Einsteins

In 1955, someone secretly stole Einstein’s brain and stored it in mayonnaise jars. That was just the beginning

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Seven hours after Albert Einstein’s death, Thomas Harvey was preparing to perform an autopsy on the body at the Priceton Hospital morgue. It was April 18, 1955 and Otto Nathan, friend and executor of the famous physicist, was present: old Albert had become in the “greatest rock star of the 20th century”but he wanted the cult of his person to end there. The pathologist would perform the autopsy, the family would collect the body and secretly cremate it before scattering its ashes in the Delaware River. And so it was. Or, well, that’s what the family believed. Not in my lair. Because inadvertently, without prior documented permission and as quickly as he could, Thomas Harvey removed Einstein’s brain and kept it (in a jar full of formaldehyde). At first he kept it a secret, but no one steals the brain of the great genius of the 20th century to keep it a secret. The news, in a matter of hours, spread like wildfire. And, in fact, on the 20th the New York Times posted that something was happening with the brain. The family panicked, but shortly before publication (and following a fait accompli policy) Harvey managed to convince Hans Albert Einstein, the eldest son, to give him retrospective permission. I imagine Hans didn’t have much room for maneuver: Harvey had the brain in his possession. It was ‘give him permission’ or, perhaps, lose him forever. Einstein’s son set conditions, of course: the main one is that the organ be used for scientific purposes. It wasn’t going to be possible either. Especially because Harvey ‘fell in love’ with the brain and, despite Princeton Hospital’s efforts to have him deposit it, the pathologist repeatedly refused. To the point where, at the end of the year, he is fired. That’s when he took the brain to the University of Pennsylvania and, in a friend’s lab, divided it into about 240 pieces and created 12 sets of slides. Fired and sidelined, Harvey sent 42 of the samples to different forensic experts and neurologists for investigation. That was their plan to return through the front door: the majority did not respond and those who did did not find anything notable. So things really started to go wrong. As a result of his stubbornness, his marriage breaks down. At some point in the 1960s, divorce forces him to take the glass jars containing his brain out of the basement and go to the Midwest. And, deep down, he was lucky. On the one hand, none of the affected institutions wanted to speak publicly about this so as not to compromise their prestige. On the other hand, the courts were not as involved in American life, nor did information flow with the same ease. So found a job in Wichita and he kept the brain in the same refrigerator where he had the beer. Until someone finds it. That someone is Steven Levy, a journalist for New Jersey Monthly. In August 1978, Levy told your brain search of the physical. When she found him in Kansas, Harvey didn’t want to talk, but he quickly loosened his tongue. And, of course, it was a scandal. Throughout the 1980s, he sent samples to some researchers (a Marian Diamond, Berkeley neuroanatomistsent him four samples in a mayonnaise jar), but his ambition was to study it himself in his free time. Things get complicated. Because at the end of the 80s, Harvey lost his license and moved to Lawrence, Kansas, to work in a plastic extrusion factory. He spends his nights getting drunk with William S. Burroughs and welcoming those who come to see him. Convinced by journalists, he did a lot of strange things: from cutting pieces on a cheese board to taking, now in his eighties, a trip to California to talk to Einstein’s granddaughter. Finally, between 1998 and 2007 (when Harvey died), was donating parts from the brain to Princeton Hospital. However, that is the most interesting thing we have been able to get out of this organ of contention: its delirious history is more interesting than what scientists have been able to get out of it. Something that reminds us of a phrase normally attributed to Richard Feynman: “it’s worth having an open mind, but not so much that your brain falls out” (or has it stolen). Image | Taton Moise In Xataka | Einstein’s first violin had passed unnoticed. Until an auction house put it up for sale.

The problem with microrobots is that they don’t have a “brain.” The solution has been to use Einstein’s relativity to guide them

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Making robots the size of a piece of human hair is already a reality, but it faces a big problem: they are too small to bring a “brain” on board. And it is logical, since on a microscopic scale there is no space to insert a microchip, batteries or navigation systems, so in a few words we can talk about “dumb robots” that only react to basic stimuli. But here the Einstein’s relativity has given a small solution. The solution. One of the functions of these small robots is precisely in be able to navigate the bloodstream to react to different stimuli. But the big question here is how they can navigate a bloodstream without colliding with each other. Something that was on the mind of a team of researchers from the University of Pennsylvania what have you seen that the key is not in making robots smarter, but in manipulating the “spacetime” through which they move. To understand this thread, you have to think about how gravity works according to the theory of general relativity. Here Einstein taught us that planets do not revolve around the sun because an invisible force pulls them, but because the mass of the Sun curves the fabric of spacetime, as with the Earth, which follows the easiest path through that curved space. To biology. Here the researchers wanted to apply this same mathematical principle to microrobotics, introducing the concept of “artificial spacetimes”. And since microscopic robots move in response to light, the scientists designed light fields projected onto a Petri dish that mimic the curvature of spacetime. In this way, the variations in light they faced acted like “artificial gravity.” In this way, the robot does not need to know where it is or where it is going. It simply turns on and moves forward, since it is the light pattern that “pushes” it to curve its path to avoid obstacles or find the exit from a maze, exactly like a ray of light curves when passing near a massive object in the cosmos. It seems like magic. In the experiment proposed by the researchers, different two-dimensional light labyrinths are projected. In this virtual scenario, they created dark areas that mathematically act as “black holes”, since when the microrobot approaches these areas, the equations that govern your response to light They are formally identical to those of the path of light falling through an extreme gravitational field. In this way, when the microrobot approaches these areas, the equations that govern its response to light are formally identical to those of the path of light falling through an extreme gravitational field. From here, using mapping, scientists managed to get these robots to ‘patrol’ specific areas, avoid obstacles and group together at an exact point. And the most interesting thing is that all this happens without a single processing chip on board the robot, since the “calculation” falls entirely on the geometry of the projected environment. A future doctor. The implications of this advance will now allow microrobots to be freed from the need to have a computer system inside them, which means they can be manufactured cheaply and even made even smaller. From here opens the door to very important medical applicationssince millions of these “reactive robots” can be injected into the human body. The objective here is to use external fields such as magnetic fields that act as a curved spacetime that allows them to move through our circulatory system to release a drug, clean arteries or perform biopsies at the cellular level. Images | Ruben Sukatendel In Xataka | Robots have a problem that no one has solved in decades: they get lost. A Spanish engineer believes she has found the key

Einstein’s first violin had passed unnoticed. Until an auction house put it up for sale.

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Albert Einstein is one of the most outstanding figures of the 20th century, and that means that is surrounded by myths. He “everything is relative”, I wasn’t good at math or in studies in general are some of the most widespread, but if you have ever read that he was passionate about the violin, I have to tell you that that is true. And one of them is so special that just reached a million euros at auction. The interesting thing? What was a fluke?. Einstein started playing the violin from a very young age. His mother was the one who gave him the germ of love for music and that instrument, but although at first he was not enthusiastic about it, when he discovered Mozart… things changed. It makes sense if we think about the mathematical logic after the Amadeus sonatas, and the Austrian composer became a figure of admiration for Einstein. The German physicist continued to play, sometimes in chamber groups with renowned musicians, and stated that music was a source of inspiration and even comfort when he had to solve complex problems. There are conflicting opinions about his skill with the instrument, but the violin was for Einstein a means of escape and relaxation. The violin of relativity Throughout his life, it is believed that he owned a dozen violins and all of them were called “Lina”. It was something that was recorded somewhere on the back of the instrument and it was short for “violin.” And, logically, items like this usually end up in the hands of collectors or enthusiasts, who acquire them through auctions. For example, in 2018, one of his violins ended up selling for $516,500. Aside from belonging to the physicist, it was the violin that was made specifically for him when he arrived in the United States in 1933. The protagonist of this story, however, has ended up reaching the figure of 860,000 poundswhich amounts to one million euros. It is a new record because it is the most expensive violin ever auctioned for someone who was not a professional concert pianist. The bidding started at 150,000 pounds and the estimate She was extremely modest. the house Dominic Winter Auctioneers thought it would end up between £200,000 and £300,000, but it seems that buyers ended up valuing something important: it is believed that This violin was the first that Einstein bought when I feared 15 years. It was made in 1894 by the German luthier Anton Zunterer, something that can be read on the label on the back of the instrument, and was key during the authentication process. Composer Paul Wingfield, who has spent an entire career researching, among other things, Einstein’s musical life, spent six months meticulously researching correspondence, contemporary documents, testimonies and customs regulations until say that he was “as sure as anyone could be that this violin belonged to Einstein.” The curious thing? Which was the instrument that, it seems, accompanied the scientist during the most prolific years of his careerincluding the period in which he developed the famous theory of relativity. In 1932, Einstein was preparing to flee Germany due to the rise of nazism and the growth of anti-Semitism. He decided to give his violin to friend and physicist Max von Laue, who later, in 1952, gave it to Margarete Hommrich, an admirer of Einstein. The violin remained in Hommrich’s family for 70 years, until Margarete’s great-great-granddaughter decided to put it up for auction, reaching this impressive figure. Apart from being the first one he bought and the one who accompanied him during the formulation of the theory of relativity, what is really impressive, and what puts that million euros in context, is what we mentioned about it being the most expensive violin auctioned that has not been owned by a famous concert artist (that honor goes to the violin that was played during the sinking of the titanicthat reached 900,000 pounds) or one made by Stradivarius. These are unattainable, as reflected by the almost 16 million dollars of the ‘Lady Blunt’ of 1721 sold in 2011. Images | Dominic Winter Einstein playing the violin In Xataka | 100 years later, Einstein’s relativity will undergo its most demanding test: two atomic clocks in space

What is a light year and why it is impossible to travel in less than a year, according to Einstein’s relativity

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Among all the rules that govern the universe, one of the most iconic and at the same time difficult to understand is the universal speed limit. The speed of light is not only an unwavering constant: it is the link between matter and energy, as Albert Einstein described with the most famous formula of science: E = Mc². Can Asom to the foundations of our own existencebut not travel to more than “C”. Only light can travel a light year in a year. Let’s define constants: the speed of light The speed of light is the key piece in Einstein’s equation. That “C” is not only a number, but the conversion factor that unites the concepts of mass (m) and energy (e). It is a constant that represents the speed of light in a vacuum, but also the speed limit for the spread of any type of information, signal or material particle in the universe. If you think very strong, it is the limit of causality itself: an effect cannot occur before its cause, spreading at the maximum “C” speed, can reach it. This speed is the same for any observer in the universe, regardless of their own state of movement. If you travel in a hypothetical 99% spacecraft of the speed of light and light a flashlight, the light of that flashlight will move away from you exactly at the speed of light, not to a fraction of it. It is one of the universal constants of physics. And the observations of the cosmic microwave background, The remaining light of the Big BangThey confirm that it has not changed measurable in more than 13.8 billion years. What speed is light, then? Although it sounds strange, the speed of light in a vacuum has an exact and defined value: 299,792,458 meters per second. To put it in more earthly figures, it is equivalent to almost one billion kilometers per hour. A photon of light would go around the earth’s Ecuador about 7.5 times in a single second. It is, according to Albert Einstein’s special relativity theory, the definitive and unwavering speed limit of the universe. An epic about measuring the above Calculating the speed of light has been one of the great sagas of science. After the philosophical debates of ancient Greece and an ingenious but failed attempt from Galileo using lamps between distant hills, the first estimate came in 1676. Observing the eclipses of ío, one of Jupiter’s moons, the Danish astronomer Ole Rømer noticed that they had a different duration According to the time of the year. He deduced that it was due to the additional time that the light took to cross the orbit of the earth when our planet moved away from Jupiter. Rømer estimated the speed of light in 220,000 km/s, a surprisingly close figure for the time. Half a century later, in 1728, the English physicist James Bradley He refined this measure using a different method: the aberration of stellar light. He noted that the apparent position of the stars changed slightly due to the speed of the earth in their orbit. Something similar to how rain seems to fall at angle when we run. From this effect, it calculated a speed of 301,000 km/s, a value with an error of just 1%. Michelson’s experiment. Image | Popular Science (1930) It was not until 1887 that scientists discovered the most surprising aspect of the speed of light. Albert Michelson and Edward Morley tried to detect the “luminous ether”, an invisible half assumption that, according to the belief of the time, filled the space to allow the propagation of light. With Your experiment They hoped to measure a difference in the speed of light depending on whether it moved in favor or against the “ether wind” created by the movement of the earth. However, they found no variation at all. Sometimes, scientific progress does not come from finding what is sought, but of accepting the evidence that hits old certainty. This was how this failure It became one of the most important results in the history of physics. He showed that the speed of light was constant regardless of the observer’s movement, knocking down the ether theory and laying the empirical bases for the revolution that Einstein would unleash later. What is a light year and what is used for Since 1983, the speed of light is no longer something that scientists try to measure with increasing precision. Its value was set with such accuracy which is now the meter itself that is defined according to the light. One meter is “the length of the path traveled by light in a vacuum during a time interval of 1/299792458 seconds.” This change hides a deep truth: the constancy of the speed of light is a more fundamental property of our universe than our own units of measure. We no longer use meters to measure the speed of light, we use the speed of light to define the subway. And this is how one of the largest units of measure we use is born, and that has been crucial to understand the immense scales of the universe. Although your name includes the word “year”, a light year is not a measure of time, but of distance. In a nutshell, a light year is the distance that a ray of light travels in a vacuum during the course of a terrestrial year. That is, in 365 days. Given the incredible speed at which the light travels, it is an astronomical distance, of approximately 9.5 billion kilometers. We use the light years because the distances in space are so huge that measuring them in kilometers would be totally impractical. For example, The exoplanet closest to EarthNext Centauri B, is about 4.2 light years away. In kilometers, that figure would be almost 40 billion, a much more difficult number to handle and contextualize. How a light year is calculated in kilometers A laser indicates the center of the galaxy … Read more

wants to overthrow Einstein’s special theory of relativity

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Quarks, the elementary particles that make up the protons and neutrons of the atomic nucleus, are fermions. And electrons, too. There are several types, although physicists like to talk more about ‘flavors’: above (up), below (down), charm (charm), strange (strange), top (top) and background (bottom). The most frequent in ordinary matter are the up and down quarksalthough the one that interests us the most in this article is the top quark for a very interesting reason: it is the heaviest elementary particle that we can find in nature. An interesting note given that we are moving in the field of fermions: supersymmetry is a theoretical model of particle physics that proposes the existence of a hypothetical particle that is paired with each of the fundamental particles that we know. It seeks to explain the existing relationship between the bosonswhich have a spin with an integer value, and fermions, which have a half-integer spin. However, it is important that we do not overlook that it is a hypothetical theoretical framework that, therefore, has not yet been observed in nature. Not even experimentally. CERN has investigated whether the top quark respects the special theory of relativity The quantum mechanics and the special theory of relativity formulated by Albert Einstein constitute the heart of Standard Model of particle physics. Until now, this theory by the popular German physicist has stood the test of time undaunted, but scientists do not miss the slightest opportunity when it comes to putting it in trouble. And it is ideal because it is one of the most effective strategies when what is sought is to go beyond the solid walls of the Standard Model in the hope of develop new physics. Some specific models of string theory propose that at very high energies special relativity will no longer be valid. Lorentz symmetry lies at the very core of this model. Broadly speaking, this property justifies that the experimental results are independent of orientation and speed with which the experiment is carried out in the space-time continuum. It seems like a complicated concept, but if we think about it a little carefully, it is not so complicated. Be that as it may, what is really important is that so far all the experiments that physicists have carried out have supported Lorentz symmetry. However, and here comes the most interesting part, some theories, such as specific models of string theory, propose that at very high energies special relativity will no longer be valid and experimental observations will depend on the orientation of the experiment in space. -time. If so, the Lorentz symmetry would be broken. On paper, it should be possible to identify this break in the energy level that physicists work with in the CMS particle detector from CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research). For months, CMS experiment researchers have meticulously analyzed the properties of the top quark pairs produced in the collisions at the LHC (Large Hadron Collider). And their result is very interesting: the production rate of top quark pairs remains constant even though the direction of the LHC’s proton beams and the average direction of the top quarks produced in the experiment change depending on the time of day due to the Earth’s spin on its axis. This means that there is no preferred direction in the space-time continuum capable of conditioning the production of top quarks. And, therefore, the Lorentz symmetry is still intact. And the special theory of relativity is still valid. Image | CERN More information | ScienceDirect In Xataka | “If we achieve our goal, a revolution in physics will be unleashed”: we speak with Santiago Folgueras, physicist at CERN

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