Posts Tagged ‘Albert Einstein’
Inside knowledge…
Original x-rays of Einstein’s brain will go under the gavel on December 3 at Julien’s Auctions in Hollywood (along with other such memorabilia as the first guitar used on stage by Jimi Hendrix and the Michael Jackson “Bad” costume made for and worn by the chimp Bubbles).
Taken by an old friend when the Father of Modern Physics was 66, the x-rays may illustrate the root of the genius’ genius; as the BBC explains:
Scientists at McMaster University, Ontario, Canada compared the shape and size Einstein’s brain with those of 35 men and 56 women with average intelligence.
They think their findings may well explain his genius for mathematical and spatial thinking.
In general, Einstein’s brain was the same as all the others except in one particular area – the region responsible for mathematical thought and the ability to think in terms of space and movement.
Uniquely, Einstein’s brain also lacked a groove that normally runs through part of this area. The researchers suggest that its absence may have allowed the neurons to communicate much more easily.
“This unusual brain anatomy may explain why Einstein thought the way he did,” said Professor Sandra Witelson, who led the research published in the Lancet.
“Einstein’s own description of his scientific thinking was that words did not seem to play a role. Instead he saw more or less clear images of a visual kind,” she said.
The x-rays are expected to fetch $1-2,000.
(TotH to Cakehead Loves Evil)
As we muse that the juxtaposition of items in the auction is… well, relatively odd, we might cast our eyes to the heavens in honor of Johannes Kepler, the mathematician, astronomer, and astrologer (the distinctions among those fields being pretty vague in Kepler’s time); he died on this date in 1630.
Kepler’s “laws of planetary motion”– most famously, that the planets move in elliptical orbits around the Sun– were the foundation on which Isaac Newton (one of the few humans arguably smarter than Einstein) built his theory of universal gravitation.
Next to nothing…
Neutinos are so small and so nearly without mass that 50 trillion of them pass unimpeded through a person’s body every second. Ironically, this nearly nonexistent particle seems poised to start a revolution…
One of the two detectors in the MINOS neutrino experiment sits in the Soudan Underground Laboratory in Minnesota. A recent analysis of MINOS data hints that neutrinos and antineutrinos might not weigh the same-- a challenge to Einstein’s theory of special relativity.
Current theories of particle physics are based on two assumptions: All known forces arise from interactions with neighboring particles and they all obey Einstein’s special relativity theory, which holds that the speed of light and the laws of physics are always the same regardless of a particle’s speed or rotation. For that to hold true, particles and antiparticles—-including neutrinos and their antipartners — must have the same mass.
But new measurements from an experiment called MINOS (for Main Injector Neutrino Oscillation Search) seem to contradict that notion. The three known types of neutrinos —electron, muon and tau — act like chameleons, transforming from one type into another as they travel.
MINOS found that during a 735-kilometer journey from Fermilab to the Soudan Underground Laboratory in Minnesota, about 37 percent of muon antineutrinos disappeared — presumably morphing into one of the other neutrino types — compared with just 19 percent of muon neutrinos, reports MINOS spokesman Robert Plunkett of Fermilab.
That difference in transformation rates suggests a difference in mass between antineutrinos and neutrinos… “One thing is clear — if the masses are different for neutrinos and antineutrinos, then the most sacred symmetry of quantum field theory, CPT (for charge, parity and time), is broken in the neutrino sector,” says Tom Weiler of Vanderbilt University in Nashville.
Read the full story in Science News.
As we wax nostalgic for symmetry, we might send a “Alles Gute zum Geburtstag” to the remarkable Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, the philosopher, mathematician, and political adviser, who was important both as a metaphysician and as a logician, but who is probably best remembered for his independent invention of the calculus; he was born on this date in 1646. Leibniz independently discovered and developed differential and integral calculus, which he published in 1684; but he became involved in a bitter priority dispute with Isaac Newton, whose ideas on the calculus were developed earlier (1665), but published later (1687).
Playing the odds…
A P value is the probability of an observed (or more extreme) result arising only from chance.
It’s science’s dirtiest secret: The “scientific method” of testing hypotheses by statistical analysis stands on a flimsy foundation. Statistical tests are supposed to guide scientists in judging whether an experimental result reflects some real effect or is merely a random fluke, but the standard methods mix mutually inconsistent philosophies and offer no meaningful basis for making such decisions. Even when performed correctly, statistical tests are widely misunderstood and frequently misinterpreted. As a result, countless conclusions in the scientific literature are erroneous, and tests of medical dangers or treatments are often contradictory and confusing.
Replicating a result helps establish its validity more securely, but the common tactic of combining numerous studies into one analysis, while sound in principle, is seldom conducted properly in practice.
Experts in the math of probability and statistics are well aware of these problems and have for decades expressed concern about them in major journals. Over the years, hundreds of published papers have warned that science’s love affair with statistics has spawned countless illegitimate findings. In fact, if you believe what you read in the scientific literature, you shouldn’t believe what you read in the scientific literature.
“There is increasing concern,” declared epidemiologist John Ioannidis in a highly cited 2005 paper in PLoS Medicine, “that in modern research, false findings may be the majority or even the vast majority of published research claims.”
Ioannidis claimed to prove that more than half of published findings are false, but his analysis came under fire for statistical shortcomings of its own. “It may be true, but he didn’t prove it,” says biostatistician Steven Goodman of the Johns Hopkins University School of Public Health. On the other hand, says Goodman, the basic message stands. “There are more false claims made in the medical literature than anybody appreciates,” he says. “There’s no question about that.”
Nobody contends that all of science is wrong, or that it hasn’t compiled an impressive array of truths about the natural world. Still, any single scientific study alone is quite likely to be incorrect, thanks largely to the fact that the standard statistical system for drawing conclusions is, in essence, illogical. “A lot of scientists don’t understand statistics,” says Goodman. “And they don’t understand statistics because the statistics don’t make sense”…
What’s one to make of the stream of “eat this,” “avoid that” studies surfacing nearly daily? It’s an odds-on bet that readers will find out in the complete Science News story, “Odds Are, It’s Wrong.”
As we tell Monty that we’ll take what’s behind Door #2, we might recall that it was on this date in 1905 that Albert Einstein kicked off “Annus Mirabilis” with the publication of the first of his four epoch-making papers in Annalen der Physik— this one, proposing energy “quanta”– thus kicking off the year in which he reinvented physics and our understanding of reality.
The second of those papers, on Brownian motion, was the very first work of “statistical physics.”
Einstein, dressed for the patent office, 1905
Happy Náw-Rúz! This date in 1844 was the first day of the first year of the Bahai calendar.
“…what remains after one has forgotten everything he learned at school.”*
A guest post from Scenarios and Strategy (here, with an almanac entry)…
The Bureau of Labor Statistics reminds us that it’s smart to stay in school:
But as Calculated Risk reports, while unemployment among the best educated is still lowest, it’s increased as much in percentage terms for them during this current recession as for any other group.
click to enlargeOne notes that all four groups** were slow to rebound after the 2001 recession– not an encouraging reminder if one is hoping for a brisk employment-led, consumption-fueled recovery this time around.
But in some ways more striking is a difference we might expect, but that hasn’t yet emerged. Calculated Risk:
I’d expect the unemployment rate to fall faster for workers with higher levels of education, since their skills are more transferable, than for workers with less education. I’d also expect the unemployment rate for workers with lower levels of education to stay elevated longer in this “recovery” because there is no building boom this time. Just a guess and it isn’t happening so far … currently the unemployment rate for the highest educated group is still increasing.
Clearly, from an individual’s point-of-view, it’s still smarter to get more education than less. But the perturbations of past periods remind us that the gearing between between academic degrees and financial success isn’t always perfectly tight… Indeed, those with sharply-defined professional credentials in fields– e.g, finance– that are unlikely even in the intermediate term (if ever) to recover their bubble-fueled growth rates, may find their advanced degrees at best unhelpful; at worst, downright prejudicial.
Economic recovery and growth will be driven to some large extent by innovation; that innovation will create new– and new kinds of– jobs. Looking even just five years out, much less ten, one has to admit that it’s just not possible to predict what these emergent jobs, nor their requirements, will be. (Consider, e.g., the hottest topic– and job category– in marketing/advertising these days: “social media marketing”… which wasn’t even a glimmer a decade ago, and was just being born five year ago.) This is a challenge for those new to the work force, who have to wrangle the product of their schooling and their personal experience into a shape that can fit the entry-level positions they seek. It is a much bigger challenge for those mid-career who find themselves needy of making a move: these more mature folks have not only to learn new fields, they also have to re-direct the considerable momentum of perception and habit that characterized their old– and they have to do those things, usually, in ways that justify salaries way north of entry-level.
All of which underlines for your correspondent the extraordinary value of a liberal arts education. When one is faced with a “working adulthood” that is one transitional challenge after another, no skill is more valuable than the capacity to adapt. And no capability is more central to that adaptation than the ability effectively and efficiently to learn.
This is precisely what, at its core, a liberal arts education is about: learning to learn.
There are many, many other reasons, rooted in personal and societal benefits, to pursue a liberal arts education, and top support a strong foundation of liberal arts in higher education. But the lessons of the last couple of years– indeed, of the last several decades– suggest that the economic rationale is plenty strong as well…
And besides, it’s fun.
* “Education is what remains after one has forgotten everything he learned in school.”
– Albert Einstein
** To put these cohorts into perspective, the Census Bureau suggests that, of these folks “25 yrs. and over” (in 2008):
– 13.4% had less than a high school diploma.
– 31.2% were high school graduates, no college.
– 26.0% had some college or associate degree.
– 29.4% had a college degree or higher.
UPDATE: Reader JK directs our attention to another treatment of the data, in the NY Times. As he suggests, even more dramatic.
As we revisit our course catalogues, we might recall that it was on this date in 1933 that Congress passed the Emergency Banking Act, the first major legislative step in Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal program. The sense of urgency was sufficiently high– four days earlier Roosevelt had declared a “Banking Holiday,” closing all of the nation’s banks– that most legislators passed the Act without even reading the single copy that was available for review. The EBA gave the government authority to shutter insolvent banks; that, coupled with the Federal Reserve’s informal-but-explicit pledge to guarantee the deposits of banks allowed to reopen (de facto deposit insurance), eased the crisis of public confidence: within two weeks of banks’ re-opening on March 13, Americans had re-deposited over half the cash they’d withdrawn and hoarded through the period of bank failures that marked the first chapter of the Great Depression. Later that year, the (more considered and embracing) Banking Act of 1933 replaced the EBA, and established such lasting practices and institutions as the FDIC.
It’s that time again…
…time to start strategizing for that annual test of taste, that carnival of consumerism, Holiday gift shopping.
source: Amazon.co.uk
Happily, Jolyon Fenwick and Marcus Husselby have ridden to the rescue with a guide to the perfect gift for those one one’s list for whom it’s not the thought that counts: Einstein’s Watch: Being an Unofficial Record of a Year’s Most Ownable Things…
From the publisher’s description:
What is the value of Gandhi’s glasses or a collection of Braille editions of Playboy? And how much is an artwork consisting of ten million $100 banknotes worth? In this gloriously eclectic overview of 2009’s most ownable objects, Jolyon Fenwick and Marcus Husselby present a treasure trove of over 100 desirable things bought or offered for sale this year. Ranging from the sublime to the ridiculous, the cache of curios includes: a hard disk of MPs’ expenses over the last five years; Einstein’s watch; Uncle Monty’s cottage from Withnail and I; the last ever cheque issued by Woolworths (it bounced); a holy water sprinkler (made by Parker pens); official posters from the Obama campaign; Captain Cook’s boomerang; Super Lemon Haze marijuana; Black Canary Barbie (described as ‘filth’ by Christian Voice [pictured on the book’s cover]); and, the key to the binoculars storeroom on board the Titanic.
source: Designs Through Process
As we scrawl “Dear Santa,” we might note that today’s a great day to March right down the Middle, in honor of Victorian novelist, poet, and translator George Eliot– Mary Ann Evans– who was born on this date in 1819 in Warwickshire.
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