OT:
Unlike WG, who threw a bit of a tantrum, I admire your willingness to play around with this. I'd say you passed <g>
The Nobel Prize was for the photoelectric effect, which is in the realm of electromagnetism in the experiment itself, but that wasn't the gist of it. But it primarily had to do with quantization of energy.
My take on history from what I've read and been lectured about is he could easily have won the Nobel Prize for both the Special and General Relativity, but especially the former was not understood for it's value at the time. Yes, general relativity is that one about gravity: if standing in an elevator with no windows, no way an observer can tell the difference (or measure in any way) between the pull of gravitational force and the pull due to the elevator acceleration and producing the same downward force.
Rather cool, I thought. But it had other implications, e.g. light bending, which was observed during a solar eclipse years later, and a gravity lens, which was observed (finally!) I think in the late 70s.
He was one cool guy.
My favorite Einstein joke, keeping in mind that he was brilliant (a drawing so imagine him standing by his wife and both wearing T-shirts)
Einstein's T-shirt: An arrow pointing at his wife "I'm with stupid"
Wife's T-shirt: An arrow pointing back "I'm with Einstein"
Anyway, I apologize for any inaccuracies from doing this from memory. It's been a long time. My quantum physics professor, by the way, was the son of a man who won two Nobel Prizes. I thought that was pretty cool, too, although he never mentioned it, my astronomy prof told me. The first was for the invention of the transistor. My professor himself was a world class researcher in general relativity, but that was way beyond what I was going to do in physics. |
