Einstein's Voice

High Court Invokes Einstein In Blood Test Patents Case

2011-12-09T21:42:00.000+01:00

Greg Stohr has the story at Bloomberg in Blood-Test Patents Debated at High Court as Einstein Invoked.

We have fun with these patent issues because they are so absurd.

The question to us initially is as follows: Did God invent Einstein, or vice versa?

And, in either case, who holds the patent rights to E=mc2?

That question is involved in an issue of law these days.

Stohr quotes U.S. Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer:

"The justices sought to draw what proved to be a fine line between natural phenomena, which can’t be patented, and applications of those principles, which can be.

“My question is, ‘What has to be added to a law of nature to make it a patentable process?’” Justice Stephen Breyer told Mayo’s lawyer. “If you put too little in the answer to that question, I believe I can make things like E=mc2 patentable,” he said, referring to Einstein’s formula showing the connection between an object’s mass and its energy."

“And if you put too much in, you are going to wreck your own case,” Breyer said.

To understand what Breyer is talking about, we might say that God invented "fermentation" but "man" invented beer as an application of that natural phenomena.

And that gives us the correct answer for many other patent cases.

You should be able to patent YOUR particular brew, but no other.

Suffice it to say, the Justices are not that far yet in their understanding, but we are hoping, given time, that they get there.

More on the God Particle - the Hiccups Boson, oops, Higgs Boson

2011-12-09T21:31:00.000+01:00

Now you see it and now you don't, as if the so-called "God particle" had hiccups.

Eryn Brown has the story at the Los Angeles Times in Scientists excited over hints of finding the elusive Higgs boson - latimes.com.

It is an old idea you know. You cut matter in half, then cut it in half, again and again, and then, in the end, what is left?

The answer is: the imagination of modern theoretical physicists.

Neutrinos still faster than light in latest version of experiment | Science | guardian.co.uk

2011-11-18T19:50:00.000+01:00

New alleged physics test claims to contradict the Einstein theory of special relativity.

Alok Jha, science correspondent, has the story at The Guardian in Neutrinos still faster than light in latest version of experiment.

They better readjust their clocks!

Honey Bee Zen on Einstein and Bees

2011-07-05T12:25:00.000+02:00

see Is THAT a disease in my beehive? at Honey Bee Zen for a bit on Einstein and bees.

Dark Energy and Rips in the Universe

2011-07-05T12:22:00.000+02:00

Speculations about dark energy and "rips" in the universe at What does dark energy mean for the end of the universe?.

Einstein's Dark Energy Cosmological Constant Confirmed by Astronomical Survey via New Methods of Galactic Study: Galaxy Distribution & Clustering

2011-05-23T17:53:00.001+02:00

Paul Rincon, Science reporter at BBC News, reports at BBC News about a new astronomical method that confirms dark energy in the universe:

"'The results tell us that dark energy is a cosmological constant, as Einstein proposed. If gravity were the culprit, then we wouldn't be seeing these constant effects of dark energy throughout time.'
...
While dark energy makes up about 74% of the Universe, dark matter - which does not reflect or emit detectable light - accounts for 22%. Ordinary matter - gas, stars, planets and galaxies - makes up just 4% of the cosmos."

In other words, 96% of what we regard to be "the universe" is invisible to us.

News Flash: Einstein Is Still Right : Discovery News

2010-03-24T22:26:00.000+01:00

Einstein Is Still Right
by Jennifer Ouellette | March 22, 2010

"Physicists have grown accustomed to receiving the occasional crackpot letter or email from armchair theorists claiming that 'EINSTEIN WAS WRONG!!!' And now the recipients of those missives have a bit more evidence in their favor. Earlier this month, a team of physicists from UC-Berkeley, University of Zurich, and Princeton University announced that their analysis of more than 70,000 galaxies demonstrates that the theory of general relativity holds true -- now up to about 3.5 billion light years from Earth."

Read the whole article at Discovery News.

Looking for Life in the Multiverse: Scientific American

2010-01-24T13:42:00.000+01:00

Looking for Life in the Multiverse: Scientific American
by Alejandro Jenkins and Gilad Perez

"Universes with different physical laws might still be habitable"

We think that the Scientific American should change their subtitle.
The idea that the universe has more than only ONE set of physical laws is logically untenable.

Surpassing Nature, Scientists Bend Light Backward - NYTimes.com

2010-01-21T04:46:00.000+01:00

Big Al would have liked this....

Surpassing Nature, Scientists Bend Light Backward - NYTimes.com

by KENNETH CHANG, NYTimes.com

"Using tiny wires and fishnet structures, researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, have found new ways to bend light backward, something that never occurs in nature."

Dark Energy findings support Albert Einstein's Idea of a Cosmological Constant

2010-01-15T20:33:00.000+01:00

New findings on dark energy back discarded Einstein theory / The Christian Science Monitor - CSMonitor.com

"Scientists have found that dark energy, the force thought to be accelerating the expansion of the universe, may be doing the same thing to local groups of galaxies. That bolsters Einstein's idea of a 'cosmological constant.'"

Einstein's Voice Word Cloud

2008-08-10T21:14:00.002+02:00

Here is the current word cloud for Einstein's Voice from Wordle.

Physics and Law : Cosmology and Legal Theory

2008-06-12T21:56:00.003+02:00

Crossposted from LawPundit.

"What is Law?" and to what degree does "Law" by nature approximate the intricate system of fine-tuning required for the Einstein-based Lambda-CDM (ΛCDM) model of cosmology to work as predicted?

Most people think that they know what "Law" is - nearly - but perhaps we know less than we think about this intricate virtually self-adjusting societal mechanism, which seems to have a dark energy soul of its own. Let us take a look at ΛCDM for means of instructive comparison.

As described at the Wikipedia, ΛCDM is "the simplest known [cosmological] model that is in general agreement with observed phenomena" of the workings of the universe, a model which nevertheless "says nothing about the fundamental physical origin of dark matter, dark energy and the nearly scale-invariant spectrum of primordial curvature perturbations", the essential parameters of the model, and "in that sense ... [ΛCDM] is merely a useful parameterization of ignorance."

This parameterization is kept alive by fine-tuning:

"In theoretical physics, fine-tuning refers to circumstances when the parameters of a model must be adjusted very precisely in order to agree with observations."

In the case of ΛCDM, these fine-tuning adjustments are in fact enormous.

In a universe consisting of 100% of whatever it is that it is, ΛCDM assigns only 4% of the energy density of our present universe to the basic matter and the energy with which we are all familiar, i.e. the world of "atoms (and photons) that are the building blocks of planets, stars and gas clouds in the universe".

By contrast, 22% of the universe's energy density is said by ΛCDM to be made up of cold dark matter whose particles interact only via gravity (but never otherwise touch or collide).

The remaining and considerable majority of 74% of the universe is allegedly made up of a hypothetical dark energy that permeates all of space but which no one has ever seen:

"Two proposed forms for dark energy are the cosmological constant, a constant energy density filling space homogeneously, and scalar fields such as quintessence or moduli, dynamic quantities whose energy density can vary in time and space."

The name quintessence, fittingly, "comes from the Classical elements of the ancient Greeks, where a pure "fifth element," the aether, was thought to fill the Universe beyond Earth."

The names may have changed over the millennia, but the cosmological theories of the moderns are still remarkably similar to those of antiquity. Whether we call it aether or quintessence, or cold matter or dark energy, 96% of the universe is still explained by physics in terms of unseen cosmic parameters, which, like ancient but later provenly faulty planetary epicycles, apparently fit the observations - after fine-tuning, of course.

Modern cosmology has thus rightly been labeled "the useful parameterization of ignorance". What we do not know about the universe - and that is at least 96% - we have nevertheless been able to compartmentalize into useful physical "laws". A lack of knowledge has never been a great barrier to the creation of theories. Quite the contrary.

Let us now turn to legal theory. Does any great difference exist between the parameterizations of cosmology and those of Law? What do we really know? For example, are jails and prisons, crowded to the brim as the dungeons in the days of antiquity, the right answer to the questions of the criminal law? Do our civil sanctions fit the crimes they punish? Do issues such as abortion at their core reflect something other than law? Is the right to freedom of religion the same as the right to defy secular law for allegedly religious reasons? What part of Law is accounted for by "known" legal energy and what part by the unknown? Are we really following the true path? Or is 96% or more based on a kind of fine-tuning of parameteriziations of our legal and jurisprudential ignorance? Do we merely do the best we can, under the observed circumstances? Or is there a "higher" unseen law - and, if so - whose law?

Compare What Is Law? by Bo LI (an attorney with the New York law firm of Davis Polk & Wardwell) in Perspectives, Vol. 2, No. 4 where Bo Li writes, inter alia (as excerpted and commented below by LawPundit):

"... Recently, there has been a good deal of discussion on establishing the rule of law in China. In this short essay, I want to argue that to establish the rule of law in China, we should not only look at our courts; we should also reform our legislative practices. To understand my argument, it is important to understand the nature of law.

... Law existed in the state of nature, while legislation exists only in a (man-made) positive legal order. Law does not have to be written. In its original meaning, law "is the story of how things work... Man can know, through the use of his reason, what is in accord with his nature and therefore good" (Rice, 1999, p. 30). The Latin words 'ius' (law) and 'iustum' (justice) are intimately connected. Law, therefore, necessarily embodies justice, which is rooted in nature and knowable through reason. As Aristotle puts it, "there is in nature a common principle of the just and unjust that all people in some way divine [discern], even if they have no association or commerce with each other" (Aristotle, 1991, p. 102). [LawPundit: compare that to cold dark matter above] Marcus Tullius Cicero defines "Law" as "the highest reason, implanted in Nature, which commands what ought to be done and forbids the opposite.... What is right and true is also eternal, and does not begin or end with written statutes.... [LawPundit: compare that to dark energy above] It may thus be clear that in the very definition of the term 'Law' there inheres the idea and principle of choosing what is just and true" (Cicero, 1959, pp. 44-51). Ultimately, the rules that we want for governing human society are rules based on our nature and our basic sense of justice. These rules are natural or moral laws. In other words, in its original meaning, "law" means the natural or moral law, which are in accord with our basic sense of justice. In contrast, legislation (positive law) is man-made law, which can either be just or unjust....

What we need to do is to agree that law is not the same as legislation, and that there are dynamic higher laws that can only be discovered through a gradual, incremental and interactive process. Nobody can have knowledge about, or proper incentive to abide by, all higher laws. As such, the division of lawmaking power under a system of checks and balances, with properly trained judges as important law finders, assures us that we are at least as close to the higher laws as we ever can."

Is there a great difference between modern Cosmology and modern Legal Theory?
Not much.

Einstein Quotations

2008-01-30T22:39:00.000+01:00

See The Quotations Page for Einstein Quotations.

Just Stringing Along - Physics and String Theory

2007-06-12T17:53:00.000+02:00

We posted the following comment to Cosmic Variance but the string was "snipped" after the word and which is marked below in orange - but what else could we expect from string theory?
[actually, the snip was caused by the way html commands are handled as text]

"snip"

that word describes our double-edged scissored view of string theory, which seems like a postmodern system of epicycles .... or ... do branes have brains?

At
http://www.lawpundit.com/blog/2005/01/belief-without-proof-evidence-and.htm
we write:

"What are the main logical problems with string theory (alleged physical laws) from our point of view?

a. Perceived physical reality in physics is always a function of the system of measurement. Measurements are by definition relations presupposing frames of reference to be measured by some sort of "measurement ruler". Thus, "measured" reality is

1) a function of the frames of reference chosen for the relationships being measured (for example, particles, waves or "strings") and

2) the means of measurement (motion, inertia, velocity, weight, dimension, extension, contraction, etc.) "....

Speaking of "measure", has anyone considered the rather simple idea that "God" did not "make" the universe, but that God "is" the measured universe....

Perhaps the world is an "ultimate" string - but no string ever vibrates by itself, but needs to be plucked by something - frankly, we think that the idea of an infinitely extensible and unsnippable vibrating "rubber band" is better than simple string theory because it would more accurately reflect a yo-yo world alternating between the impossibles of absolute something and absolute nothing ....

For the math freaks this means that the Universe U could conceivably be defined by the formula
U = > 0 and < 1
where U is greater than 0 and less than 1 and where 0 and 1 both represent totality and singularity, i.e. absolute mass and absolute void, neither of which, apparently, are possibilities... which then results in the world that we "appear" to have....

And the Answer Is: 42 - Prime Numbers and Quantum Physics

2006-03-28T22:30:00.000+02:00

Marcus du Sautoy in "Prime Numbers Get Hitched" at Seed Magazine has a seminal article via digg concerning the seemingly unlikely connection between the prime numbers of mathematics and quantum physics. Du Sautoy compares the recent possible breakthrough to that made by Einstein:

"In 1972, the physicist Freeman Dyson wrote an article called "Missed Opportunities." In it, he describes how relativity could have been discovered many years before Einstein announced his findings if mathematicians in places like Göttingen had spoken to physicists who were poring over Maxwell's equations describing electromagnetism. The ingredients were there in 1865 to make the breakthrough—only announced by Einstein some 40 years later.

It is striking that Dyson should have written about scientific ships passing in the night. Shortly after he published the piece, he was responsible for an abrupt collision between physics and mathematics that produced one of the most remarkable scientific ideas of the last half century: that quantum physics and prime numbers are inextricably linked.

This unexpected connection with physics has given us a glimpse of the mathematics that might, ultimately, reveal the secret of these enigmatic numbers. At first the link seemed rather tenuous. But the important role played by the number 42 has recently persuaded even the deepest skeptics that the subatomic world might hold the key to one of the greatest unsolved problems in mathematics."

Go to Seed Magazine for the rest of the story....

Einstein's Message and Caricature

2006-03-08T19:52:00.000+01:00

Einstein as a "Prophet of God"

2006-02-02T13:58:00.000+01:00

Recent world events involving caricatures and religiously-motivated attacks on free speech merely validate the ancient wisdom that "the pen is mightier than the sword", any sword. Tyrants and fascist religions and institutions have never understood this wisdom and even in our modern age continue to think that the sword is mightier, even though their own reaction to the power of the pen proves the contrary.

Drawing the Line has an informative posting on political cartoons and relates an interesting story from America in this regard:

"In perhaps the best known example of the force of the political cartoon, Thomas Nast’s images in Harper’s Weekly played an important role in the overthrow of the Tweed Ring in 1870s New York City. An exasperated Boss Tweed is recorded to have demanded of his henchmen, “Stop them damn pictures. I don’t care so much what the papers write about me. My constituents can’t read. But, damn it, they can see pictures.”"

We think that free speech is not limitless and that there should be some limits on caricature (e.g. caricature which functions as libel and defamation), but there is obviously no reason that certain historical figures should be exempted from cartoon portrayal. Indeed, no historical figure is viewed uniformly by all of humanity, and no segment of humanity has the right to instruct other humans as to how to view some personage, even an alleged prophet.

In our view, the most recent "Prophet of God" was Albert Einstein, who showed us how the universe works, and yet, caricatures of Einstein are widespread without in any way detracting from his "message". There is one difference. Einstein's message is true. That is why certain nations, rather than to rely on the antiquated messages of their own alleged prophets, are attempting to gain nuclear weapons, whose construction is based on Einstein's message.

In any case, one of the reasons that blogging has become such an important part of the media scene is precisely because it is an exercise of the "power of the pen".

When just a few cartoons can provoke world-wide reaction far out of proportion to the cost of the ink and the paper used for publication, the power of the pen has been aptly proven.
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Einstein's Alleged Puzzle

2006-01-13T19:29:00.000+01:00

Coudal Partners has the folowing puzzle up, attributed to Albert Einstein, who allegedly said that 98% of the people in the world could not figure it out.

Here is the puzzle:

"There are five houses in a row in different colors. In each house lives a person with a different nationality. The five owners drink a different drink, smoke a different brand of cigar and keep a different pet, one of which is a Walleye Pike [a fish].
The question is-- who owns the fish?
Hints:
1. The Brit lives in the red house.
2. The Swede keeps dogs as pets.
3. The Dane drinks tea.
4. The green house is on the left of the white house.
5. The green house owner drinks coffee.
6. The person who smokes Pall Malls keeps birds.
7. The owner of the yellow house smokes Dunhills.
8. The man living in the house right in the center drinks milk.
9. The man who smokes Blends lives next to the one who keeps cats.
10. The Norwegian lives in the first house.
11. The man who keeps horses lives next to the one who smokes Dunhills.
12. The owner who smokes Bluemasters drinks beer.
13. The German smokes Princes.
14. The Norwegian lives next to the blue house.
15. The man who smokes Blends has a neighbor who drinks water."

The way to solve the puzzle is to put down five squares (as houses) on a piece of paper horizontally next to each other and then - below each house - to enter the information as it is solved below each house, as taken from the above statements. Also make a list of numbers from 1 to 15 and strike a number if you use the information in it. That way, you will have fewer and fewer statements to consider for solution.

The trick to solving the puzzle is at each step, in the course of solving the puzzle, to find the one statement of the 15 statements that allows information to be entered based on that statement and also based on the information already available on the house grid of five houses.

Here is the order of the statements to be followed for solution. They are listed here in backward order (!) and without separating spaces (this will make it difficult to cheat by looking here unless you specifically choose to cheat: 962133121511715414108. The solution is ours and has not been picked up from any other source.

See the final solution at Coudal here.

Via Digital: Ex Post.
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Albert Einstein Quotes Quotations

2005-12-16T16:22:00.000+01:00

Interestingly designed pages devoted to Einstein's quotations on Philosophy, Physics, Religion, Science, Metaphysics Humanity, War, Peace, Education, Knowledge, Morality & Freedom are found at Albert Einstein Quotes, part of a website on Truth and Reality by Geoff Haselhurst.

The site also has numerous photographs of Einstein.

Google as Turing's Cathedral and the Virus Principle

2005-12-03T13:57:00.000+01:00

Turing's Cathedral at Edge by George Dyson is an article (October 24, 2005) which resulted from Dyson's visit to Google on the occasion of the 60th anniversary of John von Neumann's pioneer proposal for making a digital computer.

In that article Dyson writes:

"In a digital computer, the instructions are in the form of COMMAND (ADDRESS) where the address is an exact (either absolute or relative) memory location, a process that translates informally into "DO THIS with what you find HERE and go THERE with the result." Everything depends not only on precise instructions, but on HERE, THERE, and WHEN being exactly defined. It is almost incomprehensible that programs amounting to millions of lines of code, written by teams of hundreds of people, are able to go out into the computational universe and function as well as they do given that one bit in the wrong place (or the wrong time) can bring the process to a halt.

Biology has taken a completely different approach. There is no von Neumann address matrix, just a molecular soup, and the instructions say simply "DO THIS with the next copy of THAT which comes along." The results are far more robust. There is no unforgiving central address authority, and no unforgiving central clock. This ability to take general, organized advantage of local, haphazard processes is exactly the ability that (so far) has distinguished information processing in living organisms from information processing by digital computers."

What struck me here about the description of the difference in information processing between digital computers and living organisms is that the process of information processing in living organisms resembles more that of computer virus programs than that of computer applications such as "pickyourprogram.exe". That fictitious program is only an example, as no such program was found through Google search on December 3, 2005.

As the nature of computers moves closer to biological information processing, my question in this regard is whether the "virus principle" can be made to work for beneficial programming, operating under the instruction principle: "Do THIS with the next copy of THAT which comes along"?

Einstein was a Dyslexic Genius

2005-10-28T21:26:00.000+02:00

Via Sassy Lawyer and bits of chocolate we find that Einstein was dyslexic, as was also Leonardo da Vinci.

For more information on Dyslexia, see LexiLine.org.

A historical view of the Pharaohs as Dyslexics, based on their hieroglyphic script, is found here.

Einstein is in good company.
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NASA Gravity Probe-B and Einstein's General Theory of Relativity

2005-10-21T18:58:00.000+02:00

Via the Stanford Newsletter, we are directed to Bog Kahn's article
"Gravity Probe-B data collection ends: Was Einstein correct?" about a currently ongoing experimental test of Einstein's postulated general theory of relativity, which Kahn calls "our current theory of gravity".

As Kahn writes:

"For the past 17 months, NASA's Gravity Probe-B (GP-B) satellite has been orbiting the Earth using four ultra-precise gyroscopes, about a million times better than the finest navigational gyroscopes, to generate the data required for this unprecedented test....

This year, physicists celebrate the 100th anniversary of Einstein's "miraculous year," in which he received his doctorate in physics from the University of Zurich and published four seminal papers, including the special theory of relativity and a paper on light that garnered him the Nobel Prize in 1921. But Einstein's crowning achievement came in 1916, with his publication of the general theory of relativity, in which he expanded the special theory of relativity to include the elusive concept of gravity. With general relativity, Einstein forever changed our Newtonian view of gravity as a force, postulating rather that space and time are inextricably woven into a four-dimensional fabric called spacetime, and that gravity is simply the warping and twisting of the fabric of spacetime by massive celestial bodies. Even though it has become one of the cornerstones of modern physics, general relativity has remained the least tested of Einstein's theories. The reason is, as Caltech physicist Kip Thorne once put it: "In the realm of black holes and the universe, the language of general relativity is spoken, and it is spoken loudly. But in our tiny solar system, the effects of general relativity are but whispers." And so, any measurements of the relativistic effects of gravity around Earth must be carried out with utmost precision. Over the past 90 years, various tests of the theory suggest that Einstein was on the right track. But, in most previous tests, the relativity signals had to be extracted from a significant level of background noise. The purpose of GP-B is to test Einstein's theory by carrying out the experiment in a pristine orbiting laboratory, thereby reducing background noise to insignificant levels and enabling the probe to examine general relativity in new ways."

Read Kahn's article for the full scoop.

Einstein on Edge

2005-10-07T23:58:00.000+02:00

The Reality Club at Edge (Edge 170) has a special article on Einstein.

It is the story of E = mc².
by Brian Greene, which first appeared as a NY Times Op-Ed on September 30, 2005.

Greene titles it That Famous Equation and You. It is a great read.

E=energy
m=mass
c²=velocity of light squared

Here is a short excerpt from Greene to give you a taste for the entire article:

"Mass and energy are not distinct. They are the same basic stuff packaged in forms that make them appear different. Just as solid ice can melt into liquid water, Einstein showed, mass is a frozen form of energy that can be converted into the more familiar energy of motion. The amount of energy (E) produced by the conversion is given by his formula: multiply the amount of mass converted (m) by the speed of light squared (c²). Since the speed of light is a few hundred million meters per second (fast enough to travel around the earth seven times in a single second), c² , in these familiar units, is a huge number, about 100,000,000,000,000,000.

A little bit of mass can thus yield enormous energy. The destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was fueled by converting less than an ounce of matter into energy; the energy consumed by New York City in a month is less than that contained in the newspaper you're holding."

Think about it. It is astounding.
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Original Albert Einstein Manuscript Found

2005-08-22T00:14:00.000+02:00

An August 21, 2005 article by Toby Sterling of the Associated Press in Science & Space at USA Today reports that an original manuscript of a paper by Albert Einstein, Quantum Theory of the Monatomic Ideal Gas, published in the Proceedings of the Prussian Academy of Sciences in Berlin in January 1925, has been found by a researching student, Rowdy Boeyink, in the archives of the Lorentz Institute for Theoretical Physics at Leiden University in the Netherlands.

Albert Einstein Major Special Exhibition in Bern, Switzerland

2005-08-21T17:21:00.000+02:00

From June 16, 2005 to April 17, 2006 (daily 10 to 19 o'clock) there is a major special exhibition on Albert Einstein at the Historical Museum in Bern, Switzerland (Historisches Museum Bern, Musée Historique de Berne).

As written at the Bern Historical Museum website:

"Albert Einstein was living in Bern a century ago, when he created the famous formula E=mc2 and revolutionized our ideas about space and time with his Theory of Relativity. His commitment to peace and social justice also made him a role model for man throughout the world.

Einstein’s pioneering theories, the story of his life and the history of his time will be presented in an exhibition covering 2500 sq m. Unique original pieces, written documents and newsreel film clips will provide an unforgettable experience in a lavish staging on which no expense has been spared. Over 30 animated short films have turned Einstein’s physics into a fun experience for all ages. (All exhibition texts are in German, French and English)."
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