The Family Cayenne went to check out Walter Isaacson lecture about Einstein last night at the Jimmy Carter Library in support of his book Einstein: His Life and Universe. Fascinating lecture. I usually bring my camera to these things to give some flavor of the event, but I forgot it. It’s too bad, because the Carter Center grounds are beautiful. Anyway, Isaacson refrained from telling a racy Einstein story, because he saw a kid walking around in the back - that would be L’il Cayenne. She’s famous.
We received another explanation of that bowling ball on the trampoline to explain the General Theory of Relativity. We learned that Einstein was not the best teacher. His last living descendant is an anesthesiologist at a plastic surgery practice in Beverly Hills. Who knew? It wasn’t a complete rehash of the NPR interview, and Isaacson was a lively speaker. I’m glad we hustled down there on a school night.
In other, unrelated news: Don’t forget to enter our FREE Raw Shark Texts giveaway extravaganza. You gotta play to win. L’il Cayenne will draw a name out of a hat, and we announce the winner on Monday.
April 20th, 2007 at 7:31 am
C’mon and share the other explanation of the bowling ball on the trampoline thing.
April 20th, 2007 at 8:23 am
shame you had to cut out-you missed this elderly fellow getting *completely* starstuck over Isaacson. It was a little cute, actually.
April 20th, 2007 at 10:28 am
Shaft: I forget the particulars now, but I was nodding mu head in complete understanding at the time. That’s how these work. In fact, that’s the true genius of Einstein.
Russ: The Q&A was pretty fawning as well. One question began, “Thank you so much! You are like a little boy with your enthusiasm telling this story! My goodness!” Etc.
April 20th, 2007 at 1:31 pm
RE: bowling ball on a trampoline, here’s my best shot: Before Einstein, it was believed that objects with large mass in space had gravitational pull because they actually exerted some sort of attracting force on smaller objects nearby, as a magnet does to metal. But what Einstein theorized — and what turned out to be correct — is that such objects, by virtue of their large mass, actually bend the “fabric” of the surrounding space in such as way as to make smaller objects nearby gravitate (for lack of a better word) toward them. The easy visual is that it’s like placing a bowling ball on a trampoline, which bends the fabric in all directions towards the center. If you then place tennis balls at the edges of the trampoline, they will roll towards the bowling ball, but NOT because the bowling ball is exerting any sort of pulling force on them, but because that’s the way the surrounding fabric is being bent by the mass of the bowling ball, drawing lighter objects nearby towards it. Trampoline = space, bowling ball = star, tennis balls = planets. Wham, bam, thank ya ma’am.
April 20th, 2007 at 1:54 pm
Yeah, what Frank said. The theory was actually proven during a lunar eclipse when the light from stars near the sun could be observed. The Royal Society then apologized to a picture of Sir Isaac Newton for replacing his theories with Einstein’s. Isaacson read the headline from the New York Times that followed, which was very funny.
April 20th, 2007 at 2:48 pm
It’s time to grow my hair out and stop combing it — here’s what I had written before about the bowling ball thing, which sounds shockingly like what Isaacson described at the reading:
As a guy with an engineering degree (and therefore someone who slept through more physics classes than many of you), I think what Einstein was trying to say was that the trampoline represents the “ether” and that something massive like the bowling ball bends it, causing other objects to follow the trajectory of the bent ether; i.e., the other objects aren’t “attracted to” the bowling ball, but rather naturally follow the ether and are forced to alter their course because of the disruption caused by the bowling ball.
Of course, mine’s technically wrong because there’s no such thing as “ether”, something proven I believe by Michelson and Morley, scholars from my undergraduate alma mater, CWRU, but I think I get majority credit because I put “ether” in “quotation marks”, indicating that I was just trying to dumb the explanation down. Whether I was dumbing it down for you or for me is another question.