Does Einstein’s Theory of Special Relativity Suggest That There Is an Afterlife?: A Theoretical Physicist Explains

“Let’s talk about the physics of dead grand­moth­ers.” Thus does the­o­ret­i­cal physi­cist Sabine Hossen­felder start off the Big Think video above, which soon gets into Ein­stein’s the­o­ry of spe­cial rel­a­tiv­i­ty. The ques­tion of how Hossen­felder man­ages to con­nect the for­mer to the lat­ter should raise in any­one curios­i­ty enough to give these ten min­utes a watch, but she also address­es a cer­tain com­mon cat­e­go­ry of mis­con­cep­tion. It all began, she says, when a young man posed to her the fol­low­ing ques­tion: “A shaman told me that my grand­moth­er is still alive because of quan­tum mechan­ics. Is this right?”

Upon reflec­tion, Hossen­felder arrived at the con­clu­sion that “it’s not entire­ly wrong.” For decades now, “quan­tum mechan­ics” has been hauled out over and over again to pro­vide vague sup­port to a range of beliefs all along the spec­trum of plau­si­bil­i­ty. But in the dead-grand­moth­er case, at least, it’s not the applic­a­ble area of physics. “It’s actu­al­ly got some­thing to do with Ein­stein’s the­o­ry of spe­cial rel­a­tiv­i­ty,” she says. With that par­tic­u­lar achieve­ment, Ein­stein changed the way we think about space and time, prov­ing that “every­thing that you expe­ri­ence, every­thing that you see, you see as it was a tiny, lit­tle amount of time in the past. So how do you know that any­thing exists right now?”

In Ein­stein’s descrip­tion of phys­i­cal real­i­ty, “there is no unam­bigu­ous notion to define what hap­pens now; it depends on the observ­er.” And “if you fol­low this log­ic to its con­clu­sion, then the out­come is that every moment could be now for some­one. And that includes all moments in your past, and it also includes all moments in your future.” Ein­stein posits space and time as not two sep­a­rate con­cepts, but aspects of a sin­gle enti­ty called space­time, in which “the present moment has no fun­da­men­tal sig­nif­i­cance”; in the result­ing “block uni­verse,” past, present, and future coex­ist simul­ta­ne­ous­ly, and no infor­ma­tion is ever destroyed, just con­tin­u­al­ly rearranged.

“So if some­one you knew dies, then, of course, we all know that you can no longer com­mu­ni­cate with this per­son. That’s because the infor­ma­tion that made up their per­son­al­i­ty dis­pers­es into very sub­tle cor­re­la­tions in the remains of their body, which become entan­gled with all the par­ti­cles around them, and slow­ly, slow­ly, they spread into radi­a­tion that dis­pers­es through­out the solar sys­tem, and even­tu­al­ly, through­out the entire uni­verse.” But one day could bring “some cos­mic con­scious­ness­es which will also be spread out, and this infor­ma­tion will be acces­si­ble again” — in about a bil­lion years, any­way, which will at least give grand­ma’s reassem­bled intel­li­gence plen­ty to catch up on.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Is There Life After Death?: Michio Kaku, Bill Nye, Sam Har­ris & More Explore One of Life’s Biggest Ques­tions

Elie Wiesel (RIP) Talks About What Hap­pens When We Die

Is There an After­life? Christo­pher Hitchens Spec­u­lates in an Ani­mat­ed Video

Einstein’s The­o­ry of Rel­a­tiv­i­ty Explained in One of the Ear­li­est Sci­ence Films Ever Made (1923)

Is There Life After Death?: John Cleese and a Pan­el of Sci­en­tists Dis­cuss That Eter­nal Ques­tion

Albert Ein­stein On God: “Noth­ing More Than the Expres­sion and Prod­uct of Human Weak­ness”

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

J. Robert Oppenheimer Explains How, Upon Witnessing the First Nuclear Explosion, He Recited a Line from the Bhagavad Gita: “Now I Am Become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds”

No mat­ter how lit­tle we know of the Hin­du reli­gion, a line from one of its holy scrip­tures lives with­in us all: “Now I am become Death, the destroy­er of worlds.” This is one facet of the lega­cy of J. Robert Oppen­heimer, an Amer­i­can the­o­ret­i­cal physi­cist who left an out­sized mark on his­to­ry. For his cru­cial role in the Man­hat­tan Project that dur­ing World War II pro­duced the first nuclear weapons, he’s now remem­bered as the“father of the atom­ic bomb.” He secured that title on July 16, 1945, the day of the test in the New Mex­i­can desert that proved these exper­i­men­tal weapons actu­al­ly work — that is, they could wreak a kind of destruc­tion pre­vi­ous­ly only seen in visions of the end of the world.

“We knew the world would not be the same,” Oppen­heimer remem­bered in 1965. “A few peo­ple laughed, a few peo­ple cried. Most peo­ple were silent. I remem­bered the line from the Hin­du scrip­ture, the Bha­gavad Gita; Vish­nu is try­ing to per­suade the Prince that he should do his duty and, to impress him, takes on his mul­ti-armed form and says, ‘Now I am become Death, the destroy­er of worlds.’ ”

The trans­la­tion’s gram­mat­i­cal archaism made it even more pow­er­ful, res­onat­ing with lines in Ten­nyson (“I am become a name, for always roam­ing with a hun­gry heart”), Shake­speare (“I am come to know your plea­sure”), and the Bible (“I am come a light into the world, that whoso­ev­er believeth on me should not abide in dark­ness”).

But what is death, as the Gita sees it? In an inter­view with Wired, San­skrit schol­ar Stephen Thomp­son explains that, in the orig­i­nal, the word that Oppen­heimer speaks as “death” refers to “lit­er­al­ly the world-destroy­ing time.” This means that “irre­spec­tive of what Arju­na does” — Arju­na being the afore­men­tioned prince, the nar­ra­tive’s pro­tag­o­nist — every­thing is in the hands of the divine.” Oppen­heimer would have learned all this while teach­ing in the 1930s at UC Berke­ley, where he learned San­skrit and read the Gita in the orig­i­nal. This cre­at­ed in him, said his col­league Isidor Rabi, “a feel­ing of mys­tery of the uni­verse that sur­round­ed him like a fog.”

The neces­si­ty of the Unit­ed States’ sub­se­quent drop­ping of not one but two atom­ic bombs on Japan, exam­ined in the 1965 doc­u­men­tary The Deci­sion to Drop the Bomb (below), remains a mat­ter of debate. Oppen­heimer went on to oppose nuclear weapons, describ­ing him­self to an appalled Pres­i­dent Har­ry Tru­man as hav­ing “blood on my hands.” But in devel­op­ing them, could he have sim­ply seen him­self as a mod­ern Prince Arju­na? “It has been argued by schol­ars,” writes the Eco­nom­ic Times’ Mayank Chhaya, “that Oppen­heimer’s approach to the atom­ic bomb was that of doing his duty as part of his dhar­ma as pre­scribed in the Gita.” He knew, to quote anoth­er line from that scrip­ture brought to mind by the nuclear explo­sion, that “if the radi­ance of a thou­sand suns were to burst into the sky that would be like the splen­dor of the Mighty One” — and per­haps also that splen­dor and wrath may be one.

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2020. In the light of the new Oppen­heimer film, we’re bring­ing it back.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Oppen­heimer: The Man Behind the Bomb

The “Shad­ow” of a Hiroshi­ma Vic­tim, Etched into Stone, Is All That Remains After 1945 Atom­ic Blast

Haunt­ing Unedit­ed Footage of the Bomb­ing of Nagasa­ki (1945)

63 Haunt­ing Videos of U.S. Nuclear Tests Now Declas­si­fied and Put Online

53 Years of Nuclear Test­ing in 14 Min­utes: A Time Lapse Film by Japan­ese Artist Isao Hashimo­to

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

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Neil deGrasse Tyson, High School Wrestling Team Captain, Once Invented a Physics-Based Wrestling Move

We know that Neil deGrasse Tyson was some­thing of a wun­derkind dur­ing his high school years. If you’re an OC reg­u­lar, you’ve read all about how Carl Sagan per­son­al­ly recruit­ed Tyson to study with him at Cor­nell. Deft­ly, polite­ly, the young Tyson declined and went to Har­vard.

There’s per­haps anoth­er side of the pre­co­cious Tyson you might not know as much about. The ath­let­ic side. While a stu­dent at The Bronx High School of Sci­ence, Tyson (class of 1976) wore bas­ket­ball sneak­ers belong­ing to the Knick­’s Walt “Clyde” Fra­zier. He ran an impres­sive 4:25 mile. And he cap­tained the school’s wrestling team, dur­ing which time he con­jured up a new-fan­gled wrestling move. In pro­fes­sion­al wrestling, Ric Flair had the dread­ed Fig­ure Four Leg Lock, and Jim­my Snu­ka, a dev­as­tat­ing Super­fly Splash. Tyson? He had the feared “Dou­ble Tidal Lock.” He explains and demon­strates the physics-based move in the video below, orig­i­nal­ly record­ed at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Indi­anapo­lis.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Andy Warhol’s One Minute of Pro­fes­sion­al Wrestling Fame (1985)

The Ulti­mate War­rior, Pro­fes­sion­al Wrestler & Philoso­pher, Cre­at­ed a Glos­sary of World Philoso­phies

Neil deGrasse Tyson Lists 8 (Free) Books Every Intel­li­gent Per­son Should Read

When Samuel Beck­ett Drove Young André the Giant to School

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Watch a New Animation of Richard Feynman’s Ode to the Wonder of Life, with Music by Yo-Yo Ma

…I would like not to under­es­ti­mate the val­ue of the world view which is the result of sci­en­tif­ic effort. We have been led to imag­ine all sorts of things infi­nite­ly more mar­velous than the imag­in­ings of poets and dream­ers of the past.

- Richard Feyn­man

In 1955, the­o­ret­i­cal physi­cist Richard Feyn­man gave a talk on the val­ue of sci­ence to mem­bers of the Nation­al Acad­e­my of Sci­ences at at Cal­tech Uni­ver­si­ty.

In the wake of the destruc­tion of Hiroshi­ma and Nagasa­ki, his involve­ment with the Man­hat­tan Project had been cause for seri­ous depres­sion and soul search­ing.

He con­clud­ed that the pur­suit of sci­en­tif­ic knowl­edge remained valu­able to soci­ety, even though such knowl­edge comes with­out oper­at­ing instruc­tions, and thus can be put to evil pur­pos­es.

In the Cal­tech speech, he cit­ed the life improv­ing tech­no­log­i­cal and med­ical break­throughs that are the result of sci­en­tif­ic explo­rations, as well as the sci­en­tif­ic field­’s alle­giance to the con­cept that we must be free to dis­sent, ques­tion, and dis­cuss:

If we sup­press all dis­cus­sion, all crit­i­cism, pro­claim­ing “This is the answer, my friends; man is saved!” we will doom human­i­ty for a long time to the chains of author­i­ty, con­fined to the lim­its of our present imag­i­na­tion.

(This strikes a pro­found chord in 2022, remem­ber­ing how some extreme­ly vocal politi­cians and cit­i­zens took chang­ing pub­lic health man­dates as evi­dence of con­spir­a­cy, rather than an ever-deep­en­ing sci­en­tif­ic under­stand­ing of how an unfa­mil­iar virus was oper­at­ing.)

Any child with an inter­est in STEM will be grat­i­fied to learn that Feyn­man also found much to admire in “the fun …which some peo­ple get from read­ing and learn­ing and think­ing about (sci­ence), and which oth­ers get from work­ing in it.

Through­out his speech, he refrained from tech­ni­cal jar­gon, using lan­guage that those whose pas­sions skew more toward the arts can under­stand to invoke the expe­ri­ence of sci­en­tif­ic dis­cov­ery.

His med­i­ta­tions con­cern­ing the inter­con­nect­ed­ness between every mol­e­cule “stu­pid­ly mind­ing its own busi­ness” and every­thing else in the known uni­verse, includ­ing him­self, a human stand­ing beside the sea, try­ing to make sense of it all, is of a piece with Shake­speare and Walt Whit­man.

Unti­tled Ode to the Won­der of Life

by Richard Feyn­man

I stand at the seashore, alone, and start to think.

There are the rush­ing waves

moun­tains of mol­e­cules

each stu­pid­ly mind­ing its own busi­ness

tril­lions apart

yet form­ing white surf in uni­son.

Ages on ages before any eyes could see

year after year

thun­der­ous­ly pound­ing the shore as now.

For whom, for what?

On a dead plan­et

with no life to enter­tain.

Nev­er at rest

tor­tured by ener­gy

wast­ed prodi­gious­ly by the sun

poured into space.

A mite makes the sea roar.

Deep in the sea

all mol­e­cules repeat

the pat­terns of one anoth­er

till com­plex new ones are formed.

They make oth­ers like them­selves

and a new dance starts.

Grow­ing in size and com­plex­i­ty

liv­ing things

mass­es of atoms

DNA, pro­tein

danc­ing a pat­tern ever more intri­cate.

Out of the cra­dle

onto dry land

here it is

stand­ing: atoms with con­scious­ness;

mat­ter with curios­i­ty.

Stands at the sea,

won­ders at won­der­ing: I

a uni­verse of atoms

an atom in the uni­verse

The Mar­gin­a­lian’s (for­mer­ly Brain Pick­ings) Maria Popo­va seizes on this inter­lude for the final install­ment of her video series, The Uni­verse in Verse, above, col­lab­o­rat­ing with ani­ma­tor Kel­li Ander­son on a “per­spec­tive-broad­en­ing, mind-deep­en­ing” visu­al inter­pre­ta­tion of Feynman’s excerpt­ed remarks.

Flow­ing under and around Feynman’s nar­ra­tion is an orig­i­nal com­po­si­tion by cel­list Yo-Yo Ma, whose renown in the field of music is on par with Feynman’s in physics, and who notes in the intro­duc­tion to The Quotable Feyn­man:

While he paid close atten­tion to prob­lems we face and gen­er­ate, he also knew that humans are a sub­set of nature, and nature held for him the great­est fas­ci­na­tion — for the imag­i­na­tion of nature is far, far greater than the imag­i­na­tion of man, and nature guards her secrets jeal­ous­ly.

Read Feynman’s com­plete speech to the Nation­al Acad­e­my of Sci­ences at at Cal­tech Uni­ver­si­ty here.

Watch all nine chap­ters of The Uni­verse in Verse here.

via The Mar­gin­a­lian

Relat­ed Con­tent 

The “Feyn­man Tech­nique” for Study­ing Effec­tive­ly: An Ani­mat­ed Primer

Richard Feynman’s “Lost Lec­ture:” An Ani­mat­ed Retelling

Richard Feynman’s “Note­book Tech­nique” Will Help You Learn Any Subject–at School, at Work, or in Life

Richard Feynman’s Tech­nique for Learn­ing Some­thing New: An Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion

The Feyn­man Lec­tures on Physics, The Most Pop­u­lar Physics Book Ever Writ­ten, Is Now Com­plete­ly Online

What Ignit­ed Richard Feynman’s Love of Sci­ence Revealed in an Ani­mat­ed Video

- Ayun Hal­l­i­day is the Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine and author, most recent­ly, of Cre­ative, Not Famous: The Small Pota­to Man­i­festo.  Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

Space Sex is Serious Business: A Hilarious Short Animation Addresses Serious Questions About Human Reproduction in Space

Back in the late 80s, there was a rumor float­ing around that Earth Girls Are Easy.

40 some years of sci­en­tif­ic and social advance­ment have shift­ed the con­ver­sa­tion­al focus.

We’re just now begin­ning to under­stand that Space Sex is Seri­ous Busi­ness.

Par­tic­u­lar­ly if SpaceX CEO Elon Musk achieves his goal of estab­lish­ing a per­ma­nent human pres­ence on Mars.

Sure­ly at some point in their long trav­els to and res­i­dence on Mars, those pio­neers would get down to busi­ness in much the same way that rats, fruit flies, par­a­sitic wasps, and Japan­ese rice fish have while under obser­va­tion on pri­or space expe­di­tions.

Mean­while, we’re seri­ous­ly lack­ing in human data.

A pair of human astro­nauts, Jan Davis and Mark Lee, made his­to­ry in 1992 as the first mar­ried cou­ple to enter space togeth­er, but NASA insist­ed their rela­tions remained strict­ly pro­fes­sion­al for the dura­tion, and that a shut­tle’s crew com­part­ment is too small for the sort of antics a nasty-mind­ed pub­lic kept ask­ing about.

In an inter­view with Mens Health, Colonel Mike Mul­lane, a vet­er­an of three space mis­sions, con­firmed that a space­craft’s lay­out does­n’t favor romance:

The only pri­va­cy would have been in the air lock, but every­body would know what you were doing. You’re not out there doing a space­walk. There’s no rea­son to be in there.

Short­ly after Davis and Lee returned to earth, NASA for­mal­ized an unspo­ken rule pro­hibit­ing hus­bands and wives from ven­tur­ing into space togeth­er. It did lit­tle to squelch pub­lic inter­est in space sex.

One won­ders if NASA’s rule has been rewrit­ten in accor­dance with the times. Air lock aside, might same sex cou­ples remain free to swing what het­ero-nor­ma­tive mar­rieds (arguably) can­not?

This is but one of hun­dreds of space sex ques­tions beg­ging fur­ther con­sid­er­a­tion.

Some of the most seri­ous are raised in Tom McCarten’s wit­ty col­lage ani­ma­tion for FiveThir­tyEight, above.

Name­ly how dam­ag­ing will cos­mic radi­a­tion and micro­grav­i­ty prove to human repro­duc­tion? As more humans toy with the pos­si­bil­i­ty of leav­ing Earth, this ques­tion feels less and less hypo­thet­i­cal.

Mag­gie Koerth-Bak­er, who researched and nar­rates the ani­mat­ed short, notes that Musk por­trayed the risks of radi­a­tion as minor dur­ing a pre­sen­ta­tion at the 67th Inter­na­tion­al Astro­nau­ti­cal Con­gress in Guadala­jara, Mex­i­co, and breathed not a peep as to the effects of micro­grav­i­ty.

Yet sci­en­tif­ic stud­ies of non-human space trav­el­ers doc­u­ment a host of repro­duc­tive issues includ­ing low­ered libido, atyp­i­cal hor­mone lev­els, ovu­la­to­ry dys­func­tion, mis­car­riages, and fetal muta­tions.

On its web­page, NASA pro­vides some infor­ma­tion about the Repro­duc­tion, Devel­op­ment, and Sex Dif­fer­ences Lab­o­ra­to­ry of its Space Bio­sciences Research Branch, but remains mum on top­ics of press­ing con­cern to, say, stu­dents in a typ­i­cal mid­dle school sex ed class.

Like achiev­ing and main­tain­ing erec­tions in micro­grav­i­ty.

In Phys­i­ol­o­gy News Mag­a­zine, Dr. Adam Watkins, asso­ciate pro­fes­sor of Repro­duc­tive and Devel­op­men­tal Phys­i­ol­o­gy at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Not­ting­ham, sug­gests that inter­nal and exter­nal atmos­pher­ic changes would make such things, par­don the pun, hard:

First­ly, just stay­ing in close con­tact with each oth­er under zero grav­i­ty is hard. Sec­ond­ly, as astro­nauts expe­ri­ence low­er blood pres­sure while in space, main­tain­ing erec­tions and arousal are more prob­lem­at­ic than here on Earth. 

The excep­tion­al­ly forth­right Col Mul­lane has some con­tra­dic­to­ry first hand expe­ri­ence that should come as a relief to all humankind:

A cou­ple of times, I would wake up from sleep peri­ods and I had a bon­er that I could have drilled through kryp­tonite.

Relat­ed Con­tent 

Free Online Astron­o­my Cours­es

Watch Fam­i­ly Plan­ning, Walt Disney’s 1967 Sex Ed Pro­duc­tion, Star­ring Don­ald Duck

The Sto­ry Of Men­stru­a­tion: Watch Walt Disney’s Sex Ed Film from 1946

- Ayun Hal­l­i­day is the Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine and author, most recent­ly, of Cre­ative, Not Famous: The Small Pota­to Man­i­festo.  Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

‘The Character of Physical Law’: Richard Feynman’s Legendary Course Presented at Cornell, 1964

Lec­ture One, The Law of Grav­i­ta­tion:

“Nature,” said physi­cist Richard Feyn­man, “uses only the longest threads to weave her pat­terns, so that each small piece of her fab­ric reveals the orga­ni­za­tion of the entire tapes­try.”

With those words Feyn­man end­ed the first of his famous 1964 Mes­sen­ger Lec­tures at Cor­nell Uni­ver­si­ty, a talk enti­tled “The Law of Grav­i­ta­tion, an Exam­ple of Phys­i­cal Law.” (See above.) The lec­tures were intend­ed by Feyn­man as an intro­duc­tion, not to the fun­da­men­tal laws of nature, but to the very nature of such laws. The lec­tures were lat­er tran­scribed and col­lect­ed in The Char­ac­ter of Phys­i­cal Law, one of Feyn­man’s most wide­ly read books. In the intro­duc­tion to the Mod­ern Library edi­tion, writer James Gle­ick gives a brief assess­ment of the charis­mat­ic man at the lectern:

Feyn­man, then forty-six years old, did the­o­ret­i­cal physics as spec­tac­u­lar­ly as any­one alive. He was due to win the Nobel Prize the next year for his ground­break­ing work in the 1940s in quan­tum elec­tro­dy­nam­ics, a the­o­ry that tied togeth­er in an exper­i­men­tal­ly per­fect pack­age all the var­ied phe­nom­e­na at work in light, radio, mag­net­ism, and elec­tric­i­ty. He had tak­en the cen­tu­ry’s ear­ly, half-made con­cep­tions of waves and par­ti­cles and shaped them into tools that ordi­nary physi­cists could use and under­stand. This was eso­teric science–more so in the decades that followed–and Feyn­man was not a house­hold name out­side physics, but with­in his field he had devel­oped an astound­ing stature. He had a mys­tique that came in part from sheer prag­mat­ic brilliance–in any group of sci­en­tists he could cre­ate a dra­mat­ic impres­sion by slash­ing his way through a dif­fi­cult problem–and in part, too, from his per­son­al style–rough-hewn, Amer­i­can, seem­ing­ly uncul­ti­vat­ed.

All sev­en of Feyn­man’s lec­tures were record­ed by the British Broad­cast­ing Cor­po­ra­tion and pre­sent­ed as part of BBC Two’s “Fur­ther Edu­ca­tion Scheme.” In 2009 Bill Gates bought the rights to the videos and made them avail­able to the pub­lic on Microsoft­’s Project Tuva Web site.

Since then the series has become avail­able on YouTube for eas­i­er view­ing. As you scroll down the page you can access the videos which, “more than any oth­er record­ed image or doc­u­ment,” writes physi­cist Lawrence Krauss in Quan­tum Man: Richard Feyn­man’s Life in Sci­ence, “cap­ture the real Feyn­man, play­ful, bril­liant, excit­ed, charis­mat­ic, ener­getic, and no non­sense.”

You can find the remain­ing video lec­tures below:

Lec­ture Two, The Rela­tion of Math­e­mat­ics to Physics:

Lec­ture Three, The Great Con­ser­va­tion Prin­ci­ples:

Lec­ture Four, Sym­me­try in Phys­i­cal Law:

Lec­ture Five, The Dis­tinc­tion of Past and Future:

Lec­ture Six, Prob­a­bil­i­ty and Uncertainty–The Quan­tum Mechan­i­cal View of Nature:

Lec­ture Sev­en, Seek­ing New Laws:

You can find this course indexed in our list of Free Online Physics Cours­es, a sub­set of our col­lec­tion, 1,700 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The “Feyn­man Tech­nique” for Study­ing Effec­tive­ly: An Ani­mat­ed Primer

How Richard Feynman’s Dia­grams Rev­o­lu­tion­ized Physics

The Feyn­man Lec­tures on Physics, The Most Pop­u­lar Physics Book Ever Writ­ten, Is Now Com­plete­ly Online

Albert Einstein in Four Color Films

We all think we know just what Albert Ein­stein looked like — and broad­ly speak­ing, we’ve got it right. At least since his death in 1955, since which time gen­er­a­tion after gen­er­a­tion of chil­dren around the world have grown up close­ly asso­ci­at­ing his bristly mus­tache and semi-tamed gray hair with the very con­cept of sci­en­tif­ic genius. His sar­to­r­i­al rum­pled­ness and Teu­ton­i­cal­ly hang­dog look have long been the stuff of not just car­i­ca­ture, but (as in Nico­las Roeg’s Insignif­i­cance) earnest trib­ute as well. Yet how many of us can say we’ve real­ly tak­en a good look at Ein­stein?

These four pieces of film get us a lit­tle clos­er to that expe­ri­ence. At the top of the post we have a col­orized news­reel clip (you can see the orig­i­nal here) show­ing Ein­stein in his office at Prince­ton’s Insti­tute for Advanced Study, where he took up a post in 1933.

Even ear­li­er col­orized news­reel footage appears in the video just above, tak­en from an episode of the Smith­son­ian Chan­nel series Amer­i­ca in Col­or. It depicts Ein­stein arriv­ing in the Unit­ed States in 1930, by which time he was already “the world’s most famous physi­cist” — a posi­tion then mer­it­ing a wel­come not unlike that which the Bea­t­les would receive 34 years lat­er.

Ein­stein returned to his native Ger­many after that vis­it. The Amer­i­ca in Col­or clip also shows him back at his cot­tage out­side Berlin (and in his paja­mas), but his time back in his home­land amount­ed only to a few years. The rea­son: Hitler. Dur­ing Ein­stein’s vis­it­ing pro­fes­sor­ship at Cal Tech in 1933, the Gestapo raid­ed his cot­tage and Berlin apart­ment, as well as con­fis­cat­ed his sail­boat. Lat­er the Nazi gov­ern­ment banned Jews from hold­ing offi­cial posi­tions, includ­ing at uni­ver­si­ties, effec­tive­ly cut­ting off his pro­fes­sion­al prospects and those of no few oth­er Ger­man cit­i­zens besides. The 1943 col­or footage above offers a glimpse of Ein­stein a decade into his Amer­i­can life.

A cou­ple of years there­after, the end of the Sec­ond World War made Ein­stein even more famous. He became, in the minds of many Amer­i­cans, the bril­liant physi­cist who “helped dis­cov­er the atom bomb.” So declares the announc­er in that first news­reel, but in the decades since, the pub­lic has come to asso­ciate Ein­stein more instinc­tive­ly with his the­o­ry of rel­a­tiv­i­ty — an achieve­ment less imme­di­ate­ly com­pre­hen­si­ble than the apoc­a­lyp­tic explo­sion of the atom­ic bomb, but one whose sci­en­tif­ic impli­ca­tions run much deep­er. Many clear and lucid pré­cis of Ein­stein’s the­o­ry exist, but why not first see it explained by the man him­self, and in col­or at that?

Relat­ed Con­tent:

New­ly Unearthed Footage Shows Albert Ein­stein Dri­ving a Fly­ing Car (1931)

Hear Albert Ein­stein Read “The Com­mon Lan­guage of Sci­ence” (1941)

Mar­i­lyn Mon­roe Explains Rel­a­tiv­i­ty to Albert Ein­stein (in a Nico­las Roeg Movie)

When Albert Ein­stein & Char­lie Chap­lin Met and Became Fast Famous Friends (1930)

Einstein’s The­o­ry of Rel­a­tiv­i­ty Explained in One of the Ear­li­est Sci­ence Films Ever Made (1923)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

See Every Nuclear Explosion in History: 2153 Blasts from 1945–2015

There have been more than 2,000 nuclear explo­sions in all of his­to­ry — which, in the case of the tech­nol­o­gy required to det­o­nate a nuclear explo­sion, goes back only 76 years. It all began, accord­ing to the ani­mat­ed video above, on July 16, 1945, with the nuclear device code-named Trin­i­ty. The fruit of the labors of the Man­hat­tan Project, its explo­sion famous­ly brought to the mind of the­o­ret­i­cal physi­cist Robert J. Oppen­hemier a pas­sage from the Bha­gavad Gita: “Now I am become Death, destroy­er of worlds.” But how­ev­er rev­e­la­to­ry a spec­ta­cle Trin­i­ty pro­vid­ed, it turned out mere­ly to be the over­ture of the nuclear age.

Cre­at­ed by Ehsan Rezaie of Orbital Mechan­ics, the video offers a sim­ple-look­ing but decep­tive­ly infor­ma­tion-rich pre­sen­ta­tion of every nuclear explo­sion that has so far occurred. It belongs to a per­haps unlike­ly but nev­er­the­less deci­sive­ly estab­lished genre, the ani­mat­ed nuclear-explo­sion time-lapse, of which we’ve pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured exam­ples from Busi­ness Insid­er’s Alex Kuzoian and artist Isao Hasi­mo­to here on Open Cul­ture.

The size of each cir­cle that erupts on the world map indi­cates the rel­a­tive pow­er of the explo­sion in its loca­tion (all infor­ma­tion also pro­vid­ed in the scrolling text on the low­er left); those det­o­nat­ed under­ground appear in yel­low, those det­o­nat­ed under­wa­ter in blue, and those det­o­nat­ed in the atmos­phere in red.

Trin­i­ty cre­at­ed an atmos­pher­ic explo­sion above New Mex­i­co’s Jor­na­da del Muer­to desert. (Oth­er­wise Oppen­heimer would­n’t have been able to wit­ness it change the world.) So did Lit­tle Boy and Fat Man, the bombs dropped on Japan in World War II. Those remain the only det­o­na­tions of nuclear weapons in com­bat, and thus the nuclear explo­sions every­one knows, but they, too, rep­re­sent only the begin­ning. As the Cold War sets in, some­thing of a test­ing vol­ley emerges between the Unit­ed States and the Sovi­et Union, cul­mi­nat­ing in the colos­sal red dot of 1961’s Tsar Bom­ba, still the most pow­er­ful nuclear weapon ever test­ed. With the USSR long gone today, the explo­sions have only slowed. But in recent years, as the data on which this video is based indi­cates, nuclear test­ing has turned into a one-play­er game — and that play­er is North Korea.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Every Nuclear Bomb Explo­sion in His­to­ry, Ani­mat­ed

53 Years of Nuclear Test­ing in 14 Min­utes: A Time Lapse Film by Japan­ese Artist Isao Hashimo­to

200 Haunt­ing Videos of U.S. Nuclear Tests Now Declas­si­fied and Put Online

Watch Chill­ing Footage of the Hiroshi­ma & Nagasa­ki Bomb­ings in Restored Col­or

U.S. Det­o­nates Nuclear Weapons in Space; Peo­ple Watch Spec­ta­cle Sip­ping Drinks on Rooftops (1962)

J. Robert Oppen­heimer Explains How He Recit­ed a Line from Bha­gavad Gita–“Now I Am Become Death, the Destroy­er of Worlds” — Upon Wit­ness­ing the First Nuclear Explo­sion

Haunt­ing Unedit­ed Footage of the Bomb­ing of Nagasa­ki (1945)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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