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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...

Roman Catholic priest Fr. Georges Lemaître, working off Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity, first proposed the “Big Bang” explanation of the universe’s origin in 1927. It took decades for the theory to win general acceptance. Einstein himself opposed it bitterly for years, in what he would later call “the biggest mistake of my life.” The theory was finally proved experimentally only in 1965 by Penzias and Wilson. For their pains, they were awarded the Nobel Prize. Fr. Lemaître, on the other hand, never received the public recognition that was his due. Nevertheless, in the 1970s several apparent problems with the...

For years scientists trying to visualize the concept of gravitational waves churned by the collision of black holes have relied largely on artists' conceptions. Now, at long last, they have Einstein's conception. According to Einstein, when two massive black holes merge, all of space jiggles like a bowl of Jell-O as gravitational waves race out from the collision at light speed. This is a mind-boggling notion, to be sure. NASA scientists have reached a breakthrough in computer modeling that allows them to simulate what gravitational waves from merging black holes look like. The three-dimensional simulations are a manifestation of Einstein's...

This week the History Channel is running the “10 Days That Changed America” and one of the 10 bears a striking resemblance to current events. The day? Not really fixed since the “event” was Einstein’s letter to FDR that led to the creation of America’s atomic bomb program. The letter was written by Leo Szilard August 2, 1939, obviously one of the most brilliant physicists in the world, signed by Einstein and delivered to FDR by Alexander Sachs, one of Roosevelt’s economic speech writers on October 11, 1939. Notice the timeline, nearly two months passed since a message from Einstein...

TAMPA - One minute a pair of Tampa police officers were trying to catch a couple of loose dogs Tuesday morning, the next they were fielding a unique request from a man. Would they test his crack pipe to make sure he was getting the real thing? According to an arrest affidavit, Phillip Williams wasn't convinced he was being sold actual crack cocaine. So about 11:15 a.m., he approached Officers Wayne Easley and Gary Filippone to verify he was getting real drugs.He was.The officers tested the pipe, which, sure enough, had cocaine residue. Williams, who is listed on jail...

March 22, 2006: Consider a pair of brothers, identical twins. One gets a job as an astronaut and rockets into deep space. The other stays on Earth. When the traveling twin returns home, he discovers he's younger than his brother. This is Einstein's Twin Paradox, and although it sounds strange, it is absolutely true. The theory of relativity tells us that the faster you travel through space, the slower you travel through time. Rocketing to Alpha Centauri—warp 9, please—is a good way to stay young.

The Star Trek vision of analysing rocks and minerals with the sweep of a handheld device has taken a step towards becoming science rather than science fiction. "We are developing a tricorder," said Robert Downs, associate professor of geosciences at The University of Arizona in Tucson. Professor Downs is using a technique called Raman spectroscopy to compile a library of spectral fingerprints for all the Earth's minerals. About 1,500 of the 4,000 known minerals have been catalogued so far. Although the current Raman spectrometer takes up an area the size of a tabletop, Professor Downs's colleague M. Bonner Denton, a...

Vitamin C supplements can stop most of the vitamin E loss that occurs in smokers, showing how vitamins act together to protect the body, according to a new study. Vitamin E is one of the first lines of defense against cigarette smoke in lung tissue, said Maret Traber, an Oregon State University nutrition professor and a researcher at its Linus Pauling Institute. Smoke creates free radicals -- rogue oxygen molecules -- that destroy cells and are linked to cancer. Vitamin E can act as a molecule called an antioxidant and reduce the impact of the free radicals, helping prevent the...

Top, Alinari/Art Resource; Associated Press HARMONY OF THE UNIVERSE Einstein, who learned to play the violin as a child and often turned to music in difficult times, was especially fond of the sonatas by Mozart. Last year, the 100th anniversary of E=mc2 inspired an outburst of symposiums, concerts, essays and merchandise featuring Albert Einstein. This year, the same treatment is being given to another genius, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, born on Jan. 27, 250 years ago. There is more to the dovetailing of these anniversaries than one might think. Einstein once said that while Beethoven created his music, Mozart's "was...

When it comes to the body, they say you can't take it with you when you die. But they didn't say it should be sold from the back of a truck. Or that you should not have the right to give a fully informed consent for whatever it is that medical science wants to do with your remains. Recently it was revealed that a group of criminals was stealing bones from bodies at crematoriums in New York. They were then sold to for-profit tissue banks in New Jersey and Florida. Among the victims was the late host of PBS television's...

The stars run in their courses, in billions of galaxies, orbited by planets which are orbited by moons, and if they did not do so in ways which are predictable -- that is with many recurring similarities -- science would not exist. Predictability to some degree or other is the foundation of science. Those italics emphasize an extension of previous demands by science, which insisted on absolutes. Quantum physics took that down, and in the process angered Albert Einstein. But, still and all, even in the subatomic world one can safely play the odds. You cannot predict what any given...

As the century's greatest thinker, as an immigrant who fled from oppression to freedom, as a political idealist, he best embodies what historians will regard as significant about the 20th century. And as a philosopher with faith both in science and in the beauty of God's handiwork, he personifies the legacy that has been bequeathed to the next century. In a hundred years, as we turn to another new century--nay, ten times a hundred years, when we turn to another new millennium--the name that will prove most enduring from our own amazing era will be that of Albert Einstein: genius,...

Thoughts on quantum theory by various scientists:"On quantum theory, I use up more brain grease than on relativity." Albert Einstein to Otto Stern in 1911"Those are the crazy people who are not working on quantum theory."Albert Einstein referring to the inmates of an insane asylum near his office in Prague, in 1911"I could probably have arrived at something like this myself, but if all this is true then it means the end of physics."Albert Einstein, referring to a 1913 breakthrough by Niels Bohr"Anyone who is not shocked by quantum theory has not understood a single word."Niels Bohr"I don't like it,...

December 27, 2005 Quantum Trickery: Testing Einstein's Strangest Theory By DENNIS OVERBYE Einstein said there would be days like this.This fall scientists announced that they had put a half dozen beryllium atoms into a "cat state."No, they were not sprawled along a sunny windowsill. To a physicist, a "cat state" is the condition of being two diametrically opposed conditions at once, like black and white, up and down, or dead and alive.These atoms were each spinning clockwise and counterclockwise at the same time. Moreover, like miniature Rockettes they were all doing whatever it was they were doing together, in...

LANCASTER - For Andrea Donnellan, the Earth moves. Well, the land beneath us moves for us all. It's actually in a continual state of flux. But Donnellan, a geophysicist and deputy manager of the Science Division at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, takes a special interest in the Earth's movements. Donnellan was the keynote speaker Friday at the Bohn-Meyer Math and Science Odyssey at Antelope Valley College. Roughly 150 eighth-grade students from 10 schools attended the day of workshops related to Einstein's Theory of Relativity. Donnellan served up a slide presentation titled "Living on a Restless Planet," demonstrating how...

Is Earth in a vortex of space-time? We'll soon know the answer: A NASA/Stanford physics experiment called Gravity Probe B (GP-B) recently finished a year of gathering science data in Earth orbit. The results, which will take another year to analyze, should reveal the shape of space-time around Earth--and, possibly, the vortex. Time and space, according to Einstein's theories of relativity, are woven together, forming a four-dimensional fabric called "space-time." The tremendous mass of Earth dimples this fabric, much like a heavy person sitting in the middle of a trampoline. Gravity, says Einstein, is simply the motion of objects following...

Last Updated: Tuesday, 8 November 2005, 20:27 GMT E-mail this to a friend Printable version Science to ride gravitational waves By Jonathan Amos BBC News science reporter, Hanover Jim Hough believes the hunt will soon deliver Many expect it to be one of the biggest scientific breakthroughs of our age: "There'll certainly be a Nobel Prize in it for somebody," says Jim Hough.The UK professor is standing on a farm road in Lower Saxony, Germany, with a crop of beet on one side and sprouts on the other. But the real interest lies at his feet - with some...