Faster than a speeding locomotive. by Bryan
E=MC^2 serving up the most delicious physics problems since 1905.
No, I’m not talking Clark Kent here.
I’m talking about the speed of light!
I’m talking about what happened 100 years ago today.
Don’t tell me you don’t know! (gasps)
It’s the WORLD YEAR OF PHYSICS!
Actually, I only discovered this little snippet of information yesterday while cleaning spam from my inbox.
Join your fellow Student Pugwash members in the 100th anniversary celebration of the creation of E=mc2, Einstein’s most famous equation! “Einstein’s Big Idea,” part of PBS’s NOVA series, will be shown on PBS stations nationwide on Tuesday, October 11. The program describes the development of the scientific concepts that inspired Einstein’s own special theory of relativity.
More information on the program is available at http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/einstein/. This page includes more information on Einstein’s life, the importance of the equation in today’s science, suggestions for further reading, and other resources. A detailed program description is below.
Student Pugwash USA
MIT has its own chapter of Student Pugwash. Pugwash exists to address the effects of science and technology developments on society.
Featured in the documentary is MIT Professor David Kaiser, he has taught STS.002 (Toward the Scientific Revolution) and STS.310 (Introduction to the History of Science).
If I had the ability to travel through time, I think I’d go back and meet Ol’ Al. Who’d you go meet?
Gosh, in the heat of all these exams (the A levels here)… thinking about it, I’d want to go back and see Watson and Crick, and decipher what went through their minds when they deduced the structure of DNA.
It seems exhilarating to speak and have a legitimate conversation intellectuals of your specific caliber. However, correlating to the deduction of DNA and the thought process that Watson and Crick were affiliated with is easily available in one of 3 autobiographies! Each of these pieces of literature represent seperate yet intriguing connected self-accounts of the occurrences.
“I think I’d go back and meet Ol’ Al. Who’d you go meet?”
He’s definitely one of my best choices, too… Such a scientist, such an artist.
But I think that now, 100 years after his famous publication, science (meaning cosmological science, the incorporation of general relativity and quantum mechanics, mostly) has grown to such an extent that you have to be more than an “Einstein” to keep in touch with all the theories and observations and you have to be an equal genius in mathematics as Einstein was in physics to understand all the related theoretical numbers and figures.
Of course, this is just my opinion. I do not claim that I know so much about modern science, on the contrary – I think I am just setting foot in it, and yet – I think Einstein will be a bit confused if he could see what has become now of his general relativity.
Just by the way, I have been inspired by E=mc^2 since the time I understood what it really meant. I think it is rightfully one of the most famous formulas today.