Albert Einstein, Math Genius and Man of the Century

Guide to math needed to study physics

2012-01-19T10:36:00.001-08:00

The language of physics is mathematics. In order to study physics seriously, one needs to learn mathematics that took generations of brilliant people centuries to work out. Algebra, for example, was cutting-edge mathematics when it was being developed in Baghdad in the 9th century. But today it's just the first step along the journey.

Algebra

Algebra provides the first exposure to the use of variables and constants, and experience manipulating and solving linear equations of the form y = ax + b and quadratic equations of the form y = ax2+bx+c.

Geometry

Geometry at this level is two-dimensional Euclidean geometry, Courses focus on learning to reason geometrically, to use concepts like symmetry, similarity and congruence, to understand the properties of geometric shapes in a flat, two-dimensional space.

Trigonometry

Trigonometry begins with the study of right triangles and the Pythagorean theorem. The trigonometric functions sin, cos, tan and their inverses are introduced and clever identities between them are explored.

Calculus (single variable)

Calculus begins with the definition of an abstract functions of a single variable, and introduces the ordinary derivative of that function as the tangent to that curve at a given point along the curve. Integration is derived from looking at the area under a curve,which is then shown to be the inverse of differentiation.
Calculus (multivariable)

Multivariable calculus introduces functions of several variables f(x,y,z...), and students learn to take partial and total derivatives. The ideas of directional derivative, integration along a path and integration over a surface are developed in two and three dimensional Euclidean space.

Analytic Geometry

Analytic geometry is the marriage of algebra with geometry. Geometric objects such as conic sections, planes and spheres are studied by the means of algebraic equations. Vectors in Cartesian, polar and spherical coordinates are introduced.

Linear Algebra

In linear algebra, students learn to solve systems of linear equations of the form ai1 x1 + ai2 x2 + ... + ain xn = ci and express them in terms of matrices and vectors. The properties of abstract matrices, such as inverse, determinant, characteristic equation, and of certain types of matrices, such as symmetric, antisymmetric, unitary or Hermitian, are explored.

Ordinary Differential Equations

This is where the physics begins! Much of physics is about deriving and solving differential equations. The most important differential equation to learn, and the one most studied in undergraduate physics, is the harmonic oscillator equation, ax'' + bx' + cx = f(t), where x' means the time derivative of x(t).

Partial Differential Equations

For doing physics in more than one dimension, it becomes necessary to use partial derivatives and hence partial differential equations. The first partial differential equations students learn are the linear, separable ones that were derived and solved in the 18th and 19th centuries by people like Laplace, Green, Fourier, Legendre, and Bessel.

Methods of approximation

Most of the problems in physics can't be solved exactly in closed form. Therefore we have to learn technology for making clever approximations, such as power series expansions, saddle point integration, and small (or large) perturbations.

Probability and statistics

Probability became of major importance in physics when quantum mechanics entered the scene. A course on probability begins by studying coin flips, and the counting of distinguishable vs. indistinguishable objects. The concepts of mean and variance are developed and applied in the cases of Poisson and Gaussian statistics.

In defense of Shakespeare—a conversation with veteran Australian actor and director John Bell

2012-01-19T10:33:00.000-08:00

By David Walsh
13 December 2011
William Shakespeare

The recent film Anonymous, directed by Roland Emmerich and written by John Orloff, which argues that the Earl of Oxford, Edward de Vere, was the actual author of the three dozen plays attributed to William Shakespeare (1564-1616), raises a host of questions. (See “Anonymous: An ignorant assault on Shakespeare” and “An exchange: More on the contemporary assault on Shakespeare”) At the center of the debate is the figure of Shakespeare himself and the enduring character of his work.

The arguments in favor of the Earl of Oxford are not serious ones and his champions largely attempt to take advantage of the generally low level of historical knowledge at present to gain a hearing. More serious, however, is the thrust of the effort, aimed, in our view, against the plays and Shakespeare’s extraordinary contribution as a whole.

In the assault on Shakespeare, incomprehension in the face of genuine artistic genius combines with hostility toward the universality of the plays and the playwright, including the confidence of the Elizabethan playwright that he could cognize every corner of reality and bring it to life in a poetic manner. There is something threatening and disturbing to a certain contemporary social type, self-involved and self-centered, often obsessed with gender or ethnic identity, about an artistic figure of Shakespeare’s depth and breadth.

Out of a concern with some of these general questions, I recently spoke to John Bell, the distinguished Australian actor and director who founded the Bell Shakespeare theatre company in 1990.

In his lively memoir, The Time of My Time, Bell (born 1940 in Maitland, New South Wales) describes his first eye-opening encounter with Shakespeare at a Catholic high school, when one of his teachers introduced an English class to A Midsummer Night’s Dream. On top of that, a viewing of Laurence Olivier’s Henry V at a local cinema left Bell “stunned and blinking.” He goes on, “I couldn’t believe what I’d just experienced so I went back in and watched it all over again. … In the years following, Olivier’s Hamlet and Richard III appeared and my fate was sealed.”

At the time Bell went off to university there was no full-time professional theatre company in Sydney. He told an interviewer, “If you wanted a career in the theatre, there simply wasn't one [in Australia].” Bell traveled to England in 1964, and after six months, was invited to join the prestigious Royal Shakespeare Company.

He returned to Australia in 1970, taught at the National Institute of Dramatic Art and co-founded the Nimrod Theatre Company in Sydney.

For the Shakespeare company he established 21 years ago, Bell has played Shylock, Richard III, Macbeth, Malvolio, Coriolanus, Leontes, Prospero, King Lear and Ulysses, among other roles. In the last five years alone, he has directed productions of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, The Comedy of Errors, Macbeth, As You Like It and Pericles, along with an adaptation of Melville’s Moby Dick, Heiner Müller’s reworking of Titus Andronicus, Gogol’s The Government Inspector, Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist and John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi.
John Bell

Bell Shakespeare is Australia's only national touring theatre company. It currently tours three mainstage productions to each Australian state every year, in addition to a variety of educational programs.

In 2011, Bell published On Shakespeare, his thoughts and reminiscences of playing Shakespeare over the course of half a century.

We spoke by telephone.

David Walsh: Anonymous is the immediate occasion for this conversation, but our more general concern is the appeal of Shakespeare, his universality: what it is that still draws audiences, actors, and directors to the plays.

You write in your memoir about your first encounters with Shakespeare. Can you recall the experience and some of the elements that were attractive or forceful to you at the time?

John Bell: Yes, I can. I think my very first epiphany, if you like, was hearing Julius Caesar on the radio when I was 12 or 13 years old. I was struck by the language, the poetry was what moved me most. I’d never heard language like that.

I was very fortunate in having two very good English teachers in high school, when I was about 14 or 15. They didn’t simply pass the book around the classroom and say, ‘Please, paraphrase this.’ The first one I had actually acted out the play for us, in the room, and took on all the parts, described the sets, the costumes, and lighting, the whole lot.

I guess the next thing, around the same time, when I was 14 or 15, was seeing Laurence Olivier’s movie of Henry V, which had all those elements together: the language was so thrilling, the spectacle, the sheer excitement, and generally the rough nature of it. It opens in a reconstruction of the Globe Theatre, which is full of horseplay and the actors and audience adlibbing with each other, with a great sense of improvisation about it. This reminded me of my very first encounters with theatre, which were pantomime and circus.

At the age of 15 or so, I was an absolute convert. All I wanted to do was be an actor and perform Shakespeare.

DW: I remember your comment about the circus. This is something that still strikes people: the remarkable combination in Shakespeare of vulgarity and poetry, of high-flown ideas and low-flown ideas, the mixture of genres and conceptions, personalities and social types, the rich and varied presentation of life.

JB: That’s absolutely right. It’s total theatre. You look at almost every other playwright, they’re working within relatively narrow boundaries, whether it’s Tennessee Williams or Noel Coward, Harold Pinter or Samuel Beckett. Shakespeare, as you say, crosses all genres, can go from the most vulgar to the most sublime within a single scene, in The Winter’s Tale, for instance.

One is at the same time always aware that one is in the theatre, enhanced by the character of the Globe Theatre itself. The new one in London gives you some sense of what is was like: the audience surrounding the actor, this direct contact in broad daylight, no tricks, no scenery, no fancy lighting, no illusion …

DW: Shakespeare was apparently obliged to draw 1,500 to 2,000 people a day to the Globe.

JB: We tend perhaps to underestimate Shakespeare’s audience. An audience that simply wanted to throw vegetables at the stage would have gone to the bear-baiting next door.

Also, Shakespeare is continually raising the bar, making it more difficult for his audience. If you go from the rough and readiness of The Comedy of Errors and Henry VI through to Troilus and Cressida, it’s an extraordinary escalation in demands made on the audience’s sophistication, listening power, patience and intelligence.

DW: In your memoir you suggest that the language transcended the purely rational and touched all the senses, I wonder if you have any thoughts about that.

JB: Language that captures the whole body and soul. The rhythms, the cadences, the after-effect of poetry is not just literal. The juxtaposition of words that you would not normally juxtapose, the rhythm that stays with you after you’ve heard the line, which all genuine poetry does, I think. A good many of the other prose plays of the period are just that, they are literal, they are prosaic, they even concoct a story, but it’s the cadences in Shakespeare, the qualities of sound that stay with you in a good line of poetry.

DW: Can you speak about your experience with the Royal Shakespeare Company in Britain in the 1960s?

JB: I was there nearly five years and I’d had very little acting training up to that point. I had about six months at the Bristol Old Vic school, and then I was invited to join the Stratford company, and it was during the five years I was there that I really learned what the craft of acting was about, working with very good directors of course, people like Peter Hall, John Barton, Peter Brook, at their peak. And working with some very fine actors, like Paul Scofield (my very favorite), Ian Richardson, Ian Holm, Glenda Jackson …

This was a troupe of very fine actors, and it was through being in the rehearsal room, watching them at work, then being on stage with them, that I really learned what the craft of acting was. I learned a great deal about directing as well. So I found that experience absolutely invaluable. And the fact that one was at Stratford for most of the year, so that there were relatively few distractions and you gave yourself up entirely to the work … you had the leisure, the time to simply watch rehearsals and ruminate on the work and the things that were happening.

DW: Did you have the opportunity to be in any of Peter Brook’s productions?

JB: I was only in one, unfortunately: The Investigation [by Peter Weiss], a dramatizing of the transcript of the Auschwitz trials. It was only a public reading [in 1965]. That was the only time I encountered him as a director, but he was around the company a lot, and, of course, I saw all his productions.

DW: What did you think of Paul Scofield’s King Lear [directed on film by Peter Brook in 1971]?

JB: I never got to see his Lear on stage, I only got to see the movie, which I don’t think does him justice. I don’t think it’s a particularly good movie. It’s too tricksy and too affected, I think. From what I heard about the stage production, the director wasn’t getting in the way, he simply had Scofield in that space. I was so conscious of the camera work in the movie, that it undermined the power of Scofield.

DW: Were you there at the time of [Peter Weiss’s] Marat/Sade?

JB: Yes, I saw Marat/Sade several times. Again, much, much better than the film. I think the film lost a lot of the sheer, raw presence. It was at the Aldwych Theatre in London and I saw it a number of times, I was in the company by then, and the visceral impact of that piece on stage was astonishing. That was watered down considerably in the film.

DW: You mention in your book at one point that there was no permanent professional theatre in Sydney when you began to be interested in being an actor.

JB: That was when I first joined the profession, that was in 1960. Actually, I was fortunate, because a company was established then and I worked with it for two years. There had been other companies previously that had been set up and failed.

When I came back from England, in 1970, there was a theatre industry, but it was nowhere near what it is today. I think that Australia has a pretty healthy theatre culture, and that has been a product of the last 40 years, quite extraordinarily.

DW: Obviously, the city and the country have undergone extraordinary changes and you belong to a generation that was responsible in many ways for those changes. How do you see your generation, what its challenges were and what it accomplished?

JB: I think the main thing I felt when I came back from England was that Australia was too hidebound, it wasn’t creating its own theatre, we were still imitating the English system. So that each of the major companies would have one Shakespeare, one Bernard Shaw, one Neil Simon, one Feydeau farce, or whatever, and very little in terms of Australian content. So my generation was determined to turn that around and create an Australian theatre.

There was a group in Melbourne, the Australian Performing Group, starting that work, and then in 1970, myself and a partner, set up a little theatre called the Nimrod Theatre in King’s Cross and we started producing Australian work, which I then carried on for the next 14 years. And that kind of took off. There was also the beginning of a fledgling film industry here, and I think the theatre fed the film industry with new scripts, new talent, and also an awareness of making our own voice heard. That was a significant development, it hadn’t happened much before. We also produced international talent, like Cate Blanchett, who runs a theatre company here, and many other actors who got exported to Hollywood, unfortunately, but it was the beginning of the recognition of Australian talent that we hadn’t had before.

DW: The presence of Australian actors is quite remarkable in the global film industry.

JB: It is quite striking. My only regret is that they’re all putting on American accents and pretending to be Americans. Most of the world wouldn’t even know they were Australian performers. I long for the moment when we can start using our own voice more and stop being phony Americans.

DW: That’s a problem, and not just in Australia. Back to Shakespeare. You indicate the influence his work had on you, and you’ve established a company devoted to his work, so you obviously believe in the power of these plays to have that same sort of impact on other people, and not simply those from more privileged backgrounds. I’m curious whether you find it more or less difficult for contemporary audiences to respond to Shakespeare than it was, say, several decades ago, or what sort of changes, if any, there have been in audiences.

JB: I think 40 years ago we were very hooked on a traditional way, so-called, of performing Shakespeare, which meant imitating what people thought was the Old Vic or the Royal Shakespeare Company. This meant people putting on period costumes and a very English-sounding sort of accent. And so productions were very conservative, and people who went to the opera and ballet liked those sorts of productions, they were in line with their cultural expectations. Rather lavish, decorative, rather escapist, and obviously ‘high art,’ Culture with a capital C.

And what we’ve been trying to do is break all that down over the last 40 years. So that my company, which is now 21 years old, has always performed Shakespeare in modern dress, using Australian accents throughout, or whatever accent you happen to have, whether it was Polish, Russian, Chinese, whatever. You don’t hide your voice or where you come from. And we focused very much on contemporary issues in the plays, racism, anti-Semitism, gender conflict, anti-war sentiment, whatever is in the plays that can be brought out to make the plays resonate with an audience now. We’ve concentrated on that. We’re hardly alone, that’s been a global concern. Shakespeare Our Contemporary, as [Polish critic] Jan Kott called him.

I think Shakespeare is generally taught in school as badly as he always has been. We try to counteract that by having an education wing in our company, eight young actors who spend all year performing in schools all over Australia to some 60,000 students, bringing Shakespeare into the classroom as performance. We also run workshops and seminars so we can help teachers communicate Shakespeare, especially for classrooms full of children where English is the second language, a lot of Middle Eastern students, for instance.

We find when we go into Aboriginal communities, remote communities, and play Shakespeare for them, they take to it very readily, they have no problem. They have three or four languages of their own, this is just one more language. They pick it up quite easily and respond to the big issues, the symbolism, the mythology. When we work in those communities, we translate the plays into the various Aboriginal languages and they teach us their languages in return. So there’s a lot of activity overall in education, in theatre practice, rescuing Shakespeare from the traditionalists and the conservatives, who want to keep the plays in a museum context.

DW: This is a sweeping question. At its best, in your opinion, what sort of impact does a Shakespeare or any major artistic figure have on an audience member?

JB: I don’t want to sound complacent or self-congratulatory, but I think we have made quite an impact on people. We’ve played before more than two million people, in this company, and the kind of feedback we get from younger and older people alike is gratifying. They didn’t know Shakespeare could be so entertaining, so much fun, we didn’t think we could ever understand it. People ask, who did the translation? Nobody, that was Shakespeare. So I think we’ve achieved something in performing it in a way that makes it very accessible and clear to audiences. That was my aim, that’s what I set out to do. So I think we’ve had a record of success with that.

DW: Are there plays or parts that are favorites of yours, as an actor, director or spectator?

JB: I’m often asked that, and it’s the old question: which is your favorite child? One has to love the play that one is directing or acting in, because you put about twelve months into every one, in terms of thinking about it, casting, rehearsing, getting it up. One devotes a year of one’s life to each play, and one falls in love with each one.

I think the play I most admire and that I’m most in awe of is King Lear. I’ve done that several times, and never really gotten very far up the mountain with that one. I think of all the plays, my very favorites would be Henry IV, Parts 1 and 2, in terms of the sheer scope and range of those plays, and the appeal they have.

DW: You mention Henry IV, and I was thinking about that the other day in relation to Anonymous and the Earl of Oxford. The scene of the carriers preparing to load their horses at the inn [Part I, Act II, Scene I], talking about the fleas and the price of oats… The notion that the Earl of Oxford could have written some of those scenes is so preposterous.

JB: Absolutely ludicrous. That scene you mention, I think, is a piece of verbatim theatre. I think Shakespeare was lying in bed and heard those two guys outside the window talking about the price of oats and the horses with the shakes, or whatever. It’s so authentic, and, again, I don’t see the Earl of Oxford knowing people like Bottom and Quince and Bardolph and Pistol and Mistress Quickly. This was totally out of his realm, it is so ludicrous, I agree.

DW: In our view, this is not just an attack on who wrote the plays, it’s an attack on the plays. I think there’s something offensive to certain people about the grandness and universality of the plays, they are so titanic, and certainly we reject the notion that women should only write about women, and Jews about Jews and Australians about Australians … There’s something about the universal figure of this artist that is very powerful, I think.

JB: I totally agree.

DW: Do you have any thoughts about the ‘authorship controversy,’ or is it something you simply ignore?

JB: I tend to ignore it. It’s been around for so long now, I heard about it at university, whether it was Christopher Marlowe, or Oxford, or Pembroke, or even Queen Elizabeth. Crazy, crazy notions. Look, people like parlor games, they like conspiracy theories, but I think there’s such a body of good writing now from good scholars, like Jonathan Bate, James Shapiro, Stephen Greenblatt, even Bill Bryson, and they all have good answers to the conspiracy theories, and it’s such nonsense. I guess there’s always a certain intrigue for people, and there’s a frustration because Shakespeare is so enigmatic.

Actually, we know a good deal more about his life than most of the playwrights of the period. We know nothing about John Webster, for instance, at all. He was up there with Shakespeare in terms of popularity. It’s remarkable we know as much about Shakespeare as we do. But because he remains enigmatic as a personality, and his character is so hard to pin down, people want to create their own Shakespeare, someone they would like to see as the author of those plays. Gay people will say he must have been gay, Catholics say he must have been a Catholic, atheists insist he must obviously have been an atheist, we all want to create a Shakespeare who appeals to us. That’s why people have this romantic notion of some English nobleman, rather than someone they find too shadowy to connect with.

DW: Any final words on why you continue to direct and act in Shakespeare, what the continuing appeal is?

JB: Sometimes, oddly enough, I feel it keeps me young, because it’s a continual exploration, with the acting, directing and researching. I guess like some sort of crazy scientist, someone who’s fascinated by one aspect of life, you go on exploring, researching, getting excited by it. I feel sorry for actors and directors who are jaded by their careers and say, ‘I’m doing this crap just for the money,’ ‘I’m in this TV soap or this B-grade movie because I’ve got to earn a living.’ I’ve never felt that. If you’re working on Shakespeare, I think it’s a privilege to devote your life to working alongside such a great mind. It can never be boring or exhausting, it’s always revitalizing. I still feel like the 15-year-old I was when I first discovered Shakespeare.

Did you know?

2012-01-03T14:29:00.001-08:00

The German-born physicist Albert Einstein developed the first of his groundbreaking theories while working as a clerk in the Swiss patent office in Bern. After making his name with four scientific articles published in 1905, he went on to win worldwide fame for his general theory of relativity and a Nobel Prize in 1921 for his explanation of the phenomenon known as the photoelectric effect. An outspoken pacifist who was publicly identified with the Zionist movement, Einstein emigrated from Germany to the United States when the Nazis took power before World War II. He lived and worked in Princeton, New Jersey, for the remainder of his life.

Pair of Aluminum Atomic Clocks Reveal Einstein's Relativity at a Personal Scale

2010-11-28T15:41:00.000-08:00

ScienceDaily (Sep. 24, 2010) — Scientists have known for decades that time passes faster at higher elevations -- a curious aspect of Einstein's theories of relativity that previously has been measured by comparing clocks on the earth's surface and a high-flying rocket.

Now, physicists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have measured this effect at a more down-to-earth scale of 33 centimeters, or about 1 foot, demonstrating, for instance, that you age faster when you stand a couple of steps higher on a staircase.Described in the Sept. 24 issue of Science, the difference is much too small for humans to perceive directly -- adding up to approximately 90 billionths of a second over a 79-year lifetime -- but may provide practical applications in geophysics and other fields.

Similarly, the NIST researchers observed another aspect of relativity -- that time passes more slowly when you move faster -- at speeds comparable to a car travelling about 20 miles per hour, a more comprehensible scale than previous measurements made using jet aircraft.

NIST scientists performed the new "time dilation" experiments by comparing operations of a pair of the world's best experimental atomic clocks. The nearly identical clocks are each based on the "ticking" of a single aluminum ion (electrically charged atom) as it vibrates between two energy levels over a million billion times per second. One clock keeps time to within 1 second in about 3.7 billion years and the other is close behind in performance. The two clocks are located in different laboratories at NIST and connected by a 75-meter-long optical fiber.

NIST's aluminum clocks -- also called "quantum logic clocks" because they borrow logical decision-making techniques from experimental quantum computing -- are precise and stable enough to reveal slight differences that could not be seen until now. The clocks operate by shining laser light on the ions at optical frequencies, which are higher than the microwave frequencies used in today's standard atomic clocks based on the cesium atom.

Optical clocks could someday lead to time standards 100 times more accurate than today's standard clocks.

The aluminum clocks can detect small relativity-based effects because of their extreme precision and high "Q factor" -- a quantity that reflects how reliably the ion absorbs and retains optical energy in changing from one energy level to another -- says NIST postdoctoral researcher James Chin-Wen Chou, first author of the paper.

"We have observed the highest Q factor in atomic physics," Chou says. "You can think about it as how long a tuning fork would vibrate before it loses the energy stored in the resonating structure. We have the ion oscillating in sync with the laser frequency for about 400 thousand billion cycles."

The NIST experiments focused on two scenarios predicted by Einstein's theories of relativity. First, when two clocks are subjected to unequal gravitational forces due to their different elevations above the surface of the Earth, the higher clock -- experiencing a smaller gravitational force -- runs faster.
Second, when an observer is moving, a stationary clock's tick appears to last longer, so the clock appears to run slow. Scientists refer to this as the "twin paradox," in which a twin sibling who travels on a fast-moving rocket ship would return home younger than the other twin. The crucial factor is the acceleration (speeding up and slowing down) of the travelling twin in making the round-trip journey.

NIST scientists observed these effects by making specific changes in one of the two aluminum clocks and measuring the resulting differences in the two ions' relative ticking rates, or frequencies.

In one set of experiments, scientists raised one of the clocks by jacking up the laser table to a height one-third of a meter (about a foot) above the second clock. Sure enough, the higher clock ran at a slightly faster rate than the lower clock, exactly as predicted.

The second set of experiments examined the effects of altering the physical motion of the ion in one clock. (The ions are almost completely motionless during normal clock operations.) NIST scientists tweaked the one ion so that it gyrated back and forth at speeds equivalent to several meters per second.
That clock ticked at a slightly slower rate than the second clock, as predicted by relativity. The moving ion acts like the traveling twin in the twin paradox.

Such comparisons of super-precise clocks eventually may be useful in geodesy, the science of measuring the Earth and its gravitational field, with applications in geophysics and hydrology, and possibly in space-based tests of fundamental physics theories, suggests physicist Till Rosenband, leader of NIST's aluminum ion clock team.

NIST scientists hope to improve the precision of the aluminum clocks even further, as much as 10-fold, through changes in ion trap geometry and better control of ion motion and environmental interference. The aim is to measure differences in timekeeping well enough to measure heights to an accuracy of 1 centimeter, a performance level suitable for making geodetic measurements. The paper suggests that optical clocks could be linked to form a network of "inland tidal gauges" to measure the distance from the earth's surface to the geoid (the surface of the earth's gravity field that matches the global mean sea level). Such a network could be updated far more frequently than current techniques.

(For the rest of this article, please click on the link in this blog title's post above it.)

Physicists Are Close to Uncovering the Fundamental Rules of Reality

2010-09-17T14:16:00.000-07:00

String theorist Brian Greene on his hopes for science over the next 30 years

By Andrea Ventura
Discover October 2010 issue
Published online September 14, 2010

This article is part of DISCOVER's 30th anniversary special section, including 11 eminent scientists' predictions about the next 30 years. Share your thoughts on the future of science at the Science Not Fiction blog.

"My great hope is that we will figure out how to meld gravity and quantum mechanics, realizing a dream that can be traced back to Einstein and that, in its more modern form, has captivated two generations of theoretical physicists. Such a theory might provide us the tools for gaining a clear understanding of the origin of the universe.

A vital part of such progress requires making contact between experiment and our theoretical attempts to quantize gravity and unify nature’s forces. For a long time we have been pursuing theoretical ideas like string theory without input from experiment or observation, and that is an unusual way for a science to evolve. In three decades—perhaps sooner with the help of the Large Hadron Collider and satellite-based astronomical observations—I would hope this changes. Should the observations support the theory, great; should they rule it out, that’s great too, because we’d be able to move on, full throttle, to other ideas. A big puzzle now facing string theory is that there are many possible forms for the extra dimensions that the mathematics requires. In the mid-1980s there were dozens. Today that number has soared, by some estimates to 10500 if not more.

There’s no way theorists can possibly examine all of them; 10500 dwarfs the number of particles in the observable universe! So we will continue to search for some mathematical equation that pinpoints a handful or even one specific form for the extra dimensions, allowing us to determine a single universe that string theory predicts. Alternatively, we may establish that there is not a unique universe but many. Each universe would make use of a different form for the extra dimensions, with our universe being just one of many in a grand multiverse. That would be one of the most profound revolutions in thinking we have ever sustained.

I am confident that well before 2040 we will nail down what dark matter is. Identifying dark energy will be harder, but we might nail that, too. And if I allow my imagination to run wild, I would love it if we had some deep insight that let us understand what space and time actually are. We know a lot about the features of space and time, what they can do—but many of us believe these are not fundamental. Identifying the constituents of space and time would be a grand insight."

Brian Greene is a string theorist at Columbia University, author of the best seller The Elegant Universe, and cofounder of the World Science Festival in New York.

Space, Time and String Theory

2010-09-17T14:10:00.000-07:00

The Official String Theory Website

If string theory is a theory of gravity, then how does it compare with Einstein's theory of gravity? What is the relationship between strings and spacetime geometry?

Strings and gravitons

The simplest case to imagine is a single string traveling in a flat spacetime in d dimensions, meaning that it is traveling across space while time is ticking, so to speak. A string is a one-dimensional object, meaning that if you want to travel along a string, you can only go forwards or backwards in the direction of the string, there is no sideways or up and down on a string. The string can move sideways or up and down in spacetime, though, and as the string moves around in spacetime, it sweeps out a surface in spacetime called the string worldsheet, a two-dimensional surface with one dimension of space and one dimension of time.

The string worldsheet is the key to all the physics of the string. A string oscillates as it travels through the d-dimensional spacetime. Those oscillations can be viewed from the two-dimensional string worldsheet point of view as oscillations in a two-dimensional quantum gravity theory. In order to make those quantized oscillations consistent with quantum mechanics and special relativity, the number of spacetime dimensions has to be restricted to 26 in the case of a theory with only forces (bosons), and 10 dimensions if there are both forces and matter (bosons and fermions) in the particle spectrum of the theory.

So where does gravity come in?

If the string traveling through spacetime is a closed string, then the spectrum of oscillations includes a particle with 2 units of spin and zero mass, with the right type of interactions to be the graviton, the particle that is the carrier of the gravitational force.

Where there are gravitons, then there must be gravity. Where is the gravity in string theory?

Strings and spacetime geometry

The classical theory of spacetime geometry that we call gravity consists of the Einstein equation, which relates the curvature of spacetime to the distribution of matter and energy in spacetime. But how do the Einstein equations come out of string theory?

If a closed string is traveling in a curved spacetime, then the coordinates of the string in spacetime feel this curvature as the string propagates. Once again, the answer lies on the string worldsheet. In order for their to be a consistent quantum theory in this case, the curved space in which the string travels must be a solution to the Einstein equations.
Now this is really something! This was a very convincing result for string theorists. Not only does string theory predict the graviton from flat spacetime physics alone, but string theory also predicts the Einstein equation will be obeyed by a curved spacetime in which strings propagate.

What about strings and black holes?

Black holes are solutions to the Einstein equation, therefore string theories that contain gravity also predict the existence of black holes. But string theories give rise to more interesting symmetries and types of matter than are commonly assumed in ordinary Einstein relativity. So black holes are more interesting to study in the context of string theory, because there are more kinds to study.

Is spacetime fundamental?

Note that there is a complication in the relationship between strings and spacetime. String theory does not predict that the Einstein equations are obeyed exactly. String theory adds an infinite series of corrections to the theory of gravity. Under normal circumstances, if we only look at distance scales much larger than a string, then these corrections are not measurable. But as the distance scale gets smaller, these corrections become larger until the Einstein equation no longer adequately describes the result.

In fact, when these correction terms become large, there is no spacetime geometry that is guaranteed to describe the result. The equations for determining the spacetime geometry become impossible to solve except under very strict symmetry conditions, such as unbroken supersymmetry, where the large correction terms can be made to vanish or cancel each other out.
This is a hint that perhaps spacetime geometry is not something fundamental in string theory, but something that emerges in the theory at large distance scales or weak coupling. This is an idea with enormous philosophical implications.

Random Acts of Science

2010-09-17T14:04:00.000-07:00

By GRAHAM FARMELO
Published: June 11, 2010
The New York Times

Quantum mechanics is the most revolutionary scientific theory to appear in the past 150 years. In the atomic domain, it superseded laws first set out by Isaac Newton a quarter of a millennium earlier and has since had an unbroken string of successes. Today, it continues to give an utterly reliable account of the behavior of the subatomic world, yet there are nagging doubts that there is something rotten at its core.

In his lively new book, “Quantum,” the science writer Manjit Kumar cites a poll about the interpretation of quantum mechanics, taken among physicists at a conference in 1999. Of the 90 respondents, only four said they accepted the standard interpretation taught in every undergraduate physics course in the world. Thirty favored a modern interpretation, laid out in 1957 by the Princeton theoretician Hugh Everett III, while 50 ticked the box labeled “none of the above or undecided.” Almost a century after a few physicists first set out the basic theory, quantum mechanics is still a work in progress.

It was the German theoretician Max Planck who first presented the idea that energy is fundamentally granular. In a lecture given in the closing weeks of 1900, he described his bizarre proto-theory that when light and matter interact, energy cannot be transferred in arbitrary amounts, as would be expected on the basis of Newton’s account. Rather, Planck suggested, energy transfers take place only in discrete chunks, which he called “quanta.” A deeply conservative thinker, he was never comfortable with this notion, which he saw as a “purely formal assumption,” and was unconvinced when the young Albert Einstein suggested — in what he considered to be his only revolutionary contribution to science — that it was possible to think of light in terms of particles, later called photons. Planck died, almost 50 years later, unwilling to believe the picture of light that he himself had introduced. This is a classic example of the adage that physics progresses through a succession of funerals — of the pioneers who could not live with the consequences of their most radical work.

In resisting the photon concept, Planck was in good company. Another influential skeptic was the Danish physicist Niels Bohr, a remarkably profound thinker and inveterate mumbler who continually struggled to find coherent expressions of his ideas. (“You should never express more clearly than you can think,” he would whisper to often-baffled colleagues.) Bohr at first refused to believe in the reality of photons, even after the American experimenter Arthur Compton first found compelling evidence for them in 1922. For a short time, Einstein was in the vanguard of quantum theory, while Bohr lagged behind.

For many of the physicists who forged the first comprehensive quantum theory in the second half of the 1920s, Bohr was a kind of intellectual godfather. Through cajoling and persistent tactful criticism, he helped them to do their best work and produce the components of the theory, whose coherence and unity emerged only gradually. One of its creators, the taciturn English physicist Paul Dirac, liked to point out that quantum mechanics was the first mathematical theory in science in which the discoverers did not fully understand the meaning of the terms in their own equations.

“Quantum” is a wide-ranging account, written for readers who are curious about the theory but want to sidestep its mathematical complexities. It’s full of a surprising amount of detail, perhaps rather more than most readers will want. The story is chock-full of colorful characters, including the two physicists who independently set out the first two versions of the theory, which initially appeared to be quite different. The first was the young Werner Heisenberg, not two years past his doctorate, fun-seeking and intensely competitive, not least at the Ping-Pong table. The other was the older Erwin Schrödinger, an Austrian polymath who scandalized his conservative colleagues by showing up at conferences in his climbing gear, sometimes accompanied by an adolescent lover.

Kumar will not win prizes for historical originality. This is an unapologetically orthodox account, largely derived from the standard sources and without the benefit of some of the latest scholarship. Occasionally, the narrative appears to be driven by a wish to thread together every amusing story, anecdote and famous quotation. There is, however, no doubt about the author’s skill in making accessible the philosophical controversies in his story, especially the debates between Bohr and Einstein. For Bohr, physics was not about finding out what nature is, but about what can be said about it. Quantum mechanics was a complete theory of the behavior of matter and light, and we just have to come to terms with the limitations it places on what can be known, for example as illustrated by the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. Einstein was having none of it. He believed that there is an objective world out there and that it is the job of scientists to describe it. The appearance of probabilities in the theory was, for him, evidence of its incompleteness.

In 1964, after both Einstein and Bohr had died, the Irish physicist John Bell did something they had failed to do; he found a way of testing experimentally which of their opposing viewpoints most accurately described nature, by laying out a mathematical theorem. In the denouement of “Quantum,” Kumar describes the result of the experiment, which I shall not reveal, though I think it fair to say it leaves us feeling that the story of quantum mechanics is not yet over.

In the late 1970s, I had the pleasure of talking with John Bell about the Bohr-Einstein debates during a train journey from Oxford to London. Every seat was taken, so we had to stand. Pressed against me by sullen commuters, Bell summarized his apparently reluctant conclusion as we pulled into Paddington station: “Bohr was inconsistent, unclear, willfully obscure and right. Einstein was consistent, clear, down-to-earth and wrong.”

Einstein, always his own man, never cared whether his colleagues regarded him as wrongheaded. While the public all over the world regarded him as a kind of sage, he knew that his fellow physicists — especially younger ones — saw him as eccentric or even senile. In the early 1940s, the theorist John Wheeler visited him at his home in Princeton to brief him on a new development in quantum theory and to ask if he would now accept it. “I still can’t believe that the good Lord plays dice,” Einstein replied. After a pause, he added, “Maybe I have earned the right to make my mistakes.” Yet Einstein never publicly accepted that he was mistaken; nothing was going to persuade him to change his way of looking at the world. A few years later, he told a friend that he believed “in a world that objectively exists, and which I, in a wildly speculative way, am trying to capture.” It seemed he could not live with the consequences of his most revolutionary idea.

Kumar ends his fascinating book with the verdicts of some of today’s leading physicists on Bohr’s and Einstein’s contrasting views on quantum mechanics. It is clear from this that quite a few of Einstein’s most distinguished successors believe he was right to say that the theory is fundamentally unsatisfactory and that we need a deeper account of reality. The sage of Princeton may yet have the last chuckle.

Graham Farmelo is the author of “The Strangest Man,” a biography of Paul Dirac.

A version of this review appeared in print on June 13, 2010, on page BR25 of the Sunday Book Review.

Stan Lee's Uncle's Grandson Unleashes Atlas Comics

2010-09-17T14:01:00.001-07:00

Sep 15th 2010 By: Andy Khouri
Comics Alliance

The fact that Marvel Comics grew out of the entity called Timely is common knowledge among many comics fans, but what is often forgotten is the intermediary step Timely took to become the mighty Marvel, a little thing called Atlas Comics. After Marvel mastermind (and Stan Lee's uncle) Martin Goodman, sold the company in the late '60s, he revived the Atlas brand in the '70s as a distinctly new publishing house with all-new characters and titles that disappeared after about a year. Well, get ready, because Atlas Comics and all its heroes you've probably never heard of are back!

As amusingly declared in a new press release, "The Grandson of Marvel's Founder [not Stan Lee, his uncle!] Unleashes Atlas Comics", courtesy of Jason Goodman and Ardden Entertainment, the publisher of nostalgia titles "Casper the Friendly Ghost" and "Flash Gordon," founded by Brendan Deneen (the press release makes a point to mention he's a former development executive for Hollywood Producers! Scott Rudin and Bob & Harvey Weinstein) and Rich Emms (formerly of APC and Markosia, which the press release doesn't mention).

"Although my grandfather eventually sold Marvel, he insisted on keeping Atlas Comics in the family," Goodman said in the press release. "As a result of his vision, Atlas Comics is the largest individually-held library of comic book heroes and villains on the planet."

Naturally, there are mass media concerns in play. "We have twenty eight titles and hundreds of characters imagined by some of the greatest minds in the industry. They will now find a new life in comics, television, and movies. We are thrilled to finally bring these great characters back for the world to enjoy," Goodman said.

The first of those storied heroes to be revived are Phoenix and Grim Ghost, in self-titled #0 issues to debut at New York Comic-Con. The press release indicates that both series will "draw from the Atlas library that featured stories and art by Neal Adams and Spider-Man co-creator Steve Ditko," although those men will presumably not be contributing to this new venture. In fact, no creative teams have been announced. However, the genuinely excellent J.M. DeMatteis ("Justice League International", "Booster Gold", "Moonshadow", "Brooklyn Dreams") is overseeing the line in his capacity as Editor-in-Chief of Ardden.

Atlas Comics is remembered by industry insiders for its groundbreaking practices in comics creators' rights, most notably the return of original artwork to its creators. With any luck, the new venture will work to embrace the spirit of innovation (to a reasonable extent) as well.

Einstein College receives grant to develop stem cell-based therapies

2010-08-14T16:46:00.000-07:00

12. August 2010
The Medical News

Scientists at Albert Einstein College of Medicine (http://www.einstein.yu.edu/home/default.asp) of Yeshiva University have received a five-year, $10.8 million grant to develop stem cell-based therapies that could be used to mitigate radiation-induced gastrointestinal syndrome - part of acute radiation syndrome (ARS) - for military personnel, first responders and the general public. The Einstein research, funded by the federal Centers for Medical Countermeasures Against Radiation, is part of a program coordinated by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (http://www.niaid.nih.gov/Pages/default.aspx).

"This type of research fills a special need," said lead investigator Chandan Guha, M.B.B.S., Ph.D(http://www.einstein.yu.edu/home/faculty/profile.asp?id=7020&k=&O=1), professor and vice chair of radiation oncology (http://www.montefiore.org/prof/departments/radiation/) at Einstein and Montefiore Medical Center. "Currently, post-event strategies for responding to ARS must be carried out within the first several hours of an event, and those strategies have demonstrated only marginal protection." At present, there are no Food and Drug Administration (FDA)-approved treatments that can effectively treat ARS. For first responders and others, this lack of protection against the effects of radiation could be fatal.

Radiation protection is a natural research avenue for Dr. Guha and his radiation oncology colleagues. Killing cancer cells with radiation therapy or chemotherapy must be done in ways that minimize toxicity to the rest of the body.

"When radiation is used in combination with chemotherapy for head and neck cancer or cervical cancer, it is very successful," said Dr. Guha. "But the same cannot be done for cancers in the abdomen. High doses of radiation cannot be administered effectively to that area because radiation is very toxic to the intestines and the liver. This is the same sort of toxicity that occurs in radiation-induced gastrointestinal syndrome."

Radiation to the abdomen can cause intestinal cells to begin dying within hours. The result is a loss of the intestine's protective mucosal lining, microbial infection, septic shock, and an inflammatory response that affects the entire body. Death is dose dependent and can occur within days following exposure.

In earlier research, Dr. Guha has shown that animals receiving lethal doses of radiation to their abdomen can be rescued by intravenous transplantation of bone marrow-derived stromal cells. Using their bone marrow-derived stem cell transplant technique, Einstein scientists have saved animals exposed to a radiation dose of 18-20 Gy ─ equal to more than 2.5 times their lethal dose. The transplant was successful in saving these animals from fatal radiation injury even when administered 24 hours after radiation exposure. This cell therapy is believed to create conditions that allow irradiated intestinal stem cells to recover.

The new grant will allow Einstein researchers to develop their bone marrow transplant technique with the goal of saving people suffering from radiation-induced gastrointestinal failure. Further research will be performed to identify chemical agents that accelerate repair and regeneration of stem cells exposed to irradiation.

SOURCE Albert Einstein College of Medicine

Stan Lee asks, 'Who Wants to Be a Superhero?'

2010-07-02T13:04:00.000-07:00

ONCE UPON A TIME there was Stan Lee's Marvel Comics Bullpen. Gazing upon the inert figure of a gentleman poet named Stan Lee, I saw visions of the White South entered by a freckly Jew. Blanching, it dawned on me that I must someday sustain a non-bullpen, a place of sustenance called Rainbow Writing, Inc., that would be neither a bullpen nor a cowpen - it would have to be a people computer company. Stan Lee is a secret Dream Machine, and through thinking of hims Rainbow Writing, Inc. was born...

Somewhere deep inside many ordinary human beings lies an inner superhero who longs to do good deeds, right wrongs, defeat evil and save the world. But unless one happens to become a soldier or cop or firefighter or nurse or ER doctor -- or is bitten by a radioactive spider or bombarded by gamma rays - that cape and tights often remain safely tucked away.

Comic-book legend Stan Lee wants to get the spandex out of the closet.

On Thursday, July 27, Sci-Fi Channel premieres "Who Wants to Be a Superhero?" a six-week reality competition series in which a few fortunate folk create a superhero alter ego -- including a name, costume and superpower -- then vie for a chance to have it immortalized in a new comic book created by Lee and in a Saturday night action movie on Sci-Fi.

After a long stint at Marvel Comics as the man behind "Spider-Man," "The Incredible Hulk," "The Fantastic Four" and "X-Men," Lee recently founded POW! (Purveyors of Wonder) Entertainment Inc., with partner Gill Champion. For "Superhero," POW! has joined forces with Bruce Nash's Nash Entertainment ("Meet My Folks," "For Love or Money," "Who Wants to Marry My Dad?").

Anyone who has viewed costumed attendees at comic-book conventions could be forgiven for thinking that some of these would-be crusaders might have some problem distinguishing fantasy from reality - but Lee begs to differ.

"I don't think they really believe (they're superheroes)," he says, "but I think they'd all like to be them. If you could go to these comic conventions and see how many of them come in costumes - it's just a little fantasy that these fans have."

"It's interesting," Champion says, "many of these contestants have other lives. Most of them have professional backgrounds. They come from diversified backgrounds and run the gamut from firemen to personal trainers to investment bankers.

"But they all have a belief or a fantasy that they and the world can somehow be a little better if they could be acknowledged or their character could be acknowledged as a superhero."

"We have the brain surgeons," Lee says, "the atomic scientists."

"But they all went through a background check," Champion says, "and passed with flying colors."

While the superhero characters have superpowers, their creators don't. So they must be judged on other criteria.

"Obviously," Lee says, "we're not going to expect them to fly over buildings, crash through stone walls. So we're going to have to look for the traits that a superhero or even a hero should have: courage, honor, honesty, self-sacrifice, dependability, all of the wonderful virtues that any hero should have.

"And we're going to put them to tests which will test whether or not they have those virtues and to what degree they have them. It's a comedic show but with an underlying tinge of great reality."

In true reality-show style, the 11 lucky finalists -- chosen out of nearly 1,000 applicants -- will be forced to cohabit in a "secret lair" in Los Angeles while undergoing a series of real-world challenges, with Lee as the ultimate judge.

Even though Lee has been working in comics for more than half a century, he says the basics of what makes a true hero haven't changed that much.

"The style of writing and the style of drawing has changed a bit," he says, "but I think the criteria for heroes are pretty much the same. Maybe with one difference -- and I'd like to think we started it at Marvel with my stories -- they're more three-dimensional now. They're not 100 percent goody-goody.

"They have their own hang-ups, their own problems, but they still have to be somebody that you care about, because he is doing the right thing -- he or she. No matter how tough they are, how different from the 100-percent-pure hero, you still have to admire the guy.

"Are you familiar with Wolverine in 'The X-Men'? Now there's a guy, you wouldn't call him goody-goody, but he's still the good guy. He still does the right thing. Most of the superheroes, they're like me -- they're wonderful people, and you want them to win."

As to how they winnowed down the contestants, Lee says, "It has to be just instinct more than anything. We'd say, 'Well, I think that guy would be great on camera. I think the audience would like him. This fellow is a little bit dull. I think this name and costume are great, and this girl's personality is terrific, or she's very pretty,' or whatever. Maybe the pretty came first.

"You just have to go by your own instincts. We picked ones that people are going to be interested in."

Champion says the show also challenges the notion that only boys -- of all ages -- care about superheroes.

"It's pretty even," he says. "One of the things we were pretty much amazed at is the amount of women that turned up for the auditions. The superhero world seems to be expanding certainly into the female gender. But we were really surprised."

"Sociologists are watching this show with great interest," Lee says, "because they're learning more about women. It seems that almost every woman has a hidden desire to be a superheroine, and we never realized this.

"So there will be a lot of learned papers written and a lot of college courses. In fact, our show is really an educational one. And I shouldn't say this because we haven't finished it yet, but we're working on a plan where we'll be tax-exempt, because we're contributing, really, so much to the social mores of our time."

...on June 16-17 known as Juneteenth somewhere, Ralph Ellison *Invisible Man* else, in 1986, I was willing to risk extreme bodily harm and/or death to save a Black Lady's life, as her house was being burglarized by two kids who were planning on slicing and dicing her, using her house alarm to cover her screams, etc. The kids were Black and aged 14 and 18. That's too young to do anything like that, I yelled at them and stopped them just in time.

My husband is always telling me to shut up about that.

Bohr–Einstein debates

2010-06-23T11:35:00.000-07:00

The Bohr–Einstein debates is a popular name given to a series of public disputes between Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr about quantum physics. These two men, along with Max Planck were the founders of the original quantum theory. Their "debates" are remembered because of their importance to the philosophy of science. The meaning and significance of these debates are rarely understood, but an authoritative account of them has been written by Bohr himself in an article called "Discussions with Einstein on Epistemological Problems in Atomic Physics" published in a volume dedicated to Einstein.

Einstein's position with respect to quantum mechanics is significantly more subtle and open-minded than it has often been portrayed in technical manuals and popular science articles.[citation needed] His constant and powerful criticisms of quantum mechanics compelled its defenders to sharpen and refine their understanding of the philosophical and scientific implications of their own theory.

Pre-revolutionary debates

Einstein was the first physicist to say that Planck's discovery of the quantum (h) would require a rewriting of physics. As though to prove his point, in 1905 he proposed that light sometimes acts as a particle which he called light quanta (now called the photon). Bohr was one of the most vocal opponents of the photon idea and did not openly embrace it until 1925.[1] His later ability to work creatively with an idea he had so long resisted is quite unusual in the history of science. The photon appealed to Einstein because he saw it as a physical reality (although a confusing one) behind the numbers. Bohr disliked it because it made the choice of mathematical solution arbitrary. He did not like that a scientist had to choose between equations.[2]

1913 brought the Bohr model of the hydrogen atom which made use of the quantum to explain the atomic spectrum. Einstein was at first dubious, but quickly changed his mind and embraced it. He tolerated Bohr's model despite the fact that its underlying reality could not be pictured in detail because he considered it a work in progress.

The quantum revolution

The quantum revolution of the mid-1920s occurred under the direction of both Einstein and Bohr, and their post-revolutionary debates were about making sense of the change. The shocks for Einstein began in 1925 when Werner Heisenberg introduced matrix equations that removed the Newtonian elements of space and time from any underlying reality. The next shock came in 1926 when Max Born proposed that the mechanics was to be understood as a probability without any causal explanation. Finally, in late 1927, Heisenberg and Born declared at the Solvay Conference that the revolution was over and nothing further was needed. It was at that last stage that Einstein's skepticism turned to dismay. He believed that much had been accomplished, but the reasons for the mechanics still needed to be understood.[2]

Einstein's refusal to accept the revolution as complete reflected his rejection of the idea that positions in space-time could never be completely known and by the way quantum probabilities did not reflect any underlying causes. He did not reject the statistics or probabilities on their own and Einstein himself was a great statistical thinker. It was the lack of any reason for an event that Einstein rejected.[2] Bohr, meanwhile, was dismayed by none of the elements that troubled Einstein. He made his own peace with the contradictions by proposing a Principle of Complementarity that emphasized the role of the observer over the observed.[1]

Post-Revolution: First stage

As mentioned above, Einstein's position underwent significant modifications over the course of the years. In the first stage, Einstein refuses to accept quantum indeterminism and seeks to demonstrate that the principle of indeterminacy can be violated, suggesting ingenious thought experiments which should permit the accurate determination of incompatible variables, such as position and velocity, or to explicitly reveal simultaneously the wave and the particle aspects of the same process.

The first serious attack by Einstein on the "orthodox" conception took place during the Fifth Conference of Physics at the Solvay Institute in 1927. Einstein pointed out how it was possible to take advantage of the (universally accepted) laws of conservation of energy and of impulse (momentum) in order to obtain information on the state of a particle in a process of interference which, according to the principle of indeterminacy or that of complementarity, should not be accessible.

Figure A. A monochromatic beam (one for which all the particles have the same impulse) encounters a first screen, diffracts, and the diffracted wave encounters a second screen with two slits resulting in the formation of an interference figure on the background F. As always, it is assumed that only one particle at a time is able to pass the entire mechanism. From the measure of the recoil of the screen S1, according to Einstein, one can deduce from which slit the particle has passed without destroying the wave aspects of the process.In order to follow his argumentation and to evaluate Bohr's response, it is convenient to refer to the experimental apparatus illustrated in figure A. A beam of light perpendicular to the X axis which propagates in the direction z encounters a screen S1 which presents a narrow (with respect to the wavelength of the ray) slit. After having passed through the slit, the wave function diffracts with an angular opening that causes it to encounter a second screen S2 which presents two slits. The successive propagation of the wave results in the formation of the interference figure on the final screen F.

At the passage through the two slits of the second screen S2, the wave aspects of the process become essential. In fact, it is precisely the interference between the two terms of the quantum superposition corresponding to states in which the particle is localized in one of the two slits which implies that the particle is "guided" preferably into the zones of constructive interference and cannot end up in a point in the zones of destructive interference (in which the wave function is nullified). It is also important to note that any experiment designed to evidence the "corpuscular" aspects of the process at the passage of the screen S2 (which, in this case, reduces to the determination of which slit the particle has passed through) inevitably destroys the wave aspects, implies the disappearance of the interference figure and the emergence of two concentrated spots of diffraction which confirm our knowledge of the trajectory followed by the particle.

At this point Einstein brings into play the first screen as well and argues as follows: since the incident particles have velocities (practically) perpendicular to the screen S1, and since it is only the interaction with this screen that can cause a deflection from the original direction of propagation, by the law of conservation of impulse which implies that the sum of the impulses of two systems which interact is conserved, if the incident particle is deviated toward the top, the screen will recoil toward the bottom and vice-versa. In realistic conditions the mass of the screen is so heavy that it will remain stationary, but, in principle, it is possible to measure even an infinitesimal recoil. If we imagine taking the measurement of the impulse of the screen in the direction X after every single particle has passed, we can know, from the fact that the screen will be found recoiled toward the top (bottom), if the particle in question has been deviated toward the bottom (top) and therefore we can know from which slit in S2 the particle has passed. But since the determination of the direction of the recoil of the screen after the particle has passed cannot influence the successive development of the process, we will still have an interference figure on the screen F. The interference takes place precisely because the state of the system is the superposition of two states whose wave functions are non-zero only near one of the two slits. On the other hand, if every particle passes through only the slit b or the slit c, then the set of systems is the statistical mixture of the two states, which means that interference is not possible. If Einstein is correct, then there is a violation of the principle of indeterminacy.

Figure B. Bohr's representation of Einstein's thought experiment described above. The mobile window is evidenced in order to underscore the fact that the attempt to know which slit a particle passes through destroys the interference pattern.Bohr's response was to illustrate Einstein's idea more clearly via the diagrams in Figures B and C. Bohr observes that extremely precise knowledge of any (potential) vertical motion of the screen is an essential presupposition in Einstein's argument. In fact, if its velocity in the direction X before the passage of the particle is not known with a precision substantially greater than that induced by the recoil (that is, if it were already moving vertically with an unknown and greater velocity than that which it derives as a consequence of the contact with the particle), then the determination of its motion after the passage of the particle would not give the information we seek. However, Bohr continues, an extremely precise determination of the velocity of the screen, when one applies the principle of indeterminacy, implies an inevitable imprecision of its position in the direction X. Before the process even begins, the screen would therefore occupy an indeterminate position at least to a certain extent (defined by the formalism). Now consider, for example, the point d in figure A, where there is destructive interference. It's obvious that any displacement of the first screen would make the lengths of the two paths, a-b-d and a-c-d, different from those indicated in the figure. If the difference between the two paths varies by half a wavelength, at point d there will be constructive rather than destructive interference. The ideal experiment must average over all the possible positions of the screen S1, and, for every position, there corresponds, for a certain fixed point F, a different type of interference, from the perfectly destructive to the perfectly constructive. The effect of this averaging is that the pattern of interference on the screen F will be uniformly grey. Once more, our attempt to evidence the corpuscular aspects in S2 has destroyed the possibility of interference in F which depends crucially on the wave aspects.

Figure C. In order to realize Einstein's proposal, it is necessary to replace the first screen in Figure A (S1) with a movable diaphragm which can move vertically such as this proposed by Bohr.It should be noted that, as Bohr recognized, for the understanding of this phenomenon "it is decisive that, contrary to genuine instruments of measurement, these bodies along with the particles would constitute, in the case under examination, the system to which the quantum-mechanical formalism must apply. With respect to the precision of the conditions under which one can correctly apply the formalism, it is essential to include the entire experimental apparatus. In fact, the introduction of any new apparatus, such as a mirror, in the path of a particle could introduce new effects of interference which influence essentially the predictions about the results which will be registered at the end." Further along, Bohr attempts to resolve this ambiguity concerning which parts of the system should be considered macroscopic and which not:

In particular, it must be very clear that...the unambiguous use of spatiotemporal concepts in the description of atomic phenomena must be limited to the registration of observations which refer to images on a photographic lens or to analogous practically irreversible effects of amplification such as the formation of a drop of water around an ion in a dark room.

Bohr's argument about the impossibility of using the apparatus proposed by Einstein to violate the principle of indeterminacy depends crucially on the fact that a macroscopic system (the screen S1) obeys quantum laws. On the other hand, Bohr consistently asserted that, in order to illustrate the microscopic aspects of reality it is necessary to set off a process of amplification which involves macroscopic apparatuses, whose fundamental characteristic is that of obeying classical laws and which can be described in classical terms. This ambiguity would later come back in the form of what is still called today the measurement problem.

The principle of indeterminacy applied to time and energy

Figure D. A wave extended longitudinally passes through a slit which remains open only for a brief interval of time. Beyond the slit, there is a spatially limited wave in the direction of propagation.In many textbook examples and popular discussions of quantum mechanics, the principle of indeterminacy is explained by reference to the pair of variables position and velocity (or angular momentum). It is important to note that the wave nature of physical processes implies that there must exist another relation of indeterminacy: that between time and energy. In order to comprehend this relation, it is convenient to refer to the experiment illustrated in Figure D, which results in the propagation of a wave which is limited in spatial extension. Assume that, as illustrated in the figure, a ray which is extremely extended longitudinally is propagated toward a screen with a slit furnished with a shutter which remains open only for a very brief interval of time Δt. Beyond the slit, there will be a wave of limited spatial extension which continues to propagate toward the right.

A perfectly monochromatic wave (such as a note which cannot be divided into harmonics) is infinitely spatially extended. In order to have a wave which is limited in spatial extension (which is technically called a wave packet), several waves of different frequencies must be superimposed and distributed continuously within a certain interval of frequencies around an average value, such as ν0;. It then happens that at a certain instant, there exists a spatial region (which translates with time) in which the contributions of the various fields of the superposition add up constructively. Nonetheless, according to a precise mathematical theorem, as we move far away from this region, the phases of the various fields, in any specified point, are distributed causally and destructive interference is produced. The region in which the wave is non-zero is therefore spatially limited. It is easy to demonstrate that if the wave has a spatial extension equal to Δx (which means, in our example, that the shutter has remained open for a time Δt = Δx / v where v is the velocity of the wave), then the wave contains (or is a superposition of) various monochromatic waves whose frequencies cover an interval Δν which satisfies the relation:

Remembering that in the universal relation of Planck, frequency and energy are proportional:

It follows immediately from the preceding inequality that the particle associated with the wave should possess an energy which is not perfectly defined (since different frequencies are involved in the superposition) and consequently there is indeterminacy in energy:

From this it follows immediately that:

which is the relation of indeterminacy between time and energy.

Einstein's second criticism

Einstein's thought experiment of 1930 as designed by Bohr. Einstein's box was supposed to prove the violation of the indeterminacy relation between time and energy.At the sixth Congress of Solvay in 1930, the indeterminacy relation just discussed was Einstein's target of criticism. His idea contemplates the existence of an experimental apparatus which was subsequently designed by Bohr in such a way as to emphasize the essential elements and the key points which he would use in his response.

Einstein considers a box (called Einstein's box; see figure) containing electromagnetic radiation and a clock which controls the opening of a shutter which covers a hole made in one of the walls of the box. The shutter uncovers the hole for a time Δt which can be chosen arbitrarily. During the opening, we are to suppose that a photon, from among those inside the box, escapes through the hole. In this way a wave of limited spatial extension has been created, following the explanation given above. In order to challenge the indeterminacy relation between time and energy, it is necessary to find a way to determine with an adequate precision the energy that the photon has brought with it. At this point, Einstein turns to his celebrated relation between mass and energy of special relativity: . From this it follows that knowledge of the mass of an object provides a precise indication about its energy. The argument is therefore very simple: if one weighs the box before and after the opening of the shutter and if a certain amount of energy has escaped from the box, the box will be lighter. The variation in mass multiplied by will provide precise knowledge of the energy emitted. Moreover, the clock will indicate the precise time at which the event of the particle’s emission took place. Since, in principle, the mass of the box can be determined to an arbitrary degree of accuracy, the energy emitted can be determined with a precision ΔE as accurate as one desires. Therefore, the product ΔEΔt can be rendered less than what is implied by the principle of indeterminacy.

(To read the rest of this article, please click the link in the title above.)

Quantum physics and Einstein were not friends. Einstein argued to the very end….

2010-06-23T11:29:00.000-07:00

Quantum physics is a very strange theory.

The history of quantum mechanics began as far back as 1838 discovery of cathode rays by Michael Faraday, the 1859 statement of the black body radiation problem by Gustav Kirchhoff, the 1877 suggestion by Ludwig Boltzmann that the energy states of a physical system could be discrete, and the 1900 quantum hypothesis by Max Planck that any energy is radiated and absorbed in quantities divisible by discrete ‘energy elements’, E, such that each of these energy elements is proportional to the frequency ν with which they each individually radiate energy, as defined by the following formula:

E = hv = hw,

where h is Planck’s Action Constant.

the processes of absorption and emission of radiation and had nothing to do with the physical reality of the radiation itself. However, this did not explain the photoelectric effect (1839), i.e. that shining light on certain materials can function to eject electrons from the material. In 1905, basing his work on Planck’s quantum hypothesis, Albert Einstein postulated that light itself consists of individual quanta. These later came to be called photons (1926).

Einstein’s simple postulation was born a flurry of debating, theorizing and testing, and thus, the entire field. (Wikipedia)

This is all very ironic as Einstein could not accept this theory of uncertainty. There is an introduction to quantum physics elsewhere on my site. Here I just want to show Einstein and Bohr debate, which in itself highlights a lot about the strange quantum world.

All videos are courtesy of the Open University

Introduction to the debate

I have one last thing to add to this. When modern day scientists are quick to discredit those on the cutting edge of consciousness and spirituality (Deepak Chopra, Stuart Hameroff, Eckhart Tolle, etc.) they will do good by remembering that it took almost a century for the EPR paradox (and by implication Einstein) to be proven wrong. It may take as long for current hypothesis to be proven, so let’s keep an open mind.

Dr. Paul Frenette to Lead Einstein Stem Cell Research

2010-05-24T20:33:00.000-07:00

Released: 5/24/2010 4:00 PM EDT
Source: Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University

Named Director of the Gottesman Institute of Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine Research

Newswise — Leading stem cell and vascular biology researcher Paul S. Frenette, M.D., has been named the first director of the Ruth L. and David S. Gottesman Institute for Stem Cell and Regenerative Medicine Research at Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University. Dr. Frenette will spearhead Einstein’s efforts to build upon existing resources to create a premier stem cell research institute. His role will concentrate on exploring new research directions, encouraging collaboration among researchers, recruiting new stem cell investigators, and overseeing the establishment of shared core resources. Dr. Frenette’s appointment begins July 1, 2010.

Dr. Frenette joins Einstein from Mt. Sinai School of Medicine, where he was professor of medicine, hematology and medical oncology and of gene and cell medicine. He was also a member of the school’s stem cell and immunology institutes and cancer center. The author of groundbreaking studies on the stem cell microenvironment and sickle cell disease, Dr. Frenette is an elected member of the American Society for Clinical Investigation and the Association of American Physicians. He served on the editorial boards of Blood and The Journal of Clinical Investigation, as chair of the scientific committee on thrombosis and vascular biology of the American Society of Hematology, and on multiple panels at the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute of the National Institutes of Health.

“Dr. Frenette is a brilliant and creative scientist,” said Allen M. Spiegel, M.D., the Marilyn and Stanley M. Katz Dean. “Within his own research program and as director of the Gottesman Institute, his ability to connect basic biology to clinical medicine will help him realize the enormous potential of stem cell research for improving treatment of human disease.”

A generous gift from Ruth L. and David S. Gottesman established The Gottesman Institute for Stem Cell and Regenerative Medicine Research in 2008. It will provide a more cohesive and supportive environment to nearly two dozen stem cell investigators focusing on a diverse range of fields, including liver failure, cancer and heart disease.

Among Einstein’s notable researchers is Eric Bouhassira, Ph.D., professor of cell biology and of medicine and the Ingeborg and Ira Leon Rennert Professor of Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine. He studies human embryonic and adult stem cells to understand the process leading to their differentiation into red cells, T cells, platelets, and all other cell types that comprise blood. Sanjeev Gupta, M.D., M.B.B.S., professor of medicine and of pathology and the Eleazar and Feige Reicher Chair in Translational Medicine, is another leading member of the institute. He is developing strategies for turning human embryonic stem cells into fully functional liver cells that could be transplanted into the body, eliminating the need for liver transplants.

Since 2008, Einstein has been a leading recipient of stem cell funding from the New York State Stem Cell Science (NYSTEM) initiative. The state is committing $600 million in the next decade to advance stem cell science in New York. To date, Einstein researchers have received over $15 million in NYSTEM funding. Earlier this year, the College of Medicine received two new grants totaling over $1.4 million, awarded to two leading members of Einstein’s stem cell research team; Jayanta Roy-Chowdhury, M.B.B.S., professor of medicine and of genetics, and Ulrich Steidl, M.D., Ph.D., the Diane and Arthur B. Belfer Faculty Scholar in Cancer Research and assistant professor of cell biology. Working with these and other members of the Einstein community, Dr. Frenette will leverage the College of Medicine’s distinctively collaborative environment and establish more frequent and robust research partnerships. By facilitating an extensive network of research relationships among basic, clinical and population researchers, the institute will expand the translational research and applications of its members and Einstein as a whole.

In consultation with several departments, Dr. Frenette will lead the recruitment of new stem cell investigators. He will also oversee the expansion of the physical resources, including the development of new laboratory space and shared resource facilities.

“Dr. Spiegel’s sustained commitment to stem cell research and clear vision for the future has created a dynamic, attractive and inspiring atmosphere,” said Dr. Frenette. “I’m looking forward to working with Einstein’s strong stem cell faculty and leadership to create a leading institute that has a real impact on the health and lives of patients.”

In addition to his responsibilities as director of the institute, Dr. Frenette will continue to lead his own laboratory, which focuses on stem cell biology, vascular biology and inflammation. His work in blood stem cell trafficking – which investigates how stem cells migrate between the bone marrow and the blood – led to the recognition of an unexpected connection between the brain and bone marrow. His laboratory has shown that the release of hematopoietic stem cells in the blood follows circadian rhythms, which may impact stem cell therapy already used with cancer patients recovering from high doses of chemotherapy.

Dr. Frenette’s vascular biology interests include studies on how vascular occlusions (sudden blockages in blood vessels) occur, particularly in sickle cell anemia. His paradigm-shifting findings revised the understanding of the mechanisms involved in this complex process. By indentifying the critical role played by white blood cells, his work provides potential new therapies for the disease.

Originally from Quebec City, Canada, Dr. Frenette received his M.D. from Laval University in Quebec and completed his residency and internship at Montreal General Hospital, McGill University. He moved to Boston in 1991, where he was a clinical and research fellow in hematology-oncology at the New England Medical Center, then a research affiliate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), instructor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, associate physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and a junior investigator at the Center for Blood Research. In 1998, he joined the faculty of Mt. Sinai School of Medicine.

About Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University
Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University is one of the nation’s premier centers for research, medical education and clinical investigation. During the 2009-2010 academic year, Einstein is home to 2,775 faculty members, 722 M.D. students, 243 Ph.D. students, 128 students in the combined M.D./Ph.D. program, and approximately 350 postdoctoral research fellows. In 2009, Einstein received more than $155 million in support from the NIH. This includes the funding of major research centers at Einstein in diabetes, cancer, liver disease, and AIDS. Other areas where the College of Medicine is concentrating its efforts include developmental brain research, neuroscience, cardiac disease, and initiatives to reduce and eliminate ethnic and racial health disparities. Through its extensive affiliation network involving five medical centers in the Bronx, Manhattan and Long Island – which includes Montefiore Medical Center, The University Hospital and Academic Medical Center for Einstein – the College of Medicine runs one of the largest post-graduate medical training programs in the United States, offering approximately 150 residency programs to more than 2,500 physicians in training.

For more information, please visit www.einstein.yu.edu

Strange Facts About Albert Einstein

2010-05-10T19:32:00.000-07:00

Unique Daily
May 10 2010
Also: Road Tickle

“If you ask someone to name a genius, nine times out of ten that person is going to name a man by the name of Albert Einstein. Einstein is the image of a genius in our society because of his revolutionary concepts that helped to create the future that we know. It is no surprise that Time Magazine chose Einstein as the Person of the Century in 1999. While we know all about Einstein creating the Theory of Relativity and E=mc2, there are some other interesting facts about the man with the wild hair.”

1) Einstein had Trouble Speaking

Even though he was essentially a genius, Einstein had trouble speaking when he was a child. As a child, Einstein would speak very slowly as he would form sentences in his head so he could speak them properly. This was not something confined to his very early years, but continued all the way until he was nine. It worried his parents so much that they thought he may have been mentally-handicapped. As it turns out, speech problems are actually very common in individuals who are described as brilliant later in their lives. In a book by Thomas Sowell, the term Einstein Syndrome has been coined to describe gifted individuals who have trouble speaking as children.

2) Einstein had an Interesting Relationship with his Wife

Einstein was married to Mileva Maric, with whom he had two children, Hans Alberta and Eduard. While Einstein was known as somewhat of a ladies’ man, plus his constant traveling as part of his academic fame, the relationship between him and Mileva became strained. After trying to work things out, the couple entered into a contract that would allow them to live together under certain conditions. These conditions, outlined by Einstein, were as follows:

1. You will make sure my clothes and laundry are in good order.
2. You will make sure that I will receive my three meals regularly in my room.
3. You will make sure my bedroom and study is kept neat, and especially that my desk is left for my use only.
4. You will renounce all personal relations with me insofar as they are not completely necessary for social reasons.
5. You will stop talking to me if I request it.

3) Einstein, a Pacifist, Urged Roosevelt to Create the Bomb

Einstein was well-known for being a pacifist but even he could see the danger of the Nazi Regime. So, in 1939, worried about the rise of Nazi Germany, Einstein was convinced by Leo Szilard, a fellow physicist, to write a letter to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The letter warned Roosevelt that Nazi Germany may be working on developing an atomic bomb and it was important that the United States began work on its own atomic program.

This letter is often cited as one of the main reasons that Roosevelt began work on the Manhattan Project. The odd thing is that even though Einstein helped push Roosevelt towards the idea of the atomic bomb, the army did not trust Einstein and he was seen as a security risk. As a result, he was not invited to help with the Manhattan Project in any way.

4) The Great Brain ends up in a Trunk

The brain of one of the most important men in history was seen as just too valuable to leave alone following the death of Einstein in 1955. As a result, Thomas Stoltz Harvey, the pathologist who did the autopsy on Einstein, chose to remove Einstein’s brain, without notifying the family. Harvey took the brain home and placed it into a jar where it remained for 43 years. Harvey was even fired from his job because he would not release the brain to the family.

Eventually, the son of Einstein, Hans Albert, received permission to study Einstein’s brain, which he did by sending slices to scientists all over the planet. Some of the information found included the fact that Einstein’s brain had more glial cells in the region of the brain that is responsible for synthesizing information. Another study of the slices found that Einstein’s brain lacked a certain wrinkle characteristic called the Sylvian Fissure. It is believed by some that this allowed the neurons in Einstein’s brain to communicate better with each other. One more study found that Einstein had a denser brain than most and the inferior parietal lob, which is where scientists believe mathematical ability comes from, was larger than in normal brains.

So, how did Einstein’s brain end up in the trunk of a car? Well, in the early 1990s, Harvey went with a freelance journalist on a cross-country trip to meet the granddaughter of Einstein. They drove in a Buick Skylark with Einstein’s brain sitting in a jar in the trunk. This entire escapade was turned into a book by the freelance journalist.

5) Some More Strange Facts

There are plenty of strange facts about Einstein’s brain that are short and sweet, so here are a few more about the great man.

1. No one knows what Einstein’s final words were because he spoke them in German and his nurse did not understand German.
2. When Einstein received the Nobel Prize in Physics, he was not on hand to accept the award because he was touring Japan at the time.
3. When Israel was made into a country following the Second World War, Einstein was offered the presidency. However, he chose to decline because as he said, he had no head for problems.
4. Einstein was not known for being particularly well-dressed. When he was younger, he found his big toe would make a hole in his sock, so he stopped wearing socks from that point on. In addition, he refused to dress properly for anyone, including important heads of state.
5. Einstein was so famous in his lifetime that people would stop him in the street to ask him to explain to them the Theory of Relativity. He finally got so tired with the questions that when someone would ask, he would respond “So Sorry! Always I am mistaken for Professor Einstein.”
6. Einstein was a genius of physics, but he was not very good at spelling. Einstein’s second language was English, which may be a reason why his spelling was pretty bad. Einstein often claimed he could speak English, but could not write it because of his poor spelling.
7. Einstein was a man of science, but he hated science fiction. He felt that science fiction distorted pure science and he told people to stay away from science fiction. As he said, “I never think about the future, it comes soon enough.” He also did not believe in flying saucers, which became very well-known in the last few years of his life.
8. At the age of 17, Einstein tried to enrol in the Swiss Federal Polytechnical School, but he failed his University Entrance Exam. While he passed the math and science portions, he failed the rest, which including languages, geography and history. As a result, Einstein went to trade school before he could retake the exam a year later. The second time around, he passed.
9. Einstein actually had a poor memory. He often forgot the birthdays of his wife and children, and it was not uncommon to see Einstein wandering around the Princeton area in the afternoon because he could not remember where he lived.

Author: Craig Baird — Copyrighted © roadtickle.com

Albert Einstein's theory of General Relativity holds up

2010-05-10T19:23:00.000-07:00

The Christian Science Monitor
By Kim Arcand, ChandraBlog / May 10, 2010

Using observations of galaxy clusters from the Chandra X-Ray Center, two teams of scientists have tested Albert Einstein's theory of General Relativity against two competing theories of gravitation.

Two different teams have reported using Chandra observations of galaxy clusters to study the properties of gravity on cosmic scales and test Einstein's theory of General Relativity.

Such studies are crucial for understanding the evolution of the universe, both in the past and the future, and for probing the nature of dark energy, one of the biggest mysteries in science.

This composite image of the galaxy cluster Abell 3376 shows X-ray data from the Chandra X-ray Observatory and the ROSAT telescope in gold, an optical image from the Digitized Sky Survey in red, green and blue, and a radio image from the VLA in blue.

The "bullet-like" appearance of the X-ray data is caused by a merger, as material flows into the galaxy cluster from the right side. The giant radio arcs on the left side of the image may be caused by shock waves generated by this merger.

The growth of galaxy clusters like Abell 3376 is influenced by the expansion rate of the universe - controlled by the competing effects of dark matter and dark energy - and by the properties of gravity over large scales.

By contrast, observations of supernovas or the large-scale distribution of galaxies, which measure cosmic distances, depend only on the expansion rate of the universe and are not sensitive to the properties of gravity.

More: http://www.chandra.harvard.edu/photo/2010/a3376/

Stan Lee to Host Superhuman Show on History Channel

2010-05-10T19:17:00.001-07:00

PASTE
By Rachel Bailey
May 10 2010

Stan Lee brought us one of the most well-known comic book series with X-Men, the story of everyone’s favorite genetically modified superheroes. Soon, he’ll be rubbing elbows with real live mutants as the co-host of the History Channel’s Stan Lee’s Superhumans alongside the world’s most flexible man, Daniel Browning Smith.

Superhumans will focus on real people with genetic mutations that give them noteworthy abilities, according to Reuters. It joins the History Channel’s slew of new shows, like Around the World in 80 Ways, in which three people race around the world using unconventional means of transportation, and Chasing Mummies, which follows archeologist Zahi Hawass to digs across Egypt.

Einstein Receives $10 Million NIH Grant to Expand Stem Cell Research Facilities

2010-04-25T21:34:00.001-07:00

Released: 4/15/2010
Source: Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University

Newswise — Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University has been awarded $10 million from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to expand its stem cell research capabilities. The funds will be used to create new laboratories in order to increase its already substantial base of stem cell investigators. This will be carried out under the auspices of the recently established Ruth L. and David S. Gottesman Institute for Stem Cell and Regenerative Medicine Research.

The Gottesman Institute for Stem Cell and Regenerative Medicine Research will utilize the NIH support, issued under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, to renovate and modernize existing research space and expand the related stem cell core facilities for cell sorting and cell transplantation. The changes will create space for several new senior stem cell investigators.

“A key aspect of our plan is to embed stem cell laboratories within easy reach of Einstein’s centers in diabetes, cancer, HIV/AIDS, liver disease and women’s health to encourage the free flow of science,” said Harry Shamoon, M.D., associate dean for clinical and translational research. “With guidance and support from Allen M. Spiegel, M.D., and in consultation with our faculty leadership, a team from Einstein’s academic administration worked with our outstanding facilities and management department to map out this plan.” Dr. Spiegel is the Marilyn and Stanley M. Katz Dean.

Einstein’s stem cell investigators are currently located in laboratories throughout the Jack and Pearl Resnick Campus in the Bronx. The Gottesman Institute for Stem Cell and Regenerative Medicine Research, which will house the director’s laboratories in a dedicated wing of the Michael F. Price Center for Genetic and Translational Medicine/Harold and Muriel Block Research Pavilion, will also be home to the institute’s administrative core, while also facilitating increased stem cell research throughout Einstein’s campus.

The laboratory renovations, which will be accomplished over the next two years, focus on four broad themes: 1) stem cell biology, 2) stem cell genetics, 3) cancer stem cells, and 4) translational stem cell research. In order to best complement and build upon the work of existing Einstein stem cell researchers, the Gottesman Institute for Stem Cell and Regenerative Medicine Research will expand basic and translational stem cell research by co-recruiting new faculty in concert with multiple departments, including cell biology, genetics, developmental and molecular biology, the Dominick P. Purpura Department of Neuroscience, and others.

The renovation funds, part of President Obama’s stimulus program for NIH, will create 150 new jobs, in both construction and research positions. This will be economically critical for the 1.4 million people in the Bronx, while also creating a major driver of scientific innovation to create cures for multiple diseases.

In consultation with the faculty, the grant proposal was developed by staff in the office of Dean Spiegel, in conjunction with Dr. Shamoon; Salvatore Ciampo, senior director of facilities management; Julia Herrick, former assistant dean for research development; Cecilia Haas, M.S., CFM, assistant director of facilities planning; and John Harb, M.S.P.H., assistant dean for scientific operations and director of the Office of Biotechnology.

The Gottesman Institute for Stem Cell and Regenerative Medicine Research is supported by external sources, including the NIH and the New York State Stem Cell Research Program, as well as by a major generous gift from the Gottesman family.

Currently, Einstein has a faculty base of nearly two dozen NIH-funded stem cell investigators tackling some of the world’s most challenging diseases – including liver failure, cancer and heart disease. Einstein has been a leading recipient of stem cell funding from New York State since its 2008 initiative to commit $600 million in the next decade to advance stem cell science in the state (NYSTEM). To date, Einstein researchers have received over $15 million in NYSTEM funding, including two new awards totaling over $1.4 million announced last month.

The recent NYSTEM grants were awarded to Jayanta Roy-Chowdhury, M.B.B.S., professor of medicine and of genetics, and Ulrich Steidl, M.D., Ph.D., the Diane and Arthur B. Belfer Faculty Scholar in Cancer Research and assistant professor of cell biology. Dr. Roy-Chowdhury was awarded a $1,080,000 Investigator-Initiated Research Project grant to study the Amelioration of Hepatic Metabolic Defects by Stem Cell-Derived Human Hepatocytes. Dr. Steidl was awarded $330,000 for an Innovative, Developmental or Exploratory Activities award for Identifying Epigenomic Determinants of Hematopoietic Stem Cell Commitment.

About Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University
Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University is one of the nation’s premier centers for research, medical education and clinical investigation. During the 2009-2010 academic year, Einstein is home to 2,775 faculty members, 722 M.D. students, 243 Ph.D. students, 128 students in the combined M.D./Ph.D. program, and approximately 350 postdoctoral research fellows. In 2009, Einstein received more than $155 million in support from the NIH. This includes the funding of major research centers at Einstein in diabetes, cancer, liver disease, and AIDS. Other areas where the College of Medicine is concentrating its efforts include developmental brain research, neuroscience, cardiac disease, and initiatives to reduce and eliminate ethnic and racial health disparities. Through its extensive affiliation network involving five medical centers in the Bronx, Manhattan and Long Island – which includes Montefiore Medical Center, The University Hospital and Academic Medical Center for Einstein – the College of Medicine runs one of the largest post-graduate medical training programs in the United States, offering approximately 150 residency programs to more than 2,500 physicians in training. For more information, please visit www.einstein.yu.edu

Albert Einstein Medical Center Takes the Lead in Offering New Ultrasound Screening to Detect Breast Cancer

2010-04-25T21:23:00.000-07:00

Albert Einstein Healthcare Network
April 25 2010

Philadelphia, PA, April 13, 2010 – The Marion-Louise Saltzman Women’s Center at Albert Einstein Medical Center is the first hospital in the Philadelphia region to offer SonoCiné, a new computerized three-dimensional ultrasound exam in addition to traditional mammography for women with dense breast tissue. The purpose of this ultrasound technology is to make a significant impact in the fight against breast cancer in this group of women, by helping detect breast cancer in its earliest stages, and sooner than with mammography alone. The SonoCiné technology is FDA-approved.

In women with dense breasts, it can be difficult to “see through” the tissue to detect small cancers because dense tissue appears white on a mammogram and cancerous tissue also appears white, making problem areas more difficult to identify. With the SonoCiné method, cancerous tissue appears dark on the white images, so cancers are easier to distinguish.

The SonoCiné ultrasound records a video of the entire breast, rather than just individual images, as a technologist guides an ultrasound probe over the breast. In this way, the images, which are permanently recorded, can be magnified or stopped, for the radiologist’s careful review and follow-up. Einstein is the first hospital in the Philadelphia region and in Pennsylvania, to offer this technology.

“This exam is not a replacement for screening mammography which remains the gold standard for detecting breast cancer, but rather a supplemental exam designed for women with dense breast tissue,” says Debra Copit, MD, Director of Breast Imaging at Einstein’s Marion-Louise Saltzman Women’s Center. The Center is designated a Breast Imaging Center of Excellence by the American College of Radiology and also received full three-year accreditation from the National Accreditation Program for Breast Centers, which recognized it as a “highly-integrated comprehensive breast center.”

The SonoCiné ultrasound equipment is approved by the FDA but is not covered by insurance at this time, so patients are required to pay $300 for the exam. Einstein’s Marion-Louise Saltzman Women’s Center will start offering the exam in May. For information, please call 215-254-2700.

CONTACT: Judy Horwitz
Communications Specialist
Albert Einstein Healthcare Network
215-456-6767
horwitzj@einstein.edu

Surfer inspires comparisons to Albert Einstein

2010-02-01T14:05:00.000-08:00

Theoretical physicist Garrett Lisi made his name with a paper called "An Exceptionally Simple Theory of Everything", which proposes a unified field theory that reconciles Einstein's relativity theory with particle physics. But he's equally known for shattering stereotypes – when he's not surfing wave equations, he's riding the biggest breakers on earth, and loving it!

By Mitch Potter
Washington Bureau
thestar.com
Jan 30 2010

WASHINGTON–Some people just seem to have an answer for everything. And then there is Garrett Lisi. He's unemployed. He's a surfer dude. He's a cheeky monkey, as the Brits would say.

And, in the estimation of some, maybe the next Einstein.

The Maui-based science prodigy turned the rarefied world of theoretical physics on its ear with a jaw-gaping paper, the audaciously titled An Exceptionally Simple Theory of Everything.

The California-born upstart seemed to have stumbled upon the answer to one of life's greatest mysteries – a coherent model that reconciles Einstein's theory of relativity, which addresses the universe in its largest sense, with all that is small, the tiny particles that are the realm of quantum physics.

The paper sparked both admiration and bitter intellectual blowback, not least because Lisi's eureka moment firmly bucked conventional wisdom known as string theory. Instead, Lisi argued that the Holy Grail of everything rests on a complex mathematical shape known as E8 – an eight-dimensional structure with a pattern of 248 points that arises naturally in all things big and small.

Lisi shatters all stereotypes, working science's cutting edge as a surfing, kiting, snowboarding adrenalin junkie, without so much as a scintilla of establishment backing. He has a Ph.D. and, to that extent, is no outsider. But he has no academic affiliation, let alone tenure.

The Star this week caught up with Lisi, now 42. And like everything else in his life, the exchange happened on his terms – by email.

The most important update: Lisi writes from Maui that his confidence "has increased" since November 2007, when he posted his theory on arXiv, a database on the Web that accepts scientific papers before they are peer reviewed.

"In fact, I can now make an unusually strong statement: If one believes in the unification of electromagnetic, weak and strong forces, which there's good evidence for, then the unification with gravity and Higgs particles is inevitable. When one continues this unification by including matter (electrons, quarks, neutrinos), this whole structure fits in E8. Mathematically, this is irrefutable."

As for the comparisons to Einstein, Lisi says they're "completely unjustified." He acknowledges he "managed to get extremely lucky with the physics and discover something very cool," adding "some aspects of this beautiful theory have the potential to outlive me."

But Einstein's relativistic description of gravity "has been borne out by countless experiments," Lisi says. "By comparison, I just managed to put some pieces together that were lying around."

Lisi says his "greatest hope" is that some of the new particles predicted by E8 theory soon will be detected at the Large Hadron Collider now in operation beneath Geneva.

Asked to describe his unconventional life, Lisi writes that shunning the "rat race" enables him to "balance my life equally between working and playing outside ... My friends are all geeks. And many of them are scientists who love playing outside as much as I do." Home now is a "large house shared with fellow scientists and people who love to play outside." He rents – part of life without an academic salary.

He counts Toronto as "one of my favourite places ..."

"I've enjoyed spending time there with friends, and sailing out on Lake Ontario. You also have the Perimeter Institute in your backyard, perhaps the best theoretical research institute in the world, and one of the inspirations for the Science Hostel project." The latter is a network of "micro-institutes with visiting science guests doing theoretical research in peaceful environments all over the world.''

Many of the Perimeter's scientific staff admire Lisi, too. Among them is Lee Smolin, who was ensnared in the kerfuffle over Lisi's theory when a scientific journal misquoted the Canadian researcher as endorsing it as "fabulous."

Smolin, in an interview, sets the record straight. While his enthusiasm for Lisi is genuine – the two are actually collaborating on research at the moment – he says Lisi's work is "not a complete theory of everything."

"There is more to do. There are open issues. It is a very intriguing theory that brings three closely related ideas together. I'm not being overly generous."

But Lisi, says Smolin, is hardly alone on the cutting-edge of E8 theory. Many others are labouring in obscurity in the same direction. And "like most things in theoretical physics, we rarely hit home runs. Most new ideas are incomplete when put forward. Garrett is no different."

What Smolin admires, however, is Lisi's courage in bucking convention to strike out with no safety net.

"What is remarkable about Garrett is the willingness to forgo an academic job in exchange for being intellectually independent. There are only a few precedents for this, but it takes great courage," said Smolin. "It is a healthy thing and I admire him for it. But it is a hard option and I don't want to romanticize it. Garrett's material circumstances are challenging. He doesn't have a lot of money."

Smolin says science is shifting in Lisi's direction, away from the "old-fashioned refereed journals" that once were the lone gatekeepers of new ideas. Now, almost all fresh thought in science appears first on arXiv; it has more than 500,000 papers in the fields of math, physics and computer science. Lisi's theory is reportedly the most downloaded.

"It's making a tremendous difference. Now you just need an Internet connection to fully participate," said Smolin. "You can stay in Africa or Uruguay or India – or in Maui, like Garrett – and still be on the cutting edge."

NASA budget for 2011 eliminates funds for manned lunar missions

2010-02-01T13:59:00.000-08:00

By Joel Achenbach
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, February 1, 2010

NASA's grand plan to return to the moon, built on President George W. Bush's vision of an ambitious new chapter in space exploration, is about to vanish with hardly a whimper. With the release Monday of President Obama's budget request, NASA will finally get the new administration's marching orders, and there won't be anything in there about flying to the moon.

The budget numbers will show that the administration effectively plans to kill the Constellation program that called for a return to the moon by 2020. The budget, expected to increase slightly over the current $18.7 billion, is also a death knell for the Ares 1 rocket, NASA's planned successor to the space shuttle. The agency has spent billions developing the rocket, which is still years from its first scheduled crew flight.

It remains to be seen whether Congress will accede to Obama's change in direction. Industry insiders expect a brutal fight in Congress. The early reaction to media reports about the budget request has been filled with howls of protest from lawmakers in districts that would be most affected by a sharp change in strategy.

Obama's budget, according to a background briefing by an administration official on Sunday, will call for spending $6 billion over five years to develop a commercial spacecraft that could taxi astronauts into low Earth orbit. Going commercial with a human crew would represent a dramatic change in the way NASA does business. Instead of NASA owning the spacecraft and overseeing every nut and bolt of its design and construction, a private company would design and build the spacecraft with NASA looking over its shoulder.

Former NASA administrator Michael Griffin, who championed the Constellation program, views the Obama budget as disastrous for human space flight.

"It means that essentially the U.S. has decided that they're not going to be a significant player in human space flight for the foreseeable future. The path that they're on with this budget is a path that can't work," Griffin said, anticipating the Monday announcement.

He said that, although he pushed for seed money for commercial cargo flights to space, he doesn't believe that the commercial firms, such as SpaceX and Dulles-based Orbital Sciences, are ready to take over the risky and difficult job of ferrying human beings to orbit.

"One day it will be like commercial airline travel, just not yet," Griffin said. "It's like 1920. Lindbergh hasn't flown the Atlantic, and they're trying to sell 747s to Pan Am."

John Gedmark, executive director of the Commercial Spaceflight Federation, said the critics underestimate the maturity of the commercial sector.

"The Defense Department began using commercial rockets a long time ago to launch priceless national security satellites, that our troops' lives depend on. If the Pentagon can trust private industry with this responsibility, we think NASA can, too," Gedmark said.

White House spokesman Nick Shapiro said Sunday, "The president is committed to a robust 21st-century space program, and his budget will reflect that dedication to NASA. NASA is vital not only to spaceflight, but also for critical scientific and technological advancements. The expertise at NASA is essential to developing innovative new opportunities, industries and jobs. The president's budget will take steps in that direction."

The administration estimates the new funding for the commercial program would create up to 1,700 jobs, which could help offset the expected loss of 7,000 jobs in Florida when the space shuttle is retired next year.

Although the Obama budget would give NASA a boost of more than $1 billion a year, it's not nearly as much as the $3 billion a year that a president-appointed panel said last year would be necessary for NASA to pursue a worthwhile human space flight program. The panel, headed by retired aerospace executive Norman Augustine, was harshly critical of NASA's strategy, saying that Constellation didn't have nearly the funds to meet its stated goal of a 2020 moon landing, particularly if the space station were to be kept operational.

The panel favored a new strategy for NASA in which returning to the moon would be just one possible element of a broader capacity to launch astronauts beyond low Earth orbit. No human beings have ventured farther than such an orbit since the last Apollo moon landing in 1972.

The public announcement of NASA's new direction will culminate more than a year of closed-door strategizing. That should end Monday with a series of press conferences, interviews and the messages contained in the budget itself.

Scientist: Alien life could already be on Earth

2010-01-26T14:43:00.000-08:00

Variant life forms — most likely tiny microbes — could be under our noses.

By Raphael G. Satter
MSNBC News
Associated Press
Nov 26 2010

LONDON - For the past 50 years, scientists have scoured the skies for radio signals from beyond our planet, hoping for some sign of extraterrestrial life. But one physicist says there's no reason alien life couldn't already be lurking among us — or maybe even in us.

Paul Davies, an award-winning Arizona State University physicist known for his popular science writing said Tuesday that life may have developed on Earth not once but several times.

Davies said the variant life forms — most likely tiny microbes — could still be hanging around "right under our noses — or even in our noses."

"How do we know all life on Earth descended from a single origin?" he told a conference at London's prestigious Royal Society, which serves as Britain's academy of sciences. "We've just scratched the surface of the microbial world."

The idea that alien micro-organisms could be hiding out here on Earth has been discussed for a while, according to Jill Tarter, the director of the U.S. SETI project, which listens for signals from civilizations based around distant stars.

She said several of the scientists involved in the project were interested in pursuing the notion, which Davies earlier laid out in a 2007 article published in Scientific American in which he asked: "Are aliens among us?"

So far, there's no answer. And ever finding one would be fraught with difficulties, as Davies himself acknowledged.

Unusual organisms abound — including chemical-eating bacteria which hide out deep in the ocean and organisms that thrive in boiling-hot springs — but that doesn't mean they're different life forms entirely.

"How weird do they have to be suggest a second genesis as opposed to just an obscure branch of the family tree?" he said. Davies suggested that the only way to prove an organism wasn't "life as we know it" was if it were built using exotic elements which no other form of life had.

Such organisms have yet to be found. Davies also noted that less than 1 percent of all the world's bacteria had been comprehensively studied — leaving plenty of time to find unusual organisms.

"You cannot tell just by looking that a microbe has some radically different inner chemistry," he said.

Davies' call for alien-hunting scientists to look to their own backyards came as one of the pioneers of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence told the conference the job of finding proof of alien life in outer space may be more difficult than previously thought.

Frank Drake, who conducted the first organized search for alien radio signals in 1960, said that the Earth — which used to pump out a loud mess of radio waves, television signals and other radiation — has been steadily getting quieter as its communications technology improves.

Drake cited the switch from analogue to digital television — which uses a far weaker signal — and the fact that much more communications traffic is now relayed by satellites and fiber optic cables, limiting its leakage into outer space.

Sky-mapping scope spots first new asteroid

2010-01-25T14:44:00.000-08:00

MSNBC News
Jan 25 2010

Space rock, found by NASA's WISE spacecraft, is 98 million miles from Earth.

NASA's latest sky-mapping space telescope has found an asteroid never-before-seen from Earth, the first of hundreds of new objects the telescope is expected to find.

The near-Earth object, designated 2010 AB78, was discovered by NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE, on Jan. 12. The space rock doesn't appear to pose any threat to Earth, NASA officials said.

The newfound asteroid is currently about 98 million miles (158 million km) from Earth and has an estimated diameter of 0.6 miles (I km).

The rock comes as close to the sun as Earth does, but because it circles the sun in an elliptical orbit tilted with respect to the Earth's orbital plane, the asteroid isn't thought to come near enough to our planet to pose a hazard. Scientists will monitor the asteroid though to make sure it doesn't pose an impact threat.

The WISE mission's software was able to pick out the object moving against a background of stationary stars. Researchers confirmed the object's identity with the University of Hawaii's 2.2-meter visible-light telescope near the summit of Mauna Kea.

WISE is expected to find about 100 to 1,000 previously undiscovered asteroid in the belt between Mars and Jupiter, as well as hundreds of new near-Earth asteroids during its all-sky survey, which began on Jan. 14.

A new report issued last week found that NASA's efforts at finding near-Earth asteroids that could potentially pose a threat to Earth are not sufficient.

NASA's asteroid and near-Earth object experts have said that the agency has found about 85 percent of the largest nearby asteroids, ones that are a half-mile (1 km) wide or larger. But only 15 percent of the 460-foot wide asteroids near Earth have been discovered and tracked to date, and just 5 percent of nearby space rocks about 164 feet (50 meters) across have been found.

WISE will also spot millions of new stars and galaxies as it scans the sky in the infrared wavelengths every 11 seconds as it orbits the Earth. The spacecraft launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California in December 2009.

WISE's first sky survey should be complete in about six months, with a second to follow through the fall. A preliminary look at WISE's sky maps is expected in April 2011, with the final cosmic atlas due out in March 2012.

But a selection of choice images collected during the survey will be released earlier beginning in February, mission managers said.

Astronomers capture image of 'cosmic cat'

2010-01-24T14:16:00.000-08:00

OneIndia
Sunday, January 24, 2010

Munich, January 24 (ANI): The European Southern Observatory (ESO) has recently released a stunning new image of the vast cloud known as the 'Cat's Paw Nebula', which is a complex region of gas and dust near the heart of the Milky Way galaxy, where numerous massive stars are born.

Few objects in the sky have been as well named as the Cat's Paw Nebula, or NGC 6334, a glowing gas cloud resembling the gigantic pawprint of a celestial cat.

NGC 6334 lies about 5500 light-years away in the direction of the constellation Scorpius (the Scorpion) and covers an area on the sky slightly larger than the full Moon.

British astronomer John Herschel first recorded NGC 6334 in 1837 during his stay in South Africa.

Despite using one of the largest telescopes in the world at the time, Herschel seems to have only noted the brightest part of the cloud, seen here towards the lower left.

The whole gas cloud is about 50 light-years across.

The nebula appears red because its blue and green light are scattered and absorbed more efficiently by material between the nebula and Earth.

The red light comes predominantly from hydrogen gas glowing under the intense glare of hot young stars.

NGC 6334 is one of the most active nurseries of massive stars in our galaxy and has been extensively studied by astronomers.

The nebula conceals freshly minted brilliant blue stars - each nearly ten times the mass of our Sun and born in the last few million years.

The region is also home to many baby stars that are buried deep in the dust, making them difficult to study.

In total, the Cat's Paw Nebula could contain several tens of thousands of stars.

Particularly striking is the red, intricate bubble in the lower right part of the image.

This is most likely either a star expelling large amount of matter at high speed as it nears the end of its life or the remnant of a star that already has exploded. (ANI)

New light shed on old dispute between Einstein and Bohr

2010-01-21T15:41:00.000-08:00

January 18, 2010
www.wikio.com

In classical physics there are no uncertainties - the properties of matter on an atomic level are deterministic, that is to say predetermined. The theories of quantum mechanics, however, only say something about how likely the properties are and the two interpretations of the laws of physics were a source of great controversy between Einstein and Niels Bohr. New research strengthens Bohr's quantum theories. The results have just been published in the academic journal, Physical Review Letters.

The new research, conducted in collaboration between the Department of Mathematical Analysis at the Complutense University of Madrid and Michael M. Wolf, professor of theoretical quantum physics at the Niels Bohr Institute at the University of Copenhagen, offers a reassessment of the historic dispute over the (in-)completeness of quantum mechanics.

The results strengthen Bohr’s position by showing that any hypothetical theory that would be ’more complete’ than quantum mechanics, is necessarily in opposition to Einstein’s principle that things can only function locally. So, for example, an event on Earth could not instantly affect what happens on the Moon. Ironically enough, Einstein’s wish for a more complete description of the physical reality fail because of his own principle.

The beginning of history

From the early days of quantum mechanics, Albert Einstein did not hide his dissatisfaction with the statistical nature of quantum mechanics and the fact that certain observations such as location and time cannot be simultaneously measured with any accuracy.

Einstein especially challenged the newly developed ’Copenhagen Interpretation’ of quantum mechanics at the fifth Solvay Conference in Brussels in 1927 by creating a series of hypothetical experiments. They were all concerned with a common measurement of observations that are irreconcilable (i.e. not measurable jointly) according to the new theory of quantum mechanics.

However, during the conference Niels Bohr was able to refute all of Einstein’s proposed examples by revealing gaps and inconsistencies in Einstein’s reasoning. The dispute between Einstein and Bohr continued and culminated in 1935 when Einstein, together with B. Podolsky and N. Rosen, used a characteristic - now called entanglement - to argue that it makes sense to ascribe values to irreconcilable observations. Moreover, since quantum mechanics does not predict these values, Einstein thought that it should be considered incomplete.

This time Einstein’s argument could not be refuted so easily. Even though Bohr answered quickly, it took several decades rather than a conference break before J.S. Bell showed how the matter could be settled by an experiment. Later people like A. Aspect actually performed the experiment and disproved Einstein’s claims.

Future theories

Today Bohr’s theories are generally accepted and we know that a complete theory in the sense that Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen argued for is in opposition with experiments or with Einstein’s principles.

However, one question remained, whether there could be a theory, which is more complete than quantum mechanics, but still incomplete enough to be in agreement with Einstein’s principle. The new results, which consist of a series of theoretical mathematical calculations all answer no to this question.

”Our findings not only close the past discussion. They also tell us something about theories of the future - how theories that go beyond quantum mechanics should be. It makes no sense to look for theories that are more deterministic, that is to say more certain than quantum mechanics. If we stick to Einstein’s principles, we have to accept a lot of fuzziness”, explains Michael M. Wolf, professor at the Niels Bohr Institute.

More information: Physical Review Letters -- http://prl.aps.org/abstract/PRL/v103/i23/e230402
arXiv -- http://arxiv.org/abs/0905.2998

Provided by Niels Bohr Institute

Astronomers Get New Tools for Gravitational-Wave Detection

2010-01-21T15:38:00.001-08:00

ScienceDaily (Jan. 7, 2010) — Teamwork between gamma-ray and radio astronomers has produced a breakthrough in finding natural cosmic tools needed to make the first direct detections of the long-elusive gravitational waves predicted by Albert Einstein nearly a century ago. An orbiting gamma-ray telescope has pointed radio astronomers to specific locations in the sky where they can discover new millisecond pulsars.

Millisecond pulsars, rapidly-spinning superdense neutron stars, can serve as extremely precise and stable natural clocks. Astronomers hope to detect gravitational waves by measuring tiny changes in the pulsars' rotation caused by the passage of the gravitational waves. To do this, they need a multitude of millisecond pulsars dispersed widely throughout the sky.

However, nearly three decades after the discovery of the first millisecond pulsar, only about 150 of them had been found, some 90 of those clumped tightly in globular star clusters and thus unusable for detecting gravitational waves. The problem was that millisecond pulsars could only be discovered through arduous, computing-intensive searches of small portions of sky.

"We've probably found far less than one percent of the millisecond pulsars in the Milky Way Galaxy," said Scott Ransom of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO).

The breakthrough came when an instrument aboard NASA's Fermi Gamma-Ray Space Telescope began surveying the sky in 2008. This instrument located hundreds of gamma-ray-emitting objects throughout our Galaxy, and astronomers suspected many of these could be millisecond pulsars. Paul Ray of the Naval Research Laboratory initiated an international collaboration to use radio telescopes to confirm the identity of these objects as millisecond pulsars.

"The data from Fermi were like a buried-treasure map," Ransom said. "Using our radio telescopes to study the objects located by Fermi, we found 17 millisecond pulsars in three months. Large-scale searches had taken 10-15 years to find that many," Ransom exclaimed. "Fermi showed us where to look."

"This is a huge help in our effort to use millisecond pulsars to detect gravitational waves," Ransom said. The more such pulsars scientists can find and observe over time, the more likely they are to detect gravitational waves, he explained. He said that astronomers now have barely enough millisecond pulsars to make a convincing gravitational-wave detection.

"With Fermi guiding the way, though, we can change that picture quickly," Ray said. "We've just started to follow up on the objects located by Fermi, and have many more to go, with a great success rate so far," he added.

Ransom, along with his colleague Mallory Roberts of Eureka Scientific, used the National Science Foundation's Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope (GBT) to find eight of the 17 new pulsars. The scientists announced their discoveries at the American Astronomical Society's meeting in Washington, DC.

Pulsars are neutron stars -- the dense cores left after a massive star has exploded as a supernova. About as large as a medium-sized city, these neutron stars have strong magnetic fields that channel lighthouse-like beams of radio waves that sweep through space as the star rotates. When such a beam strikes the Earth, radio telescopes can detect the strong radio waves.

As they age, pulsars slow their rotation rates. However, if the pulsar is part of a binary-star system and can draw in material from its companion, its rotation can be sped up. When the neutron star has been sped up to rotate hundreds of times a second, it is called a millisecond pulsar.

In addition to helping scientists detect gravitational waves, study of millisecond pulars also can yield important new information about other effects of General Relativity and about fundamental particle physics.

"This new ability to find many more millisecond pulsars really is a treasure chest that can yield many valuable gems of scientific discovery," Ransom said.

Brazil's Albert Einstein hospital goes live on medical-grade network

2010-01-20T13:29:00.001-08:00

September 10, 2009 | Bernie Monegain, Editor

SAO PAULO, BRAZIL – The Albert Einstein Israeli Hospital (HIAE) in São Paulo, Brazil, has deployed an integrated medical-grade network to boost patient care and reduce costs.

The hospital, which is recognized in Latin America for pioneering the use of technology to streamline business processes and deliver value to its patients, selected Cisco's health information technology architecture. The network connects the hospital's workers to essential information and services and has enabled the hospital to link its seven facilities in São Paulo.

HIAE estimates to increase by 30 percent to 40 percent the number of beds by 2011 and plans to build new facilities, create a day clinic and provide extra ambulatory services.

"We wanted to develop applications integrating voice and data, and we were interested in implementing some of these applications on IP phones, using the devices like small PCs," said Sérgio Arai, CIO at the hospital. "This would enable innovative communication, both for the staff and for patients, resulting in improvements in the service standards and patient satisfaction."

"We also found out that we shared Cisco's view – the idea of a network in which all services are integrated in order to provide more intelligence and broader functionality," he added.

Cisco executives say their solution aims to meet the hospital's growth requirements while delivering security, interoperability, availability and productivity. Cisco's healthcare architecture also enables better support for patients and clinical staff, allowing quick and easy information exchange in areas such as patient diagnostics, clinical stories and medical recommendations.

The system could be extended to partners and external agencies in the future.

Highlights of the new system include:

•The hospital has consolidated its networks for voice, data, vital sign monitoring and picture archiving and communications (PACS), creating a single, integrated network infrastructure using Cisco's technology.
•As a result, HIAE has introduced new applications that cover different work methods while reducing costs.
•HIAE migrated to Cisco's information security solutions and deployed firewall features for perimeter security, VPN services for remote access and IPS to assist in intruder prevention. These solutions have been integrated to the network, increasing reliability and security for doctors and patients.
•The local networks (LAN) and wide area networks (WAN) use Cisco technology to provide access to voice, data and PACS services, whether for fixed or wireless connections.
•Cisco Catalyst switches also provided scalability and flexibility in the main hospital's data center network. Servers and other IT systems such as PACS, which were previously distributed across the hospital's seven facilities, have been centralized into a single data center.
•Instead of having separate systems for each specialty, authorized employees can now see any image in the PACS system from any location in the hospital or its remote units, saving significant time and helping improve service to patients while also enabling doctors to access data securely.
•HIAE clinical staff are continually on the move, and many keep in touch with co-workers through mobile phones. Doctors and nurses are now starting to use wireless IP phones connected to Cisco's platform, enabling easier, more cost-effective communication using four-digit extensions.
•The hospital plans to replace all pagers with IP phones, providing clinical staff with a more versatile device that is capable of bilateral communication, reducing response times and communication costs.
•The new Cisco infrastructure provides the hospital with a platform on which several innovative applications are set to be introduced. One of these applications allows HIAE to manage and locate its medical equipment more efficiently, using radio frequency identification (RFID) tags and wireless communication network.

Pulsar watchers race for gravity waves

2010-01-15T09:13:00.000-08:00

Radio telescopes vie with laser detectors to hunt for signs of massive cosmic collisions.

Nature News
Jan 13 2010

Aided by the Universe's best celestial clocks, radio astronomers are embarking on a search for the almost-imperceptible stretching of the fabric of space by gravitational waves — predicted by Einstein's theory of general relativity but not yet detected directly. The approach is competing with more elaborate and expensive approaches to gravitational wave detection.

Since the late 1970s, astronomers have known that gravitational waves affect the arrival time of radio-wave bursts that emanate with clockwork regularity from pulsars, the spinning neutron stars left over from exploded supernovae. Now, the idea has moved from theory to application with the recent discoveries of many millisecond pulsars, which emit radio-wave bursts every thousandth of a second or so, more rapidly and more reliably than 'normal' pulsars.

NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope is identifying the locations of dozens of these galactic clocks, allowing radio astronomers to follow up and monitor them. Researchers can deduce whether a passing gravitational wave has jostled Earth by watching for slight variations in the arrival time of pulsar radio-wave bursts — just fractions of a second over the course of years. If these efforts succeed, researchers will have a new tool for exploring the cosmic cataclysms — colliding black holes, for example — that are thought to generate gravitational waves (see graphic).

The shoestring effort, involving groups in Australia, Europe and North America, could beat larger and better-funded groups that use laser interferometry to try to detect gravitational waves by their tiny effects on the movements of test masses. "People are finally taking notice," says Scott Ransom, an astronomer at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Charlottesville, Virginia, who last week announced the discovery of 17 millisecond pulsars at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Washington DC.

Ransom says that about 100 millisecond pulsars are known in the Milky Way, but only a handful are bright enough and regular enough to be measured to the precision necessary to hunt gravitational waves. Some 20–40 of these pulsars, enough for a full 'pulsar timing array', would have to be monitored for 5–10 years before a gravitational wave signal would stand out. But with new millisecond pulsars now turning up, researchers are confident that they will soon have enough to compete with the ground-based laser efforts in Italy, Germany and the United States, where physicists have been sifting through petabytes of data for years without bagging so much as a gravitational burp.

“Physicists have been sifting through data for years without bagging so much as a gravitational burp.”

These ground-based groups could still get lucky and detect the gravitational wave signature of a rare event, such as the final moments of a nearby neutron star merger. But capturing such an event is not assured until the main US detector — the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) in Washington state and Louisiana — is upgraded in 2015 to make it sensitive enough to pick up waves from a much larger volume of the Universe. Pulsar astronomers thus have a shot at first detection.

"I think they have a really solid chance of beating the ground-based detectors," says Bruce Allen, director of the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics in Hanover, Germany, who manages shared data analysis among the ground-based detectors. "It's a real race."

The end of the race to detect gravitational waves will mark the beginning of gravitational wave astronomy — yet the different approaches are sensitive to vastly different phenomena. Whereas the interferometers would detect the rapid pulses of merging neutron stars, the pulsar timing arrays seek the lower-frequency but stronger background signal that comes from violent mergers of supermassive black holes at the centres of distant galaxies. The Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA), a multibillion-dollar space mission being considered by NASA and the European Space Agency, would be sensitive to the gravitational wave frequencies in between, where events such as merging white dwarfs would stand out.

Thomas Prince, an astrophysicist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena and LISA mission scientist for NASA, says that the space- and ground-based interferometers will be better at pinpointing gravitational events in the sky. But Ransom says that by comparison, pulsar timing arrays are "dirt cheap" because they use existing radio telescopes instead of requiring a detector such as LIGO, which cost US$300 million to build and is getting another $200 million for its upgrade.

Either way, detecting the Universe's most violent events requires extraordinary sensitivity — temporal in the case of the pulsar timing arrays and spatial in the case of the interferometers. Interferometers already monitor the position of their test masses to better than one part in a million million billion (10–21) — which Prince likens to measuring the distance to a nearby star to within the width of a human hair.

Splash! NASA moon crash struck lots of water

2009-11-14T15:33:00.001-08:00

By ALICIA CHANG AP Science Writer © 2009 The Associated Press
Nov. 13, 2009, 8:04PM
www.chron.com

LOS ANGELES — Suddenly, the moon looks exciting again. It has lots of water, scientists said Friday — a thrilling discovery that sent a ripple of hope for a future astronaut outpost in a place that has always seemed barren and inhospitable.

Experts have long suspected there was water on the moon. Confirmation came from data churned up by two NASA spacecraft that intentionally slammed into a lunar crater last month.

"Indeed, yes, we found water. And we didn't find just a little bit. We found a significant amount," said Anthony Colaprete, lead scientist for the mission, holding up a white water bucket for emphasis.

The lunar crash kicked up at least 25 gallons and that's only what scientists could see from the plumes of the impact, Colaprete said.

Some space policy experts say that makes the moon attractive for exploration again. Having an abundance of water would make it easier to set up a base camp for astronauts, supplying drinking water and a key ingredient for rocket fuel.

"Having definitive evidence that there is substantial water is a significant step forward in making the moon an interesting place to go," said George Washington University space policy scholar John Logsdon.

Even so, members of the blue-ribbon panel reviewing NASA's future plans said it doesn't change their conclusion that the program needs more money to get beyond near-Earth orbit. The panel wants NASA to look at other potential destinations like asteroids and Mars.

"This new and terrific result reassures us about lunar resources, but ... the challenges currently facing the human spaceflight program remain," Chris Chyba, a Princeton astrophysicist who is on the panel, said in an e-mail.

President George W. Bush had proposed a more than $100 billion plan to return astronauts to the moon, then go on to Mars; a test flight of an early version of a new rocket was a success last month. President Barack Obama appointed the special panel to look at the entire moon exploration program. The decision is now up to the White House, and NASA's lunar plans are somewhat on hold until then.

As for unmanned exploration, previous missions had detected the presence of hydrogen in lunar craters near the moon's poles, possible evidence of ice. In September, scientists reported finding tiny amounts of water in the lunar soil all over the moon's surface.

But it was NASA's Oct. 9 mission involving the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite, LCROSS, that provided the stunning confirmation announced Friday — water, in the forms of ice and vapor.

"Rather than a dead and unchanging world, it could in fact be a very dynamic and interesting one," said Greg Delory of the University of California, Berkeley, who was not involved in the mission, led by NASA's Ames Research Center in Mountain View, Calif.

The LCROSS spacecraft only hit one spot on the moon and it's unclear how much water there is across the entire moon.

The October mission involved two strikes into a permanently shadowed crater near the south pole. First, an empty rocket hull slammed into the Cabeus crater. Then, a trailing spacecraft recorded the drama live before it also crashed into the same spot four minutes later.

Though scientists were overjoyed with the plethora of data beamed back to Earth, the mission was a public relations dud. Space enthusiasts who stayed up all night to watch the spectacle did not see the promised giant plume of debris.

NASA scientists had predicted the twin impacts would spew six miles of dust into the sunlight. Instead, images revealed only a mile-high plume, and it was not visible to many amateur astronomers peering through telescopes.

Scientists spent a month analyzing data from the spacecraft's spectrometers, instruments that can detect strong signals of water molecules in the plume.

"We've had hints that there is water. This was almost like tasting it," said Peter Schultz, professor of geological sciences at Brown University and a co-investigator on the LCROSS mission.

Astronaut Buzz Aldrin, who in 1969 made his historic Apollo 11 moonwalk with Neil Armstrong, was pleased to hear the latest discovery, but still believes the U.S. should focus on colonizing Mars.

"People will overreact to this news and say, `Let's have a water rush to the moon,'" Aldrin said. "It doesn't justify that."

Mission scientists said it would take more time to tease out what else was kicked up in the moon dust.

___

AP Science Writer Seth Borenstein contributed to this report.

___

On the Net:

LCROSS mission: http://www.nasa.gov/mission(underscore)pages/LCROSS/main/

Man-Made (But Very Tiny) Black Holes Possible

2009-11-13T17:49:00.000-08:00

By Ian O'Neill | Thu Nov 12 2009
Discovery News

Did you hear the one about the particle accelerator that created a micro-black hole? You know, the one where this black hole exponentially grows into an Earth-eating behemoth, destroying all life as we know it?

You probably did hear that little piece of comedy in the build-up to the grand start-up of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in September 2008, and at first, you might have thought there was some real physics behind this manmade doomsday theory.

Alas, the physics was flawed and the Hawaiian guy at the center of it all saw CONSPIRACY! hiding behind every super-cooled electromagnet.

The Earth (in fact, all celestial bodies) is bombarded with particles (cosmic rays) of far higher energies than the ones collided in the LHC. We're still here. What's more, I haven't seen any black holes float around my neighborhood recently.

The Black Hole Hunt

We know the Earth-munching, LHC-generated black hole theory has more flaws in it than Europa's crust, but scientists do think the next-generation particle accelerator could generate tiny black holes.

This is actually rather exciting. If micro-black holes are generated after the high-energy collisions inside the LHC, they could provide the first experimental evidence of Hawking Radiation, the only radiation predicted to be emitted from a black hole's event horizon. If the radiation predicted by Stephen Hawking is discovered (via the detection of evaporating black holes), a Nobel Prize for Physics wouldn't be far away.

Hold on, isn't there a mixed message here? On the one hand, we have conspiracy nuts scaring the world (yet thrilling the tabloid press), saying that "reckless" physicists could destroy the world with a black hole, and then we have physicists confirming that they would love to see black holes generated in the LHC. What's going on?

It's a little thing called mass, and the micro-black holes that are theorized to be produced by the LHC simply do not have enough of it to cause any damage.

More Mass = More Suck

Cosmic black holes are created after the collapse of a massive star. They are, by definition, massive. If something is massive, it has a strong gravitational field. Any planets, stars or space cows that stray too close will be sucked in, making the black hole more massive.

Micro-black holes are miniscule. They have next to no mass, exert a near-zero gravitational pull on matter, and therefore do not grow. In fact, they most likely do the opposite; they evaporate. Fast.

Even if they had the opportunity to grow, they would accrete matter so slowly that they still wouldn't attain any measurable growth for billions and billions of years.

In a recent publication, a group of physicists decided to crunch the numbers on the likelihood of the LHC generating these vanishingly small micro-black holes, and they pretty much drew the same conclusions as CERN physicists have been saying for the last year. Any black hole generated at the LHC would pose zero threat to Earth.

Brane Leak

The leading theory about how micro-black holes might form in our Universe is made possible by the existence of extra-dimensions. The theory is that more dimensions exist than the four we experience (i.e. three spatial dimensions and one time dimension that constitute "space-time" as described by Einstein's theory of General Relativity).

The four dimensional Universe we live in can be considered to be a "brane," where other branes exist alongside ours, exerting a force. This description of out multidimensional Universe is very useful as it helps to explain why the force of gravity is many orders of magnitude weaker than the strong, weak and electromagnetic forces -- gravity is 'leaking' into our 4D universe from the neighboring branes.

All this talk of branes and extra-dimensions may sound complex, but their existence allows the production of micro-black holes should the collisions inside the LHC be energetic enough. Therefore, if micro-black holes are detected in the LHC, we have experimental evidence for some of the most complex theories mankind has ever devised. In short, these are very exciting times.

The Fast Die Young, The Slow Don't Grow

So, what did the researchers from Italy, US and Germany find out?

"First, we found that tidal black holes would evaporate (almost) instantly," says Roberto Casadio from the University of Bologna, Italy, and his three colleagues in their publication titled Theoretical survey of tidal-charged black holes at the LHC.

This is all well and good, but what if a micro-black hole shoots through the Earth at high speed?

"[We] show that the black holes with a large value of the initial momentum would cross the Earth in a matter of seconds and come out with velocities much larger than the Earth's escape velocity," say Casadio et al.

Once these speeding black holes pop out the other side of the Earth, they stop accreting mass (from the Earth's interior) and are flung into space and evaporate as they radiate Hawking Radiation. But don't worry about these welterweights punching a hole in the ground beneath you, on the entire trip through our planet, a single black hole will have swept up a meager 10-22 kg of rock.

10-22 kg is the mass of a hemoglobin molecule inside a red blood cell.

But say if the black hole isn't very speedy and it drops like a stone into the Earth... and stays there?

The researchers point out that the slower the black hole, the less mass it accretes; so although it might pop out of the LHC and sink into our planet, it will suck up very little mass.

If a slow-moving micro-black hole set up home inside Earth and sat there for 13.7 billion years (the age of the Universe), it would weigh in at a puny 10-18 kg (the mass of a virus).

"Our overall conclusion is therefore that the tidal charged black holes are a viable model of micro-black holes which might be produced at the LHC. The model predicts that such black holes cannot grow to catastrophic size, but might live long enough to escape the detectors and result in significant amounts of missing energy." --Casadio et al., 2009
When the LHC gets fired up in the coming weeks, let's see if any energy goes "missing" after a particle collision, it might be a sign of black hole birth (but not of the "Earth-munching" variety).

Source: Theoretical survey of tidal-charged black holes at the LHC, Casadio et al., 2009. arXiv:0911.1884v1 [hep-th]

Image: NASA/CERN/Ian O'Neill

Precise Radio-Telescope Measurements Advance Frontier Of Gravitational Physics

2009-11-08T12:28:00.000-08:00

ScienceDaily (Sep. 2, 2009) — Scientists using a continent-wide array of radio telescopes have made an extremely precise measurement of the curvature of space caused by the Sun's gravity, and their technique promises a major contribution to a frontier area of basic physics.

"Measuring the curvature of space caused by gravity is one of the most sensitive ways to learn how Einstein's theory of General Relativity relates to quantum physics. Uniting gravity theory with quantum theory is a major goal of 21st-Century physics, and these astronomical measurements are a key to understanding the relationship between the two," said Sergei Kopeikin of the University of Missouri.

Kopeikin and his colleagues used the National Science Foundation's Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA) radio-telescope system to measure the bending of light caused by the Sun's gravity to within one part in 30,000. With further observations, the scientists say their precision technique can make the most accurate measure ever of this phenomenon.

Bending of starlight by gravity was predicted by Albert Einstein when he published his theory of General Relativity in 1916. According to relativity theory, the strong gravity of a massive object such as the Sun produces curvature in the nearby space, which alters the path of light or radio waves passing near the object. The phenomenon was first observed during a solar eclipse in 1919.

Though numerous measurements of the effect have been made over the intervening 90 years, the problem of merging General Relativity and quantum theory has required ever more accurate observations. Physicists describe the space curvature and gravitational light-bending as a parameter called "gamma." Einstein's theory holds that gamma should equal exactly 1.0.

"Even a value that differs by one part in a million from 1.0 would have major ramifications for the goal of uniting gravity theory and quantum theory, and thus in predicting the phenomena in high-gravity regions near black holes," Kopeikin said.

To make extremely precise measurements, the scientists turned to the VLBA, a continent-wide system of radio telescopes ranging from Hawaii to the Virgin Islands. The VLBA offers the power to make the most accurate position measurements in the sky and the most detailed images of any astronomical instrument available.

The researchers made their observations as the Sun passed nearly in front of four distant quasars -- faraway galaxies with supermassive black holes at their cores -- in October of 2005. The Sun's gravity caused slight changes in the apparent positions of the quasars because it deflected the radio waves coming from the more-distant objects.

The result was a measured value of gamma of 0.9998 +/- 0.0003, in excellent agreement with Einstein's prediction of 1.0.

"With more observations like ours, in addition to complementary measurements such as those made with NASA's Cassini spacecraft, we can improve the accuracy of this measurement by at least a factor of four, to provide the best measurement ever of gamma," said Edward Fomalont of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO). "Since gamma is a fundamental parameter of gravitational theories, its measurement using different observational methods is crucial to obtain a value that is supported by the physics community," Fomalont added.

Kopeikin and Fomalont worked with John Benson of the NRAO and Gabor Lanyl of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. They reported their findings in the July 10 issue of the Astrophysical Journal.

The National Radio Astronomy Observatory is a facility of the National Science Foundation, operated under cooperative agreement by Associated Universities, Inc.

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Adapted from materials provided by National Radio Astronomy Observatory.

Einstein's 'Spooky Physics' Gets More Entangled

2009-11-08T12:20:00.000-08:00

By Clara Moskowitz, LiveScience Staff Writer
03 June 2009 01:00 pm ET

Quantum entanglement is just spooky — even Einstein thought so. As if particles (as in particle physics) have telepathic empathy.

The theory of quantum mechanics predicts that two or more particles can become "entangled" so that even after they are separated in space, when an action is performed on one particle, the other particle responds immediately. Scientists still don't know how the particles send these instantaneous messages to each other, but somehow, once they are entwined, they retain a fundamental connection.

This bizarre idea riled Einstein so much he called it "spooky action at a distance."

A new study found that this eerie quantum link can apply even to situations that resemble the larger, everyday world. Scientists entangled two pairs of vibrating particles separated in space, so that when one pair was forced to change its movement, the other pair did as well.

"We've entangled something that has never been entangled before, and it's the kind of physical, oscillating system you see in the classical world, just much smaller," said John Jost, a physics graduate student at the University of Colorado at Boulder, and a guest researcher at the National Institute of Standards and Technology. Jost and team describe their findings in the June 4 issue of the journal Nature.

Previous experiments have entangled the internal properties of particles, such as spin states, but this is the first time scientists have entangled the particles' pattern of motion.

The breakthrough could help researchers build quantum computers, which could theoretically make calculations much faster than existing technology.

"Apart from adding another toy to the quantum mechanic’s playground, this is an important tool for further developments in quantum-state engineering," wrote physicist Rainer Blatt of the Austrian Academy of Sciences in a separate essay in the June 4 issue of Nature. Blatt was not involved in the new study.

To achieve this feat of entanglement, Jost and colleagues set up two pairs of ions (atoms with one electron removed, so that they have a positive charge). Each pair included one beryllium and one magnesium ion, vibrating back and forth toward and away from each other as if they were connected by an invisible spring.

Using electric fields and lasers, the researchers herded the ions into separate pairs and then entangled their motion. Then they separated the pairs by 240 micrometers (millionths of a meter), which is actually quite a span for an atom. Even at this distance, when the researchers changed the motion of one pair — stopped or started the vibrations — the other responded immediately, stopping or starting in kind.

The experiment proved that this kind of everyday springy motion is entangle-able, and blurred the boundary between the quantum world and the regular macroscopic world we live in, where normal objects don't behave like that.

As for why this entanglement, or any entanglement, is possible, physicists aren't so sure.

"It’s a very difficult question," Jost told LiveScience. "I would just have to say that it stems from the laws and rules of quantum mechanics. There are a lot of people trying to understand what it means."

•Top 10 Unexplained Phenomena

•How Quantum Physics Could Power the Future

•The Greatest Mysteries in Science

EINSTEIN NEWS: Astronomers snap most distant black hole in universe, which is 1bn times bigger than the Sun

2009-09-03T12:30:00.000-07:00

By Claire Bates
Last updated 03rd September 2009
MailOnline

Astronomers have discovered a supermassive black hole near the edge of the known universe. It lies within a galaxy the size of the Milky Way, which is 12.8billion light-years from Earth. The light from this galaxy has travelled for most of the universe's 13.7billion-year lifespan to reach us.

Most scientists believe the universe is rapidly expanding following a catastrophic event known as the Big Bang.

Light from distant objects is therefore stretched and shifted to longer wavelengths. This process, known as the redshift, is used to calculate huge distances in space.
Study leader Dr Goto said: 'It is surprising that such a giant galaxy existed when the universe was only one-sixteenth of its present age, and that it hosted a black hole one billion times more massive than the sun.

'The galaxy and black hole must have formed very rapidly in the early universe.'

Scientists hope the new images will explain how galaxies and black holes have managed to evolve together.
Black holes cannot be seen directly because they are so dense that light cannot escape from their gravitational pull.

However, matter falling into a black hole heats up from friction as it swirls around the event horizon of the black hole at great speeds. The hot material radiates strongly in ultraviolet and visible light. Until now, studying host galaxies in the distant universe has been extremely difficult because the blinding bright light from the vicinity of the black hole makes it more difficult to see the already faint light from the host galaxy.

Black holes cannot be seen directly because they are so dense that light cannot escape from their gravitational pull. To see the supermassive black hole, the team of scientists used new red-sensitive charge-coupled devices (CCDs) installed in the Suprime-Cam camera on the Subaru telescope on Mauna Kea.

CCDs are used in many light detecting gadgets from photocopiers to bar-code readers. In astronomy they are used to collect analogue information (such as light or an electrical charge from a distant object) and convert it into digital information that can be analyzed by computer software.

Professor Satoshi Miyazaki of the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ) is a lead investigator for the creation of the new CCDs and a collaborator on this project. He said: 'The improved sensitivity of the new CCDs has brought an exciting
discovery as its very first result.'

A careful analysis of the colours revealed that 40 per cent of light around 9100Angstrom is from the host galaxy itself and 60 per cent is from the surrounding ionized nebulae illuminated by the black hole.

Yousuke Utsumi, a member of the project team, said: 'We have witnessed a supermassive black hole and its host galaxy forming together. This discovery has opened a new window for investigating galaxy-black hole co-evolution at the dawn of the universe.'

Unlike smaller black holes, which form when a large star dies, the origin of the supermassive black holes remains an unsolved problem. A currently favored model requires several intermediate black holes to merge. The host galaxy discovered in this work provides a reservoir of such intermediate black holes.

The research will be published in the online version of the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society this month.

Stan Lee Reflects On 'Friendly' Relationship With Michael Jackson

2009-08-18T13:52:00.000-07:00

Pair met 'a number of times' in the 1990s to discuss buying Marvel Comics.

By Rick Marshall
For MTV Movies Blog
July 29, 2009

SAN DIEGO — It's no secret that Michael Jackson was a comic book fan — just take a look at some of the items from his personal collection. But what many people don't realize is that the recently deceased pop icon was almost a comic book publisher too.

Last month, MTV's comic book movie blog Splash Page recalled how close Jackson came to buying Marvel Comics in the late 1990s alongside Stan Lee, the famous co-creator of Spider-Man, the X-Men, Fantastic Four and countless other superheroes.

During last weekend's Comic-Con, Lee said the relationship he developed with Jackson over the course of their business dealings extended well beyond professional courtesy. In fact, as various videos popping up around the Internet lately seem to attest, it wouldn't be out of line to call Jackson a fan of Lee and his creations.

"We had met a number of times," Lee told MTV News. "In fact, [Jackson] came to my house once with his son, and I remember my wife took care of his son for about an hour while Michael and I were talking.

"He was quite a good father," he added. "He was very solicitous, and he cared very much for the boy."

While their plan to buy Marvel never progressed past "the discussion phase," Lee said, the pair grew fairly close. At one point, Lee even made a trip to Jackson's home to discuss, of all things, Spider-Man.

"I had been to his place in Neverland," Lee said. "He wanted to do Spider-Man. I'm not sure whether he just wanted to produce it or wanted to play the role...our conversation never got that far along.

"He thought I'd be the one who could get him the rights [to make a Spider-Man movie], and I told him I couldn't," Lee continued. "He would have to go to the Marvel company. But we did become friendly...and he was a great guy."

10 Lessons Every Student Can Learn From Einstein

2009-08-06T11:03:00.000-07:00

Posted by Site Administrator in Education
Aug 5th, 2009
Online College.org

Albert Einstein was one of the greatest scientists to ever live. Einstein’s physics theories are still confounding scientists more than half a century after his death. In addition to his grand technical accomplishments, the kindly German doctor was also a philosopher and ethicist of the highest order. More than simply a scientist, Einstein’s legacy provides insight into a number of fields. Here are the ten lessons every student can learn from Albert Einstein, pulled directly from his quotes and sayings.

1."Imagination is more important than knowledge.": Without the ability to dream or imagine Einstein never would have been remembered as a famous scientist. In fact Einstein even used imagination as a scientific tool by developing theories through thought experiments conducted entirely in the mind.
2."Do not worry about your difficulties in Mathematics. I can assure you mine are still greater.": Not all Einstein’s breakthroughs came easily and despite his renowned intellect, he often claimed deficiencies as a mathematician. Though many claim he failed math as kid, this endearing story is sadly not true.
3."The only real valuable thing is intuition.": Einstein understood the value of instinct and intuition when tackling problems. While knowledge and information are necessary, trusting your first reaction is often best.
4."Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new.": Falling flat on ones face is an essential part of the human experience. Failure allows time and hindsight to explore mistakes and review other courses of action.
5."The only thing that interferes with my learning is my education.": Learning is a lifelong process that frequently relies more on interests and passions then official curricula. Students that follow their interests end up successful and fulfilled.
6."I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.": Despite having contributed heavily to the atomic bomb, Einstein deplored its use and lobbied American presidents to limit the weapons’ proliferation.
7."We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.": Finding solutions means finding different routes of failure. Success can only be achieved with focused effort and well thought out solutions.
8."The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing.": Questions are good. They shape all academic disciplines and lead to more knowledge. Unfortunately, asking questions is an easy habit to break. Einstein constantly reminded people to indulge their curiosity.
9."Whoever undertakes to set himself up as a judge of Truth and Knowledge is shipwrecked by the laughter of the gods.": For all his genius and success, Einstein was aware he would never discover all the answers. This humility and down to earth sensibility has made Einstein an icon of human thought for generations.
10."Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.": This sign hung in Einstein’s Princeton University office as a reminder of the truly important things in life: love and happiness.

Quantum Goes Massive: Profound Effect Of Astrophysics Experiment On Future Quantum Experiments

2009-07-19T14:59:00.000-07:00

ScienceDaily (July 18, 2009) — An astrophysics experiment in America has demonstrated how fundamental research in one subject area can have a profound effect on work in another as the instruments used for the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) pave the way for quantum experiments on a macroscopic scale.

LIGO is a huge experiment, funded mainly by the U.S. National Science Foundation and involving more than 600 astrophysicists worldwide, undertaken to detect gravitational waves and thereby help us monitor space through another valuable set of lenses - gravitational radiation.

By measuring tiny motions of test masses caused by passing gravitational waves, LIGO expects to directly detect this radiation, thought to stem from exotic phenomena in space such as the collisions of neutron stars and black holes, and supernovae.

Laser light is used to monitor relative displacements of interferometer mirrors, which are suspended as pendulums to act as quasi-free test masses. Since the effect of gravitational waves is expected to be very small, LIGO detectors are sensitive enough to measure displacements smaller than one-thousandth the size of a proton for mirrors that are 4 km apart.

In different frequency bands, the sensitivity of the LIGO instruments are limited by noise arising from the quantum nature of the laser light, or by thermal noise arising from the thermal energy of the mirrors. Observing quantum mechanical behaviour of the LIGO mirrors requires reducing the thermal noise, which may be achieved by cooling the interferometer mirrors with techniques similar to laser cooling of atoms. However, the temperature must be brought extremely close to absolute zero (0 Kelvin, or about -273 degrees Celsius).

While absolute zero is impossible to achieve, scientists working on LIGO have used both a frictionless damping force and a magnetic restoring force to cool the mirror oscillator to about 1 millionth of a degree above absolute zero. The frictionless damping force removes energy from the mirror while the restoring force increases the frequency of the oscillator in order to avoid disturbances caused by local ground motion.

While the effort to detect gravitational waves is ongoing, the researchers have now used the LIGO apparatus to observe the oscillations of a 2.7 kg pendulum mode at a level close to its quantum ground state. The results suggest that it should be possible for quantum physicists to use the apparatus to observe quantum mechanical behaviour, such as quantum entanglement, at mass scales previously thought impractical.

While there is still work to go in strengthening the laser and reducing excess noise in the detectors, LIGO scientists Thomas Corbitt and Nergis Mavalvala of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology echo the optimism of the research article, which concludes that "the present work, reaching Microkelvin temperatures, provides evidence that interferometric gravitational wave detectors, designed as sensitive probes of general relativity and astrophysical phenomena, can also become sensitive probes of macroscopic quantum mechanics."

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Journal reference:

1.B Abbott et al. Observation of a kilogram-scale oscillator near its quantum ground state. New J. Phys., 11 073032 (13pp) DOI: 10.1088/1367-2630/11/7/073032
Adapted from materials provided by the Institute of Physics.

Spider-Man Reaches #600, Hero Initiative Gets Birthday Present!

2009-07-19T14:56:00.000-07:00

Posted: Friday, July 10, 2009
Posted By: Kevin Powers

Marvel Comics’ Amazing Spider-Man has been around long enough to reach its milestone 600th issue! And to celebrate, San Francisco’s Comic Outpost is holding a Spider-Man anniversary party on the date of the book’s release, Wednesday, July 22. The party takes place at Comic Outpost, 2381 Ocean Ave. in San Francisco.

Comic Outpost has constructed a massive wall displaying ALL 600 issues of Amazing Spider-Man, dating back to issue #1 from 1963. Fans will be able to view the massive Spidey collection, and enter raffles for books signed and sketched by legendary Spider-Man artist John Romita Sr., a signed-and-numbered copy of Stan’s Soapbox: The Collection, which collects all of Stan Lee’s legendary “Soapbox” columns, and more. The highlight of the raffle will be a genuine chainsaw prop from the Doctor Octopus emergency room scene in the Spider-Man 2 movie. All proceeds from the event will benefit Hero Initiative, the charity dedicated to helping older comic creators in medical or financial need.

“Way back in the early ’70s, my mother bought me my first comic, Marvel Team-Up #42, featuring Spider-Man and Vision. From that point I was hooked!” said Comic Outpost owner Gary Buechler. “Through the years, I’ve put together a full run of Amazing Spider-Man and it's a kick to be able to display it in my own store! It’s an honor and a duty to help give back to all of the creators who brought me and so much joy and have allowed me to actually make a living. It is the least I could do.”

“I’m very proud of my years of work on Spider-Man, and always pleasantly surprised to see that people remember it fondly still today,” said Hero Initiative Board member John Romita Sr. “My thanks to the crew at Comic Outpost. This should be a great event I wish I could attend, and should raise some much-needed funds for Hero!”

Stan Lee’s Cameo in IRON MAN 2

2009-07-04T16:31:00.000-07:00

Stan Lee’s Cameo in IRON MAN 2
by Matt Goldberg
Posted: June 28th, 2009 at 10:47 pm

A Scooper has sent us info regarding what Stan Lee will be doing in Iron Man 2. Since some folks want to avoid all spoilers at all costs, we’ll let you know what it is after the jump.

For those that don’t follow Marvel movies religiously but have always wondered who that odd, grandfatherly-looking figure who randomly appears in almost all their movies, the answer is writer Stan Lee. Lee is credited with creating or co-creating some of Marvel’s most enduring characters including Daredevil, Fantastic Four, Silver Surfer, The Avengers, X-Men, and some cult superhero known as, “Spider-Man”. Stan almost always gets a cameo in Marvel movies because he’s such a delightful and iconic character himself among comic geeks. In the first “Iron Man”, we saw Stan mistaken for Hugh Hefner. How will we see Mr. Lee this time around? Hit the jump to find out…

Here’s the info according to a scooper:

Hey guys,

Big fan of the site. Since I hadn’t read this news anywhere, I wanted to let you know Stan Lee filmed his cameo for Iron Man 2. I was told Stan filmed earlier this week and he was dressed as Larry King. The scene has Stan asking Tony Stark when he’s going to be on his show.

While we usually like to have a second source, we are very confident in the accuracy of this report. It’s not an earth-shattering revelation (unless Larry King is actually The Mandarin; then we’ve unintentionally ruined the film), but it’s still neat and it doesn’t look like Stan’s cameo will be too distracting.

“Iron Man 2″ hits theatres on May 7th, 2010.

Stan Lee as Baxter Building mailman Willie Lumpkin in “Fantastic Four”! Go to the blog in this link's title, and you will see the photos!

Bubbleator 2010 - 2044

2009-06-10T13:13:00.000-07:00

Set in Seattle Science Fiction Story – Tongue in Cheek & Liberal Left

By Karen Cole
Word Count: 2,300

“We are like animalculae in a drop of water…” Fredric Brown

AN UNDERGROUND “BUBBLEATOR” TRANSIT SYSTEM operated for 34 years through President, Calaveras, and Snohomish Counties in Western Washington without suffering through one solitary mishap. The Regional Transit Authority’s “Vision 2010” plans were now well-realized, and you could go almost anywhere via underground transit – if you weren’t too claustrophobic.

Sat 4 JUL, 2044, President County’s Chief Exec Cho-M’Bobea lasercut the SoulGold(k) across Pioneer Square Main Station’s (and Sealth’s) newest public toy. The former King County had been renamed President County when Pres. Norm Rice, our second Black President, died in the Virus Riots of 2019. This was done along with renaming the City of Seattle to the “apropos” Native American name of Sealth, for Chief Sealth of the Suquamish and Duwamish tribes, who made peace with local snotty white people of 1856 A.D.

Construction on each colorful rainbow-painted Bubbleator or “shoebox car” in the brand-spanking new underground transit elevator system had commenced in December 2010, not being completed until March 2045. But by the time this story was told over the Net, TV, video, cells and all other handhelds, people were able to access most sections of this splendid aboveground and underground transit system. It was developed to be absolutely accessible to physically, mentally and spiritually challenged bods – no mercy for the able-bodied!

Literally 1000s of “shoeboxes” dotted the landscape of “Pretzel” County, 1342 in the City of Sealth alone. The 80 Underground Access Elevators of Pioneer Square propelled 20,000+ people an hour through SEAPAC’s three levels of transit, linking the rail systems, van transit, the flyways and the new underwater marine channels to cities all over Western Washington and downcoast into Oregon, California(k), and far, very far, down into Mexico.

CE M’Bobea, a naturalized human Pan-African, spraypainted her name with harmless vegetable dyes outside Main Station’s shoebox, or UAE, on the ever-changing Rainbow Motion Board. ComPugenta(k) cool air, sights, sounds, smells and textures emanated from the board, overpowering a crowd of metallically dressed men, women, kids and natuchildren(k) gathered to watch as members of SEAPAC’s Planning Committee prepared to ride the giant “Levitator.”

“You wouldn’t believe our track improvements,” murmured Zien Pea, a grown natuchild of ten and comember of 2044’s SPC, to a Globavid reporter from East Kenya, then a white-held territory.

The reporter, David Hopdotter, an Anti-Sectionist Jew, was a known crusader on behalf of multi-nationalist groups, and a Western Bloc government-paid news agent. He was nearly keeling over from ComPugenta’s Virtual Reality show, while most of the crowd could barely converse, even in TAP.

“Isn’t work boring you?” David mouthed back. He OMG hated TAP.

But Zien, eyes large and blue-green-golden, TAPPED slowly, in a way sure to enforce her ideas SOUNDLY into David’s mind, that she LOVED the shiny clothes generated for comembers by Seabell/the Coastal Transit Project.

“I HATE autoleather. It’s SQUISHY, growing viraclothes in labs. They mined TONS of Snohomish County gold building the tracks!” She pulled his sleeve, signaling “NO WAY.” Always TAPPING the latest permafrozen slang, Zien.

You TAP using the other’s whole body. That lets in the Deaf-Blind. Zien could see and hear, some, but used a Chair. Suddenly, the entire crowd surged forward when the huge Main Elevator doors opened, letting everyone into the biggest shoebox in town. Zien and 50 other Chairpeds backed in. Padded grabbars merged as the thirty-foot wide doors whispered shut on the hunplus-foot deep shoebox. An unseen natuvoice came on, explicating the UAEs.

“Built to accommodate Sealth’s six-and-a-half million people, not to mention the two million traveling through, the shoeboxes also help generate energy, pumping out excess water from First Level. A circulating hydraulic system drives the new, totally safe, pollution-free Levitator…” droned their invisible female robot, as the leviathan elevator swooped around in loopdyloop passages.

“We’re going through the pretzel now,” David gently TAPPED on Zien’s right shoulder, “If my stomach survives all the twisting.”

Sure enough, the UAE inserted into the Water Table, the very first Underground restaurant in Sealth, just waylay enough to switch corridors while inundating all 328 passengers with gentle virtual reality tastes and aromas, one meal with drink at a time on “menu display.” Only Tokyo’s sub-cafes surpassed its quality.

The giant elevator then merrily zoomed along sideways, its foot-thick Plass front allowing full display of 1000s of tiny restaurants/drug bar fronts, markets and businesses, the six-mile Mall River Forest Park, the PoliBuilding, and Sealth Aquarium’s Salmon (Coho, Chum and Steelhead) Causeway on Mezzanine Level. David loved the salmon causeway, mouthing and TAPPING at Zien constantly about fishing privileges and waiting lists.

“Next month, honey, when I drop in from Qakar (Kenya’s new Pan-African name) I’m gonna take you fishing, up-up-up, I promise!”

Zien didn’t care. David’s third daughter, via fertilization of two women and much frantic labwork to fuse her halved body parts—David had been overtested for IDC (k) (Immune Deficiency Condition) during the Virus Riots of 2025—had a mission. Her single-minded purpose was to promote awareness of genetically altered people as legitimate human beings, in spite of their strange looks, multiple disabilities and scary but exciting potentialities.

Other than that, she ECSTATICALLY loved organic beancream!

But she was more worried than excited about her entry into Underground Sealth’s “Hell Realm,” her Chinese cultural aspects appalled by the cosmopolitan closing-in metallic walls surrounding her, plus the lack of a beautiful blue sky overhead. She knew no colors, but loved blue, able to discern its vibratory patterns the best out of the entire refractive spectrum. She leaned against her IDC-treated father, a man who’d grown up in hospitals, screaming his lungs out to leave.

Care providers of the 21rst Century were a grand delusion of medical skills and elemental soul-casting, taking life quickly with huge doses of poison when it became unpalatable, steadily experimenting with people’s bodies.

“They force us to be made sick and well,” according to megacare reformer Flo Ware X-806 .

Very few comembers were worried about this, Zien found, as she TAPPED on them; SPC Shirley Fung believed medcare to be an attempt “to help, not harm.” Bored with phrases, Zien wanted full citizen’s rights. She was already mayor of her aboveground urban village.

Zien’s burg led SeaTac region’s disposal of wastes into utilizable natural and methane gas pockets. Meanwhile plants, Earth’s chief oxygen source, had cornered AMCA’s inarable land, as everyone wildly sought solutions to the Global Warming problem…something better than air conditioning.

Disabilities, racial/sexual issues and animal rights remained as distantly soluble problems for AMCANS after the World Bank released Engas, the special bonds freezing funds of all countries in Interchange, the major global work of the tens, twenties and thirties. But money as a concept was finally destroyed by computer exchange systems. They couldn’t keep track of theft!

Only human, natu, and animal efforts, computer signals and group co-op signatures were needed to start projects anymore. That meant a multilevel Washington connected by rail to upper Canada, the southmost Baja tip, and all points east by 2039. Rail would have been global if not for planecars. Licensed drivers still flood the buzzing skies over most urban centers. They whiz around each other at lightning speeds.

Ten minutes after taking 43 planned angle turns, the west coast’s tenth largest UAE phwoomphed to a gentle, caressing stop at the Third Level’s biggest platform, Denny RetroParque.

Right under the Upper Queen Anne Transit Island, the parquet was delineated by universal animal and plant symbology. This inculpated regional Sealth landmark symbology, such as ancient Ojibwa totem poles. Aboveground, Metro TransVans provided all short trips within President and Calaveras Counties.

Everyone disembarked, some onto moving platforms, others onto the tree-lined walk/bikeway below. Zien chose the walkway, subfluorescence pulsing robin’s egg blue from the rounded walls. Third Level’s ceiling was an incredible 550-feet high, solar subfluorescence pulsing robin’s egg blue from the rounded walls. Light-emitting diodes wrapped each comember in a unique, 500-tone rainbow that caressed one’s body with orgasmically liquid warmth.

Much is being done at present to help prenatu eyes that reflex poorly against indoor light, disabling children from normal sight. Nowadays natus have all the worst vision problems as keratotomy surgery, widespread since the late ‘10s, has corrected all human vision problems. Some AMCA laws bar natus from the upper levels of the AMCA Armed Services, government and the private sector.

The Jewish father and daughter team deboarded with a knot of 20 comembers, shimmering to the tune of rainbow lights and foggy background attracter music wheezing from sardine-packed restaurants/drug bars, arriving at the commemoratively named Belated Health Bar. The recessed front of the eight-foot wide, 60-foot deep, hunplus-level, hydraulic transfloor Bar stood on the Chairped-access leftpad hologramming Sealth’s famed ruddy terrace-cotta.

David bought them one of the only family of drugs proven to benefit the human central nervous system by encouraging regrowth of damaged myelin tissue. They sipped twin cool sprinkice freshments with whipped cranboysenberry syrup, and felt the soothing effects of…PPOOOPPPPPPPP ! ! !

Both of them looked up as all light around Third Level boomed off. The last thing David saw was the glimmer of a pretty remate human’s…or was she natu?...silvamesh, pinfeather-striped organo-metallic dress.

A human-sounding voice vibrated their table as Zien clung to David, TAPPING frantically; the voice echoed like the usual David, TAPPING frantically; the voice echoed like the usual public address PoliSystem Regional Transit operative. But David sensed something amiss. Transit usually hired natus as Vocals.

“Do NOT panic. Your transit system and the Underground parquet are SAFE while service repairs are made. You will experience TEMP darkness…”
Troping the story to Globavid as he carefully listened, David also touched his cellwave phone, capable of wave rescinding through fifty thousand miles of concrete, and called Field Supervisor Terno Farquhar-el-Grey. A Pan-Arab infused with Korean body parts, Farquhar was an old friend of David’s from the Virus Riots. “Far” accidentally took a viral explosion that saved David’s life by swerving his Boeing Eagle convertible, a flying car, into an oncoming blast of fuel, aimed at David, a war analyst for the Redmond Massacre.

“FARQUHAR! My daughter is up a tree! She’s practically climbing into my outer pockets. Why’s it taking forever on this?”

“Tell your daughter to calm down, and press the receiver of your ear. Stat? Good. Third Level is being held by pro-Kenyan terrorists.”

David stoked the word “safe” into Zien’s silver hair. Zien never believed anything but her own Formachair’s computer-laden Envir(k) was safe. But she kinda liked danger. Her chair did not have normal legs. It was not a Spider Chair. It hovered over the ground on a cushion of air, and the legs were receded into the frame.

“Oh, Garamond Adonai, yer HOLLOW!” David laughed at his cute girl. “Farquhar, what is your central life’s difficulty, LOL, anyway?”

“We have about an hour to track down a team of White Party Nairobis before they blow up Third Level with a SUBGUM of a thermo-nuclear explosion, imploding SEALTH. Y’COPY???”

“‘NAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHH.” Zien could tell something was wrong. Everyone else was pulling out pocket lights and marijuana (filtered) lightups, creating a flickering candlelit glow. She finally grabbed David’s pocket lighter and beamed his face.

“If you don’t tell,” she TAPPED, all over his body, turning on her background noise inhibitor so she could hear him, “I’LL TICKLE YOU!” That was Zien’s most dreaded trick.

Farquhar steadily intoned David’s doom into one red-veined ear, giving him details the Metro PoliSafety Teams had uncovered through multicam TV detection systems. They’d spotted two alien men clothed head-to-toe in light-absorbing black Starcloth(k) when one of them idiotically lit an unfiltered hash joint.

“We turned on each sprinkler system to dampen their clothes so we can ranar ‘em better. Plus, now there will be no more fire-setting. The Purple Team saw them in Zone 14. Definitely the body shapes of human pro-phobics.”

Phobics were what media called “white” people scared of racially merging with brown people. Worldwide. There were plenty of these, holding assets of resources in centers of power, since the Virus Riots; and the Darwin-based pleas for supremacy from the former rich wielders of money and securities. David, a former phobic, hated it passionately since natu Zien was born.

Zien’s mothers were the only match possible out of available candidates for BirthQuest(k) from David’s tired, medic-tampered body. By the time he pushed to have kids he had to face that. Two Szechwan women selflessly tolerant of his Life Profile were needed to combine every sustainable, undamaged chromosome.

“The City is the place where the diffused rays of many separate Beans of Life fall into focus…” spoke a Chinese proverb in 1994 on the wall of a Metro office. “Far, how in HELL do a Jew and a disabled natu enter Zone 14, alone and unaided, when we’re all the way – Zien, gimme light – INTO ZONE 36 UQATI?”

“You don’t, we do. We’re in Zones 12 to 16, searching, and we’ve got ‘em surrounded. There go the batteries,” Farquhar sighed as hundreds of backup superconductors flooded on. “They have a combined life of about a million years. Since the world lost money as a concept we can use either system anymore. But I guess we’ll pull easy handle on Third Level’s generator soon…

“…Yup. McCaulough says they submicrowaved terminals in the fused Permaplates(k). One of the Green Team must be THEM. Oops. There’s only…all twelve of them just surrendered…their liaison says Nairobi used to be allies with my old country! We have the thermo-nuclear BOMBO – enda problema!”

Farquhar’s words, reassimilating in David’s recording cells, pared down to an essential story. David troped film/voice to Globavid pretty much like sneezing. Smiling at his relieved daughter and their refreshing liquid drugs, he touched his cell off by gently stroking it with his left little finger.

Superheroes are starting to bug me

2009-05-21T15:40:00.000-07:00

All those Sharpie-bright spandex boys have helped Hollywood off an awkward hook.

From Macleans.ca
Written by Mark Steyn on Thursday, May 14, 2009

No disrespect to Wolverine, who’s the hottest Canadian at the box office since Mary Pickford (even if they do need an Australian to play him), but I wonder about this superhero business. They’ve been cleaning up at the multiplex ever since the dawn of the millennium: Spider-Man. X-Men. Batman. Iron Man. The mid-20th-century long-underwear guys are bigger than ever in the 21st. Truly this is the Age of the Superhero. And it’s beginning to bother me.

Don’t get me wrong. I love comic books. Meeting Stan Lee was one of the great moments of my life. Read a zillion of his masterpieces as a kid—although my grasp of the details decades later is generally frozen circa issue No. 22: Jean Grey will always be Marvel Girl to me. Please, no need to write to point out that she subsequently became Phoenix, and then Dark Phoenix, and then died, and then turned up in a pod at the bottom of Jamaica Bay, which was given to Mister Fantastic of the Fantastic Four, and then she died again but implanted her psyche in the body of the comatose Emma Frost...

I’m just skimming the CliffsNotes here, so, alternatively, don’t write if my précis has omitted many fascinating plot twists over the decades. My point is that keeping up with these guys is a full-time job. And even the fellows whose basic bio doesn’t change much get “reinvented.” The reinventions are invariably the same: out with the breezy guy swinging through the streets of Gotham to a ring-a-ding-ding Neal Hefti theme tune; in with some morose misanthrope hunched on the rooftops brooding and riddled with self-doubt.

In the sixties, the TV Batman was camp. Then he got dark in the eighties movie. But then by the nineties sequels the dark Batman had mysteriously camped up again. So now he’s darker than ever. I think the concept of reinvention could do with reinventing.

When I was a lad, a lot of my pals didn’t dig this stuff. Boys who were into war stories valued verisimilitude, which made it hard to get past the capes and tights on Green Arrow or Ant-Man. So, even among the male youth demographic, the superhero catered to a niche market—and a parochial one at that. One can certainly detect, as scholars do, a long cultural inheritance of Übermensch mythology underpinning the Marvel and DC universes, but putting the Übermensch in Sharpie-coloured fully accessorized costumes is very American.

Wolverine may have been born in northern Alberta and may have spent many years struggling, somewhat improbably, to escape the sinister clutches of his masters at the Canadian Defence Ministry, but, to the best of my knowledge, he has never been spotted flying down Yonge Street fighting for truth, justice and the Canadian way as he battles Islamophoboman, the deranged Maclean’s columnist whose evil powers grow stronger with every human rights complaint against him. Canada is just a place Wolverine happens to come from, not something he embodies.

Back in the seventies, Marvel Comics introduced Captain Britain, with, first, a Britannic lion on his chest and, later, a modified Union Jack, a conscious hommage to Captain America’s star-spangled pectorals. It never really worked, in part because it seems an alien cultural vernacular: the Union Jack is fine on Austin Powers’ Y-fronts or Ginger Spice’s knickers, but looks very foreign on the rippling chest of a superhero.

So the conventions of the genre seemed quintessentially American in their expansive confidence. Or so I thought. Now, as last summer’s superheroics are succeeded by this summer’s, I’m not so sure. Recently, in Reason magazine, Jesse Walker mocked me for claiming to have detected Bush Doctrine subtexts in the first Spider-Man movie while entirely missing the masturbatory metaphor. Well, I saw Spidey in 2002, the day after visiting the World Trade Center site on what was the last chance to see it “as is,” before the authorities closed it for redevelopment (if that’s the right word for a decade of bureaucratic sclerosis).

So perhaps my emotional compass was pointing elsewhere. I thought Spidey’s big-screen debut made a case for Bush-style pre-emption in that “the men who killed his Uncle Ben were small-time crooks Peter could have stopped earlier but chose not to.” On the other hand, apropos his uncle’s famous advice to Peter Parker—“With great power comes great responsibility”—I seem to recall my colleague Paul Wells defending Jean Chrétien’s 9/11 anniversary plea for the Americans to “be nice” to foreigners as simply a Shawinigan variation on Uncle Ben: “Wid da great power come da great responsibilities.”

Who’s right? Me? Wells? Both? Neither? Well, it’s seven years on, and I can’t remember a thing about the movie except Kirsten Dunst’s clinging shirt in one rain-sodden scene. Mr. Walker is right that too many of us went looking for messages in the superheroics, and seized too eagerly on the slim pickings. As he says, the superhero genre has a “philosophical flexibility.” Spider-Man himself compared biceps with Don Rumsfeld on stage as part of some Pentagon war promotion. But in January he was trading fist bumps with Barack Obama in a presidential inaugural special. Boy sidekick to Rummy, arachnid ivory to Obamessiah ebony: which is the real Spider-Man?

Er, well, there isn’t a real Spider-Man, is there? Look, I know several comrades of mine were very taken by Michael Caine’s speech as Alfred the butler to Master Bruce—“Some men just want to watch the world burn . . . ”—hailing it as an incisive analysis of al-Qaeda et al. But I don’t think so. Terrorists enjoy the body count, yet, unlike the Joker, they do have an end rather than just means. The notion that they merely “want to watch the world burn” is more readily applied to your average Hollywood studio.

For almost a decade, the summer blockbusters have avoided saying anything about terrorism, Islam, 9/11, Bali, Beslan, Madrid or London, but they do like to “watch the world burn.” And so they opt for explosions and fireballs and shattering glass and screaming civilians unmoored from any recognizable reality. Hence, the Age of the Superhero: the Sharpie-bright spandex boys helped the movies off an awkward hook.

In the eight years American troops have been fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, the studios have failed to produce a single film on the subject, other than a handful of unwatched flops about rendition and torture. The Tom Clancy novel The Sum of All Fears was about Islamic terrorists, so naturally the cinematic version made them neo-Nazis. The Nicole Kidman yawneroo The Interpreter was originally about Islamic terrorists attacking New York, so naturally they were rewritten into terrorists from the little-known African republic of Matobo.

If a thriller’s set on a hijacked plane, the hijacker turns out to be a bespoke minion of some obscure Halliburton subsidiary. A couple of years back they made a high-tech action thriller in which the bad guy is the plane. That’s right: an unmanned computer-flown aircraft goes rogue and starts attacking things. The money shot is—stop me if this rings a vague bell—a big downtown skyscraper with a jet heading toward it. Only there are no terrorists aboard. The jet itself is the terrorist. This is the pitiful state Hollywood’s been reduced to: let’s play it safe and make the plane the bad guy.

In the nineties, upscale Brits made a nice living playing the exotic foreign evildoer in Hollywood action pics. But, unless Jeremy Irons has been practising twirling his fingers like propellers and taxiing down the garden path with outstretched arms, he’s not going to be getting many roles as the psycho aeroplane.

Some studio vice-presidents just want to watch the world burn. So we have movies about nothing. You can discern subplot if you wish, but in the end what 99 per cent of moviegoers notice is the stuff that’s not sub-: he’s dressed like a bat! He has a groovy car! Whoa, did you see the way the Joker jabbed that guy’s eye out? You can debate allegory and metaphor, but once upon a time you didn’t have to—even with superheroes. The very first issue of Captain America showed our hero punching Hitler in the kisser right on the front cover—and look at the date: March 1941, months before the U.S. even entered the war.

The critic James Bowman thinks the current vogue for big screen superheroes helps to “isolate and quarantine heroism in fantasy-land.” “Heroism” is what people who’ve been bitten by radioactive spiders do. Until that happens to you, best to steer clear. And so a world of superheroes leads to a world without heroes. Gone now are the amateur adventurers of 19th- and 20th-century fiction, chaps who’d find themselves caught up in something, and decide to give it a go, initially because it’s a ripping wheeze but also because, in some too-stiff-upper-lipped-to-say way, they understood honour required it.

Now the conventional romantic hero is all but extinct, and as giants patrol the skies those of us on the ground are perforce smaller. In The Incredibles, there’s a famous line aimed at the feel-good fatuities of contemporary education: when everyone’s special, nobody is. The failure of storytelling in today’s Hollywood teaches a different lesson: when everyone’s super, nobody’s a hero.

The Scale of Einstein, From Faith to Formulas

2009-05-14T13:43:00.000-07:00

40-year Mystery Revisited: Newtonian System Mimics 'Baldness' Of Rotating Black Holes

2009-05-04T20:11:00.000-07:00

ScienceDaily (Feb. 25, 2009)

The rotating black hole has been described as one of nature's most perfect objects. As described by the Kerr solution of Einstein's gravitational field equations, its spacetime geometry is completely characterized by only two numbers — mass and spin — and is sometimes described by the aphorism "black holes have no hair"...(to read the rest of this article, click on the link in the title above.)

Einstein Medical Center Celebrates 25 Years of Providing Comprehensive Genetics Services to the Community

2009-04-26T17:00:00.000-07:00

Philadelphia, PA, April 2, 2009 – The Division of Clinical Genetics at Albert Einstein Medical Center is celebrating 25 years of providing a full range of services to patients and families. Einstein Medical Center is the only hospital in the Philadelphia area that offers prenatal, pediatric, adult and cancer genetic services in one location. In addition, the medical center was the first hospital in the area to create a Jewish genetic disease screening program called The Victor Center for Jewish Genetic Diseases which provides affordable and accessible genetic counseling and screening to young adults, and educational programs in the community.

Adele Schneider, MD, a board-certified clinical geneticist, directs the Division of Clinical Genetics along with her team of four genetic counselors:

Tanya Bardakjian, MS, CGC, Jennifer Berkowitz, MS, Darnelle Dorsainville, MS, CGC, and Faye Shapiro, MS, CGC.

“Because the most common diseases such as diabetes and heart disease have a genetic component, the more we know about our family history the better, since we can make changes to our lifestyle that can help prevent these diseases,” says Dr. Schneider. “When it comes to babies and young children, early identification of a genetic condition can provide pediatricians with specific guidelines for healthcare maintenance and enable early intervention to give the child the best chance of achieving his/her potential.”

Following a thorough review of medical records, family history, a physical examination, or laboratory tests, Dr. Schneider and the counselors educate families about a diagnosis, how the condition was inherited, risk of recurrence, and how to manage the condition. Information is offered on support groups as well as a contact number for a local family who has a child with the same condition. The genetic counselors provide long-term ongoing support and education for families.

Genetic Services

The team provides the following services:

Evaluations for infants, children and adults suspected of having a learning or physical disability with a genetic cause, such as mental retardation, developmental delay, birth defects or chromosomal abnormalities (e.g., Down syndrome, Fragile X).
When the evaluation is completed, appropriate services are identified, a prognosis is provided and risk of recurrence in future children, if any, is determined.

Women and/or couples who are pregnant or considering starting a family can undergo genetic counseling to determine potential risk to their pregnancy.

A Breast and Ovarian Cancer Risk Assessment Program provides individuals concerned about hereditary breast and ovarian cancer with a personal and family history risk evaluation. The program includes cancer genetics education, genetics testing, and recommendations for screening and prevention options.

Services are offered in the Anophthalmia/Microphthalmia Clinic for patients and families with rare eye disorders known as anophthalmia (baby is born without one or both eyes) or microphthalmia (baby is born with an abnormally small eye or eyes).

Patients with these conditions receive a full genetics evaluation with genetic counseling. If they wish to participate in the Registry and DNA research, they provide information and genetic samples to aid researchers in their effort to identify eye-development genes, the incidence and causes of these disorders and the genetic conditions that may be associated with them. The genetics team links families to others with these conditions via an international support group, ican (international children’s anophthalmia network).

Office locations for Clinical Genetics are at Albert Einstein Medical Center, 5501 Old York Road in Philadelphia, and at duPont at Bryn Mawr, 100 Lancaster Avenue in Bryn Mawr, PA.

For more information on Einstein’s Division of Clinical Genetics, call 1-800-EINSTEIN or visit www.einstein.edu.

CONTACT: Judy Horwitz
Communications Specialist
Albert Einstein Healthcare Network
215-456-6767
horwitzj@einstein.edu

Publish date: April 2, 2009

Stan Lee, Marvel Comics Living Legend

2009-04-18T13:32:00.000-07:00

By Vince P. Platania

Without Stan Lee, Marvel Comics wouldn't be what they are today. The wunderkind came in, created a bunch of iconic, long-lasting characters and stories, and changed the face of comics forever.

It doesn't matter whether you are a Marvel Comics fan, a DC Comics fan, an independent comics fan or whatever, you have to respect Stan "The Man" Lee for his contributions to comics. Without Stan we wouldn't have the likes of Spider-Man, the Fantastic Four or the Incredible Hulk. It was his creative genius, meshed with the creative genius of Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko and others of course, that breathed new life into Marvel Comics and comics in general.

When one thinks of prolific comic book creators they think of a handful of names in comparison to the masses. Of the modern era there's Brian Michael Bendis, Geoff Johns, Neil Gaiman, Alan Moore, Jeph Loeb, Grant Morrison and a few choice others. In the Golden and Silver Ages of comics there were also big names that did big things. Bob Kane, Bill Finger, Jerry Siegel, Joe Shuster, Jack Kirby, and of course, Stan Lee.

Stan Lee's name is synonymous with greatness as it relates to imagination, creativity and passion for the world of comic books. Stan Lee, Marvel Comics' great beacon of hope that would launch the company and the industry into a new phase, introducing the family aspect of superhero books. The Marvel that Stan added would define the direction of Marvel Comics even long after Lee left the company in any prominent role.

Think about the incredible characters that derived from the mind of this man. Iron Man, the X-Men, Thor, Daredevil and Dr. Strange. These are characters everyone knows and loves. Look at this list of Stan Lee's creations and think about which ones have gone onto success in other media as well as had very successful runs in comics. Every single one of them almost. Granted, a lot of that success is due to the efforts and contributions of those writers and artists who developed the characters through the years. But Stan Lee's fingerprint is on each and every one of them and will always be seen and felt.

Can you name one single creator in comics that has contributed as much in terms of longevity, creativity and uniqueness? You can't because there are none. There are plenty of creators that have made great contributions and have written or drawn amazing characters and stories. But none can say they changed the face of the industry quite like Stan Lee can.

No matter what happens from this day forward; no matter what superstar creators land at the Big Two. Stan Lee, Marvel Comics' own living legend, stands head and shoulders above the rest.

Follow the exploits of rockers DEMON TWEAK and the racing clan HARD DRIVING HEROES, as they battle the evil trickster Loki at http://www.classic-comic-books.com . Also read articles on your favorite classic comic book heroes written by our resident historian VIRGIL THE STORYTELLER.

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Possible Abnormality In Fundamental Building Block Of Einstein's Theory Of Relativity

2009-04-13T13:30:00.000-07:00

Professor Albert Einstein: Math General of My Strange Army

2009-03-28T14:40:00.001-07:00

By Karen Cole Peralta

I recently replaced this article nearer the top of this blog, so that everyone can enjoy my Einsteinian based Germanic but non Teutonic balding and accented craziness. Also, the posting had a comment, so I didn't want to wipe it out. But now to get it back to the top, I had to leave the nice comment behind (ouch).

You can read "Mathematical General of My Strange Army" now up about three articles, above one on Einstein's bio and one on Stan Lee. I'm comparing Einstein to the inventor of Spiderman and the X-Men due to Stan's level headed genius when it comes to creating superheroes.

The rationale for "My Strange Army" involving Einstein is his famous, anti Niels Bohr statement that "when I am dead, there will be people alive looking down at my dead body...I hope!" By this, he was referring to Bohr's assertions that we create our own realities with our minds, which Einstein insisted posited that when he himself was dead, the world would thus vanish.

So I wrote "My Strange Army" about a night when I helped a black lady homeowner against two house burglars, which posits a reality for that black lady beyond both mine and those of the house burglars. Namely, that she owned a house, those two boys didn't, and they had no right to be intruding on her property that night.

But I was in the "caring neighbor" boat at the time, and knew some small karate, so I went ahead and took them on; the reference to the "elves and fairies" refers to the fact that I didn't get killed that night. So there. The police were duly called, all three of us were arrested, and the police finally got the real story, which enabled my release, although they did ask me to see a psychiatrist. They thought I was crazy for believing in Einstein's posit: that reality extends far, far beyond any one individual's perception of it, and definitely includes other people and their realities.

Nonetheless, I like Bohr, and will be posting something sooner or later on what he's been doing post his own demise in the many individualized realms of his theories adding to quantum physics, particle physics, nuclear physics and other such myriad and fascinating scientific enterprises. Stay tuned!

The Astonishing Life of Albert Einstein

2009-03-23T16:51:00.000-07:00

By Russell Shortt

In 1905, a series of papers appeared in the German physics journal, Annalen der Physik written by a young bureaucrat named Albert Einstein. Bizarrely, Einstein was affiliated to no university, had no access to a laboratory and was limited to using the library of the National Patent Office in Bern, where he was employed as a technical assistant, his responsibility being to evaluate patent applications for electromagnetic devices.

These papers contributed substantially to the foundation of modern physics, changing the way that time, space and matter were viewed. One examined the photoelectric effect by means of Planck's new quantum theory, one focussed on the behaviour of small particles in suspension (Brownian motion) and one outlined a Special Theory of Relativity. The first explained the nature of light and won Einstein the Nobel Prize, the second definitively proved the existence of atoms and the third made sure nothing would ever be the same again. And what a curious piece of work it was - it contained almost no mathematics, cited no influences or precedents and provided no footnotes or citations.

Einstein had developed his theory by just thinking, just thinking it out himself - astonishing. It's famous equation - E = mc squared, stated that energy and mass had an equivalence (hitherto thought of as distinct concepts), that they are two forms of the same thing: energy is liberated matter, matter is energy waiting to happen. C squared (the speed of light times itself) is a massive number, this suggests that tiny amounts of matter could be converted into huge amounts of energy.

Russell Shortt is a travel consultant with Exploring Ireland, the leading specialists in customised, private escorted tours, escorted coach tours and independent self drive tours of Ireland. Article source Russell Shortt, http://www.exploringireland.net
http://www.visitscotlandtours.com

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Einstein and Eirugena

2009-03-19T12:34:00.000-07:00

By Robert Baird

ALBERT EINSTEIN: - “I am satisfied with the Mysteries of life.”

"A human being is part of a whole, called by us the "Universe," a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest--a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty."

"The human mind is not capable of grasping the Universe. We are like a little child entering a huge library. The walls are covered to the ceilings with books in many different tongues. The child knows that someone must have written these books. It does not know who or how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. But the child notes a definite plan in the arrangement of the books---a mysterious order which it does not comprehend, but only dimly suspects."

"The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing. One cannot help but be in awe when he contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous structure of reality. It is enough if one tries merely to comprehend a little of this mystery every day. Never lose a holy curiosity."

"What I see in Nature is a magnificent structure that we can comprehend only very imperfectly, and that must fill a thinking person with a feeling of "humility." This is a genuinely religious feeling that has nothing to do with mysticism"

"The finest emotion of which we are capable is the mystic emotion. Herein lies the germ of all art and all true science. Anyone to whom this feeling is alien, who is no longer capable of wonderment and lives in a state of fear is a dead man. To know that what is impenetrable for us really exists and manifests itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty, whose gross forms alone are intelligible to our poor faculties -- this knowledge, this feeling ... that is the core of the true religious sentiment. In this sense, and in this sense alone, I rank myself among profoundly religious men."

Einstein saw there were people who sought to say he was religious in sense of being what they personally thought was God and he had to set them straight. Unfortunately many people have their memories tarnished by people succeeding in this propaganda that co-opts good people. He was a great man and fought most of his life for an end to standing armies. Despite the advances since his death he still makes sense in many areas of thinking including that for which he became most famous. I think this last simple quote by him says a lot.

"Two things inspire me to awe -- the starry heavens above and the moral universe within."

“Einstein died in 1955. He is best known for the theory of relativity, which states that time, mass and length all change according to velocity. Space and time are a unified continuum, which curves in the presence of mass.

The last three decades of his life were devoted to the search for a field theory which would unify gravitation and electro-magnetism.

Einstein always said that he was a deeply religious man, and his religion informed his science. He rejected the conventional image of God as a personal being, concerned about our individual lives, judging us when we die, intervening in the laws he himself had created to cause miracles, answer prayers and so on. Einstein did not believe in a soul separate from the body, nor in an afterlife of any kind.

But he was certainly a pantheist. He did regard the ordered cosmos with the same kind of feeling that believers have for their God. To some extent this was a simple awe at the impenetrable mystery of sheer being. Einstein also had an urge to lose individuality and to experience the universe as a whole.

But he was also struck by the radiant beauty, the harmony, the structure of the universe as it was accessible to reason and science. In describing these factors he sometimes uses the word God, and sometimes refers to a divine reason, spirit or intelligence. He never suggests that this reason or spirit transcends the world - so in that sense he is a clear pantheist and not a panentheist. However, this reason is to some extent anthropomorphic, and to some extent involves Einstein in a contradiction.

His religious thinking was not systematic, so he never ironed out this discrepancy. But it seems likely that he believed in a God who was identical to the universe - similar to the God of Spinoza. A God whose rational nature was expressed in the universe, or a God who was identified with the universe and its laws taken together. His own scientific search for the laws of this universe was a deeply religious quest.

Einstein's attachment to what he once called `the grandeur of reason incarnate' led him into the longest battle and the greatest failure of his life. He was implacably opposed to Niels Bohr's interpretation of quantum physics. Bohr believed that matter was fundamentally indeterminate, and our knowledge of it limited to probabilities.

Einstein's comment, "God does not play dice," became notorious. The phrase uses the present tense, not the past. This suggests that Einstein was probably not referring to the fact that a creator God would not in the beginning have created a universe in which chance reigned supreme. Rather he may have meant that as God or reason incarnate, the universe could not be governed by chance alone.” (1)

EIRUGENA: - John Scotius Eirugena (means Irish born) was a great philosopher in the late first millennium AD. Bertrand Russell seems not to know much about Irish culture when he expresses surprise to have to admit he is the greatest of minds in a very Dark Age. In fact he was just rephrasing Pelagius who was maintaining some of the remnants of Druidic thought as I see it. It annoys me to spend a day looking for a biography on a great man like this and find some fools have hundreds of links whereas he had nary a one.

Author of Diverse Druids

Columnist for The ES Press Magazine

Guest 'expert' at World-Mysteries.com

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Robert_Baird

Stan Lee, Even the Comic Book Great Ones Have Problems

2009-03-10T20:25:00.000-07:00

Stan Lee, in my mind, has to be one of the all time most recognizable individuals in the "Comic Book Industry". Most lovers of comic books have known his name all their
collecting lives. For those of you who don't know his name, I am sure you have heard of his creations. The X-Men, the Fantastic Four, the Incredible Hulk, Daredevil, and the very well known Spider-Man are all from the mind of Stan Lee. For the last forty years or more and as an employee of Marvel Comics, he has entertained us through the art of comic book imagination.

Well, by now you would think that an individual of this caliber would be taken seriously and treated with respect from his employers. Apparently not! In 2002 Stan Lee decided he had to file a lawsuit against the comic giant, Marvel. It appears the agreement between Lee and Marvel was that 10% of the income generated from TV and movies using Lee characters, was to be his. Seems Marvel didn't see it that way. Typical of conglomerates, isn't it? The boys in the suits seem to want to make all the rules. Stan at one time had even been a suit. Among other positions held at Marvel, Lee had even been president of the company for awhile.

Years ago when Stan Lee had created most of his characters, he had done it through a
write-for-hire agreement, so he doesn't own the characters. Stan was then, just a "meat and potatoes" kind of guy, trying to put meat and potatoes on the table. But over the years, he was very instrumental in putting Marvel Comics on the map.

When the 10% deal was formally put together, apparently most individuals involved
didn't realize the windfall that comic book character movies would become. Now is that any reason to hold back Stan's piece of the pie? I think not. Just corporate bigwigs trying to increase their lot in life. Now this is just my opinion so don't rant back at me as being unfair.

As luck would have it, a federal judge agreed and ruled in favor of Lee. How much
monetary compensation does this mean? Well to put it in perspective, the two Spider-
Man movies thus far, have reaped on the order of 800 million dollars apiece, in world wide ticket sales. This settlement could mean tens of millions of dollars for Lee, but the battle is not over. Marvel, will quite probably appeal the verdict and the case may be tied up in the courts for years.

Now don't go feeling too badly for Stan Lee. He is still pulling down a salary from
Marvel on the order of a million dollars. Still not to shabby in my mind. And Lee has mixed feelings because he has been loyal to Marvel for 60 years. To have his lifelong employer trying to, shall we say, stiff him, for being so loyal, I'm sure, does hurt. Had it not been for Lee, Marvel may not have been in the financial position they are today.

At 82, Stan Lee does have a comfortable and successful life. And if even his settlement is held up in the courts for years, Stan won the first round. He didn't bow down to the corporate hammer. Just another "Joe working class hero" yelling out, hey guys, let's play by the rules.

Dave Gieber, a former rocket engineer, has decided to take up residency on the Internet. He is the owner and editor of several websites, one of which was built around one of his childhood passions; http://www.comic-book-collection-made-easy.com . You can visit here to keep up to date on the world of comic books and comic book collecting. Feel free to sign up for my comic book ezine.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Dave_Gieber

Did Albert Einstein Ever Link Doom of Human Race to Bees?

2009-03-02T19:43:00.000-08:00

By Ruth Tan

Probably, the most common bee controversy ever associated with Albert Einstein is if he had ever predicted this: "If the bee disappears from the surface of the earth, man would have no more than four years to live"?

Perhaps why this dispute created a huge buzz was because it was rather unimaginable for Albert Einstein, who was neither an entomologist nor a beekeeper, to speculate about bees.

Nevertheless, we all would miss the most important lesson in this hoo-ha if our minds are fixed on verifying the authenticity of the quote. The unnerving question is "How true is this statement?" Isn't it? We can brag relentlessly about our knowledge on the advancement of science and technology today, but how much do we really know about the world we live? Have we blatantly and foolishly taken nature for granted?

Sometime in 2007, the sudden, mysterious disappearance of honeybees in the United States, Europe and Brazil was a reminder of the quote attributed to Albert Einstein, and a wake-up call for mankind. Beekeepers lost a bulk of their hives and suffered significant losses in honey production, and up till now are still stumbling over the understanding of this so-called "colony collapse disorder" syndrome and its cause. No one could explain why the bees became disoriented and failed to return to their hives!

We are told that the honey bee is totally responsible for the pollination of over 90 fruit and vegetable crops worldwide, so it would be devastating if we were to lose a majority or all of our honey bee pollinators for these crops. The bee is a fragile part of our system and an important indicator of our out of balance world. Their weird disappearing act has far-reaching implications for our agricultural food supply and is definitely not an issue to be overseen.

Until now, some of the possible causes of this strange phenomenon postulated by scientists include:

• Global warming accelerates the growth rates of pathogens such as the mites, viruses and fungi that affect the health of bee colonies. The unusual hot-cold weather fluctuations wreak havoc on bee populations which are accustomed to consistent seasonal weather patterns.

• Increasing use of chemical pesticides and herbicides, which honeybees ingest during their daily pollination rounds have weakened or killed them.

• Increase in atmospheric electromagnetic radiation as a result of growing numbers of cell phones and wireless communication towers. Cell phone radiation interferes with bees' ability to navigate through the air.

Ultimately, whether Albert Einstein did ever discuss about the bees becomes an irrelevant concern in the light of a much graver question, "What should we do to encourage the return of the bees?"

Source: http://www.benefits-of-honey.com/albert-einstein.html

R. Tan is the owner of the website http://www.benefits-of-honey.com which is a rich honey resource community specially built for all the honey lovers and fans in this world. She has packed this website with a wide range of quality contents on honey based on her knowledge and experience with honey, so as to promote its invaluable benefits which she believes could bring many positive spin-offs in everyone's daily life.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Ruth_Tan

February 13, 2009: On Not Understanding Your Own Product

2009-02-22T13:42:00.000-08:00

Superhero Conservatism (David Swindle, February 13, 2009, FrontPageMagazine.com)

We see certain ideas in particular in last year's three best superhero films: The Dark Knight, Iron Man, and The Incredible Hulk. And just what is the political vision that appears? One that's fundamentally conservative, albeit in very different fashions. [...]

In another of 2008's most popular superhero films, Iron Man, we see clear political themes emerge in the character of its protagonist Tony Stark (Robert Downey, Jr.) One of the bonus features provides an extensive look into the origins of the character and the last four years of his comics history.

Stan Lee, Iron Man's co-creator described in one of the featurettes on the Iron Man DVD how he intentionally made a conservative character:

Well it was a funny thing. I think I gave myself a dare. It was the height of the Cold War. The readers – the young readers – if there was one thing they hated it was war, it was the military, or, as Eisenhower called it, the military-industrial complex. So I got a hero who represented that to the hundredth degree. He was a weapons manufacturer. He was providing weapons for the army. He was rich. He was an industrialist. But he was good-looking guy and he was courageous… I thought it would be fun to take the kind of character that nobody would like – that none of our readers would like – and shove him down their throats and make them like him… I kind of had Howard Hughes in mind – without being crazy, he was Howard Hughes.

Right from the beginning of the film Stark is depicted as a man of the Right. As the CEO of Stark Industries he's a capitalist. Not only is he a business genius but an inventor as well, continually developing new inventions and technologies.

He's also a patriot, having come to the realization that the American Idea allows for the freedom that has given him such a wonderful life. And so he applies his genius to develop weapons which he then sells to the military.

Stark certainly isn't a social conservative, though. A bit of a womanizer, he makes a habit of seducing the attractive, leftist journalists who start out insulting him in their interviews.

In the film Stark's origin story is updated from taking place in Vietnam in 1963 to Afghanistan in modern times. While in the deserts demonstrating his newest missile for the military he's kidnapped by a terrorist group who then try and force him to build weapons for them. Instead, Stark secretly builds his first Iron Man suit which he uses to escape.

Stark returns traumatized from his experiences. His first reaction is one of pacifism – to announce that his company will no longer make weapons. It's an understandable response for someone who's just been on the receiving end of the products he's made a fortune selling. Once he gets his head on straight, though, he comes to different conclusions. It's not the weapons which are to blame, but the malevolent people using them. So, he develops better weapons – in the form of a more advanced version of the Iron Man suit – to defeat them.

In the film we see a particularly entertaining depiction of a conservative truth: the need to have superior firepower drives technological innovation. How many present-day technologies that make our lives better and easier have their origins in military development? It's no coincidence that the same innovative energy source that powers Stark's suit also keeps his heart running.

Stan Lee's particular genius was to recognize that awkward young men would relate to heroes who were vulnerable beneath their costumes. But the point is that they got to put on the costumes and kick some butt. The notion that those readers opposed war is hilarious.

Posted by Orrin Judd at February 13, 2009 9:22 AM

Person of the Century:

2009-02-13T19:00:00.000-08:00

He was the pre-eminent scientist in a century dominated by science. The touchstones of the era — the Bomb, the Big Bang, quantum physics and electronics — all bear his imprint.

By FREDERIC GOLDEN

Stephen Hawking: A Brief History of Relativity
J. Madeleine Nash: Einstein's Unfinished Symphony
Roger Rosenblatt: The Age of Einstein
TIME's Choice: Who Mattered — and Why
Runner-Up: Franklin Delano Roosevelt
Runner-Up: Mohandas Gandhi
The Necessary Evil? Why Hitler Is Not Person of the Century

Monday, Jan. 3, 2000
He was the embodiment of pure intellect, the bumbling professor with the German accent, a comic cliché in a thousand films. Instantly recognizable, like Charlie Chaplin's Little Tramp, Albert Einstein's shaggy-haired visage was as familiar to ordinary people as to the matrons who fluttered about him in salons from Berlin to Hollywood. Yet he was unfathomably profound — the genius among geniuses who discovered, merely by thinking about it, that the universe was not as it seemed.

Even now scientists marvel at the daring of general relativity ("I still can't see how he thought of it," said the late Richard Feynman, no slouch himself). But the great physicist was also engagingly simple, trading ties and socks for mothy sweaters and sweatshirts. He tossed off pithy aphorisms ("Science is a wonderful thing if one does not have to earn one's living at it") and playful doggerel as easily as equations. Viewing the hoopla over him with humorous detachment, he variously referred to himself as the Jewish saint or artist's model. He was a cartoonist's dream come true.

Much to his surprise, his ideas, like Darwin's, reverberated beyond science, influencing modern culture from painting to poetry. At first even many scientists didn't really grasp relativity, prompting Arthur Eddington's celebrated wisecrack (asked if it was true that only three people understood relativity, the witty British astrophysicist paused, then said, "I am trying to think who the third person is"). To the world at large, relativity seemed to pull the rug out from under perceived reality. And for many advanced thinkers of the 1920s, from Dadaists to Cubists to Freudians, that was a fitting credo, reflecting what science historian David Cassidy calls "the incomprehensiveness of the contemporary scene — the fall of monarchies, the upheaval of the social order, indeed, all the turbulence of the 20th century."

Einstein's galvanizing effect on the popular imagination continued throughout his life, and after it. Fearful his grave would become a magnet for curiosity seekers, Einstein's executors secretly scattered his ashes. But they were defeated at least in part by a pathologist who carried off his brain in hopes of learning the secrets of his genius. Only recently Canadian researchers, probing those pickled remains, found that he had an unusually large inferior parietal lobe — a center of mathematical thought and spatial imagery — and shorter connections between the frontal and temporal lobes. More definitive insights, though, are emerging from old Einstein letters and papers. These are finally coming to light after years of resistance by executors eager to shield the great relativist's image.

Unlike the avuncular caricature of his later years who left his hair unshorn, helped little girls with their math homework and was a soft touch for almost any worthy cause, Einstein is emerging from these documents as a man whose unsettled private life contrasts sharply with his serene contemplation of the universe. He could be alternately warmhearted and cold; a doting father, yet aloof; an understanding, if difficult, mate, but also an egregious flirt. "Deeply and passionately [concerned] with the fate of every stranger," wrote his friend and biographer Philipp Frank, he "immediately withdrew into his shell" when relations became intimate.

Einstein himself resisted all efforts to explore his psyche, rejecting, for example, a Freudian analyst's offer to put him on the couch. But curiosity about him continues, as evidenced by the unrelenting tide of Einstein books (Amazon.com lists some 100 in print).

The pudgy first child of a bourgeois Jewish couple from southern Germany, he was strongly influenced by his domineering, musically inclined mother, who encouraged his passion for the violin and such classical composers as Bach, Mozart and Schubert. In his preteens he had a brief, intense religious experience, going so far as to chide his assimilated family for eating pork. But this fervor burned itself out, replaced, after he began exploring introductory science texts and his "holy" little geometry book, by a lifelong suspicion of all authority.

His easygoing engineer father, an unsuccessful entrepreneur in the emerging electrochemical industry, had less influence, though it was he who gave Einstein the celebrated toy compass that inspired his first "thought experiment": what, the five-year-old wondered, made the needle always point north?

At age 15, Einstein staged his first great rebellion. Left behind in Munich when his family relocated to northern Italy after another of his father's business failures, he quit his prep school because of its militaristic bent, renounced his German citizenship and eventually entered the famed Zurich Polytechnic, Switzerland's M.I.T. There he fell in love with a classmate, a Serbian physics student named Mileva Maric. Afflicted with a limp and three years his senior, she was nonetheless a soul mate. He rhapsodized about physics and music with her, called her his Dolly and fathered her illegitimate child — a sickly girl who may have died in infancy or been given up for adoption. They married despite his mother's objections, but the union would not last.

A handsome, irrepressible romantic in those years, he once had to apologize to the husband of an old flame after Mileva discovered Einstein's renewed correspondence with her. He later complained that Mileva's pathological jealousy was typical of women of such "uncommon ugliness." Perhaps remorseful about the lost child and distanced by his absorption with his work — his only real passion — and his growing fame, Mileva became increasingly unhappy. On the eve of World War I, she reluctantly accompanied Einstein to Berlin, the citadel of European physics, but found the atmosphere insufferable and soon returned to Zurich with their two sons.

By 1919, after three years of long-distance wrangling, they divorced. He agreed to give her the money from the Nobel Prize he felt sure he would win. Still, they continued to have contact, mostly having to do with their sons. The elder, Hans Albert, would become a distinguished professor of hydraulics at the University of California, Berkeley (and, like his father, a passionate sailor). The younger, Eduard, gifted in music and literature, would die in a Swiss psychiatric hospital. Mileva helped support herself by tutoring in mathematics and physics. Despite speculation about her possible unacknowledged contributions to special relativity, she herself never made such claims.

Einstein, meanwhile, had taken up with a divorced cousin, Elsa, who jovially cooked and cared for him during the emotionally draining months when he made the intellectual leaps that finally resulted in general relativity. Unlike Mileva, she gave him personal space, and not just for science. As he became more widely known, ladies swarmed around him like moonlets circling a planet. These dalliances irritated Elsa, who eventually became his wife, but as she told a friend, a genius of her husband's kind could never be irreproachable in every respect.

Cavalier as he may have been about his wives, he had a deep moral sense. At the height of World War I, he risked the Kaiser's wrath by signing an antiwar petition, one of only four scientists in Germany to do so. Yet, paradoxically, he helped develop a gyrocompass for U-boats. During the troubled 1920s, when Jews were being singled out by Hitler's rising Nazi Party as the cause of Germany's defeat and economic woes, Einstein and his "Jewish physics" were a favorite target. Nazis, however, weren't his only foes. For Stalinists, relativity represented rampant capitalist individualism; for some churchmen, it meant ungodly atheism, even though Einstein, who had an impersonal Spinozan view of God, often spoke about trying to understand how the Lord (der Alte, or the Old Man) shaped the universe.

In response to Germany's growing anti-Semitism, he became a passionate Zionist, yet he also expressed concern about the rights of Arabs in any Jewish state. Forced to quit Germany when the Nazis came to power, Einstein accepted an appointment at the new Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., a scholarly retreat largely created around him. (Asked what he thought he should be paid, Einstein, a financial innocent, suggested $3,000 a year. The hardheaded Elsa got that upped to $16,000.) Though occupied with his lonely struggle to unify gravity and electromagnetism in a single mathematical framework, he watched Germany's saber rattling with alarm. Despite his earlier pacifism, he spoke in favor of military action against Hitler. Without fanfare, he helped scores of Jewish refugees get into an unwelcoming U.S., including a young photographer named Philippe Halsman, who would take the most famous picture of him (reproduced on the cover of this issue).

Alerted by the émigré Hungarian scientist Leo Szilard to the possibility that the Germans might build an atom bomb, he wrote F.D.R. of the danger, even though he knew little about recent developments in nuclear physics. When Szilard told Einstein about chain reactions, he was astonished: "I never thought about that at all," he said. Later, when he learned of the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he uttered a pained sigh.

Following World War II, Einstein became even more outspoken. Besides campaigning for a ban on nuclear weaponry, he denounced McCarthyism and pleaded for an end to bigotry and racism. Coming as they did at the height of the cold war, the haloed professor's pronouncements seemed well meaning if naive; Life magazine listed Einstein as one of this country's 50 prominent "dupes and fellow travelers." Says Cassidy: "He had a straight moral sense that others could not always see, even other moral people." Harvard physicist and historian Gerald Holton adds, "If Einstein's ideas are really naive, the world is really in pretty bad shape." Rather it seems to him that Einstein's humane and democratic instincts are "an ideal political model for the 21st century," embodying the very best of this century as well as our highest hopes for the next. What more could we ask of a man to personify the past 100 years?

Albert Einstein Medical Center Expands Maternity Unit

2009-02-10T12:58:00.000-08:00

Ensuring Continued Access to Obstetrical Care for More of the Community Served

Philadelphia, PA, January 20, 2009 ─ Since 1997, 15 hospitals in the Philadelphia region have closed their maternity units. Most say they have closed their facilities due to a combination of high malpractice insurance and low insurance reimbursements. Only seven hospitals in Philadelphia continue to offer obstetrical care, including Albert Einstein Healthcare Network. Today, Einstein announced that not only will it continue to deliver babies, but also it has nearly completed construction on a $10 million project to expand its maternity unit.

The expansion includes more beds for mothers and babies who have delivered; an expanded triage unit to care for the over 8,000 patients who come to Einstein for evaluation of problems experienced during their pregnancies; and a new Ante-natal testing unit that performs all necessary ultrasounds and testing of fetuses needed to provide the most up-to-date quality care.

Einstein has been delivering babies for nearly 150 years. The hospital delivers about 3,000 babies each year – almost 50% more than just six years ago. The expansion will allow the hospital to comfortably deliver approximately 3,300 babies annually.

Einstein’s maternity unit has 16 doctors, 11 of whom perform deliveries and four specialists in high-risk pregnancy care. Einstein is a level III nursery that allows it to take care of all babies, no matter what maternal or neonatal conditions exist. The hospital loses about $2,000 per maternity patient.

“Access to quality maternity care in Pennsylvania has reached a crisis point,” said Arnold Cohen, MD, Chairman of Einstein’s Department of Ob/Gyn. “However, Einstein is committed to fulfilling our mission to care for the community we serve. Our goal is to have a facility that allows us to continue to provide the highest quality prenatal and delivery care to the increasing number of women who now need our services. The expansion of our maternity unit will help ensure this.”

The Philadelphia region has lost more than one-third of its maternity wards in the past 10 years. There are currently just over 1,090 OB-GYNs in Pennsylvania, only one-third of whom actually deliver babies. That figure is expected to decline by another one-third over the course of the next several years.

CONTACT: Rodney Yancey
Manager, Corporate Communications
215-456-3922
yanceyr@einstein.edu

Publish date: January 20, 2009

One small step for a man, one giant leap for teleportation

2009-02-09T14:56:00.000-08:00

By Dong Ngo, CNET News

We've still got a long way to go before human beings can be beamed from one place to another "Star Trek"-style, but a team of scientists at the University of Maryland has achieved, nonetheless, a milestone in teleportation.

According to the Web site LiveScience, the university's Joint Quantum Institute for the first time was able to teleport information between two separate atoms across a distance of a meter -- about one step for an adult.

Generally, teleportation works thanks to a remarkable quantum phenomenon called entanglement, which occurs only on the atomic and subatomic scale. Once two objects are put in an entangled state, their properties are inextricably entwined. In layman's terms, if they are in entangled mode, what you "see" on one is what you get on the other.

The JQI team set out to entangle the quantum states of two individual ytterbium ions so information embodied in one could be teleported to the other. Each ion was isolated in a separate high-vacuum trap, suspended in an invisible cage of electromagnetic fields and surrounded by metal electrodes.

After that, the experiment worked like this: Single photons from each of the two ions in separate traps interacted at a beam splitter. When both detectors recorded a photon simultaneously, the ions were entangled. At that point, ion A was measured, revealing exactly what operation had to be performed on ion B to teleport ion A's information (see illustration above).

It's important to note that the achievement is not any form of conventional communication. This is because in teleportation no information pertaining to the original object actually travels to the other. Instead, the information measured from the first object appears on the second object.

The research was supported in part by the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity program under U.S. Army Research Office contract.

It looks like the military's interest in teleportation remains strong. Who knows? This might mean we'll catch Osama bin Laden soon.

©2009 CBS Interactive Inc. All rights reserved. CNET, CNET.com and the CNET logo are registered trademarks of CBS Interactive Inc.

The Scale of Einstein, From Faith to Formulas

2009-02-08T18:14:00.000-08:00

By JANET MASLIN
Published: April 9, 2007
The New York Times

The story of Albert Einstein’s life calls for a protean biographer, not to mention a fearless one. Conveying the magnitude of Einstein’s scientific achievements is tough enough, but that’s just the start. His geopolitics, faith, cultural impact, philosophy of science, amorous affairs, powers of abstraction and superstar reputation are all part of this subject. So are the two world wars through which Einstein lived and the internecine physics-world struggles in which he became embroiled.

Simon & Schuster
Walter Isaacson

EINSTEIN: HIS LIFE AND UNIVERSE
By Walter Isaacson.

675 pp. Simon & Schuster. $32.
Then there are the odd quirks and the pricelessly prophetic anecdotes, as when one Zurich classmate of the budding genius went home to tell his parents that “this Einstein will one day be a great man.” Many of these need to be included, and matters of scale make this job dauntingly difficult too. Einstein’s earth-shaking concept of general relativity is directly juxtaposed, in Walter Isaacson’s confidently authoritative “Einstein: His Life and Universe,” with a set of household rules that the great man wrote to keep his first wife at bay. “You will stop talking to me if I request it,” this document asserted. “You will not expect any intimacy from me, nor will you reproach me in any way.”

Mr. Isaacson deals clearly and comfortably with the scope of Einstein’s life. If his highly readable and informative book has an Achilles’ heel, it’s in the area of science. Mr. Isaacson had the best available help (most notably the physicist Brian Greene’s) in explicating the series of revelations Einstein brought forth in his wonder year, 1905, and the subsequent problems with quantum theory and uncertainty that would bedevil him.

But these sections of the book are succinctly abbreviated. Paradoxically that makes them less accessible than they would have been through longer, more patient explication. Still, the cosmic physics would be heavy sledding in any book chiefly devoted to Einstein’s life and times, and Mr. Isaacson acknowledges that. “O.K., it’s not easy,” he writes, “but that’s why we’re no Einstein and he was.”

In his introduction to “Einstein,” Mr. Isaacson sounds dangerously as if he is again trumpeting the virtues of a founding father (his last book was a biography of Benjamin Franklin). “Tyranny repulsed him, and he saw tolerance not simply as a sweet virtue but as a necessary condition for a creative society,” he proclaims. Whiffs of a textbook tone are similarly alarming. (“Einstein would become a supporter of world federalism, internationalism, pacificism, and democratic socialism, with a strong devotion to individual liberty and freedom of expression.”) But over all this is a warm, insightful, affectionate portrait with a human and immensely charming Einstein at its core.

“Oh my! That Johnnie boy!/So crazy with desire/While thinking of his Dollie/His pillow catches fire.” That was a poem written by the love-struck future patent clerk of Bern, Switzerland (he would spend seven years in that job while writing his greatest scientific papers) to Mileva Maric, the first of two women he would marry. (To dissolve this union, the ever-confident Einstein offered Maric the money from a Nobel Prize he had not yet won.) It reveals a different side of Einstein than his famous “On a Heuristic Point of View Concerning the Production and Transformation of Light” did.

But in Mr. Isaacson’s artfully seamless account, the genius and the flirt are remarkably well reconciled. And that first marriage was based on both. “I can already imagine the fun we will have,” he wrote to Maric about a prospective vacation. “And then we’ll start in on Helmholtz’s electromagnetic theory of light.”

Mr. Isaacson does a similarly graceful job of integrating Einstein’s science with his broader philosophical concerns, especially the global worries that plagued him with the approach of the Second World War. Even as a committed pacifist he remained primarily a scientist and revised his opinions as fate required. “For a scientist, altering your doctrines when the facts change is not a sign of weakness,” Mr. Isaacson underscores.

And the man who had once listed his religion as “Mosaic” when applying for a professorship in Prague became much more thoughtful about Judaism in later years. Whatever Einstein’s precise faith, Mr. Isaacson says, “his beliefs seemed to arise from the sense of awe and transcendent order that he discovered through his scientific work.”

With the help of many witty, candid letters, Mr. Isaacson offers a wonderfully rounded portrait of the ever-surprising Einstein personality. Equally important is the Einstein myth, and the material on this subject is even more entertaining. Einstein horrified his colleagues by enjoying his vast celebrity. (“Einstein’s personality, for no clear reasons, triggers outbursts of a kind of mass hysteria,” the German consul reported to Berlin as the great man made one of his rock-star visits to New York.) He also stymied the press in its efforts to keep up with his accomplishments. Mr. Isaacson has great fun with the reportorial frenzy that surrounded each new pearl of Einsteinian wisdom. Among the headlines that appeared in The New York Times: “Unintelligible to Laymen” and “Stars Not Where They Seemed or Were Calculated to Be, but Nobody Need Worry.”

Mr. Isaacson is also keenly attuned to the intellectual crises hidden by the hoopla. As Einstein aged, he changed from a fierce young iconoclast to a pillar of science, resistant to advances in the very quantum ideas that he himself had brought forth. “The intellect gets crippled,” he said of growing older, “but glittering renown is still draped around the calcified shell.” Here as throughout the book Mr. Isaacson asks the right questions. (“So what made Einstein cede the revolutionary road to younger radicals and spin into a defensive crouch?”) And he answers them with the clear, broad grasp of complex issues that make this book an illuminating delight.

A version of this article appeared in print on April 9, 2007, on page E1 of the New York edition.

Prof. Albert Einstein: Mathematical General of My Strange Army

2009-02-06T18:48:00.001-08:00

I Met Albert Einstein under a Paper Tree

Or, an Essay about Life and Physics

By Karen Cole Peralta

Through books and stories, movies, consciousness and training, he became a significant master of my life story. Due to this, he was put in charge of a certain metaphysical operation once on June 16 of 1986. This is because he was the Man of the Last Century, replacing Adolf Hitler. Witches from the past, including our special fearless King of the Southern Kingdom, were the sole thing in charge of the whole nine yards. It was secretly playground ethics that led to the conclusion that E=Mc2 - or not.

Energy equals mass times the speed of light squared is the theory; whether or not anything can hold that stable in a nearly unstable universe is beyond me. Finally, it is the eternally vast unknown of fluxing particle physics that leads to the conclusion that all human things whatsoever are held within the vast unknown universe. Expect the unexpected is the challenge of the samurai. You are forever walking or waltzing into a future that is clearly uncertain. On the other hand, many people already have their own gravesites quite bought. I cannot be sure myself where I am going to end up.

I often have fantasies about keeping up with great men. But some part of me is guarded and would rather be a fair young woman. The world’s scientific economy seemingly determines everyone’s entire fate. Therefore, one night in 1986, I was going to wander offstage to impossible oblivion, and by stopping a house burglary in progress which had somehow previously involved me, the elves and fairies showed and ruled the universe. I was allowed to go on living, even though it should have been fictional that I did.

Einstein always appeared to have a clear view of the problems of physics and the determination to solve them. He had a strategy of his own and was able to visualize the main stages on the way to his goal. He regarded his major achievements as mere stepping-stones for the next advance. This meant advanced mathematical thinking that became the atom bomb and other such controllable nuclear weaponry. It is certainly best, under even Hitler or Darwin’s ethics of creating evolution among humans, to keep proceeding onward into the future. There is nothing promised for any one of us there, nor for the entire planet. It is all part of the Uncertainty Principle, where however you may have reality pegged, it isn’t there. Can you really see everything around the next corner?

Perhaps you have today entirely mapped out in your head. You know you have set certain goals, yet you do not know for certain whether you will be able to achieve them all in one day. Today, I am planning to clean the bathroom at around noon, for example, but I don’t know for sure whether or not I will be able to clean it then or at all today.

Once upon a time, I had the strangest weird creative idea for a project. It was kind of understudied by the guy who looks like a statue blended with a human on our website. I’m hopelessly in love with him. He was originally the handsomest, tallest, darkest and most sophisticated man I have ever viewed in an old photo. He was quite inspiring when it came to things like standing up to the Worldwide Inquisition and forming rainbow politics. He was a modern day version of Super Slave, the politician. But he had got all of his basic ideas from his enemies. Furthermore, while not perfect, he was able to shoot to the truth as an absolute, and he played a chess game once.
He did a perfect pawn sacrifice. While being a general in an army, he traded places with another piece of human machinery in 1968. This lead to some lack of KKK Inquisition practices in the United States, due to one person with some guts and some belief. I know it must have some kind of meaning in reality that he looked like a chess piece.

So anyway, this project is in honor of all mankind, including those who would hate it being in honor of them, for them, about them, or in any way connected to them. Somewhere back there, I needed some folks to all have their individual liberties intact so I could get ahead, run my own business and at least make the incorporated hobby I am pursuing into something that could supposedly “break the glass ceiling.” Unfortunately, the project below has already done so in my own life, because I ended up perhaps doing something consequential for a change. It is unknown as to whether or not I actually did so. If so, all of such events may be held within a nonexistent past. It does not strain me too much to keep up with life. Therefore, I can yet help you ghost write, copy edit and proof read your acts of literature.

Don’t get too lost while you’re reading this. It involves particle physics, quarks, pops, whiffs and spoofs. The latter is a derivative Spanish term meaning something has completely vanished, such as the human sense of humor, intellectual thinking, and maybe Canada. In the face of its greatest obstacle, namely nature and the weather, it is there.

But Farley Mowat told me a long time ago that it is the most peculiar palace on God’s green earth. To me, it is full of Einsteinium elves and fairies. It still screens you for whether or not you are worthy to be there, a practice which is slowly beginning to melt along with the icicles and snow. It calls to old men and lovers and people of nature to visit it, fish in it, and settle into it at last. As Global Warming is involved with the continuing recession of the Ice Age, or so I figure, the snow line up above north is receding. Maybe there’s enough room up there for a wanderer’s family to find it, and maybe there is a cozy house with a fire waiting for her daughter.

I feel as if under Albert Einstein, I could finally study upper level math at last. Under Erma Bombeck, I need to get all my stuff done; but my husband is now doing it. Please read the below, as it is only creative, and you may judge me by that if you must.

THE END

Executive Director and President of Rainbow Writing, Inc., Karen Cole Peralta writes. RWI at http://www.rainbowriting.com/ is a world renowned inexpensive professional freelance book authors, ghost writers, copy editors, proof readers, coauthors, manuscript rewriters, graphics and CAD, publishing helpers, and website developers international service corporation. And if you want to attempt true immortality through magnetic devices and long life Chinese herbal therapy, try Reggie Peralta's Real Immortality Devices.

Bringing exoplanets into sharper focus

2009-02-06T16:39:00.000-08:00

Feb 6 2009
By James Dacey

Earlier this week astronomers reported observation of the smallest known planet orbiting a star other than our own. Indeed we now know about 300 such “exoplanets”, most of which are gas giants like Jupiter. Now, a new imaging technique using optical fibres could help planet-hunters towards an astronomer’s holy grail – direct observation and characterization of an Earth-like planet.

The problem with detecting such planets is one of resolution - light coming from them is incredibly faint compared with light from the parent star. A team of researchers from France and Australia suggest overcoming this problem, by feeding light through single-mode optical fibres from the telecomm industry. The new technique significantly improves the resolution of existing adaptive optics (AO), a method for reducing image fuzziness of astronomical images, say the researchers.

“Planet-hunters have started to specialize in recent years; like predators in an ecosystem,” says Peter Tuthill, one of the researchers, from the University of Sydney. “In the long run, we are aiming to characterize and study the planets themselves, not just stamp-collect them in discovery catalogues.”

Exoplanet suite
Astronomers first began detecting exoplanets back in the late 1980s, but since then detection methods have changed surprisingly little. The majority of these discoveries have resulted from two methods: either looking for a star’s “wobble” caused by the gravity of a planet as it orbits; or looking for the dimming of a star as an orbiting planet sweeps in front and partially-blocks the starlight.

Whilst these techniques can reveal the orbits and masses of the exoplanets, they can tell us very little about the atmosphere of planets within a solar system’s “habitable zone”. Although space-borne telescopes bypass image-blurring of the Earth’s atmosphere, it is still very difficult to resolve planetary light from that of its much brighter parent star. Contrasts are typically one in 100 million for a Jupiter-sized planet and one in 10 billion for an earth-sized one.

Despite these difficulties, two separate teams of astronomers, last November, did finally report the first “bona fide” direct images of exoplanets. They utilized the wide 8-10 m apertures of the Gemini and Peck earthbound telescopes. They also employed an imaging technique known as adaptive optics (AO) to “clear up” the images. AO telescopes work by including a flexible primary mirror which can be calibrated - using light from bright “guiding stars” near the astronomers’ target zone – to improve the resolution of images.

“AO’s main advantage is that it removes the effect of phase aberrations, seen as ‘speckles’, via spatial filtering and careful mapping” says Christian Marois of the Herzberg Institute of Astrophysics in Canada. One of the drawbacks of AO, however, is that calibration is notoriously difficult due to its high dependence on the angular separation between star and planet.

Adaptive Optics fine tuned
With this latest research, Tuthill and colleagues make calibration easier through developing an established technique known as “aperture masking”. In standard aperture masking, light is passed through small holes which causes the beams to diffract; observers then infer the presence – or non presence – of exoplanets from the resulting interference pattern. Until now, however, this technique has been hampered by imperfections in the interferometry equipment.

The researchers have improved aperture masking by placing an array of 36 single mode optical fibers behind the aperture disk. By feeding incoming light through the fibres the wavefronts retain their relative phases, leading to an improved resolution and reliability of data (arXiv:0901.2165 ). “You can think of aperture masking as an afterburner for an AO system because we will still use an AO system to do the first-pass at correcting the starlight for aberrations” said Tuthill.

Although the ‘pupil remapping’ approach is yet to be tested on real astronomical images Tuthill told physicsworld.com that the technology is “hot off the development bench” in the photonics industry.

Community reaction
Wesley Traub, Chief Scientist for the NASA Navigator Program, told physicsworld.com, “The new method is similar to pupil masking, but different in that all of the pupil can now be used.”

“The really interesting new feature is that they use phase closure to look for a non-symmetric distribution of light on the sky, as would be produced by a star with a planet nearby,” he added.

Tuthill and his colleagues now plan to test their device on real images of space. “In the longer term, we hope there might be potential for the next generation of giant telescopes,” he said. “As yet nobody knows how to build the AO systems to make these giants function properly, but our team thinks that instruments like the ones described here will be a key component to getting the best science from the new generation of behemoth telescopes.”

Adaptive optics expert Denis Brousseau of Laval University in Canada told physicsworld.com, “The technique holds the potential to improve aperture masking at major world observatories.”

About the author
James Dacey is a reporter for physicsworld.com

Tina Brown, Secret Godmother of Science Fiction

2009-01-30T16:54:00.000-08:00

By charliejane, 9:30 AM on Tue Jan 29 2008

The Tina Brown era was the heyday of science fiction at the New Yorker, which also published a decent amount of SF in the 80s. But the magazine has only published one SF story over the past decade, when the genre has supposedly been amassing tons of literary prestige. What's up with that? Here's our survey of the past 30 years' worth of science fiction at the New Yorker.

We surveyed the stories tagged "science fiction" in the New Yorker's archive, and the results are below. It's interesting to see the rise and fall of certain authors. Also, some themes seem to hold sway over the years: a high proportion of these science fiction stories are satires or parodies, including two cyberpunk parodies in a row. And there are two stories about insomnia and outsourcing sleep.

The New Yorker only published three science fiction stories prior to 1978, when it started flirting with the genre actively. Its main love object in the beginning? Polish satirist Stanislaw Lem.

Here's our complete history:

1978

The New Yorker goes on its first Stanislaw Lem kick, publishing three of his fictional book reviews within a four-month period. He reviews the non-existent books Gruppenfuhrer Louis XVII an SS novel by Alfred Zellerman; Non Serviam, a weird science book by James Dobb; and two books about how physics proves nothing can ever happen, by Cezar Kouska: De Impossibilitate Vivae and De Impossibilitate Prognoscendi. (All three reviews appear in the book A Perfect Vacuum.

1980

"Nana Hami Ba Reba" by Garrison Keillor. A satire. In the year 1984, everything in America has gone Metric, including Metric Time and a weird Metric language. The main character, responsible for this transformation, gets expelled from this perfect future and zapped back in time to the 1950s.

1981

Another Stanislaw Lem kick. The New Yorker publishes four of his satirical Ijon Tichy stories within a three-month period: "The Washing Machine Tragedy," "Phools," "Let Us Save The Universe" and "Project Genesis." These stories, collected in Memoirs of a Space Traveler, are more Earth-bound than earlier Tichy stories. They take out-of-control technology to its furthest extreme, including crazy washing machines and mind-controlling computers.

"Snorkeling" by Nicholson Baker. An executive "beats fatigue by employing drones to sleep on his behalf," says the Guardian.

1982

"Spoons In The Basement" by Ursula K. LeGuin. A woman comes across a set of valuable apostle spoons while cleaning her house. She accepts them as a gift from the house. Much later, she discovers a hidden "second basement" in the house, where three unmarried women live, along with an obnoxious middle-aged married couple. She lets the three women stay, but kicks out the married couple. After that, she can't find the spoons, and it seems the house has taken them back.

1984

"Offering" by Stainslaw Lem. The last gasp of the New Yorker's romance with Lem: a fake ad for the Extelopedia, a volume that contains information about the future.

1987

"Plan 10 From Zone R-3" by Polly Frost. A parody of Invasion of the Body-Snatchers, despite the title referencing Plan Nine From Outer Space. A weird plague turns everybody in a town into a real-estate agent clutching a Filofax.

1988

"Worlds Of Love" by Jeffrey Shaffer. Satire, sort of. A series of funny personal ads with silly scifi themes, like "Star Warrior" and "Pardon my Polarity."

"Numeromancer" by Michael Caruso. A parody of William Gibson's Neuromancer, in which cyborgs play baseball.

1992

"Cyberprez" by Richard Liebmann-Smith. Another parody of Gibson's Neuromancer, this one touching on the fact that then-President Bush admitted taking tranquilizers.

"Offloading For Mrs. Schwartz" by George Saunders. A man who creates porno-horror holographic "modules" for people to experience grieves for his wife. He steals memories from a woman in a nursing home, then ends up selling his own memories. This story appeared in Tina Brown's first issue as editor, but a previous editor had bought it.

1994

"Several Birds" by David Foster Wallace. A homeless tranny junkie lives in 21st. century Massachusetts. The junkie steals a woman's artificial heart by mistake, gets involved in a Quebec-separatist assassination, kicks drugs, goes through withdrawal and hallucinates. A much different version of this piece appears as part of Infinite Jest, Wallace's mega-novel.

1995

"Paper Lantern" by Stuart Dybek. A researcher is building a time machine, but accidentally burns the lab down by leaving a bunsen burner going. A fortune cookie at a Chinese restaurant warns him too late, and he realizes his ex-lover's nude photos are being burned up in that lab fire. (He'd falsely told the ex-lover he destroyed those nude photos already.)

1996

"Warm Dogs" by Paul Theroux. A widespread virus causes infertility in a future dystopia. A couple tries in vain to adopt a child, then winds up buying a mixed-race kid. But then they get nabbed by the police, along with their kid. The couple winds up in a warehouse, blindfolded and surrounded by children who poke them with spears. One child touches the woman and says, "This one is mine." She cries out.

1998

"Tough Girls Don't Dream" by Jeanette Winterson. Later retitled "Disappearance I." Takes place in a futuristic dystopia where sleep has become as much a taboo as kinky sex. But some people are paid to sleep so everyone else can spy on their dreams. (This is the second of the two New Yorker stories about lack of sleep, and outsourcing sleep, the first being Nicholson Baker's from 1981.)

"Sea Oak" by George Saunders. More weird satire. The main character's aunt dies, and comes back from the dead. Then she starts pimping out the main character, encouraging him to show his penis to random women for money.

"The Janitor On Mars" by Martin Amis. In 2049, a robot known as The Janitor On Mars suddenly contacts Earth, because humanity has just passed the point of no return: no matter what we do, we're doomed to extinction, thanks to changes in the environment. The robot relates the rise and fall of Martian civilization, while on Earth, a mentally disabled boy reveals the principal of his school raped him. (I read this story back when it appeared, and it remains my favorite thing ever to appear in the New Yorker.)

And then there's a gap of nearly five years before SF graces the New Yorker again. And it's only one story:

2003

"Jon" by George Saunders. In a weird future, a group of teenagers are trapped in a facility for assessing products, where they view ads and represent the teen demographic. The girls have velcro chastity-guards and everyone's encouraged to masturbate instead of having sex, but one girl, Carolyn, still manages to get pregnant.

Heisenberg and Bohr

2009-01-30T16:48:00.000-08:00

To the Editor:

Re ''Frayn Takes Stock of Bohr Revelations'' (Arts & Ideas pages, Feb. 9) and ''New Twist on Physicist's Role in Nazi Bomb'' (front page, Feb. 7): Regarding the letters that Niels Bohr drafted but never sent to his friend Werner Heisenberg, it is important to make clear why controversy over Heisenberg's role has persisted, the fact that the small-scale German bomb program came to a halt in June 1942, and that it was Heisenberg who persuaded the authorities to kill it.

In his unsent letters, Bohr said he had ''wondered with what authorization such a dangerous matter, of such great political importance, could be taken up with someone in an occupied country.'' To this question Heisenberg could have answered truthfully that he had no authority to tell Bohr about the German bomb program; he did it on his own.

Michael Frayn opens his play ''Copenhagen'' with the inevitable next question: ''Why did he come?'' asks Bohr's wife. ''What was he trying to tell you?'' But Bohr never sent the letter he had been trying to write, and Heisenberg had no chance to answer.

THOMAS POWERS
South Royalton, Vt., Feb. 13, 2002

The writer is the author of ''Heisenberg's War: The Secret History of the German Bomb.''

Possible Abnormality In Fundamental Building Block Of Einstein's Theory Of Relativity

2009-01-27T18:35:00.000-08:00

ScienceDaily (Jan. 6, 2009)

Physicists at Indiana University have developed a promising new way to identify a possible abnormality in a fundamental building block of Einstein's theory of relativity known as "Lorentz invariance." If confirmed, the abnormality would disprove the basic tenet that the laws of physics remain the same for any two objects traveling at a constant speed or rotated relative to one another.

IU distinguished physics professor Alan Kostelecky and graduate student Jay Tasson take on the long-held notion of the exact symmetry promulgated in Einstein's 1905 theory and show in a paper to be published in Physical Review Letters that there may be unexpected violations of Lorentz invariance that can be detected in specialized experiments.

"It is surprising and delightful that comparatively large relativity violations could still be awaiting discovery despite a century of precision testing," said Kostelecky. "Discovering them would be like finding a camel in a haystack instead of a needle."

If the findings help reveal the first evidence of Lorentz violations, it would prove relativity is not exact. Space-time would not look the same in all directions and there would be measurable relativity violations, however minuscule.

The violations can be understood as preferred directions in empty space-time caused by a mesh-like vacuum of background fields. These would be separate from the entirety of known particles and forces, which are explained by a theory called the Standard Model that includes Einstein's theory of relativity.

The background fields are predicted by a generalization of this theory called the Standard Model Extension, developed by Kostelecky to describe all hypothetical relativity violations.

Hard to detect, each background field offers its own universal standard for determining whether or not an object is moving, or in which direction it is going. If a field interacts with certain particles, then the behavior of those particles changes and can reveal the relativity violations caused by the field. Gravity distorts the fields, and this produces particle behaviors that can reveal otherwise hidden violations.

The new violations change the gravitational properties of objects depending on their motion and composition. Objects on the Earth are always moving differently in different seasons because the Earth revolves around the Sun, so apples could fall faster in some seasons than others. Also, different objects like apples and oranges may fall differently.

"No dedicated experiment has yet sought a seasonal variation of the rate of an object's fall in the Earth's gravity," said Kostelecky. "Since Newton's time over 300 years ago, apples have been assumed to fall at the same rate in the summer and the winter."

Spotting these minute variances is another matter as the differences in rate of fall would be tiny because gravity is a weak force. The new paper catalogues possible experiments that could detect the effects. Among them are ones studying gravitational properties of matter on the Earth and in space.

The Standard Model Extension predicts that a particle and an antiparticle would interact differently with the background fields, which means matter and antimatter would feel gravity differently. So, an apple and an anti-apple could fall at different rates, too.

"The gravitational properties of antimatter remain largely unexplored," said Kostelecky. "If an apple and an anti-apple were dropped simultaneously from the leaning Tower of Pisa, nobody knows whether they would hit the ground at the same or different times."

The research was funded by the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Science and the abstract and article can be viewed at: http://link.aps.org/abstract/PRL/v102/e010402.

Animation using Kostelecky's Standard Model Extenstion to predict how apples might fall differently can be viewed at http://www.physics.indiana.edu/~kostelec/movies/agrav3.avi.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Journal reference:

1.V. Alan Kostelecký and Jay D. Tasson. Prospects for Large Relativity Violations in Matter-Gravity Couplings. Physical Review Letters, January 9, 2009 DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.102.010402

Adapted from materials provided by Indiana University.

Stan Lee brings gay superhero to TV

2009-01-21T15:03:00.000-08:00

From UAB's The Kaleidoscope
Stan Lee brings gay superhero to TV
Ashley Jones, Senior Staff Writer
Published On: 01/20/2009

Comic book creator extraordinaire Stan Lee is going to shake up the world of superheroes by introducing the first homosexual superhero, according to www.thesun.co.uk.

Lee, creator of Spider-Man, X-Men, and countless other successful superheroes, will introduce Thom Creed, a basketball star who discovers his superpowers and his sexuality in a television show that will air in the United States and the United Kingdom.

Lee hopes that his superhero will rival the hit, “Heroes,” and maybe make people broaden their idea of what a superhero should be. Lee’s risky move was not a solo effort — Thom Creed is not a Stan Lee creation.

Creed is the main character in Perry Moore’s award-winning book, “Hero.” There is no word yet on when the show is set to air.

Einstein Was Uncertain About Uncertainty. Can You Understand It? Certainly.

2009-01-18T13:43:00.000-08:00

Einstein Was Uncertain About Uncertainty. Can You Understand It? Certainly.

By JANET MASLIN
Published: February 12, 2007
The New York Times
Correction Appended

Last year, in an unprecedented feat of quantum mechanics, Harvard physicists were able to use a cloud of Bose-Einstein condensate to stop a pulse of light and then resuscitate the light at a different location. “That’s the sort of stuff we find really sexy in this business,” Eric A. Cornell, from the National Institute of Standards and Technology, said admiringly.

David Lindley’s new book about the development and impact of Werner Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle has some of that same sex appeal. Though this book’s only suspense revolves around exactly when each of its principals will receive his Nobel Prize (Max Born got a late one in 1954), it provides a useful précis of the mind-blowing progress of physics in the early 20th century.

Mr. Lindley is a sufficiently good explicator to summarize how an understanding of the atom begat nuclear physics, which led to quantum mechanics, special relativity, matrix algebra, matrix mechanics and so on. That he breaks this down, step by step — and casts it in terms accessible to lay readers, yet not too oversimplified for more sophisticated ones — is reason enough for “Uncertainty” to be worthwhile.

Mr. Lindley’s clear explanations brings to mind one great scientist’s remark, cited here, that any physicist worth his salt ought to be able to explain his research to a barmaid. By contrast, Mr. Lindley says, Niels Bohr had trouble making even other physicists understand what he meant. One of this author’s better ideas is to translate passages of typically vague and bewildering Bohrian prose.

In a book that is wisely short-winded, Mr. Lindley also analyzes tensions among the important theorists and innovators in these fields. And when his book’s subtitle calls this friction a “struggle for the soul of science,” it is not being excessive.

“Uncertainty” examines the critical juncture at which classical scientific methods became obsolete and the most radical theories began to be outside the realm of proof. He explains how “a gap had opened up between what a theory said was the full and correct picture of the physical world and what an experiment could in practice reveal of that world.” This was a schism so deep and troubling that it meant two fundamentally different ways of approaching science.

At some point the debate became a battle of personalities as well as of scientific principles. And while Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, Ernest Rutherford, Max Planck, Erwin Schrödinger, Wolfgang Pauli and their colleagues were not prone to conventional catfights, they did have claws. As Pauli once said to Heisenberg, the irreverent young physicist who made waves in more ways than one: “It’s much easier to find one’s way if one isn’t too familiar with the magnificent unity of classical physics. You have a decided advantage there, but then lack of knowledge is no guarantee of success.”

What Heisenberg had done to prompt such malice was to come up with an idea too sexy to stay confined to the physics world. As Mr. Lindley points out, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle is now freely bandied about in nonscientific contexts, from literary theory to television dialogue. He cites an instance when Heisenberg was glibly name-dropped on “The West Wing,” in an anecdote about a film crew’s changing an event simply by observing it.

If Heisenberg’s idea “has become a touchstone, a badge of authority, for a certain class of ideas and speculations,” Mr. Lindley says, perhaps that is because it can be used to make scientific truth sound less than all-powerful. Treated that way, “the uncertainty principle makes scientific knowledge itself less daunting to the nonscientists and more like the slippery, elusive kind of knowing we daily grapple with.”

But the real uncertainty principle is more precise than that. It states that while some phenomena produce a definable range of possible outcomes, it is impossible to infer from the outcome which single unique event actually produced it. This has evolved, Mr. Lindley says, into “a practical, workaday definition of the uncertainty principle that most physicists continue to find convenient and at least moderately comprehensible — as long as they choose not to think too hard about the still unresolved philosophical or metaphysical difficulties it throws up.”

But in Heisenberg’s day, as “Uncertainty” elucidates, science’s superstars were not inclined to overlook those unresolved difficulties. Heisenberg prompted great resistance from Einstein, who by 1927 was the great old man of the physics world (his own biggest ideas had arrived with staggering impact in 1905) and found at least one of Heisenberg’s scientific papers to be “dégoûtant,” or disgusting.

“Heisenberg has laid a large quantum egg,” Einstein complained. It does not escape Mr. Lindley, nor has it escaped other scientists writing about this conflict, that the man whose theory of relativity was so counterintuitive might better have been inclined to give the oddness of Heisenberg’s theory the benefit of the doubt.

As for Bohr, whose machinations with Heisenberg have prompted so much speculation (as in Michael Frayn’s play “Copenhagen”) and whose influence led to changes in Heisenberg’s thinking, Mr. Lindley examines the evidence and decides that “the simple explanation is not necessarily wrong.” In his opinion, and in a book more finely attuned to scientific progress than to the personalities behind it: “Heisenberg changed his mind, in short, because he saw that Bohr offered a better way forward. He was a pragmatist. There is no reason to believe he was insincere.”

Correction: February 15, 2006

The Books of The Times review on Monday, about “Uncertainty: Einstein, Heisenberg, Bohr and the Struggle for the Soul of Science,” by David Lindley, referred imprecisely to an experiment by Harvard physicists that was described as having the same kind of appeal to scientists as Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. While the results of the experiment, in which a pulse of light was stopped and then resuscitated at a different location, were published last week, the experiment took place during the summer of 2006.

First Citizen of the Space-Time World

2009-01-15T14:09:00.000-08:00

By DENNIS OVERBYE
Published: November 15, 2002
The New York Times

For the young Albert Einstein, a 26-year-old patent clerk in Bern, Switzerland, 1905 was a very good year. After years of turmoil and tension he was living a middle-class life with his wife, Mileva, and a year-old son, Hans Albert. He was completing his Ph.D., and he published a spate of scientific papers that changed history. Among them was the theory of relativity, which gave the world E=mc2, clocks that speed up and slow down and too many bad jokes using the word ''relative.''

Although he would not give up his day job for another four years, the young man with the dark eyes and curly hair was on his way to scientific fame and worldwide celebrity. And what a long, strange trip it was! In the 76 years from his birth in 1879 in Ulm, Germany, to his death in 1955 in Princeton, N.J., he went from rebellious prodigal youth to the bad-boy scientist in Bern, cosmic guru, peacenik, atomic prophet, Jewish hero, civil rights crusader and target of J. Edgar Hoover. He vaulted from scientific revolutionary to the embodiment of the 20th century itself with all its bright hopes and failures.

All this and more is the subject of ''Einstein,'' which opens today at the American Museum of Natural History. Its advent marks the beginning of a sort of Einstein season in New York, with a slate of symposiums and special events at the museum and elsewhere over the next six months. And it serves as the distant opening trumpet blast for the bigger parties already being planned to celebrate the 100th anniversary of Einstein's ''Annus Mirabilis.''

The show was produced by the museum in collaboration with the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, which Einstein helped found and which owns most of Einstein's papers and artifacts, and with help from the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles. It will tour the United States before landing in Jerusalem in 2005.

For those who think of Einstein mainly as the wild-haired geek responsible for mind-bending and obscure pronouncements about space, time and the universe, the exhibition is likely to be an eye-opener. It is chockablock with letters, photographs and artifacts, which include porcelain teacups illustrated with his and his sister Maja's baby pictures, and some of his sheet music -- ''I live my daydreams in music,'' Einstein said. These document in illuminating detail his romantic and political lives as well as his scientific one. Many of these are things rarely seen even by Einstein aficionados. Part of the show consists of letters in his own pointy little handwriting, which have rarely, if ever, been seen outside the Jerusalem archives where they reside. There is grit as well as glory: the certificate exempting Einstein from Swiss military service because of his flat feet and the notepad on which he was inscribing delicate ethereal equations when he died.

It is a show that pulls no punches about the failings or vulnerabilities of Einstein the man, which are crystallized by two exhibits in particular, one near the beginning of the show, the other near the end.

Early on, sitting in a case side by side, as their recipients assuredly would not have, are letters to three different women tracing an eternal trajectory of hope and failure. The first is a love letter written in 1900 to Mileva Maric, his former classmate at Zurich Polytechnic and his future wife. ''My dearest Dollie,'' he begins in a typical lament about their separation. ''Soon I'll be with my sweetheart again and can kiss her, hug her, make coffee with her, scold her, study with her, laugh with her, walk with her, chat with her . . . ad infinitum!''

Next to it is a brown piece of paper, dated June 12, 1918, on which Albert and Mileva scrawled their divorce agreement, including the proviso that he would give her his Nobel Prize money if he won the award, for which he had already been nominated several times.

And next to that is one reason for the divorce, a 1913 love letter to his cousin Elsa Einstein (she had been married to yet another relative), whom he married in 1919. But that marriage had its own problems, as evidenced by the fourth item in the case, a 1924 missive to Betty Neumann, the niece of one of Einstein's best friends, with whom Einstein carried on an affair for about a year, apparently with Elsa's permission.

That arc described by those letters is poignantly mirrored by another set from a very different time and arena of the physicist's life. One is the 1939 letter that Einstein, a lifelong pacifist, wrote, at the physicist Leo Szilard's urging, alerting President Franklin D. Roosevelt to the possibility of an atomic bomb. The second is Roosevelt's reply, reporting that he had set up a high-level committee to study Einstein's suggestion. That led to the Manhattan Project.

In March 1945 Einstein, who had been barred for security reasons from the bomb project, wrote another, lesser-known letter to Roosevelt, introducing Szilard, who wanted a meeting to talk Roosevelt out of actually dropping the bomb. But Roosevelt died in April 1945 without seeing it. In August, Hiroshima and Nagasaki were bombed, killing hundreds of thousands of people.

''Woe is me,'' said Einstein.

About half of the show, divided into sections on light, time, energy and gravity, and festooned with videoclips and interactive games, is of course devoted to Einstein's science. The curators have spared little effort to try to convey some of the concepts of Einstein's theory of relativity to the public, including not one but two different exhibits in which a museumgoer can see what he or she looks like when viewed through a black hole. Those are likely to be crowd pleasers.

Relativity theory came in two parts. The first, in 1905, now called special relativity, said that the laws of physics did not depend on how fast you were moving. Among other things, that meant that in order for the speed of a light beam to come out the same for everyone, clocks would have to appear to speed up or slow down depending on their relative motions.

How this slippery behavior could come to be is illustrated with an ingenuity and simplicity worthy of Einstein himself in an exhibit featuring something called a light clock. And the 10 minutes or so spent taking it in will be amply repaid.

The light clock is just a pair of mirrors with a pulse of light bouncing between them; each bounce is a tick of the clock. Comparing this situation to somebody dribbling a basketball, the exhibit shows that if the mirrors are moving, the light will have to travel farther, on a diagonal, between each bounce. As a result the ''ticks'' will happen farther apart. Time will appear to slow.

That simple thought is almost all you need to know about relativity. But from it vast consequences flow, like the news, imparted on a poster a little later on, that a penny, converted completely to energy, could supply New York City's power requirements for two years.

Chapter 2 of Einstein's revolution came in 1915 when, after eight years of work, he finished the general theory of relativity, which extended the thought to gravity. What we experience as the force of gravity, the theory said, is just the distortion of the geometry of space-time by matter and energy. The expanding universe, black holes and most of modern cosmology were the consequence.

The show includes Einstein's 1916 manuscript explaining the theory, which has never been displayed in the United States, the organizers say. But it is disappointing that the notebook that Einstein used to work out his theory and that scholars are still scrutinizing for clues about how he did it was not available for the exhibition.

If this show has a scientific failing, it is that it slights the other great 20th-century revolution in science in which Einstein participated. That was quantum mechanics, the paradoxical rules that ascribe randomness to subatomic behavior. One of those 1905 papers, the one that won Einstein the Nobel Prize, helped lay the foundation for quantum theory by pointing out that light behaves like particles as well as like the more familiar waves. He championed the idea of ''lichtquanten'' almost singlehandedly for a decade despite his unease with the idea, as he would later put it, that God would throw dice. He once said he used up more ''brain grease'' on quantum theory than on any other subject.

Einstein never made his peace with quantum weirdness, but modern science has accepted it as a basic aspect of reality and of modern technology, and modern physicists, Einstein's children, have made it their quest to combine general relativity with quantum theory in a unification of all laws, which was Einstein's dream for the last 30 years of his life.

Well, perhaps the quantum world will merit its own show one of these years.

By the time a British eclipse expedition in 1919 made Einstein famous by reporting that light had been bent going around the sun and thus displaced stars from their normal positions in the heavens -- as predicted by general relativity -- Einstein was 40, an age at which theoretical physicists traditionally begin to lose their juices. But the world was not finished with him.

Einstein had not sought celebrity, and it baffled him. On a trip to New York in 1930 he wrote in his diary that the photographers jumped at him like ''starving wolves.'' Nevertheless, he was savvy enough to realize he could put that celebrity to good social use.

The last third of the show documents the extent to which Einstein took advantage of his position to help fellow Nazi refugees, espouse socialism, disarmament and world government and campaign against such aspects of human behavior as racism, intolerance and nationalism, which he felt were too dangerous for a world that owned weapons of the kind he had helped create.

One result of all this was a 1,427-page F.B.I. file, some of whose pages, with crucial informants and details blacked out, hang in one corner of the exhibit.

Another was an offer, conveyed in a Nov. 13, 1952, letter from the Israeli ambassador to the United States, Abba Eban, to become the president of Israel. ''Tell me what to do if he says yes!'' Israel's prime minister David Ben-Gurion reportedly said to an aide. ''If he accepts we are in trouble.'' Einstein declined.

Einstein described his relationship with the Jewish people as ''my strongest human bond'' and supported the formation of the state of Israel, but with a proviso. In a letter to a Palestinian newspaper in 1929 he said that he could imagine the future of Palestine ''only as the scene of peaceful cooperation between the two peoples whose homeland it is.''

He also spent the last 10 years of his life answering questions about the atomic bomb, for which he disclaimed fatherhood, observing that he had written a letter only because he was afraid the Nazis would build one. On display is a scathing letter from Katusu Hara, editor of the Japanese magazine Kaizo, asking, among other things, ''What do you think of an atomic bomb as a means of slaughtering human beings?''

In an essay published in Kaizo, Einstein replied, ''I did not see any way out, although I always was a convinced pacifist.''

Einstein's last letter, on April 11, 1955, was to Bertrand Russell, the English mathematician and philosopher, agreeing to sign what became known as the Russell-Einstein Manifesto, calling on nations to renounce nuclear weapons. According to the news release preserved here, it reads in part, ''Remember your humanity, and forget the rest . . . ''

Signs of Genius

''Einstein'' is on view at the American Museum of Natural History, Central Park West and 79th Street, through Aug. 10. Timed admission to the exhibition, which includes museum admission, is $17; $12.50 for students and 60+; $10 for 12 and younger; free, under 2. Museum hours: daily, 10 a.m. to 5:45 p.m. There are also lectures and panel discussions, workshops, performances and children's programs related to the exhibition. Information: www.amnh.org, (212) 769-5100 or (212) 769-5200.

In conjunction with the museum show, the Gallery of Art and Science at the New York Academy of Sciences is presenting an exhibition, ''After Einstein: Art and Architecture With a Cosmic Perspective.'' It opens today and runs through Jan. 17 at the academy, 2 East 63rd Street, Manhattan. Free. Gallery hours: Mondays through Fridays from 9 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. A related panel discussion will be held on Nov. 21 at the academy. Reservations are required: (212) 838-0230 or www.nyas.org.

Albert Einstein

2009-01-15T14:08:00.000-08:00

The New York Times

In 1904, Albert Einstein, then an obscure young man of 25, could be seen daily in the late afternoon wheeling a baby carriage on the streets of Bern, Switzerland, halting now and then, unmindful of the traffic around him, to scribble down some mathematical symbols in a notebook that shared the carriage with his infant son, also named Albert.

Out of those symbols came the most explosive ideas in the age-old strivings of man to fathom the mystery of the universe. Out of them, also, came the atomic bomb, which, viewed from the long-range perspective of mankind’s intellectual and spiritual history may turn out, Mr. Einstein fervently hoped, to have been just a minor by-product.

With those symbols Mr. Einstein was building his theory of relativity. In that baby carriage with his infant son was Mr. Einstein’s universe-in-the-making, a vast, finite-infinite four-dimensional universe, in which the conventional universe – existing in absolute three-dimensional space and in absolute three-dimensional time of past, present and future – vanished into a mere subjective shadow.

Quantum Chaos

2009-01-12T17:11:00.000-08:00

October 27, 2008
For "Scientific American"

What would classical chaos, which lurks everywhere in our world, do to quantum mechanics, the theory describing the atomic and subatomic worlds?

By Martin Gutzwiller

Editor's Note: This feature was originally published in our January 1992 issue. We are posting it because of recent discussions of the connections between chaos and quantum mechanics.

In 1917 Albert Einstein wrote a paper that was completely ignored for 40 years. In it he raised a question that physicists have only, recently begun asking themselves: What would classical chaos, which lurks everywhere in our world, do to quantum mechanics, the theory describing the atomic and subatomic worlds? The effects of classical chaos, of course, have long been observed-Kepler knew about the motion of the moon around the earth and Newton complained bitterly about the phenomenon. At the end of the 19th century the American astronomer William Hill demonstrated that the irregularity is the result entirely of the gravitational pull of the sun. So thereafter, the great French mathematician-astronomer-physicist Henri Poincaré surmised that the moon's motion is only mild case of a congenital disease affecting nearly everything. In the long run Poincaré realized, most dynamic systems show no discernible regularity or repetitive pattern. The behavior of even a simple system can depend so sensitively on its initial conditions that the final outcome is uncertain.

At about the time of Poincaré's seminal work on classical chaos, Max Planck started another revolution, which would lead to the modern theory of quantum mechanics. The simple systems that Newton had studied were investigated again, but this time on the atomic scale. The quantum analogue of the humble pendulum is the laser; the flying cannonballs of the atomic world consist of beams of protons or electrons, and the rotating wheel is the spinning electron (the basis of magnetic tapes). Even the solar system itself is mirrored in each of the atoms found in the periodic table of the elements.

Perhaps the single most outstanding feature of the quantum world is its smooth and wavelike nature. This feature leads to the question of how chaos makes itself felt when moving from the classical world to the quantum world. How can the extremely irregular character of classical chaos be reconciled with the smooth and wavelike nature of phenomena on the atomic scale? Does chaos exist in the quantum world'? Preliminary work seems to show that it does. Chaos is found in the distribution of energy levels of certain atomic systems; it even appears to sneak into the wave patterns associated with those levels. Chaos is also found when electrons scatter from small molecules. I must emphasize, however, that the term "quantum chaos" serves more to describe a conundrum than to define a well-posed problem.

Considering the following interpretation of the bigger picture may be helpful in coming to grips with quantum chaos. All our theoretical discussions of mechanics can be somewhat artificially divided into three compartments [see illustration] although nature recognizes none of these divisions.

Elementary classical mechanics falls in the first compartment. This box contains all the nice, clean systems exhibiting simple and regular behavior, and so I shall call it R, for regular. .Also contained in R is an elaborate mathematical tool called perturbation theory which is used to calculate the effects of small interactions and extraneous disturbances, such as the influence of the sun on the moon's motion around the earth. With the help of perturbation theory, a large part of physics is understood nowadays as making relatively mild modifications of regular systems. Reality though, is much more complicated; chaotic systems lie outside the range of perturbation theory and they constitute the second compartment.

Since the first detailed analyses of the systems of the second compartment were done by Poincaré, I shall name this box P in his honor. It is stuffed with the chaotic dynamic systems that are the bread and butter of science. Among these systems are all the fundamental problems of mechanics, starting with three, rather than only two bodies interacting with one another, such as the earth, moon and sun, or the three atoms in the water molecule, or the three quarks in the proton.

Quantum mechanics, as it has been practiced for about 90 years, belongs in the third compartment, called Q. After the pioneering work of Planck, Einstein and Niels Bohr, quantum mechanics was given its definitive form in four short years, starting in 1924. The seminal work of Louis de Broglie, Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schrödinger, Max Born, Wolfgang Pauli and Paul Dirac has stood the test of the laboratory without the slightest lapse. Miraculously. it provides physics with a mathematical framework that, according to Dirac, has yielded a deep understanding of "most of physics and all of chemistry" Nevertheless, even though most physicists and chemists have learned how to solve special problems in quantum mechanics, they have yet to come to terms with the incredible subtleties of the field. These subtleties are quite separate from the difficult, conceptual issues having to do with the interpretation of quantum mechanics.

The three boxes R (classic, simple systems), P (classic chaotic systems) and Q (quantum systems) are linked by several connections. The connection between R and Q is known as Bohr's correspondence principle. The correspondence principle claims, quite reasonably, that classical mechanics must be contained in quantum mechanics in the limit where objects become much larger than the size of atoms. The main connection between R and P is the Kolmogorov-Arnold-Moser (KAM) theorem. The KAM theorem provides a powerful tool for calculating how much of the structure of a regular system survives when a small perturbation is introduced, and the theorem can thus identify perturbations that cause a regular system to undergo chaotic behavior.

Quantum chaos is concerned with establishing the relation between boxes P (chaotic systems) and Q (quantum systems). In establishing this relation, it is useful to introduce a concept called phase space. Quite amazingly this concept, which is now so widely exploited by experts in the field of dynamic systems, dates back to Newton.

The notion of phase space can be found in Newton's mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy published in 1687. In the second definition of the first chapter, entitled "Definitions", Newton states (as translated from the original Latin in 1729): "The quantity of motion is the measure of the same, arising from the velocity and quantity of matter conjointly." In modern English this means that for every object there is a quantity, called momentum, which is the product of the mass and velocity of the object.

Newton gives his laws of motion in the second chapter, entitled "Axioms, or Laws of motion." The second law says that the change of motion is proportional to the motive force impressed. Newton relates the force to the change of momentum (not to the acceleration as most textbooks do).

Momentum is actually one of two quantities that, taken together, yield the complete information about a dynamic system at any instant. The other quantity is simply position, which determines the strength and direction of the force. Newton's insight into the dual nature of momentum and position was put on firmer ground some 130 years later by two mathematicians, William Rowan Hamilton and Karl Gustav-Jacob Jacobi. The pairing of momentum and position is no longer viewed in the good old Euclidean space or three dimensions; instead it is viewed in phase space, which has six dimensions, three dimensions for position and three for momentum.

The introduction of phase space was a powerful step from a mathematical point of view, but it represents a serious setback from the standpoint of human intuition. Who can visualize six dimensions? In some cases fortunately phase space can be reduced to three or even better, two dimensions. Such a reduction is possible in examining the behavior of a hydrogen atom in a strong magnetic field. The hydrogen atom has long been a highly desirable system because of its simplicity. A lone electron moves around a lone proton. And yet the classical motion of the electron becomes chaotic when the magnetic field is turned on. How can we claim to understand physics if we cannot explain this basic problem?

Under normal conditions, the electron of a hydrogen atom is tightly bound to the proton. The behavior of the atom is governed by quantum mechanics. The atom is not free to take on any arbitrary energy, it can take on only discrete, or quantized, energies. At low energies, the allowed values are spread relatively far apart. As the energy of the atom is increased, the atom grows bigger, because the electron moves farther from the proton, and the allowed energies get closer together. At high enough energies (but not too high, or the atom will be stripped of its electron!), the allowed energies get very close together into what is effectively a continuum, and it now, becomes fair to apply the rules of classical mechanics.

Such a highly excited atom is called a Rydberg atom. Rydberg atoms inhabit the middle ground between the quantum and the classical worlds, and they are therefore ideal candidates for exploring Bohr's correspondence principle which connects boxes Q (quantum phenomena) and R (classic phenomenal). If a Rydberg atom could be made to exhibit chaotic behavior in the classical sense, it might provide a clue as to the nature of quantum chaos and thereby shed light on the middle ground between boxes Q and P (chaotic phenomena).

A Rydberg atom exhibits chaotic behavior in a strong magnetic field, but to see this behavior we must reduce the dimension of the phase space. "The first step is to note that the applied magnetic field defines an axis of symmetry through the atom. The motion of the electron takes place effectively in a two-dimensional plane, and the motion around the axis can be separated out; only the distances along the axis and from the axis matter. The symmetry of motion reduces the dimension of the phase space from six to four.

Additional help comes from the fact that no outside force does any work on the electron. As a consequence, the total energy does not change with time. By focusing attention on a particular value of the energy, one can take a three-dimensional slice-called an energy shell-out of the four-dimensional phase space. The energy shell allows one to watch the twists and turns of the electron, and one can actually see something resembling a tangled wire sculpture. The resulting picture can be simplified even further through a simple idea that occurred to Poincaré. He suggested taking a fixed two-dimensional plane (called a Poincaré section, or a surface of section) through the energy shell and watching the points at which the trajectory intersects the surface. The Poincaré section reduces the tangled wire sculpture to a sequence of points in an ordinary plane.

A Poincaré section for a highly excited hydrogen atom in a strong magnetic field is shown on the opposite page. The regions of the phase space where the points are badly scattered indicate chaotic behavior. Such scattering is a clear symptom of classical chaos, and it allows one to separate systems into either box P or box R.

What does the Rydberg atom reveal about the relation between boxes P and Q? I have mentioned that one of the trademarks of a quantum mechanical system is its quantized energy levels, and in fact the energy levels are the first place to look for quantum chaos. Chaos does not make itself felt at any particular energy level, however; rather its presence is seen in the spectrum, or distribution, of the levels. Perhaps somewhat paradoxically in a nonchaotic quantum system the energy levels are distributed randomly and without correlation, whereas the energy levels of a chaotic quantum system exhibit strong correlations [see illustration]. The levels of the regular system are often close to one another, because a regular system is composed of smaller subsystems that are completely decoupled. The energy levels of the chaotic system, however, almost seem to be aware of one another and try to keep a safe distance. A chaotic system cannot be decomposed; the motion along one coordinate axis is always coupled to what happens along the other axis.

The spectrum of a chaotic quantum system was first suggested by Eugene P. Wigner, another early master of quantum mechanics. Wigner observed, as had many others, that nuclear physics does not possess the safe underpinnings of atomic and molecular physics: the origin of the nuclear force is still not clearly understood. He therefore asked whether the statistical properties of nuclear spectra could be derived from the assumption that many parameters in the problem have definite, but unknown values. This rather vague starting point allowed him to find the most probable formula for the distribution. Oriol Bohigas and Marie-Joya Giannoni of the Institute of Nuclear Physics in Orsay, France, first pointed out that Wigner's distribution happens is be exactly what is found for the spectrum of a chaotic dynamic system.

Chaos does not seem to limit itself to the distribution of quantum energy levels, however, it even appears to work its way into the wavelike nature of the quantum world. The position of the electron in the hydrogen atom is described by a wave pattern. The electron cannot be pinpointed in space; it is a cloudlike smear hovering near the proton. Associated with each allowed energy level is a stationary state, which is a wave pattern that does not change with time. A stationary state corresponds quite closely to the vibrational pattern of a membrane that is stretched over a rigid frame, such as a drum.

The stationary states of a chaotic system have surprisingly interesting structure, as demonstrated in the early 1980s by Eric Heller of the University of Washington. He and his students calculated a series of stationary states for a two-dimensional cavity in the shape of a stadium. The corresponding problem in classical mechanics was known to be chaotic, for a typical trajectory quickly covers most of the available ground quite evenly. Such behavior suggests that the stationary states might also look random, as if they had been designed without rhyme or reason. In contrast. Heller discovered that most stationary states are concentrated around narrow channels that form simple shapes inside the stadium, and he called these channels "scars" [see illustration]. Similar structure can also be found in the stationary states of a hydrogen atom in a strong magnetic field [see illustration]. The smoothness of the quantum wave forms is preserved from point to point, but when one steps back to view the whole picture, the fingerprint of chaos emerges.

It is possible to connect the chaotic signature of the energy spectrum to ordinary classical mechanics. A clue to the prescription is provided in Einstein's 1917 paper, He examined the phase space of a regular system from box R and described it geometrically as filled with surfaces in the shape of a donut; the motion of the system corresponds to the trajectory of a point over the surface of a particular donut. The trajectory winds its way around the surface of the donut in a regular manner, but it does not necessarily close on itself.

In Einstein's picture, the application of Bohr's correspondence principle to find the energy levels of the analogous quantum mechanical system is simple. The only trajectories that can occur in nature are those in which the cross section of the donut encloses an area equal to an integral multiple of Planck's constant, h (2π times the fundamental quantum of angular momentum having the units of momentum multiplied by length). It turns out that the integral multiple is precisely the number that specifies the corresponding energy level in the quantum system.

Unfortunately as Einstein clearly saw, his method cannot be applied if the system is chaotic, for the trajectory does not lie on a donut and there is no natural area to enclose an integral multiple of Planck's constant. A new approach must be sought to explain the distribution of quantum mechanical energy levels in terms of the chaotic orbits of classical mechanics.

Which features of the trajectory of classical mechanics help us to understand quantum chaos? Hill's discussion of the moon's irregular orbit because of the presence of the sun provides a clue. His work represented the first instance where a particular periodic orbit is found to be at the bottom of a difficult mechanical problem. (A periodic orbit is tike a closed track on which the system is made to run: there are many of them, although they are isolated and unstable.) Inspiration can also be drawn from Poincaré, who emphasized the general importance of periodic orbits. In the beginning of his three-volume work, "The New Methods of Celestial Mechanics" which appeared in 1892, he expresses the belief that periodic orbits "offer the only opening through which we might penetrate into the fortress that has the reputation of being impregnable." Phase space for a chaotic system can be organized, at least partially around periodic orbits, even though they are sometimes quite difficult to find.

In 1970 I discovered a very general way to extract information about the quantum mechanical spectrum from a complete enumeration of the classical periodic orbits. The mathematics of the approach is too difficult to delve into here, but the main result of the method is a relatively simple expression called a trace formula. The approach has now been used by a number of investigators, including Michael V. Berry of the University of Bristol, who has used the formula to derive the statistical properties of the spectrum.

I have applied the trace formula to compute the lowest two dozen energy levels for an electron in a semiconductor lattice, near one of the carefully controlled impurities. (the semiconductor, of course, is the basis of the marvelous devices on which modern life depends; because of its impurities, the electrical conductivity of the material is half-way between that of an insulator, such as plastic, and that of a conductor, such as copper.) The trajectory of the electron can be uniquely characterized by a string of symbols, which has a straightforward interpretation. The string is produced by defining an axis through the semiconductor and simply noting when the trajectory crosses the axis. A crossing to the "positive" side of the axis gets the symbol +, and a crossing to the "negative" side gets the symbol -.

A trajectory then looks exactly like the record of a coin toss. Even if the past is known in all detail even if all the crossings have been recorded-the future is still wide open. The sequence of crossings can be chosen arbitrarily. Now, a periodic orbit consists of a binary sequence that repeats itself; the simplest such sequence is (+ -), the next is (+ -), and so on (Two crossings in a row having the same sign indicate that the electron has been trapped temporarily.) All periodic orbits are thereby enumerated, and it is possible to calculate an appropriate spectrum with the help of the trace formula. In other words, the quantum mechanical energy levels are obtained in an approximation that relies on quantities from classical mechanics only.

The classical periodic orbits and the quantum mechanical spectrum are closely bound together through the mathematical process called Fourier analysis. The hidden regularities in one set, and the frequencies with which they show up, are exactly given by the other set. This idea was used by John B. Delos of the College of William and Mary and Dieter Wintgen of the Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics in Heidelberg to interpret the spectrum of the hydrogen atom m a strong magnetic field.

Experimental work on such spectra has been done by Karl H. Welge and his colleagues at the University of Bielefeld, who have excited hydrogen atoms nearly to the point of ionization where the electron tears itself free of the proton. The energies at which the atoms absorb radiation appear to be quite random [see illustration], but a Fourier analysis converts the jumble of peaks into a set of well-separated peaks. The important feature here is that each of the well-separated peaks corresponds precisely to one of several standard classical periodic orbits. Poincaré's insistence on the importance of periodic orbits now takes on a new meaning. Not only does the classical organization of phase space depend critically on the classical periodic orbits, but so too does the understanding of a chaotic quantum spectrum.

So far I have talked only about quantum systems in which an S electron is trapped or spatially confined. Chaotic effects are also present in atomic systems where an electron can roam freely, as it does when it is scattered from the atoms in a molecule. Here energy is no longer quantized, and the electron can take on any value, but the effectiveness of the scattering depends on the energy.

Chaos shows up in quantum scattering as variations in the amount of time the electron is temporarily caught inside the molecule during the scattering process. For simplicity the problem can be examined in two dimensions. To the electron, a molecule consisting of four atoms looks like a small maze. When the electron approaches one of the atoms, it has two choices: it can turn left or right. Each possible trajectory of the electron through the molecule can be recorded as a series of left and right turns around the atom until the particle finally emerges. All of the trajectories are unstable: even a minute change in the energy or the initial direction of the approach will cause a large change in the direction in which the electron eventually leaves molecule.

The chaos in the scattering process comes from the fact that the number of trajectories increases rapidly with path length. Only an interpretation From the quantum mechanical point of view gives reasonable results; a purely classical calculation yields nonsensical results. In quantum mechanics each classical trajectory is used to define a little wavelet that finds its way through the molecule. The quantum mechanical result follows from simply adding up all such wavelets.

Recently I have done a calculation of the scattering process for a special case in which the sum of the wavelets is exact An electron of known momentum hits a and emerges with the same momentum. The arrival time for the electron to reach a fixed monitoring station varies as a function of the momentum and the way in which it varies is so fascinating about this problem. The arrival time fluctuates over small changes in the momentum but over large changes a chaotic imprint emerges which never settles down to any simple pattern.

A particularly tantalizing aspect of the chaotic scattering process is that it may connect the mysteries of quantum chaos with the mysteries of number theory. The calculation of the time delay leads straight into what is probably the most enigmatic object in mathematics, Riemann's zeta function. Actually it was first employed by Leonhard Euler in the middle of the 18th century to show the existence of an infinite number of prime numbers (integers that cannot be divided by any smaller integer other than one). About a century later Bernhard Riemann, one of the founders of modem mathematics, employed the function to delve into the distribution of the primes. In his only paper on the subject, he called the function by the Greek letter zeta.

The zeta function is a function of two variables, x and y which exist in the complex plane). To understand the distribution of prime numbers, Riemann needed to know when the zeta function has the value of zero. Without giving a valid argument, he stated that it is zero only when x is set equal to 1/2. Vast calculations have shown that he was right without exception for the first billion zeros, but no mathematician has come even close to providing a proof. If Riemann's conjecture is correct, all kinds of interesting properties of prime numbers could be proved.

The values of y for which the zeta function is zero form a set of numbers that is much like the spectrum of energies of an atom. Just as one can study the distribution of energy levels in the spectrum so can one study the distribution of zeros for the zeta function. Here the prime numbers play the same role as the classical closed orbits of the hydrogen atom in a magnetic field: the primes indicate some of the hidden correlations among the zeros of the zeta function.

In the scattering problem the zeros of the zeta function give the values of the momentum where the time delay changes strongly. The chaos of the Riemann zeta function is particularly apparent in a theorem that has only recently been proved: the zeta function fits locally any smooth function. The theorem suggests that the function may describe all the chaotic behavior a quantum system can exhibit. If the mathematics of quantum mechanics could be handled more skillfully, many examples of locally smooth, yet globally chaotic, phenomena might be found.

Comic relief: ‘From Krakow to Krypton’ throws Jewish cartoonists into spotlight

2009-01-11T14:24:00.000-08:00

By Emily Savage
staff writer
The Jewish News Weekly
Friday November 21, 2008

It’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s … a book about Jews and comic books! And it is, admittedly, much more exciting than I thought it could be. While comic books themselves still give me a heart-palpitating rush, I worried that dissecting their creation and connections to Judaism would ruin their simple, aesthetic fun.

Luckily, that’s not the case with “From Krakow to Krypton.”

In the comic book world, superheroes created by Jews are everywhere, from Superman to Batman to the X-Men, with many minor and not-so-minor players in between.

In “From Krakow to Krypton,” MAD magazine writer Arie Kaplan has assembled a veritable dream team of Jewish comic book characters, artists and publishers. Follow-ing a foreword in comic form by Harvey Pekar and JT Waldman, the book is fat with quotes from famous comic book artists and writers such as Will Eisner, Stan Lee and MAD magazine’s Al Jaffee.

Kaplan quickly declares that Jews are the core of the comic world. Jews created the first comic book, the first graphic novel, the first comic book convention and the first comic book specialty store, among other notable achievements.

“From Krakow to Krypton” spans from the creation of comic books in 1933 to the popularity of underground comix in the 1960s to the advent of popular films based on comic characters. In between there are highlights such as the 1952 creation of MAD magazine by Jewish writers, the 1962 creation of Spider-Man by Stan Lee (born Stanley Lieber), and the 1978 X-Men revelation that Magneto was a Jewish Holocaust survivor. This aspect of the book is neatly sectioned off into the Golden, Silver and Bronze Ages of comic book history.

The book is a fun and surprisingly thought-provoking read. Along with the thorough history of comic books, there also are plenty of asides, interesting factoids and colorful graphic images. Kaplan doesn’t just focus on the simple fact that these comic creators were Jewish — he delves into their Judaism, their careers and how their background affected their alternate realities.

Kaplan studiously describes Superman creators Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster’s humble beginnings and feelings of inadequacy, which led them to create a man of undeniable strength — a super man, if you will. An early version of the Man of Steel was more interested in fighting social injustices than battling strange, unearthly figures. He fought abusers and crooked government officials in an effort to preserve the goodness of the human race.

“It’s not too far of a stretch to surmise that Siegel and Shuster’s obsession with social justice came from their Jewish background,” Kaplan writes. “Jewish ethics largely revolve around the concept of tikkun olam, or healing the world, and though this isn’t an exclusively Jewish ideal, a strong concern for social ills is found in the work of many Jewish writers, artists and performers.”

The book also discusses why the world of comic books was so enticing to young Jewish writers and artists.

“I think the factor that brought all the Jewish guys into [comic books] is that there was a tremendous amount of anti-Semitic bigotry as far as a lot of [other] industries were concerned,” MAD’s Jaffee writes in the book. “We couldn’t get into newspaper strips or advertising.”

Kaplan excels at setting the early comic book scene — the dank Brooklyn walk-up buzz-ing with creative, Jewish up-and-comers, tapping into a brand new type of entertainment. It is an exciting world, despite the obvious anti-Semitism that forced many of the originators to cover up their backgrounds and secularize their names.

The comic world was a place for Jews to vent their frustrations about anti-Semitism. Early comics were a subtle (and not-so-subtle) way of fighting the injustices of the world. The Holocaust, for example, was the subject of several vengeance storylines, such as the first issue of Captain America (created by Jewish cartoonists Joe Simon and Jack Kirby, born Jacob Kurtzberg), which showed the spangle-suited hero punching Hitler in the face.

Though the comic world has come a long way in its acceptance of minorities, Jews still occasionally hide under their pseudonyms and behind their superheroes. Kaplan comes back to this point toward the end of the book when he discusses the 2004 comic book “The Amazing Adventures of the Escapist.”

“In the story we see the Escapist’s Captain America-esque origin,” Kaplan notes, “and all the Jewish metaphors contained therein: the themes of escaping from bondage; the ultra-WASPy hero created by a Jew; the hero who wears a mask to hide his true self.”

“From Krakow to Krypton” by Arie Kaplan (225 pages, Jewish Publication Society, $25)

Ten Obscure Factoids Concerning Albert Einstein

2009-01-09T16:15:00.000-08:00

1. He Liked His Feet Naked

"When I was young, I found out that the big toe always ends up making a hole in the sock," he once said. "So I stopped wearing socks." Einstein was also a fanatical slob, refusing to "dress properly" for anyone. Either people knew him or they didn't, he reasoned - so it didn't matter either way.

2. He Hated Scrabble

Aside from his favourite past-time sailing ("the sport which demands the least energy"), Einstein shunned any recreational activity that required mental agility. As he told the New York Times, "When I get through with work I don't want anything that requires the working of the mind."

3. He Was A Rotten Speller

Although he lived for many years in the United States and was fully bilingual, Einstein claimed never to be able to write in English because of "the treacherous spelling". He never lost his distinctive German accent either, summed up by his catch-phrase "I vill a little t'ink".

4. He Loathed Science Fiction

Lest it distort pure science and give people the false illusion of scientific understanding, he recommended complete abstinence from any type of science fiction. "I never think of the future. It comes soon enough." He also thought people who claimed to have seen flying saucers should keep it to themselves.

5. He Smoked Like A Chimney

A life member of the Montreal Pipe Smokers Club, Einstein was quoted as saying: "Pipe smoking contributes to a somewhat calm and objective judgment of human affairs." He once fell into the water during a boating expedition but managed heroically to hold on to his pipe.

6. He Wasn't Much Of A Musician

Einstein would relax in his kitchen with his trusty violin, stubbornly trying to improvise something of a tune. When that didn't work, he'd have a crack at Mozart.

7. Alcohol Was Not His Preferred Drug

At a press conference upon his arrival to New York in 1930, he said jokingly of Prohibition: "I don't drink, so it's all the same to me." In fact, Einstein had been an outspoken critic of "passing laws which cannot be enforced".

8. He Equated Monogamy With Monotony

"All marriages are dangerous," he once told an interviewer. "Marriage is the unsuccessful attempt to make something lasting out of an incident." He was notoriously unfaithful as a husband, prone to falling in love with somebody else directly after the exchanging of vows.

9. His Memory Was Shot

Believing that birthdays were for children, his attitude is summed up in a letter he wrote to his girlfriend Mileva Maric: "My dear little sweetheart ... first, my belated cordial congratulations on your birthday yesterday, which I forgot once again."

10. His Cat Suffered Depression

Fond of animals, Einstein kept a housecat which tended to get depressed whenever it rained. Ernst Straus recalls him saying to the melancholy cat: "I know what's wrong, dear fellow, but I don't know how to turn it off."

John A. Wheeler, Physicist Who Coined the Term ‘Black Hole,’ Is Dead at 96

2009-01-03T19:31:00.000-08:00

By DENNIS OVERBYE
April 14, 2008

Correction Appended

John A. Wheeler, a visionary physicist and teacher who helped invent the theory of nuclear fission, gave black holes their name and argued about the nature of reality with Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr, died Sunday morning at his home in Hightstown, N.J. The cause was pneumonia, said his daughter Alison Wheeler Lahnston.

Dr. Wheeler was a young, impressionable professor in 1939 when Bohr, the Danish physicist and his mentor, arrived in the United States aboard a ship from Denmark and confided to him that German scientists had succeeded in splitting uranium atoms. Within a few weeks, he and Bohr had sketched out a theory of how nuclear fission worked. Bohr had intended to spend the time arguing with Einstein about quantum theory, but “he spent more time talking to me than to Einstein,” Dr. Wheeler later recalled.

As a professor at Princeton and then at the University of Texas in Austin, Dr. Wheeler set the agenda for generations of theoretical physicists, using metaphor as effectively as calculus to capture the imaginations of his students and colleagues and to pose questions that would send them, minds blazing, to the barricades to confront nature.

Max Tegmark, a cosmologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said of Dr. Wheeler, “For me, he was the last Titan, the only physics superhero still standing.”

Under his leadership, Princeton became the leading American center of research into Einsteinian gravity, known as the general theory of relativity — a field that had been moribund because of its remoteness from laboratory experiment.

“He rejuvenated general relativity; he made it an experimental subject and took it away from the mathematicians,” said Freeman Dyson, a theorist at the Institute for Advanced Study across town in Princeton.

Among Dr. Wheeler’s students was Richard Feynman of the California Institute of Technology, who parlayed a crazy-sounding suggestion by Dr. Wheeler into work that led to a Nobel Prize. Another was Hugh Everett, whose Ph.D. thesis under Dr. Wheeler on quantum mechanics envisioned parallel alternate universes endlessly branching and splitting apart — a notion that Bryce DeWitt, of the University of Texas in Austin, called “Many Worlds” and which has become a favorite of many cosmologists as well as science fiction writers.

Recalling his student days, Dr. Feynman once said, “Some people think Wheeler’s gotten crazy in his later years, but he’s always been crazy.”

John Archibald Wheeler — he was Johnny Wheeler to friends and fellow scientists — was born on July 9, 1911, in Jacksonville, Fla. The oldest child in a family of librarians, he earned his Ph.D. in physics from Johns Hopkins University at 21. A year later, after becoming engaged to an old acquaintance, Janette Hegner, after only three dates, he sailed to Copenhagen to work with Bohr, the godfather of the quantum revolution, which had shaken modern science with paradoxical statements about the nature of reality.

“You can talk about people like Buddha, Jesus, Moses, Confucius, but the thing that convinced me that such people existed were the conversations with Bohr,” Dr. Wheeler said.

Their relationship was renewed when Bohr arrived in 1939 with the ominous news of nuclear fission. In the model he and Dr. Wheeler developed to explain it, the atomic nucleus, containing protons and neutrons, is like a drop of liquid. When a neutron emitted from another disintegrating nucleus hits it, this “liquid drop” starts vibrating and elongates into a peanut shape that eventually snaps in two.

Two years later, Dr. Wheeler was swept up in the Manhattan Project to build an atomic bomb. To his lasting regret, the bomb was not ready in time to change the course of the war in Europe and possibly save his brother Joe, who died in combat in Italy in 1944.

Dr. Wheeler continued to do government work after the war, interrupting his research to help develop the hydrogen bomb, promote the building of fallout shelters and support the Vietnam War and missile defense, even as his views ran counter to those of his more liberal colleagues.

Dr. Wheeler was once officially reprimanded by President Dwight D. Eisenhower for losing a classified document on a train, but he also received the Atomic Energy Commission’s Enrico Fermi Award from President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1968.

When Dr. Wheeler received permission in 1952 to teach a course on Einsteinian gravity, it was not considered an acceptable field to study. But in promoting general relativity, he helped transform the subject in the 1960s, at a time when Dennis Sciama, at Cambridge University in England, and Yakov Borisovich Zeldovich, at Moscow State University, founded groups that spawned a new generation of gravitational theorists and cosmologists.

One particular aspect of Einstein’s theory got Dr. Wheeler’s attention. In 1939, J. Robert Oppenheimer, who would later be a leader in the Manhattan Project, and a student, Hartland Snyder, suggested that Einstein’s equations had made an apocalyptic prediction. A dead star of sufficient mass could collapse into a heap so dense that light could not even escape from it. The star would collapse forever while spacetime wrapped around it like a dark cloak. At the center, space would be infinitely curved and matter infinitely dense, an apparent absurdity known as a singularity.

Dr. Wheeler at first resisted this conclusion, leading to a confrontation with Dr. Oppenheimer at a conference in Belgium in 1958, in which Dr. Wheeler said that the collapse theory “does not give an acceptable answer” to the fate of matter in such a star. “He was trying to fight against the idea that the laws of physics could lead to a singularity,” Dr. Charles Misner, a professor at the University of Maryland and a former student, said. In short, how could physics lead to a violation itself — to no physics?

Dr. Wheeler and others were finally brought around when David Finkelstein, now an emeritus professor at Georgia Tech, developed mathematical techniques that could treat both the inside and the outside of the collapsing star.

Correction: April 17, 2008

An obituary on Monday about the physicist John A. Wheeler referred incorrectly to J. Robert Oppenheimer’s position when he first discussed a theory of black holes with Dr. Wheeler in 1939. Dr. Oppenheimer, who clashed with Dr. Wheeler over the theory, had yet to take over the Manhattan Project, since it had not begun. He was not “formerly the head” of the project at the time. The obituary also misstated the origin of the term “many worlds,” a description of the parallel universe theory of Dr. Wheeler’s student Hugh Everett. It was coined by Bryce DeWitt, of the University of Texas in Austin, not by Dr. Wheeler.

Einstein Was Uncertain About Uncertainty. Can You Understand It? Certainly.

2009-01-03T18:13:00.000-08:00

By JANET MASLIN
Published: February 12, 2007
Correction Appended

Hellen Gelband
David Lindley

UNCERTAINTY
Einstein, Heisenberg, Bohr and the Struggle for the Soul of Science
By David Lindley

257 pages. Doubleday. $26.

Readers’ Opinions
Forum: Book News and Reviews
Last year, in an unprecedented feat of quantum mechanics, Harvard physicists were able to use a cloud of Bose-Einstein condensate to stop a pulse of light and then resuscitate the light at a different location. “That’s the sort of stuff we find really sexy in this business,” Eric A. Cornell, from the National Institute of Standards and Technology, said admiringly.

David Lindley’s new book about the development and impact of Werner Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle has some of that same sex appeal. Though this book’s only suspense revolves around exactly when each of its principals will receive his Nobel Prize (Max Born got a late one in 1954), it provides a useful précis of the mind-blowing progress of physics in the early 20th century.

Mr. Lindley is a sufficiently good explicator to summarize how an understanding of the atom begat nuclear physics, which led to quantum mechanics, special relativity, matrix algebra, matrix mechanics and so on. That he breaks this down, step by step — and casts it in terms accessible to lay readers, yet not too oversimplified for more sophisticated ones — is reason enough for “Uncertainty” to be worthwhile.

Mr. Lindley’s clear explanations brings to mind one great scientist’s remark, cited here, that any physicist worth his salt ought to be able to explain his research to a barmaid. By contrast, Mr. Lindley says, Niels Bohr had trouble making even other physicists understand what he meant. One of this author’s better ideas is to translate passages of typically vague and bewildering Bohrian prose.

In a book that is wisely short-winded, Mr. Lindley also analyzes tensions among the important theorists and innovators in these fields. And when his book’s subtitle calls this friction a “struggle for the soul of science,” it is not being excessive.

“Uncertainty” examines the critical juncture at which classical scientific methods became obsolete and the most radical theories began to be outside the realm of proof. He explains how “a gap had opened up between what a theory said was the full and correct picture of the physical world and what an experiment could in practice reveal of that world.” This was a schism so deep and troubling that it meant two fundamentally different ways of approaching science.

At some point the debate became a battle of personalities as well as of scientific principles. And while Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, Ernest Rutherford, Max Planck, Erwin Schrödinger, Wolfgang Pauli and their colleagues were not prone to conventional catfights, they did have claws. As Pauli once said to Heisenberg, the irreverent young physicist who made waves in more ways than one: “It’s much easier to find one’s way if one isn’t too familiar with the magnificent unity of classical physics. You have a decided advantage there, but then lack of knowledge is no guarantee of success.”

What Heisenberg had done to prompt such malice was to come up with an idea too sexy to stay confined to the physics world. As Mr. Lindley points out, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle is now freely bandied about in nonscientific contexts, from literary theory to television dialogue. He cites an instance when Heisenberg was glibly name-dropped on “The West Wing,” in an anecdote about a film crew’s changing an event simply by observing it.

If Heisenberg’s idea “has become a touchstone, a badge of authority, for a certain class of ideas and speculations,” Mr. Lindley says, perhaps that is because it can be used to make scientific truth sound less than all-powerful. Treated that way, “the uncertainty principle makes scientific knowledge itself less daunting to the nonscientists and more like the slippery, elusive kind of knowing we daily grapple with.”

But the real uncertainty principle is more precise than that. It states that while some phenomena produce a definable range of possible outcomes, it is impossible to infer from the outcome which single unique event actually produced it. This has evolved, Mr. Lindley says, into “a practical, workaday definition of the uncertainty principle that most physicists continue to find convenient and at least moderately comprehensible — as long as they choose not to think too hard about the still unresolved philosophical or metaphysical difficulties it throws up.”

But in Heisenberg’s day, as “Uncertainty” elucidates, science’s superstars were not inclined to overlook those unresolved difficulties. Heisenberg prompted great resistance from Einstein, who by 1927 was the great old man of the physics world (his own biggest ideas had arrived with staggering impact in 1905) and found at least one of Heisenberg’s scientific papers to be “dégoûtant,” or disgusting.

“Heisenberg has laid a large quantum egg,” Einstein complained. It does not escape Mr. Lindley, nor has it escaped other scientists writing about this conflict, that the man whose theory of relativity was so counterintuitive might better have been inclined to give the oddness of Heisenberg’s theory the benefit of the doubt.

As for Bohr, whose machinations with Heisenberg have prompted so much speculation (as in Michael Frayn’s play “Copenhagen”) and whose influence led to changes in Heisenberg’s thinking, Mr. Lindley examines the evidence and decides that “the simple explanation is not necessarily wrong.” In his opinion, and in a book more finely attuned to scientific progress than to the personalities behind it: “Heisenberg changed his mind, in short, because he saw that Bohr offered a better way forward. He was a pragmatist. There is no reason to believe he was insincere.”

Correction: February 15, 2006

The Books of The Times review on Monday, about “Uncertainty: Einstein, Heisenberg, Bohr and the Struggle for the Soul of Science,” by David Lindley, referred imprecisely to an experiment by Harvard physicists that was described as having the same kind of appeal to scientists as Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. While the results of the experiment, in which a pulse of light was stopped and then resuscitated at a different location, were published last week, the experiment took place during the summer of 2006.

Einstein Was Right, Astrophysicists Say

2008-12-27T21:00:00.000-08:00

ScienceDaily (July 4, 2008) — Researchers at McGill University's Department of Physics -- along with colleagues from several countries -- have confirmed a long-held prediction of Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity, via observations of a binary-pulsar star system.

Pulsars are small, ultradense stellar objects left behind after massive stars die and explode as supernovae. They typically have a mass greater than that of our Sun, but compressed to the size of a city like Montreal. They spin at staggering speeds, generate huge gravity fields and emit powerful beams of radio waves along their magnetic poles.

These illuminate Earth-based radio-telescopes like rotating lighthouse beacons as the pulsar spins. More than 1,700 pulsars have been discovered in our galaxy, but PSR J0737-3039A/B, discovered in 2003, is the only known double-pulsar system; that is, two pulsars locked into close orbit around one another. The two pulsars are so close to each other, in fact, that the entire binary could fit within our Sun. PSR J0737-3039A/B lies about 1,700 light years from Earth.

This new test of Einstein's theory was led by McGill astrophysics PhD candidate René Breton and Dr. Victoria Kaspi, leader of the McGill University Pulsar Group.

"A binary pulsar creates ideal conditions for testing general relativity's predictions because the larger and the closer the masses are to one another, the more important relativistic effects are," Breton explained.

"Binary pulsars are the best place to test general relativity in a strong gravitational field," agreed Kaspi, McGill's Lorne Trottier Chair in Astrophysics and Cosmology and Canada Research Chair in Observational Astrophysics. ""Einstein's theory predicted that, in such a field, an object's spin axis should slowly change direction as the pulsar orbits around its companion. Imagine a spinning top when its slightly non-vertical: the spin axis slowly changes direction, an elegant motion called 'precession.'"

The researchers discovered that one of the two pulsars is indeed precessing -- just as Einstein's 1915 theory predicts. If Einstein had been wrong, the pulsar wouldn't be precessing, or would precess in some other way.

Pulsars are too small and too distant to to allow us to directly observe their orientation, the researchers explained. However, they soon realized they could make such measurements using the eclipses visible when one of the twin pulsars passes in front of its companion. When this occurs, the magnetosphere of the first pulsar partly absorbs the radio "light" being emitted from the other, which allows the researchers to determine its spatial orientation. After four years of observations, they determined that its spin axis precesses just as Einstein predicted.

Even though spin precession has been observed in Earth's solar system, differences between general relativity and alternative theories of gravity might only shake out in extremely powerful gravity fields such as those near pulsars, Breton said.

"However, so far, Einstein's theory has passed all the tests that have been conducted, including ours. We can say that if anyone wants to propose an alternative theory of gravity in the future, it must agree with the results that we have obtained here."

Breton, Kaspi and colleagues in Canada, the United Kingdom, the U.S., France and Italy studied the twin-pulsar using the 100-metre Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Radio Telescope at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Green Bank, WV.

"I think that if Einstein were alive today, he would have been absolutely delighted with these results," said Dr. Michael Kramer, Associate Director of the Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics at Manchester University. "Not only because it confirms his theory, but also because of the novel way the confirmation came about."

Adapted from materials provided by McGill University.