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As we all know, as as numerous stacks of research have shown, only really stupid, illogical, fact-challenged people believe that God played some meaningful role in the creation of heaven and earth. Right?I mean, facts are facts and journalism is all about the facts. Still, I am happy to report that the New York Times ran an essay the other day that opened the currents of science just a bit and showed us the kind of things that linear, logical scientists think about when things go bump in the dark, or when they go bump in the light. This is...

Einstein’s God by Jean F. Drew Albert Einstein (1879 – 1955) — reluctant scientific revolutionary and one of the most prolific theoretical physicists who ever lived — continues to fascinate us as a world-class thinker and important public actor to this day. There has been much speculation regarding his religious views in particular over the course of many decades. Some people nowadays maintain that Einstein was an atheist. Others, a pantheist. His great biographer Abraham Pais (in Subtle Is the Lord, 1982) averred that Einstein’s God was simply the God of Baruch Spinoza ((1632–1677), one of the most influential European...

And now for something quasi-serious. A fascinating concept, perfectly executed: Hardly a relative theory. Click here!

A new version of a computer intrusion detection system being developed by the United States Department of Homeland Security has raised concerns from advocacy groups over privacy and the involvement of the National Security Agency (NSA) in the development of the software. The new system, known as Einstein 3, can reportedly read email as well as its original function, to detect malicious software. Civil rights group Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT) called on the Obama administration to release information about the legal implications of Einstein 3, which will be rolled out across all government agencies. “While its predecessor merely...

Time doesn’t exist. The universe isn’t really expanding. And if you want a theory of quantum gravity, look to the man who inspired Einstein, says Julian Barbour. For someone who believes time doesn’t exist, Julian Barbour sure has a head for dates. He remembers exactly when he started to have doubts about time: It was October 18, 1963, and he was reading the newspaper. He spotted an article about the physicist Paul Dirac and his quest for a theory of quantum gravity—a theory linking Einstein’s ideas about gravity to the clashing doctrine of quantum mechanics. Today, Barbour is on that...

The Obama administration will proceed with a Bush-era plan to use National Security Agency assistance in screening government computer traffic on private-sector networks, with AT&T as the likely test site, according to three current and former government officials. — “We absolutely intend to use the technical resources, the substantial ones, that NSA has. But . . . they will be guided, led and in a sense directed by the people we have at the Department of Homeland Security,” the department’s secretary, Janet Napolitano, told reporters in a discussion about cybersecurity efforts. … The program is the most controversial element of...

The Suppression of Inconvenient Facts in Physics "Textbooks present science as a noble search for truth, in which progress depends on questioning established ideas. But for many scientists, this is a cruel myth. They know from bitter experience that disagreeing with the dominant view is dangerous - especially when that view is backed by powerful interest groups. Call it suppression of intellectual dissent. The usual pattern is that someone does research or speaks out in a way that threatens a powerful interest group, typically a government, industry or professional body. As a result, representatives of that group attack the...

Seeking signs of genius, a researcher recently reconstructed the shape of Albert Einstein's brain with techniques normally used to analyze fossils. This mold of thought, she believes, reveals the imprint of a rare intelligence that transformed our understanding of space, time and energy. By studying photographs of Einstein's brain taken at his death in 1955, paleoanthropologist Dean Falk at Florida State University identified a dozen subtle variations in its surface that may have heightened his ability to see physics in a new way. Her research suggests how the brain shaped the inner life of the 20th century's most famous mind....

Don't try this at home. Several times a day, for several days, you induce pain in someone. You control the pain with morphine until the final day of the experiment, when you replace the morphine with saline solution. Guess what? The saline takes the pain away.

One of quantum physics' crazier notions is that two particles seem to communicate with each other instantly, even when they're billions of miles apart. Albert Einstein, arguing that nothing travels faster than light, dismissed this as impossible "spooky action at a distance." The great man may have been wrong. A series of recent mind-bending laboratory experiments has given scientists an unprecedented peek behind the quantum veil, confirming that this realm is as mysterious as imagined. Quantum physics is the study of the very small -- atoms, photons and other particles. Unlike the cause-and-effect of our everyday physical world, subatomic particles...

In this centennial year of Albert Einstein's revolutionary theories of space, time, and gravity, humanities scholars say that his influence extended far beyond science. Time is a nebulous thing, except maybe for lunchtime. That's a lesson from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, the science-fiction romp by Douglas Adams that was thrown into Hollywood's Infinite Improba bility Drive and emerged as an early-summer movie hit. Consider the elaborately imagined history of the Guide itself, and of its various editors. We learn that one Lig Lury Jr., hired by a publishing consortium operating from a chunk of celestial real estate called...

An Indian boy has an IQ greater than that of Albert Einstein at the tender age of six. Pranav Veera has an IQ of 176, while Einstein’s IQ was believed to be about 160. The little boy can recite the names of the U.S. presidents in the order they served in office, and is able to say the alphabet backward. Given a date back to 2000, Pranav can even tell which day of the week that was. He is highly competitive at playing Wii video games, and likes to play outside. Pranav’s parents have revealed that he seemed unusually intelligent...

God’s mighty expanse by D. Russell HumphreysPublished: 26 February 2009(GMT+10) Psalm 150:1, the first verse of the last psalm, contains a phrase that has always intrigued me: … Praise Him in his mighty expanse. (NAS), or… praise him in the firmament of his power. (KJV) God made the expanse (firmament) on the second day and called it “heavens” (Genesis 1:8, plural from literal Hebrew). Later, on the fourth day, He populated the expanse with the sun, moon and stars (Genesis 1:14-19). So the expanse is not the heavenly bodies, but rather the space that contains the heavenly bodies. Normally people...

California has Silicon Valley. North Carolina, the Research Triangle. Now some in New Jersey would like the central part of the state branded Einstein's Alley. Trying to capitalize on Albert Einstein's ties to Princeton, where he lived in his last years, a group has launched an aggressive marketing campaign to lure high-tech industries to the five-county region of Somerset, Hunterdon, Mercer, Middlesex and Monmouth. "We want to help the economy in New Jersey," said Lou Wagman, co-executive director of Einstein's Alley, the nonprofit launched two years ago at the suggestion of Rep. Rush Holt (D-12th Dist.). "And we're starting to...

Aided by a supercomputer, an international team of theoretical physicists has recently performed a massive computation that confirmed Einstein’s famous formula E=mc2, which states that matter and energy interconvert. Their research appears in the November 21, 2008, edition of the journal Science. The study set out to provide a stronger theoretical basis for the Standard Model of particle physics. Part of this model holds that the protons and neutrons inside atomic nuclei are made of quarks and gluons, which are theoretical particles of energy. The researchers’ quantitative calculations agreed very closely with the experimental observations that “more than 99 percent...

PARIS (AFP) — It's taken more than a century, but Einstein's celebrated formula e=mc2 has finally been corroborated, thanks to a heroic computational effort by French, German and Hungarian physicists.

Enlarge ImageIt's relative. Astronomers have been measuring spin precession in an eclipsing pair of pulsars.Credit: Daniel Cantin/McGill University As if his reputation needed cementing, astronomers have confirmed Albert Einstein's status as a supergenius once more. Studying a unique pair of pulsars--small and extremely dense leftovers from supernova explosions--researchers have measured an effect that was predicted by Einstein's 92-year-old general theory of relativity. The result, they report tomorrow in Science, is almost exactly what the famous physicist had foreseen. In Einstein's relativistic universe, matter curves space and slows down time, and the speed of light remains the only constant. But...

"The word god is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honourable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish. No interpretation no matter how subtle can (for me) change this." "For me the Jewish religion like all others is an incarnation of the most childish superstitions. And the Jewish people to whom I gladly belong and with whose mentality I have a deep affinity have no different quality for me than all other people. As far as my experience goes, they are no better than other human groups,...

Albert Einstein described belief in God as "childish superstition" and said Jews were not the chosen people, in a letter to be sold in London this week, an auctioneer said Tuesday. The father of relativity, whose previously known views on religion have been more ambivalent and fuelled much discussion, made the comments in response to a philosopher in 1954. As a Jew himself, Einstein said he had a great affinity with Jewish people but said they "have no different quality for me than all other people". "The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of...

"Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind." So said Albert Einstein, and his famous aphorism has been the source of endless debate between believers and non-believers wanting to claim the greatest scientist of the 20th century as their own. A little known letter written by him, however, may help to settle the argument - or at least provoke further controversy about his views. Due to be auctioned this week in London after being in a private collection for more than 50 years, the document leaves no doubt that the theoretical physicist was no supporter of religious beliefs,...

Many leading figures in the fields of science, politics and the arts have achieved success because they had autism, a leading psychiatrist has claimed.Michael Fitzgerald, Professor of Psychiatry at Trinity College, Dublin, argued the characteristics linked to autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) were the same as those associated with creative genius. (l-r) George Orwell, Albert Einstein and Thomas Jefferson Prof Fitzgerald cited Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein, George Orwell, H G Wells and Ludwig Wittgenstein as examples of famous and brilliant individuals who showed signs of ASDs including Asperger syndrome.Beethoven, Mozart, Hans Christian Andersen and Immanuel Kant have also received post mortem...

50 NOBEL LAUREATES AND OTHER GREAT SCIENTISTS WHO BELIEVE IN GOD (This book is an anthology of well-documented quotations. It is a free e-book.) CONTENTS PART I. NOBEL SCIENTISTS (20th - 21st Century) Albert EINSTEIN, Max PLANCK, Erwin SCHRÖDINGER, Werner HEISENBERG, Robert MILLIKAN, Charles TOWNES, Guglielmo MARCONI, John ECCLES, Richard SMALLEY, etc. PART II. NOBEL WRITERS (20th - 21st Century) T.S. ELIOT, Rudyard KIPLING, Alexander SOLZHENITSYN, François MAURIAC, Hermann HESSE, Winston CHURCHILL, Rabindranath TAGORE, Jean-Paul SARTRE, etc. PART III. NOBEL PEACE LAUREATES (20th - 21st Century) Albert SCHWEITZER, Jimmy CARTER, Theodore ROOSEVELT, Woodrow WILSON, Nelson MANDELA, Dag HAMMARSKJÖLD, Martin Luther...

Is PBS still making money off a discredited documentary that they know is filled with untruths, misquotes, and lies? It would seem so. In 2003 PBS aired a show titled "Einstein's Wife" that attempted to prove that Albert Einstein's world changing theories of physics were a result of a hidden collaboration with his first wife, Mileva Maric. This documentary claimed that Maric’s work on the theory of relativity was lied about and hidden away all these years by Einstein, his biographies and history. Imagine the implications if the work of what must be the smartest woman on earth was hidden...

A pair of German physicists claim to have broken the speed of light - an achievement that would undermine our entire understanding of space and time. According to Einstein's special theory of relativity, it would require an infinite amount of energy to propel an object at more than 186,000 miles per second. However, Dr Gunter Nimtz and Dr Alfons Stahlhofen, of the University of Koblenz, say they may have breached a key tenet of that theory. The pair say they have conducted an experiment in which microwave photons - energetic packets of light - travelled "instantaneously" between a pair of...

Nearly three years ago, NASA's oft-canceled $750 million Gravity Probe B Relativity Mission finally shot into space with one goal -- to quantify Einstein's predictions from Earth's orbit. Earlier this year, at the meeting of the American Physics Society, principal investigator Francis Everitt delivered the first results: Gravity Probe B has verified Einstein's theory to within 1 percent... Einstein's theory predicts that the axes should shift by a tiny amount -- 0.0018 degree -- under the influence of Earth's pull on space-time. After 18 months of data analysis, Everitt and his team measured the axial shift to within 1 percent...

One of the great paradoxes of physics is that while gravity was the first force in nature to be described physically and mathematically -- Isaac Newton worked out its basic laws more than 300 years ago -- it may be the last to be understood. Generations of physicists have remained stumped by the utter strangeness of gravity: Not only is it the weakest of the four natural forces, but it is also the only one that appears to be directly related to the nature of space and time... The uniquely geometric nature of gravity has made it frustratingly difficult to...

On Complementarity: A Tale of Two Friends Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr were great friends. Of this extraordinary friendship a mutual friend would write, “Their relations were marked not only by profound mutual respect but also by great affection, if not love.”1  It is a friendship that history records as one of most contentious, yet fruitful, and splendidly illuminating of all time. For the two friends engaged in a great debate over many decades — a public one, with “all comers” invited. History will likely record it as one of the greatest extended public debates on issues in science,...

The fact that he spent seven years as a patent clerk -- and wrote the paper for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in that period -- is often presented as one of history's great injustices, but Einstein would disagree. He wrote in an autobiographical sketch that the daily examination of patent applications "stimulated me to see the physical ramifications of theoretical concepts." His superior, Friedrich Haller, "graciously ignored" the fact that Einstein completed his work in two or three hours and spent the rest of his time on physics; further, he insisted that the examiners "think that everything...

AFTER more than 90 years, scientists believe they may have found experimental proof for general relativity, one of Albert Einstein’s greatest theories. Scientists announced yesterday that early results from Gravity Probe B (GP-B), the £400m space mission carrying the first experiments capable of testing the theory, suggested that Einstein was right. The researchers cautioned that they still had several months of work to confirm the result. However, the announcement, made at the annual meeting of the American Physical Society, is seen as highly significant. Since its launch by Nasa in April 2004, GP-B has been using four ultra-precise gyroscopes to...

He was slow in learning how to talk. "My parents were so worried," he later recalled, "that they consulted a doctor." ......... It may seem logical, in retrospect, that a combination of awe and rebellion made Einstein exceptional as a scientist. But what is less well known is that those two traits also combined to shape his spiritual journey and determine the nature of his faith....he rejected at first his parents' secularism and later the concepts of religious ritual and of a personal God who intercedes in the daily workings of the world. But the awe part comes in his...

Man will never fly. Wrong. Well, OK, but man will never break the sound barrier. Wrong. You can’t invent a vaccine against smallpox. Against measles. Against polio. Wrong, wrong, wrong... "We shall never be able by any means to study [the stars’] chemical composition," he wrote. Wrong... Now it’s time for another dire prediction: We will never be able to tell if there are planets orbiting around other stars. Wrong... Are there other Earth out there? Never say never. Now what about the science-fictiony idea of traveling faster than light? If we ever expect to visit those planets circling other...

ADAIR, Okla. A beer keg left on a patio fire pit in the eastern Oklahoma town of Adair exploded with the blast heard for miles. Police say no one was hurt but windows were broken in three homes and bricks from the pit were thrown a block-and-a-half away. Police Chief Albert McKee says two people put the old keg on the fire to watch beer spew out when it got hot. But they gave up and went inside before the explosion. McKee says it's a good thing they went inside because the blast could've killed them.

Rockets center Dikembe Mutombo, seated next to first lady Laura Bush and proudly flashing his familiar broad smile, was honored by President George Bush Tuesday at the State of the Union Address in Washington. Mutombo, working almost daily, raised $29 million (donating $15 million himself) for the construction of the Biamba Marie Mutombo Hospital and Research Center in Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Mutombo plans to open the hospital — Kinshasa's first new one in 40 years — this summer. It is named for his mother, who died nine years ago when civil unrest and...

NEW YORK - The Hubble Space Telescope has shown that a mysterious form of energy first conceived by Albert Einstein, then rejected by the famous physicist as his "greatest blunder," appears to have been fueling the expansion of the universe for most of its history. This so-called "dark energy" has been pushing the universe outward for at least 9 billion years, astronomers said Thursday. "This is the first time we have significant, discrete data from back then," said Adam Riess, a professor of astronomy at Johns Hopkins University and researcher at NASA's Space Telescope Science Institute. He and several colleagues...

Oscar-winning actor Sean Penn may wind up portraying legendary physicist Albert Einstein for a joint U.S.-Italian TV film production.

Maths genius declines top prize Photos of the reclusive genius are rare Grigory Perelman, the Russian who seems to have solved one of the hardest problems in mathematics, has declined one of the discipline's top awards. Dr Perelman was to have been presented with the prestigious Fields Medal by King Juan Carlos of Spain, at a ceremony in Madrid on Tuesday. In 2002, the mathematician claimed to have solved a century-old problem called the Poincare Conjecture. So far, experts working to verify his proof have found no significant flaws. There had been considerable speculation that Grigory "Grisha" Perelman would...

Brilliant men always betray their wives Einstein's affairs should surprise no one, says Desmond Morris. It is all in the genius's genes So Albert Einstein did not, after all, spend all his waking hours chalking up complex symbols on a blackboard. According to letters newly released this week, he devoted quite a bit of it to chasing the ladies. And with considerable success. To many, the idea of Einstein having 10 mistresses does not fit the classical image of the great, remote genius. Why was he wasting his valuable time with the exhausting business of conducting a string of illicit...

1 The placebo effect DON'T try this at home. Several times a day, for several days, you induce pain in someone. You control the pain with morphine until the final day of the experiment, when you replace the morphine with saline solution. Guess what? The saline takes the pain away. This is the placebo effect: somehow, sometimes, a whole lot of nothing can be very powerful. Except it's not quite nothing. When Fabrizio Benedetti of the University of Turin in Italy carried out the above experiment, he added a final twist by adding naloxone, a drug that blocks the effects...

Tuesday, Apr 12, 2005 A century after Albert Einstein published his most famous ideas, physicists commemorated the occasion by trying to demolish one of them. Yesterday astronomers were to tell experts gathering at Warwick University in England to celebrate the anniversary of the great man's "miracle year" that the speed of light -- Einstein's unchanging yardstick that underpins his special theory of relativity -- might be slowing down. Michael Murphy, of the Institute of Astronomy at Cambridge University, said: "We are claiming something extraordinary here. fundamental "The findings suggest that there is a more fundamental theory of the way that...

Physical constants are one of the cornerstones of physics – sacred numbers which we know to be fixed – but what if some of these constants are changing? Speaking at the Institute of Physics conference Physics 2005, Dr Michael Murphy of Cambridge University will discuss the "fine structure constant" – one of the critical numbers in the universe which seems to be precisely tuned for life to exist – and suggest that it might not be constant after all. Dr Murphy has used the largest optical telescope in the world, the Keck telescope on Mauna Kea in Hawaii, to study...

Using a quasar located 12.3 billion light-years away as a beacon, a team of astronomers detected the presence of molecular hydrogen in the farthest system ever, an otherwise invisible galaxy that we observe when the Universe was less than 1.5 billion years old, that is, about 10% of its present age. The astronomers find that there is about one hydrogen molecule for 250 hydrogen atoms. A similar set of observations for two other quasars, together with the most precise laboratory measurements, allows scientists to infer that the ratio of the proton to electron masses may have changed with time. If...

THE ENERGY OF EMPTY SPACE THAT ISN'T ZERO [LAWRENCE KRAUSS:] I just returned from the Virgin Islands, from a delightful event — a conference in St. Thomas — that I organized with 21 physicists. I like small events, and I got to hand-pick the people. The topic of the meeting was "Confronting Gravity. " I wanted to have a meeting where people would look forward to the key issues facing fundamental physics and cosmology. And if you think about it they all revolve in one way or another around gravity. Someone at the meeting said, well, you know, don't we...

Public confidence in the "constants" of nature may be at an all time low. Recent research has found evidence that the value of certain fundamental parameters, such as the speed of light or the invisible glue that holds nuclei together, may have been different in the past. ADVERTISEMENT "There is absolutely no reason these constants should be constant," says astronomer Michael Murphy of the University of Cambridge. "These are famous numbers in physics, but we have no real reason for why they are what they are."

Public confidence in the "constants" of nature may be at an all time low. Recent research has found evidence that the value of certain fundamental parameters, such as the speed of light or the invisible glue that holds nuclei together, may have been different in the past. "There is absolutely no reason these constants should be constant," says astronomer Michael Murphy of the University of Cambridge. "These are famous numbers in physics, but we have no real reason for why they are what they are." The observed differences are small—roughly a few parts in a million—but the implications are huge:...

JERUSALEM - An Albert Einstein letter decrying the attentions of a Berlin socialite is among newly unsealed documents that promise to shed light on the private life of the 20th century's greatest physicist. Ethel Michanowski was involved with Einstein in the late 1920s and early 30s, going so far as to chase him to England, said Barbara Wolff of the Hebrew University's Albert Einstein Archives, which on Monday unsealed more than 3,500 pages of correspondence written between 1912 and 1955, the year Einstein died at age 76. Wolff described their relationship as an affair, but disclosed little about Michanowski other...

SYDNEY (Reuters) - A team of Australian scientists has proposed that the speed of light may not be a constant, a revolutionary idea that could unseat one of the most cherished laws of modern physics -- Einstein's theory of relativity. The team, led by theoretical physicist Paul Davies of Sydney's Macquarie University, say it is possible that the speed of light has slowed over billions of years. If so, physicists will have to rethink many of their basic ideas about the laws of the universe. "That means giving up the theory of relativity and E=mc squared and all that sort...

Visitors of G.H. Hardy noted that one of the great English mathematicians of the 20th century kept portraits of Lenin and Einstein above his mantelpiece. His political views were decidedly left wing, so much so that he was made an honorary member of the academy of sciences in Leningrad in 1934. A few years later Stalin would start his purges that killed an estimated 20 million people. Hardy was unmoved, for the portrait of Lenin kept its place above the mantelpiece in his room until his death. Hardy was not alone, more often then not, some of the greatest minds...

Albert Einstein's brain was not only unique but physically different according to researchers. Albert Einstein, a mathematician and physicist one of the most intelligent men in history. Researchers have been fascinated with his brain after he died at the eage of 76 in 1955. Researchers are comparing Einstein's brain with four other men's brain of similiar age has discovered structure differences. Einstein's brain is larger than others and contained more brain cells too. Having more brain cells, researchers suggest Einstein's brain required more energy. Further, Einstein's brain had unusual pattern of grooves - 15% wider than other brains. Despite these...

Scientists use quantum gravity to describe the universe before the Big Bang.Scientists may finally have an answer to a "big" question: If the Big Bang was the beginning of the universe, what could have caused it to happen? Using a theory called "loop quantum gravity," a group led by Penn State professor Abhay Ashtekar has shown that just before the Big Bang occurred, another universe very similar to ours may have been contracting. According to the group's findings, this previous universe eventually became so dense that a normally negligible repulsive component of the gravitational force overpowered the attractive component, causing...