Albert Einstein Exhibition at the American Museum of Natural History in NYC, Nov 15, 2002 - Aug 10, 2003. Notes to the Online Exhibtion:

May 29, 1919: solar eclipse proved that the Sun's gravity acts like a lens and deflects light from distant stars; confirmed Einsteins General Theory of Relativity.

LIFE

March 14, 1879: Albert Einstein born in Ulm, Germany; poor student, but excelled at math and science; taught himself geometry at the age of 12; embraced intellectual independence as a child;

January 6, 1903: Einstein marries Mileva Maric, a fellow physics student at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology; daughter Lieserl born out of wedlock in 1902; Albert's passion for Mileva ran deep, but that didn't stop him from meeting other women when they were apart; Albert and Mileva divorced in 1919.

1905: Einstein (age 26) received his Ph.D. from the University of Zurich, publishes four groundbreaking articles in physics that were published in the prestigious journal 'Annalen der Physik'.

When Albert fell ill in 1917, his cousin Elsa Loewenthal nursed him back to health. He found her devotion endearing. Even before the couple married in 1919, Albert embraced Elsa's two daughters, Ilse and Margot, as his own children.

First job out of college as a patent clerk at the Swiss Federal Office for Intellectual Property in Bern.

Einstein's Nobel Prize (1921): He won the prize for his distinguished career in physics, most notably for his theory of light and electrons called the Photoelectric Effect (1905), not his more controversial theory of relativity.

Einstein never actually made it to Stockholm to accept his medal; Einstein was in the midst of a world lecture tour and headed to Japan when the Nobel telegram arrived at their Berlin residence in 1922. The German ambassador to Sweden attended the December award ceremony on Einstein's behalf, overlooking that the scientist had renounced his German citizenship in 1896. After much confusion over whether Einstein was a German or Swiss citizen, the Swedish ambassador hand-delivered the medal to Einstein in Berlin in 1923. Later that year Einstein visited Sweden to give his "Nobel lecture"— on relativity. With the medal came a sum of 121,592 kronor (roughly $32,000), which Einstein gave to his ex-wife Mileva as part of their divorce agreement.

LIGHT

1905: light always travels at a constant speed (300,000 km/sec = 186,000 miles/sec)); 'ether' to speed up light or slow down does not exist; light from a moving source has the same velocity as light from a stationary source.

1887: Albert Michelson and Edward Morley (both American scientists): Interferometer; they hoped it would enable them to prove the existence of the ether. Michelson and Morley ran their interferometer experiment numerous times but never saw any evidence of the ether.

The Michelson-Morley interferometer works by splitting a single beam of light in two. The two beams bounce off mirrors and arrive at a detector. If the ether existed, it would remain still while the Earth moved through it. The ether would then change the speed of light depending on whether the light was moving in the direction of Earth's motion or at a right angle to that motion. Michelson and Morley expected to find that two light beams arrived at the detector at different times. Instead they found that no matter which direction light traveled, it always moved at the same speed—indicating that the ether does not exist.

How long does it take to get to the Moon? Light travels the 380,000 kilometers (240,000 miles) between the Moon and the Earth in 1.3 seconds; Electron: 2.9 minutes; space shuttle (orbital speed): 14 hours; sound (70 F): 13 days; passenger jet: 18 days; NYC subway car (maximum speed): 220 days; human (walking): 9 years

Why can't you travel faster than light? The faster an object travels, the more massive it becomes. As an accelerating object gains mass and thus becomes heavier, it takes more and more energy to increase its speed. It would take an infinite amount of energy to make an object reach the speed of light.

TIME

Q: If the speed of light is constant, how could different observers measure the same speed for light when the observers themselves were moving at different speeds? For speed to remain constant, intervals of time and distance would have to change...

A: Time is not absolute; despite our common perception that a second is always a second everywhere in the universe, the rate at which time flows depends upon where you are and how fast you are traveling. Time does not progress at the same rate for everyone, everywhere. Instead, Einstein showed that how fast time progresses depends on how fast the clock measuring time is moving. The faster an object travels, the more slowly time passes for that object, as measured by a stationary observer.

Earth are traveling at 107,000 kilometers (67,000 miles) an hour around the Sun.

Different 'frames of reference' are defined in part by speed. In the Special Theory of Relativity, Einstein determined that time is relative—in other words, the rate at which time passes depends on your frame of reference. The effect of time slowing down is negligible at speeds of everyday life, but it becomes very pronounced at speeds approaching that of light.

Hypothetical 'light clock' experiment: Imagine a clock that consists of a pulse of light and two mirrors, one at the top of the clock and one at the bottom. The clock "ticks" when the pulse reaches the mirror at the top of the clock. and "tocks" at the bottom. The pulse bounces back and forth between the mirrors at a constant rate. When the clock moves, the time between ticks is longer. (diagonal path).

Effect is only detectable at high speeds: two highly accurate atomic clocks, flew one around the Earth aboard an airplane. When the airborne clock returned to Earth, it was a tiny fraction of a second behind the one that remained on the ground.

Intriguingly, someone moving will not think that their clock is running slow, because everything in that frame of reference will have slowed down as well. According to a stationary observer in space watching Earth move around the Sun, all of the clocks on our planet are running slow, yet we don't notice anything out of the ordinary.

A very fast spaceship is a time machine to the future. Five years on a ship traveling at 99 percent the speed of light (2.5 years out and 2.5 years back) corresponds to roughly 36 years on Earth!

The fastest spaceships of today travel at only 0.00004 % the speed of light. The most cutting-edge proposals for new engine technology would enable humans to travel at 0.1 percent the speed of light. Time travel—at least to the future—is theoretically possible, according to Einstein's Theory of Relativity. (Time travel to the past remains impossible.)

Cosmonaut Sergei Avdeyev spent a total of 748 days on the Russian space station Mir. Because Mir was moving relative to Earth, it was also a time machine. Avdeyev is 0.02 seconds younger than he would have been had he never traveled in space.

ENERGY

For centuries, scientists thought that matter could not be created or destroyed—it could only change form. The same idea seemed to apply to energy. Einstein: Mass and energy are different forms of the same thing: E=mc²

GRAVITY

Einstein postulated: gravity and acceleration are equivalent (equivalence principle); this idea was the seed that—over the next nine years— became the 'General Theory of Relativity'.

4-D Space-Time: Space and time make up the four-dimensional arena in which all things exist. Space-time valleys create the effect of gravity. So, the bowl-shaped warp made by Earth's mass, for example, alters the course of an object, like a satellite, that travels into that warp.


Snippets:
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Model, writer: Sophie Dahl, granddaughter of writer Roald Dahl; book: The Man with the Dancing Eyes (Der Spiegel Nr. 19, 2003, 5.5.03 (in German))
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More Models: Storm Models
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Photography: The Gateway to Astronaut Photography of Earth: Access to all photographs since 1961. Searchable. Example: NYC
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CD: Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers: Moanin' (1958)
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