and that will be how fast you move. An open-and-shut case, yes?

    Well, and so we went to test this idea out. Hey, you don't need to be in a void to do this test. We move all the time, even as we sit here. We spin, in fact. So they shot some rays off and took note of how fast they went east, and how fast they went west, and so on. Well, what do you know? The rays went just as fast both ways. All ways, in fact. They all went at c, just the same. Not an iota more or less.

    To say that we were less than glad to find that out is to be kind. It blew the mind, is more like it. "What is up with that?" we said. And here is when old Al came in.

    [ II ]

    Old Al, he came out the blue and said, "Not only do rays move at c if what puts them out is held fast or not: they move at

  • Speaking of people understanding (Score:5, Funny)

    by bradleyland ( 798918 ) on Thursday December 30, 2004 @01:20PM (#11220559)
    I asked 7 people in my office what elucidate meant. Only one person knew, some shrugged, and one asked me if that was really a word *sigh*

  • As a Physics/Comp Sci Major... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by TJ_Phazerhacki ( 520002 ) on Thursday December 30, 2004 @01:20PM (#11220564) Journal
    I can honestly say that, even a hundred years later, Ein never ceases to amaze me. Just gotta wonder some times - what would have hapened without him? We were so close to losing him.


    We need a National Holiday - Physicists Day - On his Birthday!

    • He does amaze me, as well, but I think someone else would have eventually derived his formulas and theories. I mean, Calculus was simultaneously derived/invented/discovered by at least two people, namely Newton and Leibniz. Had they not, someone else would have, sooner or later.

      I say this not to take anything away from Einstein, because he was truly a genius. In fact, there have been very few individuals as influential and as damn smart as Einstein. Forget Paris Hilton, drool over Einie!

  • Another good book and thoughts (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Manan Shah ( 808049 ) on Thursday December 30, 2004 @01:21PM (#11220566)
    Another good book is 'Relativity and Common Sense'. It explains the logical progression from Newton to Einstein. It starts off with Gravity, newtonian principles and then starts adding twists. However, I think that quantom mechanics probably was a bigger discovery than Einstein. The concept of chance at the atomic level was a revelation, and even Einstein had trouble accepting it. However, we can only hope that within our lifetime, someone will succeed in crafting the 'THeory of Everything' which combines theory of large objects such as Planets, galaxies of Einstein with the theory of small things such as atoms of quantam mechanics. Maybe M (string theory) is the answer, maybe not. But these are exciting times we live in!
    • I just read Gleick's biography of Newton...amazing how even back then they were arguing particle vs. wave for light, based on odd discrepencies with even their fairly primitive aparatus...like how light refracts around a razor blade. Given that the answer we now seem happiest with is "both", it's not surprising Newton kind of hedged his bets.
    • It should be noted that einstein won the nobel prize for his work on the photoelectric effect, which is a part of quantum mechanics.

  • Old relativity joke (Score:5, Funny)

    by fm6 ( 162816 ) on Thursday December 30, 2004 @01:22PM (#11220583) Homepage Journal
    Old Man to his grandson: All you talk about is this Einstein and his relativity. What is this "relativity"?

    Grandson (who hasn't a clue, but can't admit it): Well, you see, relative to me, you're old, but relative to a sea turtle, you're young...

    (Long silence.)

    Old Man: So. From this, your Einstein makes a living?

  • Einstein hated? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by teiresias ( 101481 ) on Thursday December 30, 2004 @01:22PM (#11220585)
    I had a physics professor who hated Einstein and seemed to imply that there was a large faction of the scientific community who did as well. I'm not sure if this is from popularity or some honest to God issue he/they might have had with him. And I don't think I'll be able to find that out from this article since it seems to be singing most of his praises.

    Any ideas?

    • Re:Einstein hated? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by jamesoutlaw ( 87295 ) on Thursday December 30, 2004 @01:29PM (#11220649) Homepage
      It's not surprising that you had a professor who hated Einstein. Scientists are notorious for hating one another- often for absurd reasons- but also often out of jealousy or simply from a difference of "professional" opinion. I once knew two research engineering professors, from the same department, who would try to get each others research grants cancelled simply because they disagreed on some theories.
    • Your professor was an anti-Semite. ;)

      Just kidding, but scientists are very passionate about which theories they choose to believe. I can see someone disagreeing to that extent, even with established theories.

    • Re:Einstein hated? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by parker9 ( 60593 ) on Thursday December 30, 2004 @01:47PM (#11220797) Homepage
      it's not that physicists hate Einstein, it's more they hate how people view Einstein. it's mostly because Einstein became the poster-boy for the media about modern physics. as we know, the media tends to simplify things and so it suggests that Einstein did relativity, photoelectric effect, etc. by himself.

      given that Newton said he had seen far only because he stood on the shoulders of giants, Einstein is even more indebted to others before and during his time.

      look, i'm not saying that he wasn't a remarkable physicist- when i read some of his papers, i do feel like i'm reading something that's very close to 'god'- so clear, so elegant, so beautiful.

      yes, i am a physicist. and yes, i do find myself using Einstein's results. i'm glad when it happens, because i *feel* i'm close to reality.
    • 1. There is a general uneasiness in some parts of the scientific community about him not giving sufficient credit to Poincare. OK, that is an understatement, some people quite openly consider that he nicked most of Poincare's work. I have never read both in original so I would not venture any guesses. Ask someone who had (there are not many as Poincare papers have not been reprinted since WWI).

      2. There is a general uneasiness in some parts of the engineering community regarding the striking similarities be

  • having taken quantum mechanics courses... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by eobanb ( 823187 ) on Thursday December 30, 2004 @01:24PM (#11220601) Homepage

    ...I can certainly appreciate Einstein's sheer genius, particularly when it came to relativity. It was Einstein who postulated that, essentially, absolutely everything was relative. You hear all the examples about going around the sun in a spaceship really fast, or the twins paradox, but it doesn't really just stop there. There are all kinds of weird things that happen when you go really fast; for example, your size changes. If I'm driving my car really really fast (and of course, we're talking close to the speed of light), my vehicle actually becomes shorter. Then as I slow down, it stretches out again. At the beginning of the 20th century, no doubt what a lot of Einstein proposed sounded like sheer madness.

    In his later years, though, Einstein became increasingly conservative and very resistant to the idea of uncertainty, formulated by Bohr and Heisenberg. Einstein, from a generation of research before these two scientists, was still a determinist; he believed that you could not only discover both the position and velocity (speed and direction) of a particle, but that if you knew all such properties of all particles, you could accurately predict the state of things far in the future. I became disappointed with Einstein when I learned that, in the late 30s and 40s, even when faced with overwhelming evidence to support the ontic and epistemic uncertainty principles, Einstein tried lots of clever thought experiments to prove them wrong, even though they all relied on knowing more than one mutually incompatible property at once. I think Einstein contributed a lot, but he also made a lot of mistakes later in his life.

    • Whether they were mistakes or not, Einstein became sort of the sounding board for developments in theoretical physics. So whether he "agreed" with the ideas posed by quantum physics or not, he certainly helped drive research along with his constant challenges of other scientist's work.

      Plus, it's interesting to note that alot of his "mistakes", like the cosmological constant, are gaining support once again with developments derived out of superstring theory like extra dimensions and dark matter/energy.
    • What if he were right and one of his clever though experiements did prove them wrong?

      In his time he couldn't KNOW he was right or wrong, he just hoped he was right.

      It's only in hindsight can you say, "he also made a lot of mistakes later in his life," but if you were there, then, you would STILL be dwarfed, I think, by his genius. It's only unfortunate that his genius didn't extend to embrace QM, but he honestly thought they were wrong, too.
    • "God does not play dice."

      Perhaps his adherance to faith led to such views? Uncertainty I can imagine would put a large dent in the concept of an omniscient Lord.

      • Wrong on both parts.

        First off, Einstein refuted that quote. While he may have been religious, it was apparantly closer to deism than judaism.

        Secondly, uncertainty doesn't rule out God -- it gives God a backdoor through which to influence the universe without having to do more than fix the dice. There are some physicissts who become MORE religious, not less, from their studies.
      • "God does not play dice."

        Perhaps his adherance to faith led to such views? Uncertainty I can imagine would put a large dent in the concept of an omniscient Lord.

        It would? AFAIK, the uncertainty principle only points to our inability to ascertain the location and velocity of sub-atomic particles without affecting one or the other.

        so, an omniscient God wouldn't be subject to the same limitations that non-omniscient creatures are. Uncertainty, then, would seem to flow more naturally with a belief in a

      • Re:having taken quantum mechanics courses... (Score:4, Informative)

        by 31415926535897 ( 702314 ) on Thursday December 30, 2004 @04:21PM (#11222231) Journal
        Here is the real quote from your paraphrase:

        "Quantum mechanics is very impressive. But an inner voice tells me that it is not yet the real thing. The theory yields a lot, but it hardly brings us any closer to the secret of the Old One. In any case I am convinced that He doesn't play dice."
        -Einstein

        I think this is one of the most misunderstood quotes. Einstein is saying that yes, the models we have for understanding QM are incredibly accurate, but he doesn't feel like the models we have derived are 'the answer.' He is saying that just because the best we can do to predict QM events is with a probabalistic model does not mean that God does not know what is going to happen to each subatomic particle.

        Also, on a side note, I feel that uncertainty is necessary for there to be a God. QM uncertainty is the physical means to a free will which allows us the ability to accept or reject God.
    • Everyone's free to believe what they believe and to try to prove it to the opposition. Heck, isn't that the spirit of peer review?

      Science is all about changing the theory if something comes up in nature that's not properly predicted, so I believe that there is still alot of value in having one of the greatest minds around throw all of his ability at trying to find flaws in quantum mechanics, and utterly failing to do so.

      He may not have been right in not believing in the truth of quantum mechanics, but
    • the most amazing aspect of relativity, to me, was the fact einstein had the "guts" to challenge newton's laws of physics. he realized that the maxwell's equations were "relativistic" while newton's laws were not. instead of patching up the maxwell's equations so that the speed of light wouldn't be invariant under all reference frames, he decided that it was newton's laws that needed to fixing...
    • I think Einstein contributed a lot, but he also made a lot of mistakes later in his life.

      what I find interesting about Einstein is he married a radical woman that was as brilliant as himself only to dump her for a more traditional wife later in life.

      Radical to traditional in both scientific and private life....odd parallels

  • even non-geeks appreciate him (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    For example, this on-air quote:

    "There are no geniuses [among coaches] in the National Football League. A genius is someone like Norman Einstein."

    - ESPN commentator Joe Theismann

  • Einstein Quotes (Score:5, Interesting)

    by mabu ( 178417 ) on Thursday December 30, 2004 @01:36PM (#11220702)
    Here are some Einstein quotes from Wisdomtoday.com - a daily quote e-mail [wisdomtoday.com]:

    Strange is our situation here on earth. Each of us comes for a short visit, not knowing why, yet sometimes seeming to divine a purpose. From the standpoint of daily life, however, there is one thing we do know: that man is here for the sake of other men - above all for those upon whose smiles and well-being our own happiness depends.
    - Albert Einstein

    I cannot imagine a God who rewards and punishes the objects of his creation, whose purposes are modeled after our own - a God, in short, who is but a reflection of human frailty. Neither can I believe that the individual survives the death of his body, although feeble souls harbor such thoughts through fear or ridiculous egotisms.
    - Albert Einstein

    As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.
    - Albert Einstein

    Make things as simple as possible, but no simpler.
    - Albert Einstein

    Technological progress is like an axe in the hands of a pathological criminal.
    - Albert Einstein

    The significant problems we face can not be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them.
    - Einstein

    It is easier to denature plutonium than to denature the evil spirit of man.
    - Albert Einstein

    Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity opinions which differ from that of their social environment.
    - Albert Einstein

    The important thing is not to stop questioning.
    - Albert Einstein
    • I gotta say my favourite Einstein quote, and no doubt in my top 10, which you haven't posted, is "The only thing that inteferes with my learning is my education". So true, it really sucks being too smart for what your supposed to be at your age and school/college justs slows you down, but hey.
      • My favorite quote, which I omitted because it's probably his most common quote: "Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds."

  • General Theory of Relativity in two lines (Score:5, Interesting)

    by fromme ( 834062 ) on Thursday December 30, 2004 @01:43PM (#11220772)
    Space tells matter how to move. Matter tells space how to curve.

    The best definition I've found till date. If you can wrap your head around that, you're in the clear!

  • Invariance and Statistics (Score:5, Interesting)

    by radtea ( 464814 ) on Thursday December 30, 2004 @01:47PM (#11220798)
    From the article:

    Abraham Pais, a physicist who wrote what is generally regarded as the definitive scientific biography of Einstein, said of his subject that there are two things at which he was "better than anyone before or after him; he knew how to invent invariance principles and how to make use of statistical fluctuations."

    This is a great one-line summary of what made Einstein an outstanding physicist.

    The use of invariance principles is still finding its way slowly into other subjects. Jaynes' work on probability is an excellent example of the power of invariance principles--he derives all of probability theory from a few basic postulates, including the condition that conclusions be invariant under transformations in the path used to reach them.

    --Tom

  • Biblical proportions (Score:3, Funny)

    by Dorsai65 ( 804760 ) <[dkmerriman] [at] [gmail.com]> on Thursday December 30, 2004 @01:54PM (#11220855) Homepage Journal
    And God said "sqrt(e/m)=c" - and there was light.

    • Re:Biblical proportions (Score:2, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      About your sig... for the same reason, you are not eating your girlfriend....oh wait

  • Patent Clerk?!? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 30, 2004 @02:11PM (#11221032)
    But wait, Einstein started out as a patent clerk. Aren't we supposed to hate him for that?

    I'm so confused......

  • Recommended reading.. (Score:5, Informative)

    by mabu ( 178417 ) on Thursday December 30, 2004 @02:13PM (#11221051)
    For laypeople, I think the best book introducing Einstein's theories in an understandable way is Relativity Visualized [amazon.com] by L. Epstein.

  • Some highlights from my annus mirabilis.... (Score:4, Funny)

    by mogrify ( 828588 ) on Thursday December 30, 2004 @02:17PM (#11221079) Homepage

    ate a pound of pasta in one sitting

    avoided every single episode of Fear Factor

    bowled a 150 game

    watched the entire Godfather trilogy, pausing only to switch discs

    obeyed nearly all traffic laws

    finally cleaned out the laundry room

    played Civ II for 13 hours straight

    washed the car

  • thats because (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Striker770S ( 825292 ) on Thursday December 30, 2004 @02:27PM (#11221167) Journal
    most people still do not understand exactly what it was he did
    thats because the average person has the thought capacity of a 4th grader. I mean hell, many people still believe the world was created around 6000 years ago on a given sunday by some guy. That kills me.

  • Don't forget Poincaré (Score:4, Interesting)

    by cy_a253 ( 713262 ) on Thursday December 30, 2004 @02:29PM (#11221180)
    The french mathematician Henri Poincaré anticipated Einstein by a full 8 years with his 1897 "The Relativity of Space" paper.

    http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosop hy/works/fr/poincare.htm [marxists.org]

    What he describes in his paper is quite similar to the Special Relativity of Einstein, although he does not explain it as clearly and as completely as Einstein does. But why history keeps him the shadow I'll never understand.

    • Well, you'll probably get some flack from right-wingers for linking to a Marxist site, but whatever the politics Poincare certainly deserves some recognition. But still, much like Alfred Wallace, who discovered natural selection independently of Darwin but didn't want it to apply to humans, Poincare didn't really recognize how relativity changed everything. An in any case, what Poincare discovered was really only a form of Special Relativity. It was General Relativity which really made Einstein famous.

    • Re:Don't forget Poincaré (Score:5, Informative)

      by radtea ( 464814 ) on Thursday December 30, 2004 @11:40PM (#11225387)

      David Bohm's excellent primer, "Special Relativity" (available in Dover paperback) gives a very good summary of the situation prior to Einstein's 1905 paper. Essentially, every result that Einstein's theory gave (including the famous E = mc**2, which was published by Heaviside in 1892!) had been arrived at previously by Poincare' and others as necessary consequences of a particular dynamical interpretation of Maxwell's electro-magentic theory.

      Einstein's revolution was the derivation of the same results via a kinematical restatement of mechanical laws. Dynamics deals with the causes of motion, kinematics with the description of motion. The "old" relativity assumed that there were real forces acting to squeeze matter so that rods got short and clocks ran slow. Einstein's relativity showed that the same results followed immediately from adopting a particular, consistent, description of motion based on two assumptions (the constancy of the speed of light and the invariance of the laws of nature under changes of velocity.)

      One of the consequences of Einstein's theory is that when we discovered matter that does not participate in electro-magentic interactions, such as neutrinos, we could confidently treat it using relativistic mechanics. The old relativity, in contrast, only applied to charged particles.

      It is a remarkable and still interesting fact that so much of what Einstein explained can be explained by alternative means within the context of Newtonian dynamics, although the explanations are much less general and much harder to understand.

      --Tom

  • Read Einstein himself! (Score:3, Interesting)

    by turboalberta ( 215280 ) on Thursday December 30, 2004 @03:04PM (#11221528) Homepage
    I have found out that reading the original papers of Einstein elucidates a lot more than the whole of literature that's been wasted on the subject to introduce people to the ideas. Start with "Relativity : The Special and the General Theory" which is an introduction for everybody who followed math in highschool a little decently. Then read "The principle of relativity" published by Dover. You can buy both for $14.36 on amazon. I found those very understandable and I'm certainly no math wizard.

    Einstein was a marvellous educator and his writing on the subject is way better than almost anybody else (except for Feynmann maybe).

  • sciscoop too (Score:3, Informative)

    by apsmith ( 17989 ) * on Thursday December 30, 2004 @03:12PM (#11221623) Homepage
    We attempted to elucidate [sciscoop.com] Einstein's miracle year last week, but I have to admit the Economist did a nice job on this article.

  • GR, Einstein, Grossman, Hilbert and Plagiarism (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Baldrson ( 78598 ) on Thursday December 30, 2004 @03:24PM (#11221763) Homepage Journal
    Another article from the UK Register [theregister.co.uk] discusses some apparent shenannigans surrounding the theory of General Relativity.

    The money quote:

    "My analysis of Hilbert's mutilated proofs therefore cannot prove that Einstein copied from Hilbert," he says. "It proves less, which is that it cannot be proved that Einstein could not have copied from Hilbert. But it proves that Hilbert had not copied from Einstein, as it has been insinuated following the paper by Corry, Renn and Stachel."

    The original paper by Prof. Winterbottom [unr.edu] was published but a rebuttal to that paper by Corry, Renn and Stachel was not [mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de].

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