Einstein has had a good month, all things considered. His century-old prediction, that the very fabric of space and time can support waves travelling at light-speed, was confirmed by the LIGO collaboration. More, the bizarre and horrifying consequences of his theory of gravity, the singularly-collapsed stars that came to be called ‘black holes’, have been directly detected for the first time.

The post Questions, questions, questions… appeared first on OUPblog.

Add a Comment

The discovery of gravitational waves, announced on 11 February 2016 by scientists from the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO), has made headline news around the world. One UK broadsheet devoted its entire front page to a image of a simulation of two orbiting black holes on which they superimposed the headline "The theory of relativity proved".

The post When black holes collide appeared first on OUPblog.

Add a Comment

Albert Einstein’s greatest achievement, the general theory of relativity, was announced by him exactly a century ago, in a series of four papers read to the Prussian Academy of Sciences in Berlin in November 1915, during the turmoil of the First World War. For many years, hardly any physicist—let alone any other type of scientist—could understand it.

The post Einstein’s mysterious genius appeared first on OUPblog.

Add a Comment

I grew up in a house which lived and breathed mathematics. I was quick at numbers and happy with algebra as it contained letters and therefore writing. But maths was not my strength so it was nigh on impossible to participate in the family past time.
We lived in Hayes, Middlesex, in a small house, in an ordinary street. But inside our house, extraordinary stuff was going on.
I went back to visit this year and in the photo you can just see my old bedroom window, jutting out above the lawn behind me.

My older brother  and my father sat at the dinner table every night and talked maths for hours. I was reading on the floor in front of the fire. Words filtered down to me  - quantum mechanics, relativity, theorems ( I liked Pythagoras - history was my passion including history of maths), calculus, the atom, the splitting of the atom, anything really to do with the atom.


Then there were all the people - men really - Einstein, Newton, Archimedes - lots of history there. So without really understanding the maths, I was growing up in a home which would give me a backdrop to feed my imagination, my vocabulary, my world view and my thirst for knowledge. This has never left me and I believe it has been a huge influence on my writing.

Fast forward to 2007. My younger brother, Louis Berk, a keen amateur photographer,( who was much better at maths than me) tells me that we should visit Bletchley Park before it gets properly discovered. Louis reckons our Dad was receiving decoded messages from Bletchley when he drove his radio car around France after D-Day. For quite sometime he was the only link between the British and American lines and got a letter from Eisenhower. I think he's wearing his driving gloves in the photo. He never took a driving test. Just got told to drive round the parade ground until he got the hang of it and then off he went.


One of Dad's hobbies was designing circuits and after he died we framed one and hung it on the wall. He drew the circuits with pencils he sharpened with a Stanley knife. He loved sharpening pencils and I always had a box full of fiercely sharpened pencils for school every day. No wonder I became a writer!



Louis was absolutely right. Bletchley Park was practically empty. We wandered around the huts which looked like the code breakers had literally just walked out the door and took photos. It was like stepping back seventy years. These photos were taken by Louis.







These photos were taken by me - you can see the difference!







I was inspired to write this post after seeing the film The Imitation Game about the work of Alan Turing at Bletchley Park, cracking the German code and shortening the WW2 by two years. They saved 14 million lives. But everyone who worked there stayed silent for decades. This film is about mathematics at its most extreme.

I loved every minute of it. I had learnt at my father's knee, you don't have to know about maths to be inspired by it. My imagination might not have solved black holes but it can soar as far as I need it to and beyond. Growing up in quantum mechanics - what gorgeous words - taught me how to think outside the box and that's what every writer needs.


www.miriamhalahmy.com

Add a Comment

Quick! What’s behind you right now? Did you peek over to see desks, the wallpaper, students, books, or toys? Were those objects there even before you looked at them? Are they there now, even though you’re reading this instead of seeing them? As strange as it sounds, some scientists believe that nothing exists definitely until someone measures it, such as you did with your eyes and ears. These scientists work in a field of science called Quantum Mechanics.

In the early 1900s, smarty-pants scientists like Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, and Werner Heisenberg studied, experimented and argued over the question of what light was made of. Light was very mysterious to scientists at the time, because in some experiments it acted like a wave, similar to the invisible radio and magnetic waves all around us. In other experiments though, light acted like a particle, a solid object like a Pop Tart, a textbook, a penny, a skyscraper… Anything that’s in one place and that weighs something is a particle. It didn’t seem to make sense for something to be an invisible wave and a solid particle at the same time, but in test after test, light was both! You might think it was time for these scientists to turn in their labcoats and get new jobs… this was too hard to figure out! Instead of giving up though, the scientists continued experimenting and studying the subject until they found a solution: light is a wave until it gets observed, then it becomes a solid particle!

This was huge news for scientists. If light acts like this, then other solid objects may not be so solid after all too. The scientists studying Quantum Mechanics presented this thought-provoking possibility: that that the world is actually a wave of possibilities until we observe it, then it becomes the solid place we can feel, touch, taste and smell. It’s a bit like hiding trash under your bed: if you can’t see it, it’s not there!

Display Comments Add a Comment

Ben Franklin Image in the Public Domain

It’s an important day – Inauguration Day and Martin Luther King Day. These events bring to mind the many great people who have contributed to America and the entire world. It took me a while, but I came up with my wish list of the Top Three Historical Figures (no longer living) that I would love to interview today (if I could bring them back to life, of course). And if I could interview them, what 10 questions would I ask each of them? No question would be off limits.

Martin Luther King

1. Where did you get your courage to stand up for what you believed in?
2. Looking back on your life, is there anything significant you wish you would had done differently?
3. What are your thoughts on the riots that ensued following your assassination, since you so often spoke about the importance of peace?
4. What do you think of the state of racism and equality today as compared to the 1960s?
5. Are you surprised that we first elected an African American US President in 2008?
6. How would you rate the progress of America as it compares to your “I Have a Dream” speech?
7. Did you ever imagine that your speech would be so eternally regarded and a national holiday would be established in your name?
8. Were you faithful to your wife?
9. If you were alive today, what would you be doing?
10. What advice do you have for those out there who are trying to muster up the courage to stand up for what they believe in?

Benjamin Franklin

1. What of your many accomplishments are you most proud?
2. What is your opinion of the amendments that have been made to the US Constitution since you signed it?
3. Who in your opinion is the best US President in history and why?
4. Who was the mother of your illegitimate son, William?
5. When you discovered electricity, did you realize how much your findings would change the world?
6. What invention that has taken place since your death do you most respect?
7. How does your list of Thirteen Virtues hold up in the world today, and would change that list in any way now?
8. How do you feel about the current state of education at the highly regarded University of Pennsylvania, the school you founded it in the 1700s and the challenges students face today getting into the top universities?
9. What was your reaction when you learned of the digital age and e-publishing?
10. If you were alive today, what would you be doing?

Albert Einstein

1. What happened to your daughter, Leiserl?
2. Did you know at the time of your theories that you would change the world of science as you did?
3. Can you explain your theories of relativity in layman’s terms?
4. What of your many accomplishments are you most proud?
5. What is your opinion about how the science of physics has progressed (or not progressed) since your death?
6. If you could change anything you did in your life what would it be and why would you change it?
7. What most surprises you about the changes in technology in the world since your death and how could that help you with your work?
8. Why do you suppose there is such a shortage of scientists in America and the world as a whole these days?
9. What do you have to say about how your brain was taken without permission from your family after your death to be studied?
10. If you were alive, what would you be doing today?

Those are my top three choices for interviews with historical figures. If I could expand my list, I’d add:

• George Washington
• Thomas Jefferson
• Abe Lincoln
• King Henry VIII
• Alfred Hitchcock
• Vincent Van Gogh
• Frederick Douglas
• Freddy Mercury
• Rod Serling
• Ayn Rand
• William Shakespeare
• Grace Kelly

Who would you interview if you could, and what would you ask?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Add a Comment

By Dean Falk, Fred Lepore, and Adrianne Noe

Imagine that you return from work to find that a thief has broken into your home. The police arrive and ask if they may dust for finger and palm prints. Which would you do? (A) Refuse permission because palm reading is an antiquated pseudoscience or (B) give permission because forensic dermatoglyphics is sometimes useful for identifying culprits. A similar question may be asked about the photographs of the external surface of Albert Einstein’s brain that recently emerged after being lost to science for over half a century. If asked whether details of Einstein’s cerebral cortex should be identified and interpreted from the photographs, which would you answer? (A) No, because to conduct such a study would engage in the 19^th century pseudoscience of phrenology or (B) Yes, because the investigation could produce interesting observations about the cerebral cortex of one of the world’s greatest geniuses and, in light of recent functional neuroimaging studies, might also suggest potentially testable hypotheses regarding Einstein’s brain and those of normal individuals. Lest you think this is a straw man (or Aunt Sally) exercise, more than one pundit has recently invoked the phrenology argument against studying Einstein’s brain. For example, one blogger opines, “I hope no one cares about Einstein’s brain. By this I mean his brain anatomy.” The three of us who were privileged to describe the treasure-trove of recently emerged photographs opted for B.

We did so because various data support studying the variation and functional correlates of folds (gyri) on the surface of the human brain and the grooves (sulci) that separate them. For example, David Van Essen hypothesizes that tensions along the connections between cells that course beneath the surface of the brain explains typical patterns of convolutions on its surface. Disruptions in the development of these connections in humans may result in abnormal convolutions that are associated with neurological problems such as autism and schizophrenia.  Representations in sensory and motor regions of the cerebral cortex may change later in life as shown by imaging studies of Braille readers, upper limb amputees, and trained musicians, and sometimes these adaptations are correlated with superficial neuroanatomical features such as an enlargement in the right precentral gyrus (called the Omega Sign because of its shape) associated with movement of the left hand in expert string-players. Indeed, Einstein’s right hemisphere has an Omega Sign (labeled K in the following photograph, for knob), which is consistent with the fact that he was a right-handed string-player who took violin lessons between the ages of 6 and 14 years. The aforementioned blogger supports his opposition to studying Einstein’s cerebral cortex with the observation that “assuming causality with correlation” is “a cardinal sin of science”. However, this old saw does not mean that correlated features are necessarily causally unrelated. The functional imaging literature on the cerebral cortices of musicians and controls suggests that Einstein’s Omega Sign and his history as a violinist were probably not an unrelated coincidence.

The investigation of previously unpublished photographs of Einstein’s brain reveals numerous unusual cortical features which suggest hypotheses that others may wish to explore in the histological slides of Einstein’s brain that surfaced along with the photographs. For example, Einstein’s brain has an unusually long midfrontal sulcus that divides the middle frontal region into two distinct gyri (labeled 2 & 3 in the following image), which causes his right frontal lobe to have four rather than the typical three gyri. An extra frontal gyrus is rare, but not unheard of. Einstein’s frontal lobe morphology is interesting because the human frontal polar region expanded differentially during hominin evolution, is involved in higher cognitive functions (including thought experiments), and is associated with complex wiring underneath its surface. These data suggest that the connectivity associated with Einstein’s prefrontal cortex may have been relatively complex, which could potentially be explored by investigating histological slides that were prepared from his brain after it was dissected.

 The microstructural organization in the parts of the cerebral cortex that are involved heavily in speech (Broca’s area and its homologue) were shown to be unique in their patterns of connectivity and lateralization in the genius Emil Krebs, who spoke more than 60 languages. That study, however, did not include information about the gross external neuroanatomy in the relevant regions. Functional neuroimaging technology is making it possible to explore the functional relationships between variations in external cortical morphology, subsurface microstructure including neuronal connectivity, and cognitive abilities. In other words, scientists should now be able to analyze form and function cohesively from the external surface of the cerebral cortex into the depths of the brain. Pseudoscience this is not.

Dr Dean Falk is the Hale G. Smith Professor of Anthropology at Florida State University and a Senior Scholar at the School for Advanced Research in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Dr Fred Lepore is Professor of Neurology and Ophthalmology at Robert Wood Johnson Medical School in Piscataway, New Jersey. Dr Adrianne Noe is Director of the National Museum of Health and Medicine in Silver Spring, Maryland. You can read their paper, ‘The cerebral cortex of Albert Einstein: a description and preliminary analysis of unpublished photographs’ in full and for free. It appears in the journal Brain.

Brain provides researchers and clinicians with the finest original contributions in neurology. Leading studies in neurological science are balanced with practical clinical articles. Its citation rating is one of the highest for neurology journals, and it consistently publishes papers that become classics in the field.

Subscribe to the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Subscribe to only health and medicine articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Image credits: Both images are authors’ own. Do not reproduce without prior permission from the authors.

The post Examining photographs of Einstein’s brain is not phrenology! appeared first on OUPblog.

Add a Comment

By Gordon Fraser

When the Nazis came to power in Germany in 1933, neither the Atomic Bomb nor the Holocaust were on anybody’s agenda. Instead, the Nazi’s top aim was to rid German culture of perceived pollution. A priority was science, where paradoxically Germany already led the world. To safeguard this position, loud Nazi voices, such as Nobel laureate Philipp Lenard,  complained about a ‘massive infiltration of the Jews into universities’.

The first enactments of a new regime are highly symbolic. The cynically-named Law for the Restoration of the Civil Service, published in April 1933, targeted those who had non-Aryan, ‘particularly Jewish’, parents or grandparents. Having a single Jewish grandparent was enough to lose one’s job. Thousands of Jewish university teachers, together with doctors, lawyers, and other professionals were sacked. Some found more modest jobs, some retired, some left the country. Germany was throwing away its hard-won scientific supremacy. When warned of this, Hitler retorted ‘If the dismissal of [Jews] means the end of German science, then we will do without science for a few years’.

Why did the Jewish people have such a significant influence on German science? They had a long tradition of religious study, but assimilated Jews had begun to look instead to a radiant new role-model. Albert Einstein was the most famous scientist the world had ever known. As well as an icon for ambitious young students, he was also a prominent political target. Aware of this, he left Germany for the USA in 1932, before the Nazis came to power.

How to win friends and influence nuclear people
The talented nuclear scientist Leo Szilard appeared to be able to foresee the future. He exploited this by carefully cultivating people with influence. In Berlin, he sought out Einstein.

Like Einstein, Szilard anticipated the Civil Service Law. He also saw the need for a scheme to assist the refugee German academics who did not. First in Vienna, then in London, he found influential people who could help.

Just as the Nazis moved into power, nuclear physics was revolutionized by the discovery of a new nuclear component, the neutron. One of the main centres of neutron research was Berlin, where scientists saw a mysterious effect when uranium was irradiated. They asked their former Jewish colleagues, now in exile, for an explanation.

The answer was ‘nuclear fission’. As the Jewish scientists who had fled Germany settled into new jobs, they realized how fission was the key to a new source of energy. It could also be a weapon of unimaginable power, the Atomic Bomb. It was not a great intellectual leap, so the exiled scientists were convinced that their former colleagues in Germany had come to the same conclusion. So, when war looked imminent, they wanted to get to the Atomic Bomb first. One wrote of ‘the fear of the Nazis beating us to it’.

Szilard, by now in the US, saw it was time to act again. He knew that President Roosevelt would not listen to him, but would listen to Einstein, and wrote to Roosevelt over Einstein’s signature.

When a delegation finally managed to see him on 11 October 1939, Roosevelt said “what you’re after is to see that the Nazis don’t blow us up”. But nobody knew exactly what to do. The letter had mentioned bombs ‘too heavy for transportation by air’. Such a vague threat did not appear urgent.

But in 1940, German Jewish exiles in Britain realized that if the small amount of the isotope 235 in natural uranium could be separated, it could produce an explosion equivalent to several thousand tons of dynamite. Only a few kilograms would be needed, and could be carried by air. The logistics of nuclear weapons suddenly changed. Via Einstein, Szilard wrote another Presidential letter. On 19 January 1942, Roosevelt ordered a rapid programme for the development of the Atomic Bomb, the ‘Manhattan Project’.

Across the Atlantic, the Germans indeed had seen the implications of nuclear fission. But its scientific message had been muffled. Key scientists had gone. Germany had no one left with the prescience of Szilard, nor the political clout of Einstein. The Nazis also had another priority. On 20 January, one day after Roosevelt had given the go-ahead for the Atomic Bomb, a top-level meeting in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee outlined a “final solution of the Jewish Problem”. Nazi Germany had its own crash programme.

As such, two huge projects, unknown to each other, emerged simultaneously on opposite sides of the Atlantic. The dreadful schemes forged ahead, and each in turn became reality. On two counts, what had been unimaginable no longer was.

Gordon Fraser was for many years the in-house editor at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, in Geneva. His books on popular science and scientists include Cosmic Anger, a biography of Abdus Salam, the first Muslim Nobel scientist, Antimatter: The Ultimate Mirror, and The Quantum Exodus. He is also the editor of The New Physics for the 21st Century and The Particle Century.

Subscribe to the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Subscribe to only history articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Subscribe to only physics and chemistry articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS.

Image credits: Atomic Bomb tested in the New Mexico desert. Photograph courtesy of  Los Alamos National Laboratory; Auschwitz-Birkenau, alte Frau und Kinder, Bundesarchiv Bild, Creative Commons License via Wikimedia Commons.

The post How Nazi Germany lost the nuclear plot appeared first on OUPblog.

Add a Comment

 The Principle of Relativity (in the restricted sense)
 
Word of the day – Anisotropic – having different values when measured from different directions.
Albert is trying to be as clear as possible, but I don’t get it. Perhaps it is the language of the early 1900s that is perplexing me or I am just plain dumb as a box of rocks. But I am not daunted.

Something that moves in a straight line at a constant speed is said to move in a uniform translation – imagine the old train car jugging along --------

Now if a raven is flying overhead while we are on the train it will have a different uniform translation than if we saw it flying overhead while standing on the ground. I get that, but then Albert has to start in with this math crap —“If a mass m is moving uniformly in a straight line with respect to a co-ordinate system K, then it will also be moving uniformly and in a straight line relative to a second co-ordinate system K1, provided that the latter is executing a uniform translatory motion with respect to K”. What happened to the raven??

SO –If the Train is moving in a straight line in relation to the guy on the ground, and the raven (m) is moving in a straight line with respect to the train, then the raven will also be moving uniformly in relation to the guy standing on the ground.

So Albert’s brilliant principle of relativity (in the restricted sense) is –If the raven maintains a uniform translation it will follow the same general laws as the train in relation to the guy on the ground.  I thought we already kind of knew that. 

Oh crap – there is a BUT. But in view of the recent development in electodynamics and optics things might be more difficult - of course.
If a man (w) is walking inside a train car (v) (in the same direction as the train car) his distance (W) traveled is the combination of his walking (w) and the train’s movement(v)
W = v + w

Then we have the speed of light – 300,000km per second in a vacuum – and this, Albert says threw physicists into a tizzy. Because if light (c) is moving through a train car (v) instead of a man it is now W = c- v. It is subtracted. It is not the same equation and that screwed things up. But I’m not sure why? Is it because the light is so fast that the train in essence traps it and slows it down? Like catching a flying hummingbird in a net. Okay. I’m good with that. However – since these two equations don’t fit, one of the founding theories was thought to be flawed - It couldn’t be relativity, no, not Albert’s brilliant idea. Perhaps it is the idea of the constant speed of light.. No. That can’t be it either. Some other guys proved that. So – we need another theory to explain the inconsistency.
At this point my book exploded – literally.

I guess I’ve been too rough on Albert.

Add a Comment

Welcome to Theoretical Thursday!

Today I start a new journey of expoloration and learning.  I will endeavor to learn Theoretical Physics. For as long as I can remember I have loved science – the idea that things are discoverable and understandable largely just by being observant. The life cycle of an insect, the growth of mold on bread, the magic of a healing cut, etc. And in physics class - A ball in a wagon is set in motion when the wagon is pulled. When the wagon stops, the ball keeps moving… etc. I get that. After all, I was the girl who scored the highest in all things mechanical on some Junior High assessment test (you had to follow the cogs and wheels of a machine and draw the direction of movement for each.)

But then I hit a road block – theoretical explorations where things like quirks, quarks and the Higgs-Boson particle are spoken about as if they too were sitting in a wagon. As I type this sentence, I realize that my ignorance may be showing and these things are real and observable and I just haven’t understood the conversation. And that is the impetus for this experiment – I want to understand the conversation. I want to understand how very smart men and women can earn a living by making stuff up. At least that is what it seems to me, right now, in my theoretically-challenged brain.

So, who better to teach me Theoretical Physics than the great man himself – Albert Einstein. And I just happen to have his book – RELATIVITY: The Special and the General Theory, A Clear Explanation That Anyone Can Understand. (Wanna bet?) Even Einstein appears to have misgivings as he peers at me with raised eyebrows from the photo on the cover. He holds his hands in pre-wringing motion as if to say, “This job may be harder than I thought.” And I think he may be right.

This book, written in MCMLXI, includes a preface. “The present book is intended, as far as possible, to give an exact insight into the theory of Relativity to those readers who, from a general scientific and philosophical point of view, are interested in the theory, but who are not conversant with the mathematical apparatus of theoretical physics.” I fit that bill – I am interested. And I am not conversant. So far so good.

His next sentence (Don’t worry, I’m not going to go through the whole book sentence by sentence. I think.) presumes I have an education of a standard “corresponding to that of a university matriculation examination.” I have a Masters in Anthropology, but that probably isn’t what he meant. I suspect that exams in MCMLXI might have been more rigorous than they were when I graduated, but I can’t be sure, so I press on.

The book also presumes, “…a fair amount of patience and force of will on the part of the reader.” Hmmm. Might have a problem there. I didn’t have much force of will last night when I ate 4 bowls of popcorn and a couple glasses of wine. (Note: it was “Smart Popcorn”) However, Albert promises that he has written the book in a ‘step-motherly-fashion” (and I’m hoping that doesn’t mean evil Cinderella’s step mother) and he hopes the book may bring someone “a few hours of suggestive thought!” (Albert, you dog! I don’t know about a few hours worth, but I like a suggestive thought now and then.)

That preface was written in December 1916. The edition I have is the 15th edition and on June 9th, 1952 (8 years before I was born) he wrote a short note about the addition of a 5th appendix about the “problem of space in general and on t

Add a Comment

Start of a new term at AiPD -- and as usual I gave my students a "however you want" inclass project of drawing Einstein. This is my version. Kinda' fun to look back at all the versions.

Add a Comment

Tweet

By George Levine

How could Darwin still be controversial?  We do not worry a lot about Isaac Newton, nor even about Albert Einstein, whose ideas have been among the powerful shapers of modern Western culture.   Yet for many people, undisturbed by the law of gravity or by the theories of relativity that, I would venture, 99% of us don’t really understand, Darwin remains darkly threatening.  One of the great figures in the history of Western thought, he was respectable and revered enough even in his own time to be buried in Westminster Abbey, of all places.  He supported his local church; he was a Justice of the Peace; and he never was photographed as a working scientist, only as a gentleman and a family man.  Yet a significant proportion of people in the English-speaking world vociferously do not “believe” in him.

Darwin is resisted not because he was wrong but because his ideas apply not only to the ants, and bees, and birds, and anthropoids, but to us.  His theory is scary to many people because it seems to them it lessens our dignity and deprives our ethics of a foundation.  The problem, of course, is that, like the theories of gravity and relativity, it is true.    

At the heart of this very strange phenomenon there is a fundamental crisis of secularism.  Secularism is not simply disbelief; it is not equivalent to atheism.  Many supporters of secularism, like the distinguished Catholic philosopher, Charles Taylor, are believers.  The most important aspect of secularism is that it is a condition of peaceful coexistence of otherwise antithetical faiths.   In a secular state, diverse religions must agree that on matters of civil order and organization there is an institution to which they will all defer in what Taylor has described as “overlapping consensus.”  They may disagree about God but they have to agree that in civil society they will adhere to the laws of the country. 

But what happens when the overlapping consensus doesn’t overlap?  This brings us to a very complicated problem: the authority of the specialist.  In a democratic society, it is the responsibility of each of us to stay informed on issues that matter to the polity, and to make judgments, usually through established institutions, school boards, for example, or national elections.  At the same time, our society usually sanctions the training of professionals, and forces them to undergo rigorous training, tests them to be sure of their qualifications.

Within professions, there will inevitably be learned and crucial squabbling and exploration, and new theories piled on top of old ones, or revising them.  But these squabbles are part of what it is to be professional and they rarely reach the ears of the lay population.  When science as an institution sanctions evolutionary theory (and squabbles about how it works), and its most distinguished practitioners insist that evolution is the foundation of all modern biology and by way of that theory make ever expanding discoveries about our health, a significant portion of the population accuse them of mere prejudice against doubters.   People insist they don’t “believe” in Darwin, when they haven’t read him, don’t understand the theory to which they object, and seem unaware that evolutionary biology, though perhaps founded on Darwin, has long since made the nature of Darwin’s belief irrelevant to the validity of modern science.

Imagine a scientific community that allowed published papers to be reviewed by lay people, or simply published them without being reviewed by experts in the field.  Imagine if The New England Journal of Medicine, or Nature, accepted papers which had not produced adequate evidence to make their cases, or distorted and misrepresented the evidence.  Would that be a reasonable and democratic openi

Add a Comment

Tweet

By Jim Baggott

 

If a tree falls in the forest, and there’s nobody around to hear, does it make a sound?

For centuries philosophers have been teasing our intellects with such questions. Of course, the answer depends on how we choose to interpret the use of the word ‘sound’. If by sound we mean compressions and rarefactions in the air which result from the physical disturbances caused by the falling tree and which propagate through the air with audio frequencies, then we might not hesitate to answer in the affirmative.

Here the word ‘sound’ is used to describe a physical phenomenon – the wave disturbance. But sound is also a human experience, the result of physical signals delivered by human sense organs which are synthesized in the mind as a form of perception.

Now, to a large extent, we can interpret the actions of human sense organs in much the same way we interpret mechanical measuring devices. The human auditory apparatus simply translates one set of physical phenomena into another, leading eventually to stimulation of those parts of the brain cortex responsible for the perception of sound. It is here that the distinction comes. Everything to this point is explicable in terms of physics and chemistry, but the process by which we turn electrical signals in the brain into human perception and experience in the mind remains, at present, unfathomable.

Philosophers have long argued that sound, colour, taste, smell and touch are all secondary qualities which exist only in our minds. We have no basis for our common-sense assumption that these secondary qualities reflect or represent reality as it really is. So, if we interpret the word ‘sound’ to mean a human experience rather than a physical phenomenon, then when there is nobody around there is a sense in which the falling tree makes no sound at all.

This business about the distinction between ‘things-in-themselves’ and ‘things-as-they-appear’ has troubled philosophers for as long as the subject has existed, but what does it have to do with modern physics, specifically the story of quantum theory? In fact, such questions have dogged the theory almost from the moment of its inception in the 1920s. Ever since it was discovered that atomic and sub-atomic particles exhibit both localised, particle-like properties and delocalised, wave-like properties physicists have become ravelled in a debate about what we can and can’t know about the ‘true’ nature of physical reality.

Albert Einstein once famously declared that God does not play dice. In essence, a quantum particle such as an electron may be described in terms of a delocalized ‘wavefunction’, with probabilities for appearing ‘here’ or ‘there’. When we look to see where the electron actually is, the wavefunction is said to ‘collapse’ instantaneously, and appears ‘here’ with a frequency consistent with the probability predicted by quantum theory. But there is no predicting precisely where an individual electron will be found. Chance is inherent in the collapse of the wavefunction, and it was this feature of quantum theory that got Einstein so upset. To make matters worse, if the collapse is instantaneous then this implies what Einstein called a ‘spooky action-at-a-distance’ which, he argued, appeared to violate a key postulate of his own special theory of relativity.

So what evidence do we have for this mysterious collapse of the wavefunction? Well, none actually. We postulate the collapse in an attempt to explain how a quantum system with many different possible outcomes before measurement transforms into a system with one and only one result after measurement. To Irish physicist John Bell this seemed to be at best a confidence-trick, at worst a fraud. ‘A theory founded in this way on arguments of manifestly approximate character,’ he wrote some years later, ‘howe

Add a Comment

Tweet
Where do geniuses come from? What makes a genius? Are all geniuses interesting people? Who’s more amazing, Shakespeare, Darwin or Einstein?

There are many questions about genius, and in his newest book, Sudden Genius? The Gradual Path to Creative Breakthroughs, Andrew Robinson answers all these and more.

About Sudden Genius

Click here to view the embedded video.

A Q&A with Andrew Robinson

Click here to view the embedded video.

Andrew Robinson was Literary Editor of The Times Higher Education Supplement from 1994-2006. His latest book is Sudden Genius? The Gradual Path to Creative Breakthroughs. He has written many other books including biographies of Albert Einstein, the film director Satyajit Ray, the writer Rabindranath Tagore, and the archaeologist Michael Ventris. He is also the author of Writing and Script: A Very Short Introduction, and Genius: A Very Short Introduction (forthcoming Spring 2011). You can read his previous OUPblog posts here (2009) and here (2010).

Add a Comment

Add a Comment

By Andrew Robinson

In the early 21st century, talent appears to be on the increase, genius on the decrease. More scientists, writers, composers, and artists than ever before earn a living from their creative output. During the 20th century, performance standards and records continually improved in all fields—from music and singing to chess and sports. But where is the Darwin or the Einstein, the Mozart or the Beethoven, the Chekhov or the Shaw, the Cézanne or the Picasso or the Cartier-Bresson of today? In the cinema, the youngest of the arts, there is a growing feeling that the giants—directors such as Charles Chaplin, Akira Kurosawa, Satyajit Ray, Jean Renoir, and Orson Welles—have departed the scene, leaving behind the merely talented. Even in popular music, genius of the quality of Louis Armstrong, The Beatles, or Jimi Hendrix, seems to be a thing of the past. Of course, it may be that the geniuses of our time have yet to be recognized—a process that can take many decades after the death of a genius—but sadly this seems unlikely, at least to me.

In saying this, I know I am in danger of falling into a mindset mentioned by the great 19th-century South American explorer and polymath Alexander von Humboldt, ‘the Albert Einstein of his day’ (writes a recent biographer), in volume two of his five-volume survey Cosmos. ‘Weak minds complacently believe that in their own age humanity has reached the culminating point of intellectual progress,’ wrote Humboldt in the middle of the century, ‘forgetting that by the internal connection existing among all the natural phenomena, in proportion as we advance, the field to be traversed acquires additional extension, and that it is bounded by a horizon which incessantly recedes before the eyes of the inquirer.’ Humboldt was right. But his explorer’s image surely also implies that as knowledge continues to advance, an individual will have the time to investigate a smaller and smaller proportion of the horizon with each passing generation, because the field will continually expand. So, if ‘genius’ requires breadth of knowledge, a synoptic vision—as it seems to—then it would appear to become harder to achieve as knowledge advances.

The ever-increasing professionalization and specialisation of education and domains, especially in the sciences, is undeniable. The breadth of experience that feeds genius is harder to achieve today than in the 19th century, if not downright impossible. Had Darwin been required to do a PhD in the biology of barnacles, and then joined a university life sciences department, it is difficult to imagine his having the varied experiences and exposure to different disciplines that led to his discovery of natural selection. If the teenaged Van Gogh had gone straight to an art academy in Paris, instead of spending years working for an art dealer, trying to become a pastor, and self-tutoring himself in art while dwelling among poor Dutch peasants, would we have his late efflorescence of great painting?

A second reason for the diminution of genius appears to be the ever-increasing commercialisation of the arts, manifested in the cult of celebrity. True originality takes time—at least ten years, as I show in my book Sudden Genius?—to come to fruition; and the results may well take further time to find their audience and market. Few beginning artists, or scientists, will be fortunate enough to enjoy financial support, like Darwin and Van Gogh, over such an extended period. It is much less challenging, and more remunerative, to make a career by producing imitative, sensational, or repetitious work, like Andy Warhol, or any number of professional scientists who, as Einstein remarked, ‘take a board of wood, look for its thinnest part, and drill a great number of holes when the drilling is easy.’

Thirdly, if less obviously, our expectations of modern genius have become more sophisticated and discriminating since the time of the 19th-century Romantic movement

Add a Comment

By Jennifer Coopersmith

There is a Jane Austen-esque phrase in my book: “it is a ceaseless wonder that our universal and objective science comes out of human – sometimes all too human – enquiry”. Physics is rather hard to blog, so I’ll write instead about the practitioners of science – what are they like? Are there certain personality types that do science? Does the science from different countries end up being different?

Without question there are fewer women physicists than men physicists and, also without question, this is a result of both nature and nurture. Does it really matter how much of the ‘blame’ should be apportioned to nature and how much to nurture? Societies have evolved the way they have for a reason, and they have evolved to have less women pursuing science than men (at present). Perhaps ‘intelligence’ has even been defined in terms of what men are good at?

Do a disproportionate number of physicists suffer from Asperger Syndrome (AS)? I deplore the fashion for retrospectively diagnosing the most famous physicists, such as Newton and Einstein, as suffering in this way. However, I’ll jump on the bandwagon and offer my own diagnosis: these two had a different ‘syndrome’ – they were geniuses, period. Contrary to common supposition, it would not be an asset for a scientist to have AS. Being single-minded and having an eye for detail – good, but having a narrow focus of interest and missing too much of the rich tapestry of social and worldly interactions – not good, and less likely to lead to great heights of creativity.

In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the science of energy was concentrated in two nations, England and France. The respective scientists had different characteristics. In England (strictly, Britain) the scientists were made up from an undue number of lone eccentrics, such as the rich Gentleman-scientists, carrying out researches in their own, privately–funded laboratories (e.g. Brook Taylor, Erasmus Darwin, Henry Cavendish and James Joule) and also religious non-conformists, of average or modest financial means (e.g. Newton, Dalton, Priestley and Faraday). This contrasts with France, where, post-revolution, the scientist was a salaried professional and worked on applied problems in the new state institutions (e.g. the French Institute and the École Polytechnique). The quality and number of names concentrated into one short period and one place (Paris), particularly in applied mathematics, has never been equalled: Lagrange, Laplace, Legendre, Lavoisier and Lamarck, – and these are only the L’s. As the historian of science, Henry Guerlac, remarked, science wasn’t merely a product of the French Revolution, it was the chief cultural expression of it.

There was another difference between the English and French scientists, as sloganized by the science historian Charles Gillispie: “the French…formulate things, and the English do them.” For example, Lavoisier developed a system of chemistry, including a new nomenclature, while James Watt designed and built the steam engine.

From the mid-19th century onwards German science took a more leading role and especially noteworthy was the rise of new universities and technical institutes. While many German scientists had religious affiliations (for example Clausius was a Lutheran), their science was neutral with regards to religion, and this was different to the trend in Britain. For example, Thomson (later Lord Kelvin) talked of the Earth “waxing old” and other quotes from the Bible, and, although he was not explicit, appears to have had religious objections to Darwin’s Theory of Evolution (at any rate, he wanted his ‘age of the Earth calculations’ to contradict Darwin’s Theory).

Whereas personal, cultural, social, economic and political factors will undoubtedly influence the course of science, the ultimate laws must be free of all such associations. Presumably the laws of Thermodynamics would still

Add a Comment

Frank Close, OBE, is a Professor of Physics at Oxford University and a Fellow of Exeter College. In his new book, The Void Close tells the story of scientists’ efforts to understand the Void and in the process helps us understand that by seeking to understand the nature of the Void, we are confronting the enigma of why anything should exist at all. In the excerpt below Close looks at ancient conceptions of the Void.

The paradox of creation from the void, of Being and Non-Being, has tantalized all recorded cultures. As early as 1,700, years BC, the Creation Hymn of the Rigveda states that

There was neither non-existence nor existence then. There was neither the realm of space nor the sky which is beyond. What stirred? Where? (more…)

Share This

Add a Comment

Here's one of my all time favorite quotes that Insight of the Day sent today.

"Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world."

Albert Einstein1879-1955, Physicist


Speaking of imagination and marvelous things,...isn't it fascinating about another DaVinci painting possibly close to being revealed? I hope it is discovered and verified soon. I believe Seracini is right and that a DaVinci's painting will be uncovered. Who else but DaVinci would put a hidden message in a painting to point to another. (well..I'm sure there are many artists who have done that and still do, but it seems in character with DaVinci)

Add a Comment