Tag archives for relativity
EINSTEIN Part II: A Bundle of Contradictions
Posted by Bulent Atalay of Author, National Geographic Books; author, Smithsonian Books; Prof. UMW, Adj Prof UVA. on March 20, 2012 
Albert Einstein, whose name has become synonymous with “genius,” was a complex man, a virtual bundle of contradictions. The ultimate intellectual rebel, he demonstrated a level of intuition and imagination beyond any mathematical scientist since Isaac Newton. He was a very good mathematician, but not a mathematical genius in the mode of Newton, who…
EINSTEIN Part I: The Pi in ‘π-day’
Posted by Bulent Atalay of Author, National Geographic Books; author, Smithsonian Books; Prof. UMW, Adj Prof UVA. on March 16, 2012 
Among physics students, March 14 is known as “π-Day” (“Pi-Day”) the day that Albert Einstein was born in Ulm, Germany in 1879. The venerable physicist is known for changing the very paradigm of physics, rejecting the three “fundamental undefinables” of length, mass and time as invariant, and positing in their place the speed of…
Posted by Of the more than 300 planets circling other stars we’ve found so far, only a handful have ever had their pictures taken directly. Astronomers strongly suspect the vast majority of these so-called exoplanets exist based solely on indirect evidence, such as their gravitational effects on stars. So the trick, then, is figuring out anything else…
