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1921 Nobel Prize in Physics, Albert Einstein, astrophysics, bending of light by gravity, E=mc2, Einstein, Einstein’s God, General relativity, How the Universe Works, Hunt4Truth, photo-effect, Physics, Special relativity, Speed of light, Theoretical physics, Theory of Knowledge, Thought experiment
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Albert Einstein had a powerful internal motivation to explain how the universe and the quantum particles of our physical objects form. He wasn’t able to put this into mathematical expression. However, his contributions still amaze us. This post came together because although I didn’t want to take much time at first with it — when I received a comment and more interest than I’d expected, I decided to put more work into it. I do things like this sometimes with posts… it isn’t word-pressing of the normal sort but these articles really are mostly for me and those closest to me — I share here for reasons additional to public blogging.
I think (speculate) that Einstein “knew” that equations that he presented were from a greater consciousness than he alone; the inside workings of his fascination with reality that this inner vision, uniquely his to share, was from the source of his nature, to become a science for all of us in our shared reality. Perception then was as important to him as it is becoming in this modern age of exploring an inner shift and a great awakening. What sense we have in three dimensional reality is as difficult for us to understand as was a grand-unified theory for Einstein to explain.
I believe we are to pick up where Einstein left of — us all, together, coming to agreement that the outer reality is a mirror of sorts that, established here, in space-time as in a sense limiting us to the outer five senses while internally we have perhaps many softer, greater sixth senses.
I do my best to advance my own progress with these posts, while at the same time, making progress to advance understanding of our space-time universe. So, here I keep coming back to my initial inspirations with Einstein. While he is not the only scientist that I admire as deeply, his work is where I can be safely with this challenge to balance my inner knowing to what we perceive in our shared universe.
1905 was Albert Einstein’s year. While working as a patent clerk in Bern, Switzerland, Einstein submitted a supplement to his special theory of relativity of earlier that year. In it he derived the most famous equation of all time; E=MC²; energy is equal to mass multiplied by the speed of light squared.
The equation showed that mass and energy were related and that one could, in theory, be transformed into the other. But because the speed of light squared is such a huge number, it meant that even a small amount of mass could potentially be converted into a huge amount of energy.
Einstein – Birth Of God’s Equation (E=MC²)
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Beginning in early disillusionment with religion, and developing an intense fascination with geometry, Einstein’s “theory of knowledge” moved him past the foundations of Newtonian physics to a development of his own theories of relativity, and later to opposition of some assumptions of quantum theory.
Einstein’s great original contribution to quantum theory (1905) was just the recognition of how physical phenomena like the photo-effect may depend directly on individual quantum effects. He demonstrated step-by-step the conclusion that any radiation process involves the emission or absorption of individual light quanta or “photons” with energy and momentum (it was of great interest for me to review how human vision works).
E = hf and P = hs
h is Planck’s constant, while f and s are the number of vibrations per unit time and the number of waves per unit length
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In 1909, Albert Einstein became associate professor of theoretical physics at Zurich, in 1911 professor of theoretical physics at the German University in Prague and then returned to the Institute of Technology in Zurich the following year. In 1914, he was appointed director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics in Berlin. He became a German citizen in the same year. In 1916 he published his theory of general relativity.
“When I was a fairly precocious young man I became thoroughly impressed with the futility of hopes and striving that chase most men restlessly through life. Moreover, I soon discovered the cruelty of that chase, which in those years was much more carefully covered up by hypocrisy and glittering words than is the case today. . . . As the first way out there was religion, which is implanted into every child by way of the traditional education machine. Thus I came, though the child of entirely irreligious (Jewish) parents, to a deep religiousness, which, however, reached an abrupt end at the age of twelve.”
Albert Einstein built up his theory of gravity, general relativity, through a series of ‘thought experiments’ and mathematical proofs. In 1915 he showed that gravity is caused by objects with mass such as planets and stars warping space-time. For example, the Earth is caught in the curve in space-time caused by the Sun, and the Moon is caught in a warp created by the Earth.
Similarly light is bent when it passes massive objects like galaxies (it was of great interest for me to review how our human brain works to assemble an inner awareness of the outer physical universe that we can perceive by this both to limit our perceptions and also allow altering these internally — thus the benefits of changing how I perceive reality by seeking internally the humility of staying with my inner sense of confusions and upsets became essential to me).
General relativity
Einstein’s theory has important astrophysical implications. For example, it implies the existence of black holes—regions of space in which space and time are distorted in such a way that nothing, not even light, can escape—as an end-state for massive stars.
There is ample evidence that the intense radiation emitted by certain kinds of astronomical objects is due to black holes; for example, micro-quasars and active galactic nuclei result from the presence of stellar black holes and black holes of a much more massive type, respectively.
The bending of light by gravity can lead to the phenomenon of gravitational lensing, in which multiple images of the same distant astronomical object are visible in the sky.
General relativity also predicts the existence of gravitational waves, which have since been observed indirectly; a direct measurement is the aim of projects such as LIGO and NASA/ESA Laser Interferometer Space Antenna and various pulsar timing arrays. In addition, general relativity is the basis of current cosmological models of a consistently expanding universe.
Einstein received the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect and his work in the field of theoretical physics.
Einstein’s Theory Of Relativity
A really rare documentary about Einstein’s Theory of Relativity that changed our perception of reality and the workings of the Universe.
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Time Since Einstein
Albert Einstein shattered previous ideas about time, but left many pivotal questions unanswered: Does time have a beginning? An end? Why does it move in only one direction? Is it real, or something our minds impose on reality? Journalist John Hockenberry leads a distinguished panel, including renowned physicist Sir Roger Penrose and prominent philosopher David Albert, as they explore the nature of time.
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sources: BBC: General Relativity,
Albert Einstein Youth And College,
Einstein’s Philosophy of Science
I updated this post because the original video was deleted from Youtube. I added some additional video after replacing the missing video. Since I had posted this, I opened an account at Facebook.
Check me out at Facebook here: www.facebook.com/Cellular.Eric
I love learning with you.
Eric
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Einstein’s nightmares… part two
Einstein’s nightmares… part three
How the Universe Works (in 25 minutes)
jiggled — twisted warping and
curved space-time confirmed
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the Hunt for Truth 
Pingback: Lee Smolin: A New Theory of Time | the Hunt for Truth
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Inside Einstein’s Mind The Enigma of Space and Time
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How Einstein Changed the World
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Albert Einstein once said that there are only two things that might be infinite: the universe and human stupidity. And, he confessed, he wasn’t sure about the universe.
When we hear that, we chuckle. Or at least we smile. We do not take offense. The reason is that the name “Einstein” conjures an image of a warm-hearted, avuncular sage of an earlier era. We see the good-natured, wild-haired scientific genius whose iconic portraits—riding a bike, sticking out his tongue, staring at us with those penetrating eyes—are emblazoned in our collective cultural memory. Einstein has come to symbolize the purity and power of intellectual exploration.
Einstein shot to fame within the scientific community in 1905, a year christened as his annus mirabilis. While working eight hours days, six days a week at the Swiss patent office in Bern, he wrote four papers in his spare time that changed the course of physics. In March of that year he argued that light, long described as a wave, is actually composed of particles, called photons, an observation that launched quantum mechanics. Two months later, in May, Einstein’s calculations provided testable predictions of the atomic hypothesis, later confirmed experimentally, cinching the case that matter is made of atoms. In June he completed the special theory of relativity, revealing that space and time behave in astonishing ways no one had ever anticipated—in short, that distances, speeds and durations are all relative depending on the observer. And to cap it off, in September 1905 Einstein derived a consequence of special relativity, an equation that would become the world’s most famous: E = mc2.
Science usually progresses incrementally. Few and far between are contributions that sound the scientific alert that a radical upheaval is at hand. But here one man in one year rang the bell four times, an astonishing outpouring of creative insight. Almost immediately, the scientific establishment could sense that reverberations of Einstein’s work were shifting the bedrock understanding of reality. For the wider public, however, Einstein had not yet become Einstein.
That would change on November 6, 1919.
In special relativity, Einstein established that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. This set the stage for a confrontation with Newton’s theory of gravity, in which gravity exerts its influence across space instantaneously. Driven by this looming contradiction, Einstein brazenly sought to rewrite the centuries-old rules of Newtonian gravity, a daunting task that even his ardent supporters considered quixotic. Max Planck, the dean of German science, intoned, “As an older friend, I must advise you against it…. You will not succeed, and even if you succeed, no one will believe you.” Never one to yield to authority, Einstein pressed on. And on. For nearly a decade.
Finally, in 1915, Einstein announced his general theory of relativity, which offered a profound recasting of gravity in terms of a startling new idea: warps and curves in space and time. Instead of Earth grabbing hold of a teacup that slips from your hand and pulling it to an untimely demise on the floor, general relativity says that the planet dents the surrounding environment, causing the cup to slide along a spacetime chute that directs it to the floor. Gravity, Einstein declared, is imprinted in the geometry of the universe.
During the 100 years since Einstein proposed the theory, physicists and historians have pieced together a coherent, if complex, story of its genesis [see “How Einstein Reinvented Reality,” by Walter Isaacson]. In some of my own general-level writings, I’ve had the pleasure of retracing Einstein’s climb, from elegant maneuvers to pieds en canard to his final summit. Far from demystifying Einstein’s creative leaps, however, perusing his process only adds luster to the astonishing novelty and overwhelming beauty of the proposal.
On November 6, 1919, four years after Einstein completed the general theory of relativity, newspapers the world over trumpeted just released astronomical measurements establishing that the positions of stars in the heavens were slightly different than what Newton’s laws would have us expect, just as Einstein had predicted. The results triumphantly confirmed Einstein’s theory and rocketed him to icon status overnight. He became the man who had toppled Newton and who, in the process, had ushered our species one giant step closer to nature’s eternal truths.
To top it off, Einstein made for great copy. While squinting in the limelight and paying lip service to an ardent desire for solitude, he knew how to entice the world’s interest in his mysterious but momentous dominion. He would throw out clever quips (“I am a militant pacifist”) and gleefully play the public part of the bemused genius of geniuses. At the premiere of City Lights, while the cameras on the red carpet flashed, Charlie Chaplin whispered to Einstein something along the lines of, “The people applaud me because everybody understands me, and they applaud you because no one understands you.” It was a role Einstein wore well. And the wider public, weary from World War I, embraced him wholeheartedly.
As Einstein glided through society, his ideas about relativity, at least the version broadly reported, seemed to resonate with other cultural upheavals. James Joyce and T. S. Eliot were splintering the sentence. Pablo Picasso and Marcel Duchamp were cleaving the canvas. Arnold Schoenberg and Igor Stravinsky were shattering the scale. Einstein was unshackling space and time from outmoded models of reality.
Some have gone further, portraying Einstein as the central inspiration for the avant-garde movement of the 20th century, the scientific wellspring that necessitated a cultural rethink. It’s romantic to believe that nature’s truths set off a tidal wave that swept away the dusty vestiges of an entrenched culture. But I’ve never seen convincing evidence pinning these upheavals to Einstein’s science. A widespread misinterpretation of relativity—that it eliminated objective truth—is responsible for many unjustified invocations of Einstein’s theories in the realm of culture. Curiously, Einstein himself had conventional tastes: he preferred Bach and Mozart to modern composers and refused a gift of new Bauhaus furniture in favor of the well-worn traditional decor he already owned.
It is fair to say that many revolutionary ideas were wafting through the early 20th century, and they surely commingled. And just as surely, Einstein was a prime example of how breaking from long-held assumptions could uncover breathtaking new landscapes.
A century later the landscapes Einstein revealed remain remarkably vibrant and fertile. General relativity gave birth in the 1920s to modern cosmology, the study of the origin and evolution of the entire universe. Russian mathematician Aleksandr Friedmann and, independently, Belgian physicist and priest Georges Lemaître used Einstein’s equations to show that space should be expanding. Einstein resisted this conclusion and even modified the equations by inserting the infamous “cosmological constant” to ensure a static universe. But subsequent observations by Edwin Hubble showing that distant galaxies are all rushing away convinced Einstein to return to his original equations and accept that space is stretching. An expanding universe today means an ever smaller universe in the past, implying that the cosmos emanated from the swelling of a primordial speck, a “primeval atom” as Lemaître called it. The big bang theory was born.
In the decades since, the big bang theory has been substantially developed (today the most widely held version is inflationary theory) and, through various refinements, has aced a spectrum of observational tests. One such observation, which received the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics, revealed that for the past seven billion years not only has space been expanding, but the rate of expansion has been speeding up. The best explanation? The big bang theory augmented by a version of Einstein’s long-ago-discarded cosmological constant. The lesson? If you wait long enough, even some of Einstein’s wrong ideas turn out to be right.
An even earlier insight from general relativity originated in an analysis carried out by German astronomer Karl Schwarzschild during his stint at the Russian front in the midst of World War I. Taking a break from calculating artillery trajectories, Schwarzschild derived the first exact solution of Einstein’s equations, giving a precise description of the warped spacetime produced by a spherical body like the sun. As a by-product, Schwarzschild’s result revealed something peculiar. Compress any object to a sufficiently small size—the sun, say, to three miles across—and the resulting spacetime warp will be so severe that anything approaching too closely, including light itself, will be trapped. In modern language, Schwarzschild had revealed the possibility of black holes.
At the time, black holes seemed far-fetched, a mathematical oddity that many expected to have no relevance to reality. But observation, not expectation, dictates what is right, and astronomical data have now established that black holes are real and plentiful. They are too far away for direct exploration at the moment, but as theoretical laboratories, black holes are indispensable. Beginning with Stephen Hawking’s influential calculations in the 1970s, physicists have become increasingly convinced that the extreme nature of black holes makes them an ideal proving ground for attempts to push general relativity forward and, most notably, to meld it with quantum mechanics [see “The Black Hole Test,” by Dimitrios Psaltis and Sheperd S. Doeleman]. Indeed, one of today’s most hotly debated issues concerns how quantum processes may affect our understanding of the outer edge of a black hole—its event horizon—as well as the nature of a black hole’s interior.
Which is all just to say that the centenary of general relativity is a far cry from a backward glance of historical interest. Einstein’s general relativity is tightly woven into the tapestry of today’s leading-edge research.
How, then, did Einstein do it? How did he contribute so much of such lasting importance? Whereas we can dismiss Einstein as the source of Cubism or atonal music, he is why we imagine that someone can, in the privacy of his or her own mind, think hard and reveal cosmic truths. Einstein was social as a scientist, but his big breakthroughs were solitary aha! moments. Did those insights emerge because his brain had an unusual architecture? Because of a nonconformist perspective? Because of a tenacious and uncompromising ability to focus? Maybe. Yes. Probably. The reality, of course, is that no one knows. We can tell stories of why someone may have had this or that idea, but the bottom line is that thought and insight are shaped by influences too numerous to analyze.
Eschewing hyperbole, the best we can say is that Einstein had the right mind at the right moment to crack a collection of deep problems of physics. And what a moment it was. His numerous but comparatively modest contributions in the decades after the discovery of general relativity suggest that the timeliness of the particular intellectual nexus he brought to bear on physics had passed.
With all that he accomplished, and the continuing legacy he spawned, there’s an urge to ask another speculative question: Could there be another Einstein? If one means another über genius who will powerfully push science forward, then the answer is surely yes. In the past half a century since Einstein’s death, there have indeed been such scientists. But if one means an über genius to whom the world will look not because of accomplishments in sports or entertainment but as a thrilling example of what the human mind can accomplish, well, that question speaks to us—to what we as a civilization will deem precious.
source: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-einstein-changed-the-world/
The Case for Temporal Dynamics
Gavin Wince explores conventional concepts concerning the meaning of time held by some of the world’s top physicists.
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Time dimensions
of passages of time within a sense of timelessness
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It becomes important when attempting to understand time to investigate the perceptions of past time and future as a power of the present. Internally, we actually store bits and pieces of what happens but no where near entirely accurately. The greatest challenge of difficulty of perceiving accurately may just be that there isn’t anything that distinguishes the present moment from the just past moments.
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An impression weaves together into perception and this seems or feels like seamless experiences. In fact though, our perceptions are skewed and discontinuous.
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When we’ll look carefully at what occurs, there we’ll discover, actually there are an infinite number of me and of you even and as I write this or while you are reading there are billions of new you and me possibilities.
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Our brains try to reconstruct past events retroactively nut get some things wrong and occasionally get lots wrong. The brain will re-make the past while it processes mostly the past to do so. We can’t record an accurate history while this is true and this is true always. So, what really is happening is that we always have perceptions of events and these stories will never be completely agreeable since we all have somewhat a different story and differing experiences.
However, when we accept this as conditioning and then apply from the basic variations a system to derive mathematically multidimensional understanding and as this evolves,, we come about to perceiving better how time really works.
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The BIG Picture:
Three Dimensional Time Applied to Minkowski Diagram
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This is a short animation illustrating the concept of 3D-Time then superimposing it onto a Minkowski Diagram with light cone and all. Notice several things:
1) Linear time is a vector of two temporal dimensions,
2) The metric for the temporal coordinates is a complex conjugate of the metric for the spacial coordinates,
3) The center section of the model is a complex plane or surface and not a point,
4) If we let the center section correspond with Plank units, then temporal components can correspond with changes in momentum and spatial components can correspond with changes in position.
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Minkowski diagram
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minkowski_diagram
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A Century of Relativity
http://discovermagazine.com/special-reports/einstein
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Putting Relativity to the Test
The theory bears out all sorts of wild predictions.
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A History of General Relativity
The most important developments over the last 100 years.
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Defying Gravity
Physicists have barely gotten started with tests of general relativity.
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Beyond Einstein
Why are researchers so intent on proving Einstein right or wrong?
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Review…
Time is Relative
Einstein writes: “Since there exists in this four dimensional structure [space-time] no longer any sections which represent ‘now’ objectively, the concepts of happening and becoming are indeed not completely suspended, but yet complicated. It appears therefore more natural to think of physical reality as a four dimensional existence, instead of, as hitherto, the evolution of a three dimensional existence.”
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Einstein believed that there is no true division between past and future. So, time is rather like a solid or a single continuous existence. There never being a single ‘now’ moment and another and so on is important and perhaps true or not. However, Einstein did prove to our satisfaction, I suppose, for everyone concerned, that time is relative and time is not absolute as Newton had claimed.
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see: A. Einstein, Relativity (1920), Appendix II (122), Appendix V (150)
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http://www.einstein-online.info/elementary/specialRT/relativity_space_time
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Imaginary Time
With ‘The No Boundary Proposal’ (of the Universe), put forth by Stephen Hawking in his book, A Brief History of Time (1988), Hawking introduces a reference of time that he called Imaginary time. “The universe would be completely self-contained and not affected by anything outside itself. It would neither be created nor destroyed. It would just BE.” Hawking further explains, “Imaginary time is a new dimension, at right angles to ordinary, real time.”
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In a lecture paper, (http://www.hawking.org.uk/the-beginning-of-time.html+) Hawking writes: “Quantum theory introduces a new idea, that of imaginary time. Imaginary time may sound like science fiction, and it has been brought into Doctor Who [an English Star Trek]. But never the less, it is a genuine scientific concept. One can picture it in the following way. One can think of ordinary, real, time as a horizontal line. On the left, one has the past, and on the right, the future. But there’s another kind of time in the vertical direction. This is called imaginary time, because it is not the kind of time we normally experience. But in a sense, it is just as real, as what we call real time.”
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In his ‘Sum Over Histories,’ Richard Feynman chose to continue using the term imaginary time… however, time is only imaginary because in angles as such, time is totally indistinguishable from directions in space.
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The past is simply another place in time, as is the future.
Einstein’s space-time is described as a four dimensional existence, rather than as three dimensions that evolve in time. The difference between the physicists is that Einstein believed only in a past and a future. He demonstrated that we exist simultaneously both in the past and in the future. Imaginary time recognized a simultaneous present but multiple directions of possibilities of experiences shooting off into a variety of pasts and futures.
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Multiple Time Paths and Multiple Universes
Einstein’s Relativity Theory led him to reject time and Feynman’s Sum over Histories theory led him to describe time as a direction in space. Was Einstein wrong? I say, he was not wrong. However, there was a greater exploration and Feynman’s theories took us further.
Feynman’s theory explores probabilities of events. A probability is determined by examining together all the possible histories of that event. For example, for a particle moving from point A to B, examine it traveling by all possible paths. It may follow any of the paths. Each path has amplitude. Feynman’s method was to sum these and when summed we discover that a majority of amplitudes add up to zero. Only those that remain actually abide by natural laws and forces. Sum over Histories indicates there will be a direction from this of time as a path in space which is more probable than any other path directions.
I’m not sure if Feynman’s summing of all possible histories was the first timeless description of a multitude of space-time worlds that all exist simultaneously. I don’t need anything more complex right now. There is more that needs to be said if proving multiple worlds. That just isn’t what I am doing today.
Right now is important and what paths can be taken is important. So, this one is not taxing. Getting back to the film, did you meet the Supreme Being yet?
see also:
http://www.universetoday.com/113900/parallel-universes-and-the-many-worlds-theory/
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Every man… the real thing is your question…
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A man was sitting at the gate of a town; an old man. A rider stopped; a horse rider asked him, “What are the people of this town like?”
The old man asked, “Why do you ask this?”
The rider said, “The people of the town I have come from are very indecent. I was upset and disturbed by them. I had to leave that town. Now I want to become a resident of some new town. So I am asking you how the people of this town are.”
The old man said, “Brother, you had better move on. The people of this town are even more vile, more wicked, more indecent. Here you will get into trouble, go look somewhere else.”
The rider moved on. Just behind him a bullock cart came to a halt and a man looked around and said, “Grandfather, how are the people of this village? I am searching for a new residence.”
The old man asked again, “How were the people of the village you have left?”
Tears came to the eyes of that man. He said, “I didn’t want to leave, helplessly I had to leave. The people of that village were very loving. Now wherever I live the memory of those people will torment me. I was helpless, I was in economic difficulty. I had to leave it so that I can earn something, I need to try my luck somewhere else. But I have just one ambition that whenever my luck improves, I will return there. I will reside in that village. In the end I want to die in that village. If I cannot live there then at least I want to die there.”
That old man said, “You are welcome. You will find the people of this village even more loving than the people of that village.”
A man was sitting there listening to all this. First he heard what the horse rider said and the old man’s answer. Then he heard what this man on the bullock cart said and the old man’s answer. The man said, “You have really surprised me. You said to one man that this village is very vile and wicked; just move on. To the other you said this village has very loving people, you have no need to go further, you are welcome!
The old man explained, “People are just the way you are. Everywhere men are the same. The real thing is your question.”
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In reality, we can never know how time flows. Time is not an absolute fact but just a memory set of perceptions.
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In my opinion the great genius of Einstein stems from openness…
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When Einstein Met Tagore:
A Remarkable Meeting of Minds on the Edge of Science and Spirituality
On July 14, 1930, Albert Einstein welcomed into his home on the outskirts of Berlin the Indian philosopher, musician, and Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore. The two proceeded to have one of the most stimulating, intellectually riveting conversations in history, exploring the age-old friction between science and religion. Science and the Indian Tradition: When Einstein Met Tagore (public library) recounts the historic encounter, amidst a broader discussion of the intellectual renaissance that swept India in the early twentieth century, germinating a curious osmosis of Indian traditions and secular Western scientific doctrine.
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The following excerpt from one of Einstein and Tagore’s conversations dances between previously examined definitions of science, beauty, consciousness, and philosophy in a masterful meditation on the most fundamental questions of human existence.
http://www.brainpickings.org/2012/04/27/when-einstein-met-tagore/
Thank you Eric… He was indeed a very intriguing human being… 🙂
I read a biography about him, he had an interesting life & was quite the practical joker in his day!
“an” Einstein seems to take the humanity away from this incredible human being. Please don’t make him into one of the theories that he loved to explore.
May we never lose touch with our humanity 🙂
oh; good point; I hadn’t noticed this perspective. Thank You Val.
I changed the title.
~ Eric
The comment from Val actually led me to revise the entire post … even the video is higher quality … now, re-published 8/17
I love learning with you, too! 🙂 Thank you, Kim