Celebrating the centenray of something cerebral

November 24, 2015

THIS IS A DAY OF CELEBRATION.

Exactly one hundred years ago today, a human, about whom we have all heard much, made us take a leap of faith. And that faith has been, continuously and in ever newer ways, vindicated.

Hence the celebration, of that faith.

Happy Centenary,

GENERAL THEORY OF RELATIVITY!

Some background, for those who may be interested.

Albert Einstein, ten years after he started shaking the foundations of physics in 1905 (The year is called Annus Mirabilis – the year of miracles) by publishing truly path breaking papers, four of them, on Brownian Motion, Photoelectric Effect, Special Theory of Relativity, and Mass-Energy equivalence, shook the physics world further.

You may have heard about Ayn Rand’s book, Atlas Shrugged. Well that is fiction, whereas what Einstein did was real shaking, of the physics world.

Einstein gave a set of four lectures in the month of November 1915 (every Thursday) to the Prussian Academy of Science, and his final lecture was on November 24^th.

Just a parting thought.

I do wonder what if …

… there had been metrics for evaluating the impact of a technical paper then, as they are now?

Raghuram Ekambaram

Note: You may perceive some parallel with where Einstein was working and where Srinivasa Ramanujam was working, when they came within the halo of the scientific and mathematics communities – patent office and port trust office, respectively – not exactly the hot beds for pure academic research.