“Logical simplicity is the only path that leads to more profound knowledge.”

Albert Einstein

“The surrender of fundamentally elaborated notions on space, time, and motion may not be seen as voluntary, but rather as mandated by observed facts.”

Albert Einstein

Albert Einstein

“If I have learned one thing from all the pondering that has accompanied me through my long life, it is this: we are further removed from a deep insight into the elementary processes in our world than most of our contemporaries would believe.”

Albert Einstein

“When I ask myself why it was I who developed the theory of relativity, I found it must be due to one particular fact: a grown-up does not think about problems of space and time. Everything that has to be thought about in this respect, he has thought about when he was a child. I, on the other hand, developed so slowly that I began to wonder about space and time only when I was an adult. It is only natural that I then delved into its problematics much more deeply than a normal child would do!”

Albert Einstein (from a note he sent to a colleague in 1916 regarding the development of his special theory of relativity)

“Concepts that have proven useful when putting order to our observations may easily wind up looking authoritative: we might then forget whence they came, and might accept them as ultimate truths. They become branded as “habits of thought,” as given, an a priori, etc. The truth of scientific progress will often be littered by such errors. Therefore, it is not idle gimmickry if we train ourselves in analyzing familiar concepts, looking into the sources and circumstances of their usefulness, their origins in our experience. Such analysis will relativize their authority. They may have to be abandoned if they cannot be fully legitimized. They may have to be corrected if their deduction from observation was on the sloppy side. We may have to replace them by others if there is a new system that we find preferable for whatever reason.”

Albert Einstein

Behold the stars, behold how they teach
how far the master’s prowess will reach.
Newton, by rights, can claim paternity
for telling the orbits they run in eternity.

Albert Einstein

Albert Einstein

(Source: subatomiconsciousness, via subatomiconsciousness)

Vietnam postage stamp: Einstein by karen horton on Flickr.

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Einstein’s Gravity Theory Passes Toughest Test Yet

An extreme pair of superdense stars orbiting each other has put Einstein’s general theory of relativity to its toughest test yet, and the crazy-haired physicist still comes out on top.

About 7,000 light-years from Earth, an exceptionally massive neutron star that spins around 25 times a second is orbited by a compact, white dwarf star. The gravity of this system is so intense that it offers an unprecedented testing ground for theories of gravity.

Scientists know general relativity, proposed by Albert Einstein in 1915, isn’t the complete story. While it does very well describing large, massive systems, it’s incompatible with quantum mechanics, which governs the physics of the very small. For something extremely small, yet extremely massive — such as a black hole — the two theories contradict each other, and scientists are left without a physical description.

Rare systems like this binary star pair offer a chance to probe the boundary between the two theories, and search for possible openings toward new physics that could reconcile them.

“We thought this system might be extreme enough to show a breakdown in general relativity, but instead, Einstein’s predictions held up quite well,” Paulo Freire, an astronomer at the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Germany, said in a statement.

The white dwarf in the pair represents the remains of an aging star that lost its atmosphere and is gradually cooling down. Its companion, the neutron star, is much more massive and is so dense that the protons and electrons in its atoms have collapsed to form neutrons. Created in a supernova explosion that marked the death of a star, the neutron star contains twice the mass of the sun packed into an area just 12 miles (19 kilometers) wide. On the surface of this star, gravity is 300 billion times stronger than on Earth.

The neutron star is what’s called a pulsar, because it gives off a beam of light that appears to pulse on and off as it rotates past Earth.

The gravitational field created by the pulsar is so strong that the scientists suspected they might notice deviations from the predictions of general relativity in the motions of the white dwarf around it. General relativity posits that massive objects warp the space and time around them, causing other objects, and even light, to travel along curved paths when they pass nearby.

General relativity also predicts that a close binary system such as this one will radiate gravitational energy in the form of ripples in space-time called gravitational waves. This loss of energy would cause the orbital period of the system to change slightly over time. Alternative theories of gravity offer slightly different predictions for the white dwarf’s motions.

“Our radio observations were so precise that we have already been able to measure a change in the orbital period of 8 millionths of a second per year — exactly what Einstein’s theory predicts,” said Paulo Freire, another team member at the Max Planck Institute.

Though the results don’t help physicists solve the fundamental gravity quandary, they do confirm that current efforts to detect gravitational waves, based on Einstein’s predictions, are on the right track. Several Earth-based tests are underway to look for perturbations in space-time distances caused by passing gravitational waves.

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(Source: astronemma, via astronemma)

Albert Einstein, Civil Rights activist

Here’s something you probably don’t know about Albert Einstein.

In 1946, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist traveled to Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, the alma mater of Langston Hughes and Thurgood Marshall and the first school in America to grant college degrees to blacks. At Lincoln, Einstein gave a speech in which he called racism “a disease of white people,” and added, “I do not intend to be quiet about it.” He also received an honorary degree and gave a lecture on relativity to Lincoln students.

The reason Einstein’s visit to Lincoln is not better known is that it was virtually ignored by the mainstream press, which regularly covered Einstein’s speeches and activities. (Only the black press gave extensive coverage to the event.) Nor is there mention of the Lincoln visit in any of the major Einstein biographies or archives.

In fact, many significant details are missing from the numerous studies of Einstein’s life and work, most of them having to do with Einstein’s opposition to racism and his relationships with African Americans.

That these omissions need to be recognized and corrected is the contention of Fred Jerome and Rodger Taylor, authors of “Einstein on Race and Racism” (Rutgers University Press, 2006). Jerome and Taylor spoke April 3 at an event sponsored by the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research. The event also featured remarks by Sylvester James Gates Jr., the John S. Toll Professor of Physics, University of Maryland.

According to Jerome and Taylor, Einstein’s statements at Lincoln were by no means an isolated case. Einstein, who was Jewish, was sensitized to racism by the years of Nazi-inspired threats and harassment he suffered during his tenure at the University of Berlin. Einstein was in the United States when the Nazis came to power in 1933, and, fearful that a return to Germany would place him in mortal danger, he decided to stay, accepting a position at the recently founded Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J. He became an American citizen in 1940.

But while Einstein may have been grateful to have found a safe haven, his gratitude did not prevent him from criticizing the ethical shortcomings of his new home.

“Einstein realized that African Americans in Princeton were treated like Jews in Germany,” said Taylor. “The town was strictly segregated. There was no high school that blacks could go to until the 1940s.”

Einstein’s response to the racism and segregation he found in Princeton (Paul Robeson, who was born in Princeton, called it “the northernmost town in the South”) was to cultivate relationships in the town’s African-American community. Jerome and Taylor interviewed members of that community who still remember the white-haired, disheveled figure of Einstein strolling through their streets, stopping to chat with the inhabitants, and handing out candy to local children.

One woman remembered that Einstein paid the college tuition of a young man from the community. Another said that he invited Marian Anderson to stay at his home when the singer was refused a room at the Nassau Inn.

Einstein met Paul Robeson when the famous singer and actor came to perform at Princeton’s McCarter Theatre in 1935. The two found they had much in common. Both were concerned about the rise of fascism, and both gave their support to efforts to defend the democratically elected government of Spain against the fascist forces of Francisco Franco. Einstein and Robeson also worked together on the American Crusade to End Lynching, in response to an upsurge in racial murders as black soldiers returned home in the aftermath of World War II.

The 20-year friendship between Einstein and Robeson is another story that has not been told, Jerome said, but that omission may soon be rectified. A movie is in the works about the relationship, with Danny Glover slated to play Robeson and Ben Kingsley as Einstein.

Einstein continued to support progressive causes through the 1950s, when the pressure of anti-Communist witch hunts made it dangerous to do so. Another example of Einstein using his prestige to help a prominent African American occurred in 1951, when the 83-year-old W.E.B. Du Bois, a founder of the NAACP, was indicted by the federal government for failing to register as a “foreign agent” as a consequence of circulating the pro-Soviet Stockholm Peace Petition. Einstein offered to appear as a character witness for Du Bois, which convinced the judge to drop the case.

Gates, an African-American physicist who has appeared on the PBS show Nova, said that Einstein had been a hero of his since he learned about the theory of relativity as a teenager, but that he was unaware of Einstein’s ideas on civil rights until fairly recently.

Einstein’s approach to problems in physics was to begin by asking very simple, almost childlike questions, such as, “What would the world look like if I could drive along a beam of light?” Gates said.

“He must have developed his ideas about race through a similar process. He was capable of asking the question, ‘What would my life be like if I were black?’”

Gates said that thinking about Einstein’s involvement with civil rights has prompted him to speculate on the value of affirmative action and the goal of diversity it seeks to bring about. There are many instances in which the presence of strength and resilience in a system can be attributed to diversity.

“In the natural world, for example, when a population is under the influence of a stressful environment, diversity ensures its survival,” Gates said.

On a cultural level, the global influence of American popular music might be attributed to the fact that it is an amalgam of musical traditions from Europe and Africa.

These examples have led him to conclude that “diversity actually matters, independent of the moral argument.” Gates said he believes “there is a science of diversity out there waiting for scholars to discover it.”

via Harvard Gazette

Pages from Albert Einstein’s notebook

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Albert Einstein, Why Socialism? (via zeitvox)

(Source: cloudystones, via zeitvox)

bonghoa:

Einstein’s energy bar

Anonymous asked: Thanks for answering the Einstein question (I asked some other users too, in case you didn't answer, but you were the first to answer, actually). My friend asked me it, and I wasn't too sure I had the correct answer.

Absolutely. May I recommend this book :)

Also, “why does e=mc^2?” by Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw.