On this quest, Data is introduced to poker, an ongoing game with senior officers. Then later, on the ship's holodeck, Data engages in a game with renowned physicists of the past, whose work contributed to the theories of gravity:
After World War I, Eddington had secured an expedition to West Africa to observe the total solar eclipse. The results showed starlight was displaced along the sight line near the sun. Just as Einstein had predicted.
When I turned 7 years-old, I picked a scrumptious birthday cake with a ton of delicious looking icing on it. It was so sugary sweet that it made me sick. Ever since, I preferred pie over cake for my birthday. Or you could say, in my world, pie takes the cake.
Here's another story about birthdays and pie. Or should I say...
Pi, the Greek letter (shown to the left), denotes the irrational number resulting from the ratio of the circumference of a circle divided by its diameter. [reference: Pi ]
And it appears in more complex mathematical equations, such as:
But let's be practical. You only need 39 digits of Pi to measure the circumference of the known universe within the width of a single hydrogen atom: How Many Digits of Pi Do You Really Need?
Pi on earth
For accuracy good enough for macro purposes, Pi is rounded to 3.14 or 3.1416.
Now, this last number, 3.1416, correlates to our 2016 calendar: 3/14/16. Otherwise,
March 14, 2016
And Pi Day (March 14th) has become a big tradition as well as many teachable moments.
November, 2015 marks the centennial of Einstein papers that rocked the world and withstood the test of many experiments. Let me tell of story of a couple of these.
Gravity Probe B and Me ...
Briefly, I worked on the Gravity Probe B (GP-B) project. I say briefly because budget cuts curtailed my tenure, though I moved on to other projects. And that is another story.
Yet the decades old GP-B soldiered on and its satellite was launched in 2004. The experiment tested two elements of Einstein's Theory of General Relativity.
(1) The Geodetic Effect, a precession (like that of a spinning top) in curved space-time.
November, 1915, was a watershed month for physics. Einstein submitted four papers, one per week, to the Prussian Academy in Berlin. They launched the gravitational revolution of general relativity, overthrowing Newton's theory of the universe. [reference: Einstein's genius changed science's perception of gravity ]
Meanwhile, during this time, astronomers were on a serious
Search for the planet Vulcan ... no kidding
Newton's classic view of gravity led scientists to believe there was a hidden planet, which they called Vulcan, that caused Mercury's perturbations. But it took Einstein to crack this mystery, as explained below:
As Gravity Probe B in the 21st century would provide more evidence to vindicate general relativity, explaining the anomalies in Mercury's orbit gave convincing validation at the birth of this theory in the early 20th century.
Also, I wrote about this search for this planet that wasn't there and posted it on my website in the article: Mr. Spock and Dr. Einstein
As Einstein's General Relativity turns 100, it seems the theory will ...
That's a throwback to medieval science, isn't it? And didn't Columbus debunk the "flat Earth" when he "discovered" America? Or so says the myth.
But actually, the ancient philosophers and learned understood that the Earth was round, at least as far back as the ancient Greeks. [reference: Who Discovered The Earth is Round?]
Today, the term Flat Earther has become an epithet for someone who adheres to outmoded beliefs and ideas. And there really exists such a groups as The Flat Earth Society. And they still make the case ... you guessed it ... for a flat Earth.
Some may laugh. Flat Earth? That can't possibly be. Well, ...
It depends ....
According to Einstein and the great scientists before him, such as Lorentz and Maxwell, the length - including the "flatness" of the Earth, for example - is not absolute, but depends on your reference frame.
The video below take a serious scientific look at the flat Earth:
Indeed, our latest knowledge of physics indicate, if you are going near the speed of light, the Earth is flat as a pancake. And that point was made about 7 minutes into the video.
Again, here are the numbers, which could be the answers to homework problems given in any college modern physics course:
* For cosmic ray protons, for example, moving at 99.9999999999991% of speed of light, the Earth only appears 17 meters thick, essentially flat
But to us Earthlings, our reference frame, the Earth is ball shaped. Yet, to cosmic travelers zipping along near light speed, it's a flat Earth. At least in their direction of motion.
Why does length contract?
I had a physic professor who said - and rightly so - there is no answer to why nature behaves as it does. All we have are descriptions. And that's what all those equations are about. They describe phenomenon, make predictions of their behavior, and can be reproduced with the same results. If they fail to do so, it's back to the drawing board. (And that can be a subject of another post.)
As for length contraction, here is a mini-lecture from a modern physics class describing its observed behavior: Physics: Length Contraction
Ball or Sphere?
But what of the claims of a Flat Earth, regardless of our reference frame? Consider the philosophy of Ockham's Razor:
Ships so often are named after women. And even airships ... we call them airplanes. ;) And the Enola Gay was one of them.
This Boeing B-29 bomber was named after her commander's mother - Enola Gay Haggard Tibbets. The commander's name back then in 1945 was Colonel Paul Tibbets. And the mission of this bomber hastened the end of the most deadly war in the 20th century, if not in human history - World War Two.
World War Two (1939 - 1945) was very intense. Its precursor was Kristallnacht: The November 1938 Pogroms. But the Blitzkrieg of September 1, 1939, when Germany invaded Poland, was the tipping point. Great Britain and France sent an ultimatum to Hitler to withdraw or they would go to war. And Hitler ignored them, going deeper into Poland; and hence Britain and France declared war on Germany.
Meanwhile, the allies of Germany, like Japan, fueled their entrance into the war in the Pacific with their aggressive military expansion. (reference: Causes of World War II in the Pacific )
The US was reluctant to get involved, but Pearl Harborchanged all that. After the United States declared war on Japan, Germany declared war on the United States - interesting enough, America was the only country in which Hitler declared war. (reference: Germany World War II -- declaration of war on America)
But with the United States, World War Two began and ended in the Pacific ...
Below is a timeline of the war in the Pacific theater:
As nuclear fission was discovered in 1938, (reference: Discovery of Nuclear Fission) and atomic power seemed possible, Leo Szilard feared that Nazi Germany may be the first to create the atomic bomb. Frustrated with America's lack of action in pursuing atomic energy, Szilard recruited Albert Einstein to write a letter to President Roosevelt. It became known as the Einstein letter. And it spurred the formation of the Manhattan Project.
August 6, 1945 was the day that the Enola Gay flew her secret mission - the culmination of the Manhattan project. And here an eyewitness account of one of the crew members, who was part of that mission to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima:
One of my friends, who passed away a few years ago, was a navy veteran and had served during World War Two. He told me he was aboard a ship off the coast of Japan and saw the atomic blast of Hiroshima from a few hundred miles away. Amazing. But it is still was not over.
Victory in Japan (VJ Day) ...
After the second bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, Japan surrendered, unconditionally, and officially on September 2, 1945.
But many believed this hastened the end of the war and saved many lives. Among them may have been my father-in-law. He fought in World War Two in both the North African and European theaters. He was there on D-Day + 4. And, if the war had not ended a few months later, he would have been slated to be deployed to fight against Japan. Perhaps, he would have become another grim statistic, one of the millions of causalities of that war.
The mission of the Enola Gay hastened the end of World War Two - the worst in the 20th century - and up to that point, perhaps the worst of all recorded history.
And America's part of ending World War Two is part of America's Story, which will be continued ....
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