Albert Einstein

Today after I finished my volunteer shift at the Portland Sunday Parkways I headed down to OMSI. OMSI has free Admission this weekend, so I though I take advantage of that and check out the Albert Einstein exhibit as I read his biography before. He was definitely a gifted scientist and won the Nobel Price in 1921 for the explanation of the photoelectric effect. He wrote a paper in German on the Theory of Relativity "Relativitaetstheorie" which made him famous. Under Newtons law mass was a matter like an apple and energy was the force that could move that matter. Time was a constant and absolute. Now with Einstein's Theory the speed of light is constant which means time and distance are now variables. Time is relative depending on the point of view of the observer. And mass is equal to energy. E=mc2. There are two important statements in this equation. First: Mass is stored energy and energy can be transformed into mass. They are both equal. Second: c is the speed of light and that is a large number. When you multiply a large number by itself you get a huge number. Even if the mass is a tiny number and you multiply it with a huge number you still get a large number. This equation does not tell you how to build a nuclear weapon, but it tells you the amount of energy that gets released when you split the atom. An atom has a tiny mass, but when you split it a fraction of that mass is transformed into energy and that amount is large as it was demonstrated with the atom bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6, 1945 and August 9, 1945 respectively. Only less than 1gram of mass was converted into energy in the bomb over Nagasaki. That tells you the immense amount of energy there is when you split the atom.

Now Einstein was born Jewish, but he was not practicing it. He did not belief in a personal God, but he acknowledged and believed there is a God and that the Universe had a beginning. "The fact that all of the universe, stars and planets happened by chance is highly unlikely." Besides that he was also a great humanitarian and dedicated his last decade to the eradication of nuclear weapons.