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jtotheizzoe:

Gaming Your Way Through a Relativistic Universe

Remember in Super Mario Brothers, how the music and time would speed up when you started running low on the clock? Well, here’s a new level of video game time-freakiness, all about relativity. 

Strange things happen to our perception of the universe when we travel close to the speed of light (you know, if we could travel close to the speed of light). Special relativity, as worked out by Einstein and others, gives us plenty of weirdness when it comes to our perception of time and distance at those extreme speeds. MIT’s Game Lab has developed a game that simulates that experience. It’s called A Slower Speed of Light.

The closer we get to the speed of light, time slows down for us relative to someone watching us (“time dilation”), light shifts to red and blue, and the lengths of things contract in the direction we are moving. Weirded out yet? Ethan Siegel has a pretty good explanation of all those strange effects.

In the game, the object is to collect these orbs. As you grab each one, the speed of light slows down a bit. That means that you get closer and closer to traveling at the speed of light, and the game shifts the visuals and your movement to give you an idea of what that might feel like. It is not unlike a relativistic drug trip.

The game is available for Mac and PC. Pause the Halo and give relativity a whirl. It’s a video game that Einstein would have approved of!

(via Discovery News)

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Rare and Iconic Photos of Einstein Celebrate His Nobel Win 90 Years Ago Ask anyone to name an iconic scientist and most people will say Albert Einstein. He was his generation’s greatest physicist as well as an international celebrity and humanitarian. Many people can tell you at least something about his renowned Theory of Relativity, though the details probably elude them right now. Einstein’s fame extends to pop culture, where photos of the eminent scientist can be seen plastered on mugs, t-shirts, postcards, and internet memes. Though many images are well known — Einstein framed by his wild hair sticking his tongue out at the camera — there are still a good number that rarely see the light of day. In honor of the 90th anniversary of Albert Einstein winning the Nobel Prize in physics, we are presenting a collection of photographs — some famous, some rare — that exemplify this singular man. The images come from the Bettmann Archive, a collection of more than 11 million historical photographs owned by Corbis Images. Einstein actually received the 1921 Nobel physics prize but, because of the first World War, the announcement was delayed. He got the medal on Nov. 9, 1922 not for his Theory of Relativity, which was still controversial at the time, but for his earlier work on the photoelectric effect, which is the basis for modern solar power. Einstein wasn’t actually in Europe during the prize ceremony, he was away on a cross-country journey to lecture in Japan. His friend and fellow physicist Niels Bohr received the 1922 physics Nobel during the same ceremony and was upset that Einstein wouldn’t be there to attend the proceedings with him. Continue to Gallery

Rare and Iconic Photos of Einstein Celebrate His Nobel Win 90 Years Ago

Ask anyone to name an iconic scientist and most people will say Albert Einstein. He was his generation’s greatest physicist as well as an international celebrity and humanitarian. Many people can tell you at least something about his renowned Theory of Relativity, though the details probably elude them right now.

Einstein’s fame extends to pop culture, where photos of the eminent scientist can be seen plastered on mugs, t-shirts, postcards, and internet memes. Though many images are well known — Einstein framed by his wild hair sticking his tongue out at the camera — there are still a good number that rarely see the light of day.

In honor of the 90th anniversary of Albert Einstein winning the Nobel Prize in physics, we are presenting a collection of photographs — some famous, some rare — that exemplify this singular man. The images come from the Bettmann Archive, a collection of more than 11 million historical photographs owned by Corbis Images.

Einstein actually received the 1921 Nobel physics prize but, because of the first World War, the announcement was delayed. He got the medal on Nov. 9, 1922 not for his Theory of Relativity, which was still controversial at the time, but for his earlier work on the photoelectric effect, which is the basis for modern solar power. Einstein wasn’t actually in Europe during the prize ceremony, he was away on a cross-country journey to lecture in Japan. His friend and fellow physicist Niels Bohr received the 1922 physics Nobel during the same ceremony and was upset that Einstein wouldn’t be there to attend the proceedings with him.

Continue to Gallery

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ikenbot: Warp Drive May Be More Feasible Than Thought, Scientists Say A warp drive to achieve faster-than-light travel — a concept popularized in television’s Star Trek — may not be as unrealistic as once thought, scientists say. A warp drive would manipulate space-time itself to move a starship, taking advantage of a loophole in the laws of physics that prevent anything from moving faster than light. A concept for a real-life warp drive was suggested in 1994 by Mexican physicist Miguel Alcubierre; however, subsequent calculations found that such a device would require prohibitive amounts of energy. Now physicists say that adjustments can be made to the proposed warp drive that would enable it to run on significantly less energy, potentially bringing the idea back from the realm of science fiction into science. “There is hope,” Harold “Sonny” White of NASA’s Johnson Space Center said here Friday (Sept. 14) at the 100 Year Starship Symposium, a meeting to discuss the challenges of interstellar spaceflight. Warping space-time An Alcubierre warp drive would involve a football-shape spacecraft attached to a large ring encircling it. This ring, potentially made of exotic matter, would cause space-time to warp around the starship, creating a region of contracted space in front of it and expanded space behind. Meanwhile, the starship itself would stay inside a bubble of flat space-time that wasn’t being warped at all. “Everything within space is restricted by the speed of light,” explained Richard Obousy, president of Icarus Interstellar, a non-profit group of scientists and engineers devoted to pursuing interstellar spaceflight. “But the really cool thing is space-time, the fabric of space, is not limited by the speed of light.” With this concept, the spacecraft would be able to achieve an effective speed of about 10 times the speed of light, all without breaking the cosmic speed limit. The only problem is, previous studies estimated the warp drive would require a minimum amount of energy about equal to the mass-energy of the planet Jupiter. But recently White calculated what would happen if the shape of the ring encircling the spacecraft was adjusted into more of a rounded donut, as opposed to a flat ring. He found in that case, the warp drive could be powered by a mass about the size of a spacecraft like the Voyager 1 probe NASA launched in 1977. Furthermore, if the intensity of the space warps can be oscillated over time, the energy required is reduced even more, White found. “The findings I presented today change it from impractical to plausible and worth further investigation,” White told SPACE.com. “The additional energy reduction realized by oscillating the bubble intensity is an interesting conjecture that we will enjoy looking at in the lab.” Full Article

ikenbot:

Warp Drive May Be More Feasible Than Thought, Scientists Say

A warp drive to achieve faster-than-light travel — a concept popularized in television’s Star Trek — may not be as unrealistic as once thought, scientists say.

A warp drive would manipulate space-time itself to move a starship, taking advantage of a loophole in the laws of physics that prevent anything from moving faster than light. A concept for a real-life warp drive was suggested in 1994 by Mexican physicist Miguel Alcubierre; however, subsequent calculations found that such a device would require prohibitive amounts of energy.

Now physicists say that adjustments can be made to the proposed warp drive that would enable it to run on significantly less energy, potentially bringing the idea back from the realm of science fiction into science.

“There is hope,” Harold “Sonny” White of NASA’s Johnson Space Center said here Friday (Sept. 14) at the 100 Year Starship Symposium, a meeting to discuss the challenges of interstellar spaceflight.

Warping space-time

An Alcubierre warp drive would involve a football-shape spacecraft attached to a large ring encircling it. This ring, potentially made of exotic matter, would cause space-time to warp around the starship, creating a region of contracted space in front of it and expanded space behind.

Meanwhile, the starship itself would stay inside a bubble of flat space-time that wasn’t being warped at all.

“Everything within space is restricted by the speed of light,” explained Richard Obousy, president of Icarus Interstellar, a non-profit group of scientists and engineers devoted to pursuing interstellar spaceflight. “But the really cool thing is space-time, the fabric of space, is not limited by the speed of light.”

With this concept, the spacecraft would be able to achieve an effective speed of about 10 times the speed of light, all without breaking the cosmic speed limit.

The only problem is, previous studies estimated the warp drive would require a minimum amount of energy about equal to the mass-energy of the planet Jupiter.

But recently White calculated what would happen if the shape of the ring encircling the spacecraft was adjusted into more of a rounded donut, as opposed to a flat ring. He found in that case, the warp drive could be powered by a mass about the size of a spacecraft like the Voyager 1 probe NASA launched in 1977.

Furthermore, if the intensity of the space warps can be oscillated over time, the energy required is reduced even more, White found.

“The findings I presented today change it from impractical to plausible and worth further investigation,” White told SPACE.com. “The additional energy reduction realized by oscillating the bubble intensity is an interesting conjecture that we will enjoy looking at in the lab.”

Full Article

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ikenbot: Black Hole ‘Bonanza’: Millions Found by NASA Space Telescope A jackpot of previously unknown black holes across the universe has been discovered by the infrared eyes of a prolific NASA sky-mapping telescope. The cosmic find comes from data collected by NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey (WISE) telescope, which scanned the entire sky in infrared light from December 2009 to February 2011. The full catalog of observations by WISE during its mission was publicly released in March, and astronomers are still poring through this celestrial trove for discoveries. “WISE has found a bonanza of black holes in the universe,” astronomer Daniel Stern of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, Calif., said during a news briefing today (Aug. 29). WISE turned up about three times as many black holes as have been found by comparable surveys in visible light, offering up a total of 2.5 million new sources across the sky.

ikenbot:

Black Hole ‘Bonanza’: Millions Found by NASA Space Telescope

A jackpot of previously unknown black holes across the universe has been discovered by the infrared eyes of a prolific NASA sky-mapping telescope.

The cosmic find comes from data collected by NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey (WISE) telescope, which scanned the entire sky in infrared light from December 2009 to February 2011. The full catalog of observations by WISE during its mission was publicly released in March, and astronomers are still poring through this celestrial trove for discoveries.

“WISE has found a bonanza of black holes in the universe,” astronomer Daniel Stern of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, Calif., said during a news briefing today (Aug. 29). WISE turned up about three times as many black holes as have been found by comparable surveys in visible light, offering up a total of 2.5 million new sources across the sky.

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quantumaniac:

Einstein’s Office

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expose-the-light:

How Einstein Came Up With Special Relativity

Time dilation. Length contraction. The fact that time moves faster at your face than it does at your feet. These are all experimentally verified consequences of the Special Theory of Relativity, proposed in 1905 by Albert Einstein. But the theory also helped explain one of the most nagging questions of modern physics, namely: how anything other than light can move. Minutephysics’ Henry Reich explains, with the help of some sliding switcheroos. [Via Henry Reich]

(via expose-the-light)

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Nov. 21, 1905: It Was a Very Good Year, If You Were Einstein 1905: The Annalen der Physik (Annals of Physics) publishes Albert Einstein’s paper, “Does the Inertia of a Body Depend Upon Its Energy Content?” It is the last in a series known collectively as Einstein’s “annus mirabilis,” or “extraordinary year,” papers. Taken as a whole, they represent his basic theory of relativity and help form the basis of modern physics. Einstein’s final 1905 paper (.pdf) solidifies his theory of special relativity (E = mc²), demonstrating that radiation converts mass to energy. Work on these papers was completed while Einstein, then 26 and unable to land a teaching job, kicked around the Swiss Patent Office as a clerk. The year 1905 proved to be an extraordinary one, indeed, and effectively launched Einstein’s career. (“Annus mirabilis” was originally used in reference to Isaac Newton who, while devising his laws of motion, had a pretty good year himself in 1666.) Einstein’s contemporaries quickly recognized they were dealing with a towering, if not always agreeable, intellect. They understood, perhaps better than anyone else, that here was a man who was changing the world. His tendency toward isolation, however, would hurt him later in his career, causing him to ignore other developments in theoretical physics and in some ways leaving him behind. He was, however, a humanist at heart and his political consciousness continued evolving, formed by the horrors of the 20th century. A political refugee from Nazi Germany, Einstein eventually wound up in the United States where, despite his pacifist views, he urged development of the atomic bomb (mainly out of the fear that Germany would develop one first). But Einstein disdained nationalism (a cultural Zionist, he was not thrilled by the prospect of an independent Jewish state), he championed civil rights and ran afoul of many in his adopted country by his open contempt for capitalism, which he dismissed as the “predatory phase of human development.” None of which prevented Time magazine from selecting Einstein its “Person of the Century.” (Source: Various) Article published on Wired last November 21.

Nov. 21, 1905: It Was a Very Good Year, If You Were Einstein

1905: The Annalen der Physik (Annals of Physics) publishes Albert Einstein’s paper, “Does the Inertia of a Body Depend Upon Its Energy Content?” It is the last in a series known collectively as Einstein’s “annus mirabilis,” or “extraordinary year,” papers. Taken as a whole, they represent his basic theory of relativity and help form the basis of modern physics.

Einstein’s final 1905 paper (.pdf) solidifies his theory of special relativity (E = mc²), demonstrating that radiation converts mass to energy.

Work on these papers was completed while Einstein, then 26 and unable to land a teaching job, kicked around the Swiss Patent Office as a clerk. The year 1905 proved to be an extraordinary one, indeed, and effectively launched Einstein’s career. (“Annus mirabilis” was originally used in reference to Isaac Newton who, while devising his laws of motion, had a pretty good year himself in 1666.)

Einstein’s contemporaries quickly recognized they were dealing with a towering, if not always agreeable, intellect. They understood, perhaps better than anyone else, that here was a man who was changing the world. His tendency toward isolation, however, would hurt him later in his career, causing him to ignore other developments in theoretical physics and in some ways leaving him behind.

He was, however, a humanist at heart and his political consciousness continued evolving, formed by the horrors of the 20th century. A political refugee from Nazi Germany, Einstein eventually wound up in the United States where, despite his pacifist views, he urged development of the atomic bomb (mainly out of the fear that Germany would develop one first).

But Einstein disdained nationalism (a cultural Zionist, he was not thrilled by the prospect of an independent Jewish state), he championed civil rights and ran afoul of many in his adopted country by his open contempt for capitalism, which he dismissed as the “predatory phase of human development.”

None of which prevented Time magazine from selecting Einstein its “Person of the Century.”

(Source: Various)

Article published on Wired last November 21.

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thequantumlife: Gravity bends more than just space. It bends time. The early results from Gravity Probe B, one of Nasa’s most complicated satellites, confirmed yesterday ‘to a precision of better than 1 per cent’ the assertion Einstein made 90 years ago - that an object such as the Earth does indeed distort the fabric of space and time. But this - what is referred to as the ‘geodetic’ effect - is only half of the theory. The other, ‘frame-dragging’, stated that as the world spins it drags the fabric of the universe behind it. […] According to Einstein, in the same way that a large ball placed on a elasticated cloth stretches the fabric and causes it to sag, so planets and stars warp space-time. A marble moving along the sagging cloth will be drawn towards the ball, as the Earth is to the Sun, but not fall into it as long as it keeps moving at speed. Gravity, argued Einstein, was not an attractive force between bodies as had been previously thought. That probably didn’t clarify it any. But there’s more! When Einstein wrote his general theory of relativity in 1915, he found a new way to describe gravity. It was not a force, as Sir Isaac Newton had supposed, but a consequence of the distortion of space and time, conceived together in his theory as ‘space-time’. Any object distorts the fabric of space-time and the bigger it is, the greater the effect. Just as a bowling ball placed on a trampoline stretches the fabric and causes it to sag, so planets and stars warp space-time - a phenomenon known as the ‘geodetic effect’. A marble moving along the trampoline will be drawn inexorably towards the ball. Thus the planets orbiting the Sun are not being pulled by the Sun; they are following the curved space-time deformation caused by the Sun. The reason the planets never fall into the Sun is because of the speed at which they are travelling. According to the theory, matter and energy distort space-time, curving it around themselves. ‘Frame dragging’ theoretically occurs when the rotation of a large body ‘twists’ nearby space and time. It is this second part of Einstein’s theory that the Nasa mission has yet to corroborate. Read more!    

thequantumlife:

Gravity bends more than just space. It bends time.

The early results from Gravity Probe B, one of Nasa’s most complicated satellites, confirmed yesterday ‘to a precision of better than 1 per cent’ the assertion Einstein made 90 years ago - that an object such as the Earth does indeed distort the fabric of space and time.

But this - what is referred to as the ‘geodetic’ effect - is only half of the theory. The other, ‘frame-dragging’, stated that as the world spins it drags the fabric of the universe behind it.

[…]

According to Einstein, in the same way that a large ball placed on a elasticated cloth stretches the fabric and causes it to sag, so planets and stars warp space-time. A marble moving along the sagging cloth will be drawn towards the ball, as the Earth is to the Sun, but not fall into it as long as it keeps moving at speed. Gravity, argued Einstein, was not an attractive force between bodies as had been previously thought.

That probably didn’t clarify it any. But there’s more!

When Einstein wrote his general theory of relativity in 1915, he found a new way to describe gravity. It was not a force, as Sir Isaac Newton had supposed, but a consequence of the distortion of space and time, conceived together in his theory as ‘space-time’. Any object distorts the fabric of space-time and the bigger it is, the greater the effect.

Just as a bowling ball placed on a trampoline stretches the fabric and causes it to sag, so planets and stars warp space-time - a phenomenon known as the ‘geodetic effect’. A marble moving along the trampoline will be drawn inexorably towards the ball.

Thus the planets orbiting the Sun are not being pulled by the Sun; they are following the curved space-time deformation caused by the Sun. The reason the planets never fall into the Sun is because of the speed at which they are travelling.

According to the theory, matter and energy distort space-time, curving it around themselves. ‘Frame dragging’ theoretically occurs when the rotation of a large body ‘twists’ nearby space and time. It is this second part of Einstein’s theory that the Nasa mission has yet to corroborate.

Read more!

 

 

(via ikenbot)

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cwnl: El Gordo: Massive Galaxy Cluster Caught in Midst of Violent Merger Tipping the scales at two quadrillion times the mass of the sun, the El Gordo galaxy cluster is the largest, hottest, and most energetic cluster ever seen. Officially called ACT-CL J0102-4915, astronomers nicknamed the cluster “El Gordo” — meaning the fat one — due to its heft. A large portion of its mass is in the form of dark matter, an invisible material that pervades the universe. Galaxy clusters are the largest known objects in the universe, occurring when hundreds or even thousands of galaxies come together. El Gordo is located more than 7 billion light years from Earth. At this distance, the universe was only half its current age, presenting a puzzle for researchers. Could such a massive cluster have formed so early in the universe? “Although El Gordo is a very rare object, it’s not inconsistent with current formation theories,” said astronomer Jack Hughes of Rutgers University, who presented the giant object Jan. 10 at the [American Astronomical Society](http://aas.org/meetings/aas219) meeting. Part of the reason for the cluster’s enormous size is that it is was once two separate clusters that are now undergoing a collision. El Gordo has two density peaks, corresponding to the centers of the fuzzy purple blobs in the image above, indicating the locations of the two clusters. The bluish feature in the center of the picture is a large gas and dust pocket caught at the point of the crash. The wake of this violent impact appears as a hazy tail streaming toward the upper right in the image. Because dark matter hardly interacts, even with itself, the dark matter halos of the clusters are thought to be essentially collisionless, said Hughes. “They stream through each other,” he said. It is only the gas and dust of the clusters and interacts, producing tremendous shocks and releasing large amounts of energy.

cwnl:

El Gordo: Massive Galaxy Cluster Caught in Midst of Violent Merger

Tipping the scales at two quadrillion times the mass of the sun, the El Gordo galaxy cluster is the largest, hottest, and most energetic cluster ever seen.

Officially called ACT-CL J0102-4915, astronomers nicknamed the cluster “El Gordo” — meaning the fat one — due to its heft. A large portion of its mass is in the form of dark matter, an invisible material that pervades the universe.

Galaxy clusters are the largest known objects in the universe, occurring when hundreds or even thousands of galaxies come together.

El Gordo is located more than 7 billion light years from Earth. At this distance, the universe was only half its current age, presenting a puzzle for researchers. Could such a massive cluster have formed so early in the universe?

“Although El Gordo is a very rare object, it’s not inconsistent with current formation theories,” said astronomer Jack Hughes of Rutgers University, who presented the giant object Jan. 10 at the [American Astronomical Society](http://aas.org/meetings/aas219) meeting.

Part of the reason for the cluster’s enormous size is that it is was once two separate clusters that are now undergoing a collision. El Gordo has two density peaks, corresponding to the centers of the fuzzy purple blobs in the image above, indicating the locations of the two clusters.

The bluish feature in the center of the picture is a large gas and dust pocket caught at the point of the crash. The wake of this violent impact appears as a hazy tail streaming toward the upper right in the image.

Because dark matter hardly interacts, even with itself, the dark matter halos of the clusters are thought to be essentially collisionless, said Hughes. “They stream through each other,” he said.

It is only the gas and dust of the clusters and interacts, producing tremendous shocks and releasing large amounts of energy.

(via ikenbot)

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Galaxy Clusters Back Up Einstein’s Theory of Relativity Although researchers have proved general relativity on the scale of the solar system, validating it on cosmic scales has been more challenging. That’s exactly what a group of astrophysicists in Denmark have now done. The researchers, led by Radek Wojtak of the Niels Bohr Institute at the University of Copenhagen, set out to test a classic prediction of general relativity: that light will lose energy as it is escaping a gravitational field. The stronger the field, the greater the energy loss suffered by the light. As a result, photons emitted from the center of a galaxy cluster — a massive object containing thousands of galaxies — should lose more energy than photons coming from the edge of the cluster because gravity is strongest in the center. And so, light emerging from the center should become longer in wavelength than light coming from the edges, shifting toward the red end of the light spectrum. The effect is known as gravitational redshifting. Wojtak and his colleagues knew that measuring gravitational redshifting within a single galaxy cluster would be difficult because the effect is very small and needs to be teased apart from the redshifting caused by the orbital velocity of individual galaxies within the cluster and the redshifting caused by the expansion of the universe. The researchers approached the problem by averaging data collected from 8000 galaxy clusters by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. The hope was to detect gravitational redshift “by studying the properties of the redshift distribution of galaxies in clusters rather than by looking at redshifts of individual galaxies separately,” Wojtak explains. Sure enough, the researchers found that the light from the clusters was redshifted in proportion to the distance from the center of the cluster, as predicted by general relativity. “We could measure small differences in the redshift of the galaxies and see that the light from galaxies in the middle of a cluster had to ‘crawl’ out through the gravitational field, while it was easier for the light from the outlying galaxies to emerge,” Wojtak says. The findings appear online today in Nature. Read Full

Galaxy Clusters Back Up Einstein’s Theory of Relativity

Although researchers have proved general relativity on the scale of the solar system, validating it on cosmic scales has been more challenging. That’s exactly what a group of astrophysicists in Denmark have now done.

The researchers, led by Radek Wojtak of the Niels Bohr Institute at the University of Copenhagen, set out to test a classic prediction of general relativity: that light will lose energy as it is escaping a gravitational field. The stronger the field, the greater the energy loss suffered by the light. As a result, photons emitted from the center of a galaxy cluster — a massive object containing thousands of galaxies — should lose more energy than photons coming from the edge of the cluster because gravity is strongest in the center. And so, light emerging from the center should become longer in wavelength than light coming from the edges, shifting toward the red end of the light spectrum. The effect is known as gravitational redshifting.

Wojtak and his colleagues knew that measuring gravitational redshifting within a single galaxy cluster would be difficult because the effect is very small and needs to be teased apart from the redshifting caused by the orbital velocity of individual galaxies within the cluster and the redshifting caused by the expansion of the universe. The researchers approached the problem by averaging data collected from 8000 galaxy clusters by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. The hope was to detect gravitational redshift “by studying the properties of the redshift distribution of galaxies in clusters rather than by looking at redshifts of individual galaxies separately,” Wojtak explains.

Sure enough, the researchers found that the light from the clusters was redshifted in proportion to the distance from the center of the cluster, as predicted by general relativity. “We could measure small differences in the redshift of the galaxies and see that the light from galaxies in the middle of a cluster had to ‘crawl’ out through the gravitational field, while it was easier for the light from the outlying galaxies to emerge,” Wojtak says. The findings appear online today in Nature.

Read Full

(via ikenbot)

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cwnl: On This Day: 9/27/1905 Albert Einstein Describes Space & Time Happy Birthday E=mc^2! Now turning 106 years old Albert Einstein (1879-1955) is considered by many the greatest astrophysicist. He is pictured here in the Swiss Patent Office where he did much of his great work. Einstein’s many visionary scientific contributions include the equivalence of mass and energy (E=mc^2), how the maximum speed limit of light affects measurements of time and space (special relativity), and a more accurate theory of gravity based on simple geometric concepts (general relativity). One reason Einstein was awarded the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics was to make the prize more prestigious. September 27, 1905 is generally considered the birthday of the equation because that is the day that Einstein’s paper outlining the significance of the equation arrived in the offices of the German journal Annalen der Physik.

cwnl:

On This Day: 9/27/1905 Albert Einstein Describes Space & Time

Happy Birthday E=mc^2! Now turning 106 years old

Albert Einstein (1879-1955) is considered by many the greatest astrophysicist. He is pictured here in the Swiss Patent Office where he did much of his great work. Einstein’s many visionary scientific contributions include the equivalence of mass and energy (E=mc^2), how the maximum speed limit of light affects measurements of time and space (special relativity), and a more accurate theory of gravity based on simple geometric concepts (general relativity). One reason Einstein was awarded the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics was to make the prize more prestigious.

September 27, 1905 is generally considered the birthday of the equation because that is the day that Einstein’s paper outlining the significance of the equation arrived in the offices of the German journal Annalen der Physik.

(via holanohayolas-deactivated201207)

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