After obtaining his M.A. and B.Sc. degrees from the University of New Zealand, Ernest Rutherford was digging potatoes on his father’s farm one day when he received news of a scholarship award for Cambridge University. He is reported to have said “That’s the last potato...
In 1905, in the first of his annus mirabilis (“miracle year”) papers, Albert Einstein carried the quantum revolution a step further – a “quantum leap”, we might say (inside joke). Picking up where Planck left off, Einstein looked at the absorption of EM radiation, especially the...
On Nov. 25, 1915, Einstein announced that he had finally succeeded in explaining quantitatively “the secular rotation of the orbit of Mercury discovered by Le Verrier… without the need of any special hypothesis”. This was at least as great an accomplishment as Newton’s, and it...
Many people confuse mass with weight - among them my favorite cynic Ambrose Bierce, author of The Devil’s Dictionary: Gravitation. The tendency of all bodies to approach one another with a strength proportional to the quantity of matter they contain - the quantity of matter they...
Einstein rejects QFT. Despite his search for a unified field theory, Einstein rejected Quantum Field Theory after asking a friend, Valentin Bargmann, to give him a private tutorial on the subject. This is not surprising; at the time Quantum Field Theory was neither complete nor...
When Einstein began to tackle gravity in 1907, science had come a long way from the days of Newton. Not only had electricity and magnetism been discovered, but the concept of an electromagnetic field had replaced action-at-a-distance and was on the verge of replacing the...