Super Science Friends: how to save Newton

There is a new animated series in the city⁽¹⁾: Super Science Friends. Created by Brett Jubinville of Tinman Creative Studios, it was funded the first short through Kickstarter, while the rest of the episodes can be supported on Patreon.
The series is evidently inspired by Super Friends, produced by Hanna-Barbera for DC Comics, with the place of the heroes of JLA taken by some iconic scientists: Marie Curie, with a radioactive ring similar to Green Lantern’s one; Charles Darwin, able to transform into any animal, like Beast Boy from the Teen Titans; Nikola Tesla, with electromagnetic powers, like Magneto from Marvel universe, historical X-Men enemy; Sigmund Freud, father of psychoanalysis with oversight of lust, to be seen as an alternative to Aquaman with his oversight of aquatic creatures.

Alice underground: the door, the quaternion and the relativity

Alice underground is the first version of Aline in the wonderland by Lewis Carroll. The original manuscript, illustrated by Carroll himself, was given to the little Alice Liddell for Christmas in 1864 and picked up the story that he had told to Alice and her sisters Lorina and Edith during a summer's afternoon, precisely on July the 4th, 1862. This first version of the carrollian fantasy novel is, ultimately, a restricted version of Alice, where various characters and episodes completely absent in Underground are added, such as the Duchess or the team composed by the Mad Hatter, the March Hare and the Dormouse.
The intial, interesting considerations about underground is about the importance of the trees and the doors: following the suggestion by Adele Cammarata⁽³⁾, we can assume that the tree and the door that Alice cross to enter the garden of the Queen of Hearts, completely absent in Wonderland, is linked with the Celtic tradition. Indeed the oak is one of the sacred trees of the druids, symbolizing a link between heaven and earth⁽¹⁾. In this way the oak, which in Celtic was called duir, is a real door that connects people with the gods, but also ourselves with our inner part. So, from an etymological point of view, a carved door in a tree trunk is a Celtic symbol used to identify the Alice's passage towards a more stable phase after the size's changes of the previous scenes.
These changes in size, alluding both to the transition to adulthood, in perfect connection with the Druidic symbolism, and with the more classic homothetic transformations, i.e. the transformations which, without changing the proportions of a geometric figure, change its size. All these changes remain unchanged in the transition to the second version, including the meeting with the Caterpillar, who continues to ask Alice:

Who are you?

"We are hearing the universe"

When we describe a geometric space, we need to define a metric, or in other words a way to measure distances: in particular in general relativity we use the tensor metric, $g_{\mu \nu}$. Supposing the existence of gravitational waves, it is possible to calculate their effect on the radiation coming from some cosmic objects like a binary or a couple of merging black holes.

On September 14, 2015, within the first two days of Advanced LIGO's operation, the researchers detected a signal so strong that it could be seen by eye. The most intense portion of the signal lasted for about 0.2 s and was observed in both detectors, with a combined signal-to-noise ratio of 24. Fittingly, this first gravitational wave signal, dubbed GW150914, arrived less than two months before the 100-year anniversary of the publication of Einstein's general relativity theory.⁽¹⁾

One hundred years

Creativity is the residue of time wasted

This interesting quotation by Albert Einstein linked him with Henri Poincaré not only with the contribution of French math to special relativity, but also for the utility of the creative leisure. Indeed Poincaré told that, after some fruitless attempts to sole a particularly difficult mathematical problem, he decided to go away for a geological excursion, in this way stimulating conditions to resolve the problem!
But the most important reason in order to write something about Einstein is the general relativity birthday, that was presented by Einstein on the 25th november 1915 at the Prussian Accademy of Sciences.

What Einstein thought about Galilei

about #AlbertEinsten #GalileoGalilei

Galileo's Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems is a mine of information for anyone interested in the cultural history of the Western world and its influence upon economic and political development.
(...) To begin with, the Dialogue gives an extremely lively and persuasive exposition of the then prevailing views on the structure of the cosmos in the large. The naïve picture of the earth as a flat disc, combined with obscure ideas about star-filled space and the motions of the celestial bodies, prevalent in the early Middle Ages, represented a deterioration of the much earlier conceptions of the Greeks, and in particular of Aristotle’s ideas and Ptolemy’s consistent spatial concept of the celestial bodies and their motions.
(...) In advocating and fighting for the Copernican theory Galileo was not only motivated by a striving to simplify the representation of the celestial motions. His aim was to substitute for a petrified and barren system of ideas the unbiased and strenuous quest for a deeper and more consistent comprehension of the physical and astronomical facts.
The form of dialogue used in his work may be partly due to Plato’s shining example; it enabled Galileo to apply his extraordinary literary talent to the sharp and vivid confrontation of opinion. To be sure, he wanted to avoid an open commitment in these controversial questions that would have delivered him to destruction by the Inquisition. Galileo had, in fact, been expressly forbidden to advocate the Copernican theory. Apart from its revolutionary factual content the Dialogue represents a down-right roguish attempt to comply with this order in appearance and yet in fact to disregard it. Unfortunately, it turned out that the Holy Inquisition was unable to appreciate adequately such subtle humor.
(...) It is difficult to us today to appreciate the imaginative power made manifest in the precise formulation of the concept of acceleration and in the recognition of its physical significance.
Once the conception of the center of the universe had, with good reason, been rejected, the idea of the immovable earth, and, generally, of an exceptional role of the earth, was deprived of its justification (...)
(...) Galileo takes great pains to demonstrate that the hypothesis of the rotation and revolution of the earth is not refuted by the fact that we do not observe any mechanical effects of these motions. Strictly speaking, such a demonstration was impossible because a complete theory of mechanics was lacking. I think it is just in the struggle with this problem that Galileo’s originality is demonstrated with particular force. Galileo is, of course, also concerned to show that the fixed stars are too remote for parallaxes produced by the yearly motion of the earth to be detectable with the measuring instruments of his time. This investigation also is ingenious, notwithstanding its primitiveness.
It was Galileo’s longing for a mechanical proof of the motion of the earth which misled him into formulating a wrong theory of the tides. The fascinating arguments in the last conversation would hardly have been accepted as proofs by Galileo, had his temperament not got the better of him. It is hard for me to resist the temptation to deal with this subject more fully.
The leitmotif which I recognize in Galileo’s work is the passionate fight against any kind of dogma based on authority. Only experience and careful reflection are accepted by him as criteria of truth. Nowadays it is hard for us to grasp how sinister and revolutionary such an attitude appeared at Galileo’s time, when merely to doubt the truth of opinions which had no basis but authority was considered a capital crime and punished accordingly. Actually we are by no means so far removed from such a situation even today as many of us would like to flatter ourselves; but in theory, at least, the principle of unbiased thought has won out, and most people are willing to pay lip service to this principle.
It has often been maintained that Galileo became the father of modern science by replacing the speculative, deductive method with the empirical, experimental method. I believe, however, that this interpretation would not stand close scrutiny. There is no empirical method without speculative concepts and systems; and there is no speculative thinking whose concepts do not reveal, on closer investigation, the empirical material from which they stem. To put into sharp contrast the empirical and the deductive attitude is misleading, and was entirely foreign to Galileo. Actually it was not until the nineteenth century that logical (mathematical) systems whose structures were completely independent of any empirical content had been cleanly extracted. Moreover, the experimental methods at Galileo’s disposal were so imperfect that only the boldest speculation could possibly bridge the gaps between the empirical data. (For example, there existed no means to measure times shorter than a second). The antithesis Empiricism vs. Rationalism does not appear as a controversial point in Galileo’s work. Galileo opposes the deductive methods of Aristotle and his adherents only when he considers their premises arbitrary or untenable, and he does not rebuke his opponents for the mere fact of using deductive methods. In the first dialogue, he emphasizes in several passages that according to Aristotle, too, even the most plausible deduction must be put aside if it is incompatible with empirical findings. And on the other hand, Galileo himself makes considerable use of logical deduction. His endeavors are not so much directed at "factual knowledge" as at "comprehension". But to comprehend is essentially to draw conclusions from an already accepted logical system.

(from the foreword to Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems: Ptolemaic and Copernican (1953), Einstein Archives 1-174 - via Open Parachute)

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About the italian physicist, Galileo Galilei and the impossible biomechanics of giants is an interesting reading.

Arthur and the eclipse

by @ulaulaman about #ArthurEddington #AlbertEinstein #GeneralRelativity

On the 17th November 1922, Albert Einstein, accompanied by his wife, arrived in Kobe (see the report of the visit published on the AAPPS Bulletin - pdf). Here he was surrounded by journalists and fans: while the first asked him questions, the latter were on the hunt for an autograph from one of the most famous physicists and scientists of the time. Einstein, as written by Naoki Urasawa on the initial pages of Billy Bat #9, to a specific question on why he won the Nobel Prize for the photoelectric effect and not for the theory of special and general relativity, replied:

Because, that can't be verified.

But the mangaka committed a chronological mistake, probably caused by the Urasawa's need to focus on the innovation represented by the Einstein's theories: the point, in fact, is that just three years earlier, on the 6th November, 1919, during a meeting of the Royal Society and Royal Astronomical Society, Arthur Eddington presented the results of the celestial observations made ​​in mid-spring of that year. The interest and the importance of the discovery was such that the next day, the Times headlined:
Revolution in Science: New Theory of the Universe: Newton's Ideas Overthrown, by Joseph John Thomson:

Our conceptions about the structure of the universe must be changed in a fundamental way

So, when Einstein went to Japan, the evidence of the correctness of his theory had already been around.

The steady-state universe of Albert Einstein

We present a translation and analysis of an unpublished manuscript by Albert Einstein in which he proposed a 'steady-state' model of the universe. The manuscript appears to have been written in early 1931 and demonstrates that Einstein once considered a cosmic model in which the mean density of matter in an expanding universe remains constant due to a continuous creation of matter from empty space, a process he associated with the cosmological constant. This model is in marked contrast to previously known Einsteinian models of the cosmos (both static and dynamic) but anticipates the well-known steady-state theories of Hoyle, Bondi and Gold. We find that Einsteins steady-state model contains a fundamental flaw and suggest it was discarded for this reason. We also suggest that he declined to try again because he found more sophisticated versions rather contrived. The manuscript is of historical significance because it reveals that Einstein debated between steady-state and evolving models of the cosmos decades before a similar debate took place in the cosmological community.

From arXiv via Nature

Milano street art: Albert Einstein

posted by @ulaulaman #AlbertEinstein #StreetArt #Milano

In Paolo Sarpi, a street of Milano, there is a street artist who sketches a lot of subject (for example Iron Man or this iconic space monkey). In particular today I find a beautiful reproduction of the most famous photograph about Albert Einstein:

(photo 1 | photo 2)

On Einstein's 72nd birthday on March 14, 1951, UPI photographer Arthur Sasse was trying to persuade him to smile for the camera, but having smiled for photographers many times that day, Einstein stuck out his tongue instead. This photograph became one of the most popular ever taken of Einstein, often used in merchandise depicting him in a lighthearted sense. Einstein enjoyed this photo and requested UPI to give him nine copies for personal use, one of which he signed for a reporter.
Source: Wikipedia

Sulmondo, the nick of the street artists, add only one little detail to the original photo!

Poincaré, Einstein and Picasso: children of time

posted by @ulaulaman about #cubism #PabloPicasso #AlbertEinstein #HenriPoincaré #mathematics #art #relativity

A great thanks to Marco Fulvio Barozzi: his post⁽¹⁾ about Miller's book is the main inspiration of my post.

Yesterday, on the Guardian, Arthur I. Miller, the author of the book Einstein, Picasso: Space, Time and the Beauty that Causes Havoc, wrote a briefly article in which he resumed his thesis about the connections between Poincaré and Einstein, between Poincaré and Picasso and, for translation, between Einstein and Picasso.

Henri Poincaré was one of the most important mathematician of the early XX century: his most important contributions, that have a great impact also in physics, are in group theory and representation theory. His work was indeed important for the birth of the ray representations (the theory was developed in particular by Valentine Bargmann starting from Weyl and Wigner's works) and basic for special relativity and in particular for general relativity. Poincaré was the first to propose the symmetrical form of the Lorentz transformations, and his work was important for the creation of the Poincaré group, the symmetry group of the general relativity. In particular about the relativity, Poincaré written on his book Science and Hypothesis (1902)

Our Euclidean geometry is itself a sort of linguistic convention; we may state the facts of mechanics in relation to a non-Euclidean space, but this would be a less convenient reference, although legitimate like our ordinary space.⁽¹⁾

He also defined the principle of relative motion like

the physical impossibility of observing absolute motion.⁽¹⁾

Two years later he named it Principle of Relativity.

At the other hand, Einstein did not cite Poincaré's works in his paper published in 1905 by Annalen der Physik and only in a conference in 1921 Einstein confirmed his debt to the french mathematician, but only about general relativity and non-euclidean geometry. And this is the only documented connection between Einstein and Poincaré: we must suppose that the two scientists worked indipendetly and also after his first paper Einstein used Poincaré's discoveries in order to develop the mathematical formalism of the general relativity.
Some years later the first Einstein's paper, the cubism was born in France:

A circle of poets and critics, and followers of the philosopher Bergson, stood up for cubism in the visual arts. This group became known as the Cubists. The poet and publicist G. Apollinaire became the undisputed leader of this movement.⁽²⁾

It seems that relativity played a relevant role in the phylosophy of the artistic movement

Like the scientists, the artists has come to recognize thatclassic conceptions of space and volume are limited and one-sided. (...) The presentation of objects from several point of view introduces a principle which is intimately bound up with modern life - simultaenity. It is a temporal coincidence that Einstein should havebegan his famous work (...) with a careful definition of simultaneity.⁽⁵⁾

In this quotation by Sigfried Giedion, the connection was simply casual, only a temporal coincidence, but a lot of art historians think that the connection is not so casual. One of this is Paul M. Laporte, who published two paper about cubism and relativity, and submitted them to Albert Einstein. The great physicist reply with a long letter, in which he concludes:

This new artistic "language" has nothing in common with the Theory of Relativity.⁽⁵⁾

And probably it is so. Indeed in 1903 the Introduction to Metaphysics by Henri Bergson was published. In the book Bergson argued that

human consciousness experiences space and time as ever-changing and heterogeneous. With the passage of time, an observer accumulates in his memory a store of perceptual information about a given object in the external visible world, and this accumulated experience becomes the basis for the observer’s conceptual knowledge of that object. By contrast, the intellect or reasoning faculty always represents time and space as homogenous. Bergson argued that intellectual perception led to a fundamentally false representation of the nature of things, that in nature nothing is ever absolutely still. Instead the universe is in a constant state of change or flux. An observer views an object and its surrounding environment as a continuum, fusing into one another. The task of metaphysics, according to Bergson, is to find ways to capture this flux, especially as it is expressed in consciousness. To represent this flux of reality, Picasso began to make references to the fourth dimension by "sticking together" several three-dimensional spaces in a row.⁽⁴⁾

Do scientists pray?

And a Happy New Year

(via LettersOfNote)