Eye to Eye With Einstein

Four Talks at the Chapel Hill Public Library in Celebration of
Einstein's 1905 Papers on Relativity, Photons, and Brownian Motion.

Professor Henry Greenside
Duke University
hsg@phy.duke.edu

These talks were sponsored by the Friends Organization of the Chapel Hill Library, with special thanks to the Friends' president, Patsy Saylor. The talks are part of the outreach program of Duke University's Physics Department, and are especially a celebration of The World Year of Physics 2005, in honor of this 100th year since Einstein published his five famous papers of 1905.

If you have questions about the lectures or would like to learn more about topics related to the lectures, feel free to send an email to Professor Greenside at hsg@phy.duke.edu.

Lecture I on Special Relativity and E=mc²

1. The October 2 PowerPoint lecture file (18 megabytes) can be downloaded here.
2. Some related Internet links:
   1. Einstein's Big Idea, PBS television show on Tuesday, October 11. The website has some nice graphics and interactive tutorials.
   2. Seeing Relativity, computer simulations by Australian researchers that give a sense of what the world looks like when moving at relativistic speeds.
   3. A direct test of E=mc², recent Nature article by Simon Rainville and collaborators (Nature, Vol. 438, pages 1096-1097 (2005)) represents the most accurate test to date of Einstein's most famous equation. The paper shows that the equation holds to a relative accuracy of 0.00004%; scientists are still exploring the correctness of this equation.

Lecture II on the Photon Concept

1. The October 9 PowerPoint lecture file (24 megabytes) can be downloaded here.
2. Six Easy Pieces: Essentials of Physics Explained by Its Most Brilliant Teacher by Richard Feynman (Perseus Books Group, 1996). Chapter 6 of this book is the place to turn to for a good discussion of the implications of the two-slit experiment for understanding the quantum mechanics of light and matter.

Lecture III on Brownian Motion and the Existence of Atoms

1. The October 23 PowerPoint lecture file (18 megabytes) can be downloaded here.
2. American Institute of Physics article about Einstein and Brownian motion.
3. January 2005 Physics World article about Einstein and Brownian motion.
4. Chapter 1 of the book Six Easy Pieces by Richard Feynman (Perseus Books Group, 1996) has a very good non-technical discussion about the atomic hypothesis and how it provides many valuable insights into physics, chemistry, and biology. The same chapter is available in Volume I of Feynman's Lectures On Physics.
5. "The Elements," song by Tom Lehrer MP3 and the lyrics.
   Written when Lehrer was a graduate student of mathematics at Harvard in the 1960s, in which he put all the names of the elements together to the tune of Gilbert and Sullivan's "I Am The Very Model of a Modern Major-General".

Lecture IV on Einstein's Theory of General Relativity: Black Holes, The Big Bang, and the Ultimate Computer

1. The January 8 PowerPoint lecture file (43 megabytes) can be downloaded here.
2. 87 Frequently Asked Questions about Black Holes at the Astronomy Cafe.
3. Virtual trips to black holes and neutron stars.
4. Tutorial on dark matter.
5. NASA lunar "feather-drop" home page, discussing and showing movie of David Scott dropping hammer and feather at same time on surface of Moon, confirming Galileo's claim that objects fell independently of their mass or chemical properties.
6. Seth Lloyd's article on "Ultimate physical limits to computation," how a knowledge of special relativity, general relativity, and quantum mechanics suggest that the human race is not even close to achieving the maximum amount of computation that can be extracted from a laptop-size computer. But to achieve the ultimate (serial) computer, you need to crush it into a black hole and heat it to temperatures comparable to those that existed at the early stages of the Big Bang.
7. Some related books:
   1. Big Bang: The Origin Of The Universe by Simon Singh (Fourth Estate, 2005).
   2. Black Holes & Time Warps by Kip Thorne (W. W. Norton & Company, 1994).

Some Recommended Books:

1. Simply Einstein: Relativity Demystified by Richard Wolfson (W. W. Norton, 2003). A non-technical non-mathematical book about special and general relativity. This is probably the best book for most people to look at if they want to learn more after the lectures.
2. The New World of Mr. Tompkins by George Gamow and Russell Stannard (Cambridge University Press, 1999). A non-technical and humorous classic that introduces the reader to relativity, quantum mechanics, and other topics of 20th-century physics.
3. Einstein in Berlin by Thomas Levenson (Bantam Books, 2003). A look at Germany through the eyes of Einstein from 1914 to 1932, some science but also much interesting culture and history also.
4. The End of Science: Facing the Limits of Knowledge in the Twilight of the Scientific Age by John Horgan (Little Brown & Company, 1997, New York). Will science continue to make significant discoveries arbitrarily far into the future or will science come to an end, where the basic principles of all phenomena become known? This books takes the controversial view that science will come to an end and is likely in its twilight now.
5. Return From the Stars by Stanislaw Lem (Harvest, 1989). A science fiction book by someone that many people regard as one of the great 20th century science fiction writers. The book gives an extraordinary sense of the culture shock that a group of astronauts face when they return 130 years into Earth's future while only having aged a decade themselves because of relativistic time dilation.
6. Einstein 1905: The Standard of Greatness by John S. Rigden (Harvard University Press, 2005). A short and somewhat technical book written to coincide with the 2005 celebration of Einstein's papers. The book gives a valuable sense of how scientists reacted to Einstein's papers and the intellectual context at the time Einstein's 1905 papers were published.