顯示包含「science」標籤的文章。顯示所有文章
顯示包含「science」標籤的文章。顯示所有文章

2013年11月23日星期六

Albert Einstein, His Story and His Quotes

Was Einstein a Space Alien?
 
 
http://www.nasa.gov/vision/universe/starsgalaxies/23mar_spacealien.html
 
One hundred years ago, Albert Einstein stunned physicists with his out-of-this-world ideas.
 
Albert Einstein was exhausted. For the third night in a row, his baby son Hans, crying, kept the household awake until dawn. When Albert finally dozed off ... it was time to get up and go to work. He couldn't skip a day. He needed the job to support his young family.

Walking briskly to the Patent Office, where he was a "Technical Expert, Third Class," Albert worried about his mother. She was getting older and frail, and she didn't approve of his marriage to Mileva. Relations were strained. Albert glanced at a passing shop window. His hair was a mess; he had forgotten to comb it again.

Work. Family. Making ends meet. Albert felt all the pressure and responsibility of any young husband and father.

Young Albert Einstein at the patent office
To relax, he revolutionized physics.
Right: Young Albert Einstein at the patent office.
In 1905, at the age of 26 and four years before he was able to get a job as a professor of physics, Einstein published five of the most important papers in the history of science--all written in his "spare time." He proved that atoms and molecules existed. Before 1905, scientists weren't sure about that. He argued that light came in little bits (later called "photons") and thus laid the foundation for quantum mechanics. He described his theory of special relativity: space and time were threads in a common fabric, he proposed, which could be bent, stretched and twisted.
Oh, and by the way, E=mc2.

Before Einstein, the last scientist who had such a creative outburst was Sir Isaac Newton. It happened in 1666 when Newton secluded himself at his mother's farm to avoid an outbreak of plague at Cambridge. With nothing better to do, he developed his Theory of Universal Gravitation.

For centuries historians called 1666 Newton's annus mirabilis, or "miracle year." Now those words have a different meaning: Einstein and 1905. The United Nations has declared 2005 "The World Year of Physics" to celebrate the 100th anniversary of Einstein's annus mirabilis.

Modern pop culture paints Einstein as a bushy-haired superthinker. His ideas, we're told, were improbably far ahead of other scientists. He must have come from some other planet--maybe the same one Newton grew up on.

"Einstein was no space alien," laughs Harvard University physicist and science historian Peter Galison. "He was a man of his time." All of his 1905 papers unraveled problems being worked on, with mixed success, by other scientists. "If Einstein hadn't been born, [those papers] would have been written in some form, eventually, by others," Galison believes.
Dust flies from the tires of a moon buggy.
Above: Bushy-haired superthinker ... ordinary man ... or both? 

What's remarkable about 1905 is that a single person authored all five papers, plus the original, irreverent way Einstein came to his conclusions.

For example: the photoelectric effect. This was a puzzle in the early 1900s. When light hits a metal, like zinc, electrons fly off. This can happen only if light comes in little packets concentrated enough to knock an electron loose. A spread-out wave wouldn't do the photoelectric trick.

The solution seems simple--light is particulate. Indeed, this is the solution Einstein proposed in 1905 and won the Nobel Prize for in 1921. Other physicists like Max Planck (working on a related problem: blackbody radiation), more senior and experienced than Einstein, were closing in on the answer, but Einstein got there first. Why?

It's a question of authority.

"In Einstein's day, if you tried to say that light was made of particles, you found yourself disagreeing with physicist James Clerk Maxwell. Nobody wanted to do that," says Galison. Maxwell's equations were enormously successful, unifying the physics of electricity, magnetism and optics. Maxwell had proved beyond any doubt that light was an electromagnetic wave. Maxwell was an Authority Figure.
Einstein's High School Diploma
Einstein didn't give a fig for authority. He didn't resist being told what to do, not so much, but he hated being told what was true. Even as a child he was constantly doubting and questioning. "Your mere presence here undermines the class's respect for me," spat his 7th grade teacher, Dr. Joseph Degenhart. (Degenhart also predicted that Einstein "would never get anywhere in life.") This character flaw was to be a key ingredient in Einstein's discoveries.

Right: Einstein's High School Diploma. Contrary to urban legend, Albert did well in school.

"In 1905," notes Galison, "Einstein had just received his Ph.D. He wasn't beholden to a thesis advisor or any other authority figure." His mind was free to roam accordingly.

In retrospect, Maxwell was right. Light is a wave. But Einstein was right, too. Light is a particle. This bizarre duality baffles Physics 101 students today just as it baffled Einstein in 1905. How can light be both? Einstein had no idea.

That didn't slow him down. Disdaining caution, Einstein adopted the intuitive leap as a basic tool. "I believe in intuition and inspiration," he wrote in 1931. "At times I feel certain I am right while not knowing the reason."

Although Einstein's five papers were published in a single year, he had been thinking about physics, deeply, since childhood. "Science was dinner-table conversation in the Einstein household," explains Galison. Albert's father Hermann and uncle Jakob ran a German company making such things as dynamos, arc lamps, light bulbs and telephones. This was high-tech at the turn of the century, "like a Silicon Valley company would be today," notes Galison. "Albert's interest in science and technology came naturally."

Below: Einstein's family: Albert and sister Maja (bottom left), father Hermann (top), and mother Pauline (bottom right).
Einstein's family: Albert and sister Maja (bottom left), father Hermann (top), and mother Pauline (bottom right).
Einstein's parents sometimes took Albert to parties. No babysitter was required: Albert sat on the couch, totally absorbed, quietly doing math problems while others danced around him. Pencil and paper were Albert's GameBoy!

He had impressive powers of concentration. Einstein's sister, Maja, recalled "...even when there was a lot of noise, he could lie down on the sofa, pick up a pen and paper, precariously balance an inkwell on the backrest and engross himself in a problem so much that the background noise stimulated rather than disturbed him."

Einstein was clearly intelligent, but not outlandishly more so than his peers. "I have no special talents," he claimed, "I am only passionately curious." And again: "The contrast between the popular assessment of my powers ... and the reality is simply grotesque." Einstein credited his discoveries to imagination and pesky questioning more so than orthodox intelligence.

Later in life, it should be remembered, he struggled mightily to produce a unified field theory, combining gravity with other forces of nature. He failed. Einstein's brainpower was not limitless.
Neither was Einstein's brain. It was removed without permission by Dr. Thomas Harvey in 1955 when Einstein died. He probably expected to find something extraordinary: Einstein's mother Pauline had famously worried that baby Einstein's head was lopsided. (Einstein's grandmother had a different concern: "Much too fat!") But Einstein's brain looked much like any other, gray, crinkly, and, if anything, a trifle smaller than average.

Detailed studies of Einstein's brain are few and recent. In 1985, for instance, Prof. Marian Diamond of UC Berkeley reported an above-average number of glial cells (which nourish neurons) in areas of the left hemisphere thought to control math skills. In 1999, neuroscientist Sandra Witelson reported that Einstein's inferior parietal lobe, an area related to mathematical reasoning, was 15 percent wider than normal. Furthermore, she found, the Slyvian fissure, a groove that normally extends from the front of the brain to the back, did not go all the way in Einstein's case. Might this have allowed greater connectivity among different parts of Einstein's brain?

No one knows.

Not knowing. It makes some researchers feel uncomfortable. It exhilarated Einstein: "The fairest thing we can experience is the mysterious," he said. "It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science."

It's the fundamental emotion that Einstein felt, walking to work, awake with the baby, sitting at the dinner table. Wonder beat exhaustion, every day.

Feature Author: Dr. Tony Phillips
Feature Production Editor: Dr. Tony Phillips
Feature Production Credit: Science@NASA

_______________________________________________________________________________

A portion of Dr. Albert Einstein's God-letter:
 
  ... The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honorable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish. No interpretation no matter how subtle can (for me) change this. These subtilised interpretations are highly manifold according to their nature and have almost nothing to do with the original text. For me the Jewish religion like all other religions is an incarnation of the most childish superstitions. And the Jewish people to whom I gladly belong and with whose mentality I have a deep affinity have no different quality for me than all other people. As far as my experience goes, they are also no better than other human groups, although they are protected from the worst cancers by a lack of power. Otherwise I cannot see anything 'chosen' about them.

http://www.richarddawkins.net/news_articles/2012/8/15/albert-einstein-s-historic-1954-god-letter-handwritten-shortly-before-his-death#

 ________________________________________________________________________________

Dr. Albert Einstein Quotes

Collected Quotes from Albert Einstein

  • "Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius -- and a lot of courage -- to move in the opposite direction."
  • "Imagination is more important than knowledge."
  • "Gravitation is not responsible for people falling in love."
  • "I want to know God's thoughts; the rest are details."
  • "The hardest thing in the world to understand is the income tax."
  • "Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one."
  • "The only real valuable thing is intuition."
  • "A person starts to live when he can live outside himself."
  • "I am convinced that He (God) does not play dice."
  • "God is subtle but he is not malicious."
  • "Weakness of attitude becomes weakness of character."
  • "I never think of the future. It comes soon enough."
  • "The eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility."
  • "Sometimes one pays most for the things one gets for nothing."
  • "Science without religion is lame. Religion without science is blind."
  • "Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new."
  • "Great spirits have often encountered violent opposition from weak minds."
  • "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler."
  • "Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen."
  • "Science is a wonderful thing if one does not have to earn one's living at it."
  • "The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources."
  • "The only thing that interferes with my learning is my education."
  • "God does not care about our mathematical difficulties. He integrates empirically."
  • "The whole of science is nothing more than a refinement of everyday thinking."
  • "Technological progress is like an axe in the hands of a pathological criminal."
  • "Peace cannot be kept by force. It can only be achieved by understanding."
  • "The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is comprehensible."
  • "We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them."
  • "Education is what remains after one has forgotten everything he learned in school."
  • "The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing."
  • "Do not worry about your difficulties in Mathematics. I can assure you mine are still greater."
  • "Equations are more important to me, because politics is for the present, but an equation is something for eternity."
  • "If A is a success in life, then A equals x plus y plus z. Work is x; y is play; and z is keeping your mouth shut."
  • "Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the the universe."
  • "As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain, as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality."
  • "Whoever undertakes to set himself up as a judge of Truth and Knowledge is shipwrecked by the laughter of the gods."
  • "I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones."
  • "In order to form an immaculate member of a flock of sheep one must, above all, be a sheep."
  • "The fear of death is the most unjustified of all fears, for there's no risk of accident for someone who's dead."
  • "Too many of us look upon Americans as dollar chasers. This is a cruel libel, even if it is reiterated thoughtlessly by the Americans themselves."
  • "Heroism on command, senseless violence, and all the loathsome nonsense that goes by the name of patriotism -- how passionately I hate them!"
  • "No, this trick won't work...How on earth are you ever going to explain in terms of chemistry and physics so important a biological phenomenon as first love?"
  • "My religion consists of a humble admiration of the illimitable superior spirit who reveals himself in the slight details we are able to perceive with our frail and feeble mind."
  • "Yes, we have to divide up our time like that, between our politics and our equations. But to me our equations are far more important, for politics are only a matter of present concern. A mathematical equation stands forever."
  • "The release of atom power has changed everything except our way of thinking...the solution to this problem lies in the heart of mankind. If only I had known, I should have become a watchmaker."
  • "Great spirits have always found violent opposition from mediocrities. The latter cannot understand it when a man does not thoughtlessly submit to hereditary prejudices but honestly and courageously uses his intelligence."
  • "The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and all science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed."
  • "A man's ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeeded be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope of reward after death."
  • "The further the spiritual evolution of mankind advances, the more certain it seems to me that the path to genuine religiosity does not lie through the fear of life, and the fear of death, and blind faith, but through striving after rational knowledge."
  • "Now he has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing. People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion."
  • "You see, wire telegraph is a kind of a very, very long cat. You pull his tail in New York and his head is meowing in Los Angeles. Do you understand this? And radio operates exactly the same way: you send signals here, they receive them there. The only difference is that there is no cat."
  • "One had to cram all this stuff into one's mind for the examinations, whether one liked it or not. This coercion had such a deterring effect on me that, after I had passed the final examination, I found the consideration of any scientific problems distasteful to me for an entire year."
  • "...one of the strongest motives that lead men to art and science is escape from everyday life with its painful crudity and hopeless dreariness, from the fetters of one's own ever-shifting desires. A finely tempered nature longs to escape from the personal life into the world of objective perception and thought."
  • "He who joyfully marches to music rank and file, has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would surely suffice. This disgrace to civilization should be done away with at once. Heroism at command, how violently I hate all this, how despicable and ignoble war is; I would rather be torn to shreds than be a part of so base an action. It is my conviction that killing under the cloak of war is nothing but an act of murder."
  • "A human being is a part of a whole, called by us _universe_, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest... a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty."
  • "Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts." (Sign hanging in Einstein's office at Princeton) 

Credit: Kevin Harris

2013年11月6日星期三

北極光 Northern Lights

The northern lights are caused by collisions between fast-moving particles (electrons) from space and the oxygen and nitrogen gas in our atmosphere. These electrons originate in the magnetosphere, the region of space controlled by Earth’s magnetic field. As they rain into the atmosphere, the electrons impart energy to oxygen and nitrogen molecules, making them excited. When the molecules return to their normal state, they release photons, small bursts of energy in the form of light. [1]

[Google Translate:] 北極光的快速移動的粒子(電子從空間我們大氣中氧和氮的氣體之間的碰撞所造成的這些電子起源於磁層地球磁場控制的空間區域下雨到大氣中,因為它們電子傳遞氧和氮分子能量使它們激發分子恢復到正常狀態他們釋放光子爆發的能量以光的形式

Astronaut Mike Hopkins, aboard the International Space Station, shared this picture of the northern lights on Oct. 9, 2013, saying "The pic doesn't do the northern lights justice. Covered the whole sky. Truly amazing!": [1]

[Google Translate:] 登上國際空間站宇航員邁克·霍普金斯大學,分享這幅畫2013年10月9日北極光PIC不會北極光正義覆蓋了整個天空真正驚人


---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
IMAGE SEARCH - NORTHERN LIGHTS

Link: http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/image/0311/auroraOK_ewoldt_f1.jpg

Link: http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/image/0208/aurperseids_clark_full.jpg


Link: http://www.earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/GreenlandBlogKoenig/images/greenland_aurora.jpg

Video:

Aurora Borealis (Northern Lights). Time lapses in Norway. Polarlichter. Der Himmel brennt.



----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[1] http://www.nasa.gov/content/northern-lights-viewed-from-the-international-space-station/#.UnrFPxCBmbc

2013年11月1日星期五

Google手機 - Android Kitkat

Android is the operating system that powers over 1 billion smartphones and tablets. Since these devices make our lives so sweet (the vender says), each Android version is named after a dessert: Cupcake, Donut, Eclair, Froyo, Gingerbread, Honeycomb, Ice Cream Sandwich, and Jelly Bean. And now, Kitkat.

Google 發表 Nexus 5 手機,將於美國、加拿大、澳洲、法國、德國、西班牙、日本、韓國開賣,用戶可透過 Google Play 訂購,同時也會與 Sprint, T-Mobile, Amazon, Best Buy and RadioShack 合作推出專案價。Nexus 5 係由 LG代工生產,螢幕為 4.95吋。Google 也發表代號 KitKat 的 Android 4.4 作業系統。



2013年10月31日星期四

Happy Halloween - 'Witch Head' Brews Baby Stars 快樂萬聖節 - 女巫頭星群嬰兒恆星

'Witch Head' Brews Baby Stars 
 
 
A witch appears to be screaming out into space in this new image from NASA's Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE. The infrared portrait shows the Witch Head nebula, named after its resemblance to the profile of a wicked witch. Astronomers say the billowy clouds of the nebula, where baby stars are brewing, are being lit up by massive stars. Dust in the cloud is being hit with starlight, causing it to glow with infrared light, which was picked up by WISE's detectors.
The Witch Head nebula is estimated to be hundreds of light-years away in the Orion constellation, just off the famous hunter's knee.

WISE was recently "awakened" to hunt for asteroids in a program called NEOWISE. The reactivation came after the spacecraft was put into hibernation in 2011, when it completed two full scans of the sky, as planned.

Google Translate 谷歌翻譯:

一個巫婆出現尖叫在這個新形象進入太空美國宇航局的寬視野紅外巡天探測器或明智紅外線畫像顯示女巫頭星雲,它的相似而得名一個壞巫婆檔案天文學家說,洶湧雲彩星雲嬰兒恆星正在醞釀質量恆星點燃了星光在雲中塵埃被擊中使其煥發出紅外光,WISE探測器被拾起

女巫頭星雲的估計是幾百光年獵戶星座,只是關閉了著名獵人的膝蓋

最近被驚醒追捕小行星名為NEOWISE程序激活來到飛船進入休眠狀態,按計劃在2011年,當它完成兩個完整的天空掃描


Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Dr Seuss - Halloween is Grinch Night 

蘇斯博士 - 萬聖節之夜聖誕怪傑