Einstein as a "Prophet of God"

Recent world events involving caricatures and religiously-motivated attacks on free speech merely validate the ancient wisdom that "the pen is mightier than the sword", any sword. Tyrants and fascist religions and institutions have never understood this wisdom and even in our modern age continue to think that the sword is mightier, even though their own reaction to the power of the pen proves the contrary.

Drawing the Line has an informative posting on political cartoons and relates an interesting story from America in this regard:

"In perhaps the best known example of the force of the political cartoon, Thomas Nast’s images in Harper’s Weekly played an important role in the overthrow of the Tweed Ring in 1870s New York City. An exasperated Boss Tweed is recorded to have demanded of his henchmen, “Stop them damn pictures. I don’t care so much what the papers write about me. My constituents can’t read. But, damn it, they can see pictures.”"

We think that free speech is not limitless and that there should be some limits on caricature (e.g. caricature which functions as libel and defamation), but there is obviously no reason that certain historical figures should be exempted from cartoon portrayal. Indeed, no historical figure is viewed uniformly by all of humanity, and no segment of humanity has the right to instruct other humans as to how to view some personage, even an alleged prophet.

In our view, the most recent "Prophet of God" was Albert Einstein, who showed us how the universe works, and yet, caricatures of Einstein are widespread without in any way detracting from his "message". There is one difference. Einstein's message is true. That is why certain nations, rather than to rely on the antiquated messages of their own alleged prophets, are attempting to gain nuclear weapons, whose construction is based on Einstein's message.

In any case, one of the reasons that blogging has become such an important part of the media scene is precisely because it is an exercise of the "power of the pen".

When just a few cartoons can provoke world-wide reaction far out of proportion to the cost of the ink and the paper used for publication, the power of the pen has been aptly proven.
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Einstein's Alleged Puzzle

Coudal Partners has the folowing puzzle up, attributed to Albert Einstein, who allegedly said that 98% of the people in the world could not figure it out.

Here is the puzzle:

"There are five houses in a row in different colors. In each house lives a person with a different nationality. The five owners drink a different drink, smoke a different brand of cigar and keep a different pet, one of which is a Walleye Pike [a fish].
The question is-- who owns the fish?
Hints:
1. The Brit lives in the red house.
2. The Swede keeps dogs as pets.
3. The Dane drinks tea.
4. The green house is on the left of the white house.
5. The green house owner drinks coffee.
6. The person who smokes Pall Malls keeps birds.
7. The owner of the yellow house smokes Dunhills.
8. The man living in the house right in the center drinks milk.
9. The man who smokes Blends lives next to the one who keeps cats.
10. The Norwegian lives in the first house.
11. The man who keeps horses lives next to the one who smokes Dunhills.
12. The owner who smokes Bluemasters drinks beer.
13. The German smokes Princes.
14. The Norwegian lives next to the blue house.
15. The man who smokes Blends has a neighbor who drinks water."

The way to solve the puzzle is to put down five squares (as houses) on a piece of paper horizontally next to each other and then - below each house - to enter the information as it is solved below each house, as taken from the above statements. Also make a list of numbers from 1 to 15 and strike a number if you use the information in it. That way, you will have fewer and fewer statements to consider for solution.

The trick to solving the puzzle is at each step, in the course of solving the puzzle, to find the one statement of the 15 statements that allows information to be entered based on that statement and also based on the information already available on the house grid of five houses.

Here is the order of the statements to be followed for solution. They are listed here in backward order (!) and without separating spaces (this will make it difficult to cheat by looking here unless you specifically choose to cheat: 962133121511715414108. The solution is ours and has not been picked up from any other source.

See the final solution at Coudal here.

Via Digital: Ex Post.
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Albert Einstein Quotes Quotations

Interestingly designed pages devoted to Einstein's quotations on Philosophy, Physics, Religion, Science, Metaphysics Humanity, War, Peace, Education, Knowledge, Morality & Freedom are found at Albert Einstein Quotes, part of a website on Truth and Reality by Geoff Haselhurst.

The site also has numerous photographs of Einstein.

Google as Turing's Cathedral and the Virus Principle

Turing's Cathedral at Edge by George Dyson is an article (October 24, 2005) which resulted from Dyson's visit to Google on the occasion of the 60th anniversary of John von Neumann's pioneer proposal for making a digital computer.

In that article Dyson writes:

"In a digital computer, the instructions are in the form of COMMAND (ADDRESS) where the address is an exact (either absolute or relative) memory location, a process that translates informally into "DO THIS with what you find HERE and go THERE with the result." Everything depends not only on precise instructions, but on HERE, THERE, and WHEN being exactly defined. It is almost incomprehensible that programs amounting to millions of lines of code, written by teams of hundreds of people, are able to go out into the computational universe and function as well as they do given that one bit in the wrong place (or the wrong time) can bring the process to a halt.

Biology has taken a completely different approach. There is no von Neumann address matrix, just a molecular soup, and the instructions say simply "DO THIS with the next copy of THAT which comes along." The results are far more robust. There is no unforgiving central address authority, and no unforgiving central clock. This ability to take general, organized advantage of local, haphazard processes is exactly the ability that (so far) has distinguished information processing in living organisms from information processing by digital computers."

What struck me here about the description of the difference in information processing between digital computers and living organisms is that the process of information processing in living organisms resembles more that of computer virus programs than that of computer applications such as "pickyourprogram.exe". That fictitious program is only an example, as no such program was found through Google search on December 3, 2005.

As the nature of computers moves closer to biological information processing, my question in this regard is whether the "virus principle" can be made to work for beneficial programming, operating under the instruction principle: "Do THIS with the next copy of THAT which comes along"?

Einstein was a Dyslexic Genius

Via Sassy Lawyer and bits of chocolate we find that Einstein was dyslexic, as was also Leonardo da Vinci.

For more information on Dyslexia, see LexiLine.org.

A historical view of the Pharaohs as Dyslexics, based on their hieroglyphic script, is found here.

Einstein is in good company.
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NASA Gravity Probe-B and Einstein's General Theory of Relativity

Via the Stanford Newsletter, we are directed to Bog Kahn's article
"Gravity Probe-B data collection ends: Was Einstein correct?" about a currently ongoing experimental test of Einstein's postulated general theory of relativity, which Kahn calls "our current theory of gravity".

As Kahn writes:

"For the past 17 months, NASA's Gravity Probe-B (GP-B) satellite has been orbiting the Earth using four ultra-precise gyroscopes, about a million times better than the finest navigational gyroscopes, to generate the data required for this unprecedented test....

This year, physicists celebrate the 100th anniversary of Einstein's "miraculous year," in which he received his doctorate in physics from the University of Zurich and published four seminal papers, including the special theory of relativity and a paper on light that garnered him the Nobel Prize in 1921. But Einstein's crowning achievement came in 1916, with his publication of the general theory of relativity, in which he expanded the special theory of relativity to include the elusive concept of gravity. With general relativity, Einstein forever changed our Newtonian view of gravity as a force, postulating rather that space and time are inextricably woven into a four-dimensional fabric called spacetime, and that gravity is simply the warping and twisting of the fabric of spacetime by massive celestial bodies. Even though it has become one of the cornerstones of modern physics, general relativity has remained the least tested of Einstein's theories. The reason is, as Caltech physicist Kip Thorne once put it: "In the realm of black holes and the universe, the language of general relativity is spoken, and it is spoken loudly. But in our tiny solar system, the effects of general relativity are but whispers." And so, any measurements of the relativistic effects of gravity around Earth must be carried out with utmost precision. Over the past 90 years, various tests of the theory suggest that Einstein was on the right track. But, in most previous tests, the relativity signals had to be extracted from a significant level of background noise. The purpose of GP-B is to test Einstein's theory by carrying out the experiment in a pristine orbiting laboratory, thereby reducing background noise to insignificant levels and enabling the probe to examine general relativity in new ways."

Read Kahn's article for the full scoop.

Einstein on Edge

The Reality Club at Edge (Edge 170) has a special article on Einstein.

It is the story of E = mc².
by Brian Greene, which first appeared as a NY Times Op-Ed on September 30, 2005.

Greene titles it That Famous Equation and You. It is a great read.

E=energy
m=mass
c²=velocity of light squared

Here is a short excerpt from Greene to give you a taste for the entire article:

"Mass and energy are not distinct. They are the same basic stuff packaged in forms that make them appear different. Just as solid ice can melt into liquid water, Einstein showed, mass is a frozen form of energy that can be converted into the more familiar energy of motion. The amount of energy (E) produced by the conversion is given by his formula: multiply the amount of mass converted (m) by the speed of light squared (c²). Since the speed of light is a few hundred million meters per second (fast enough to travel around the earth seven times in a single second), c² , in these familiar units, is a huge number, about 100,000,000,000,000,000.

A little bit of mass can thus yield enormous energy. The destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was fueled by converting less than an ounce of matter into energy; the energy consumed by New York City in a month is less than that contained in the newspaper you're holding."

Think about it. It is astounding.
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