Scientist Einstein’s greatest idea

 Scientist Einstein’s greatest idea

A hundred years ago a deceptively simple formula revealed a hidden unity buried deep in the fabric of the universe it tells of a fantastic connection between energy matter and light its author was a youthful albert einstein it’s the most famous equation in the world e equals m c squared but while we’ve all heard of einstein’s big idea very few of us know what it means in fact e equals m c squared is so remarkable that even einstein wasn’t sure if it was really true you’re later than i expected we’ve only got sausage and cheese tonight what is it we need to talk has something happened oh no nothing sorry no i spent most of the day staring out the window at work looking at trains and i started to think about an object and how much energy it had can i explain it to you of course you can but first dinner food and talk i think the gods are laughing at me the gods were not laughing at einstein he’d united in one stunning insight the work of many who had come before him scientists 

Who’d fought and even died to create each part of the equation the story of e equals m c squared starts long before einstein with the discovery of e for energy in the early 19th century scientists didn’t think in terms of energy they thought in terms of individual powers or forces these were all disconnected unrelated things the power of the wind the force of a door closing the crack of lightning the idea that there might be some sort of overarching unifying energy which lay behind all these forces had yet to be revealed one lowly man’s drive to understand the hidden mysteries of nature would begin to change all that young michael faraday hated his job he was uneducated the son of a blacksmith he’d been lucky to become a bookbinder’s apprentic but faraday craved one thing he craved knowledge he read every book that passed through his hands he developed a passion for sciences all of his free time and his meager wages were poured into self-education he was on the threshold of an incredible journey into the invisible world of energy

Faraday had impressed one of his master’s customers and was rewarded with a ticket that would change his life excuse me please can i pass please can i pass some of us are trying to improve ourselves if people will let us of course of course pass this way to a better life in the early 1800s science was a pursuit of gentleman something faraday was clearly not he had a rudimentary education he’d read widely he’d gone to public lectures but in 1812 he was given tickets to hear sir humphrey davey the most prominent chemist of the age 19th century scientists were the pop stars of their day their lectures were hugely popular tickets were hard to come by and davey reveled in his status they’re waiting i knew he was also a keen follower of the latest fashion nitrous oxide or laughing gas he said it had all the benefits of alcohol without the hangove electricity ladies and gentlemen a mysterious force that can unravel the confusing mixture of intermingle substances that surround

And produce pure pure elements davey was an absolutely first-rate scientist however many will come to say that his greatest discovery is michael faraday’s unknown that is until i isolated potassium from molten potash and sodium as i showed you last time from common salt that same magical electron faraday may not have been born a gentleman but he wasn’t going to let class barriers stop him from pursuing a career in science he worked for nights on end to bind his lecture notes into a book for his new hero lord help me to think only of others to be of use to mankind help me be part of the great circle that is your work and love lord i am your servant well this is excellent work faraday so what is it you aim to do with your life my desire sir is to escape from trade which i find vicious and selfish and to become a servant of science which i imagine makes its pursuers amiable and liberal really well i shall leave it to the experience of a few years to set you right on that score look i haven’t done anything at the moment i’ll send a note if anything comes up despite this humiliating setback faraday was determined to break free from his daily toil his patience was rewarded 

You man meet mr michael faraday he’s going to be my helper while i recover he assures me he is a christian fellow perhaps with god and faraday in charge of the chemicals you and i will be safe in our place of work thank you professor davey welcome faraday oh no thank you and thank you sir humphrey just stick to your job and do as you’re told and you’ll be fine faraday became the laboratory assistant eagerly absorbing every scrap of knowledge that davey deigned to impart but in time the pupil would surpass the master the big excitement of the day was electricity another charge dude the battery had just been invented and all manner of experiments were being done but no one really understood what this strange force of electricity was the academic establishment at the time thought that electricity was you know like a fluid flowing through a pipe pushing its way along 

But in 1821 a danish researcher showed that when you pass an electrical current through a wire and place a compass near it it deflected the needle at right angles this was the first time researchers had seen electricity affect a magnet the first glimpse of two forces which had previously been seen as entirely separate now unified in some inexplicable way faraday come look at this another bright spark around here perhaps you can work it out as did’s reported an amazing finding we’re just replicating it here let’s try the compass on the other side now that is remarkable but if the electrical force is flowing through the wire why does the needle not move in the same direction parallel to the wire quite let’s try turning the whole apparatus around again newman so the electrical force goes this way the compass points that way how can one affect the other perhaps the electricity is throwing out some invisible force as it moves along what perhaps some sort of electrical force is emanating outwards from the wire oh my dear boy let me tell you that at the university of cambridge electricity flows through a wire not sideways to it 

Well that may be what they teach at cambridge but it doesn’t explain what’s happening before our eyes no no let’s just get on let’s swap the compass to below the wire why the compass was deflected at right angles why the electricity was affecting the compass at all dumbfounded davey and many others as we celebrate the marriage of michael and sarah for faraday however the problem became an obsession it was a fascination inspired by his religion for him the problem was a way to understand god’s hidden mysteries there is a small almost persecuted group in london called the sandomanians they were religious not really a sect they were just a small subset sort of like quakers faraday was a member of that group it was a very gentle decent group they believed that underneath the whole service of reality everything was created by god in a unified way that if you opened up one little part of it you could see how everything was connected 

Michael faraday was someone who like einstein thought in terms of pictures faraday was different from anybody else he had a flare for understanding his experiments for understanding what was really going on inside them by methodically placing a compass all around an electrified wire faraday started to notice a pattern what everyone else at the time had been taught was that forces travel in straight lines faraday was different faraday imagined that invisible lines of force flowed around an electric wire and then he imagined that a magnet had similar lines emerging from it and that those lines get caught up in this flow it was a bit like a flag and a wind but faraday’s great leap of imagination was to turn this experiment on its head instead of an electrified wire moving a compass needle he wondered if he could get a static magnet to move a wire i’ve never seen you like this faraday you look like a happy child i’m shaking human underneath i’m shaking

You see john you see yes this is the experiment of the century it’s the invention of the electric motor scale up the magnets and the wires make them really big attach heavy weights to them and they’ll be dragged along but almost more importantly he’s inventing a new kind of physics here although he didn’t realize it at the time faraday had also just demonstrated an overarching principle the chemicals in the battery had been transformed into electricity in the wire which had combined with the magnet to produce motion behind all these various forces there was a common energy a couple of months earlier davey had been elected president of the royal society which was the elite body of english science but then he saw this great discovery published in the quarterly journal of science i don’t know if he was envious but he certainly saw this young man who had been his assistant this mere blacksmith son had come up with one of the greatest discoveries of the victorian era 

Davey accuses faraday of plagiarizing similar work from another imminent british scientist william wollaston so faraday what does walliston make of all this it’s written to me and assures me that he’s taken no offense and he acknowledges that what i published was entirely my own work right right davey is just being an ass but will davey now retract his allegation sadly no in fact he’s still vehemently opposed to you being elected a member of the society really and what do you think faraday my dear boy you have my vote oh mine and i believe you even have wall street’s what a mess well no matter no matter it’s the science that counts so tell me how does this wire of yours spin around its magnet what mysterious forces are at play there seems to be an electromagnetic interaction in my mind i see a swirling array of lines of force spinning out of the electrified wire like a spiraling web but invisible lines of force it’s all a bit vague isn’t it parody might have a word in private certainly 

Listen parade let’s stop this nonsense i want you to take down your ballot paper from the lotus board so humphrey i see no reason to take it down my friends have proposed me it is they who put the paper up i will not take it down good day faraday was elected to the royal society davey died five years later a victim of his many gaseous inhalations in time faraday’s world of invisible forces would lead to a whole new understanding of energy he’d started what einstein would call the great revolution it was in the very heart of this exciting new world of energy that einstein grew up my father and uncle wanted to make their fortune by bringing electric light to the streets of germany from an early age i loved to look at machines understand how things work he’s going to kill himself albert stay there

I experienced a miracle when my father showed me a compass i trembled and grew cold there had to be something behind objects that lay deeply hidden at high school they had their ideas about what i should learn i had my own i was merely interested in physics maths philosophy and playing the violin everything else was a ball einstein on your feet as you obviously know everything about geology tell me how does the rock start run here it’s pretty much the same to me whichever way they run her professor einstein’s teachers tried to drum into him as faraday had shown that energy could be converted from one form into another they also believed that all forms of energy had already been discovered einstein was going to prove them wrong he would discover a new vast reservoir of energy hidden where no other scientist had ever thought of looking deep in the heart of matter

A hundred years before einstein’s birth king louis xv was on the throne of france but the ancient absolute power of the monarchy over the people was starting to be challenged shark lift the windows forget the rain we need air the french revolution was just around the corner this was the era of enlightenment when intellectuals believe very firmly that the way forward lay in science and they felt that one of the first tasks that lay ahead of them was to rationalize and to classify every single kind of matter so they could see how it all interacted together antoine lavoisier a wealthy aristocratic young man decided to take up this task to see if there was some basic connection between all the stuff of everyday life all the different substances in the world but what worked for lavoisier as a scientist his meticulous even obsessive attention to detail was also to be his downfall 

You are if my eyes do not deceive me consuming only milk this evening first you had a glass of milk now you are eating a bowl of milk will you next move on to a plate of milk your precise observations commend you as a lady of scientific curiosity mamosa most unusual as you seek knowledge so i shall dispense it for the last five weeks i have taken nothing but milk good god man i would rather die than fast on milk for five weeks are you in the grip of some horrendous ailments on the contrary i am investigating the effects of diet on health i’m sure with the greatest of respect to a member of the royal academy of sciences your guts must think your throat has been slit where is your gut count is no doubt petitioning the academy for a widening of your throat marianne how dare you insult the count don’t forget what the count offers not just marriage but think of how you will be introduced to all this alone you will be the toast of paris would not be ashamed madame to burden 

You with the duties of matrimony before you have had a chance to experience your curiosity for nature shall we all go through it’s getting rather hot in here do you really plan to marry the hammer there is a plan but it is not mine then i must contrive to save you lavoisier wasn’t a scientist by profession he was the head of tax enforcement in paris his great idea was to build a huge wall around the city and to tax everything that came and went but his taxes on the simple things in life bread wine and cheese did not endear him to the average parisian this scrupulous fastidious young man did still allow himself the occasional act of passion in 1771 lavoisier married marianne pauls the daughter of his colleague in the tax office thus he saved her as he had promised from an arranged marriage to account 40 years her elder allow me to show you something lavoisier 

I think found his job as a tax collector really rather tedious and the times he looked forward to the evenings and the weekends when he could indulge his passion for chemical experimentation and he called those times his jour de bonner his days of happiness what will happen if i take a bar of copper or iron and leave it outside in the rain for months on end madame what will become of them is this a verbal examination prior to an examination profile so many seeks the truth then you join with me monsieur for you know the truth the copper will become covered in a green verdigris and the iron will last i believe the term is uh calcium most impressive my charming one but let me press you further when the metal rusts does it get heavier or lighter why sir i think you mean to trap me and perhaps this little butterfly should land and allow me to take a closer look every last citizen in france a sensible age knows that when a metal rusts it wastes away it gets lighter and eventually disappears 

But ah stop i have not finished contain yourself sir there is more in a recently published pamphlet by a brilliant young chemist antoine voisier demonstrates that the iron combines with the air it in fact becomes heavy most impressive i intend now whatever you intend me i intend to be by your side i will learn all i can about your science and become your worthy colleague then let me show you how the iron combines with the air to form such a delicate union tomorrow tomorrow marianne learned chemistry at her husband’s side but soon sought other ways to contribute to his work she learned english so that she could translate contemporary scientific works she took drawing lessons so that she could record in forensic detail the minutiae of their work together she ran their laboratory and was the public face of lavoisier inc she was central to the whole research effort 

That is a terrible thing to say you are a cheeky man this way please gentlemen miss you it is my great ambition to demonstrate but nature is a closed system that in any transformation no amount of matter no mass is ever lost and none is gained over here please this precise amount of water is heated to steam this steam is brought into contact with a red-hot iron barrel embedded in the coals from this end we cool this thing but interestingly we collect less water than we started with so clearly we lose a certain amount of water however we also collect a gas and the weight of the iron barrel increases now when we combine these two increases the new weight of the iron barrel and the gas we have collected they are exactly equal to the weight of the lost water ah but is it atmospheric error no no because i am measuring it to the very last grain i can see that it is lighter than the air around us and moreover it is flammable voila water is made out of hydrogen 

And oxygen so what he had done is get the oxygen to stick to the inside of a red hot iron rifle barrel he was basically just making rust which is oxygen iron but he was making the rust really quickly now that left the hydrogen what he called combustible air and that was just floating around as a gas no mass had been lost it had merely been transformed and now he wanted to transform it all back into water this is only the beginning in the next few months i hope to demonstrate that i can recombine this combustible air with vital air and transform them both back into water i will recreate exactly the same amount of water that was lost here in this process it is my hope to complete the cycle water into gas into water and not a drop lost for a long time lavoisier had suspected that the exact amount of matter the mass involved in any transformation was always conserved but to prove this he had to perform thousands of experiments and he had to do the measurements with incredible accuracy 

That’s where his great wealth from being a tax collector came in he could afford to commission the most sensitive instruments ever built he became obsessed with accuracy but lavoisier’s exacting methods were also starting to anger the growing mob of hungry disenchanted parisians sorry what time is it this is almost time to receive mr maga the academy asked you to assess his designs he claims to have made a great discovery antoine have you forgotten oh god there’s another charlatan with an idea to peddle god give me passions i have invented a device which projects an image of the substance of fire onto a screen you see when a lantern is shown through a flame we see a shimmering pattern above the flame my device renders the substance of fire visible have you collected it the substance of fire have you have you trapped it and measured it no but but one can see it i’m sorry in the absence of exact measurements of precise observations without rigorous reasoning one can only be engaging in conjecture so this is not science 

Iam not given the conjecture really no if you will excuse me i am extremely busy today but thank you thank you so that is all then good day monsieur let me guess mara king’s scientific despot has decreed that your invention does not conform to the version of the truth as laid down by the academy love was ye he talks about facts he worships the truth listen to me my friend they are all the same the royal academies they insult the liberty of the mind they think they are the sole arbiters of genius they are rotten to the core just like every other tentacle of the king the people it is they who will determine right and wrong don’t worry in my next pamphlet i will expose this persecutor of yours for years the lavoisiers burned chopped melted and boiled every conceivable substance they’d shown that as long as one is scrupulous about collecting all the vapors liquids and powders created in a transformation then mass is not decreased liquids might become gases metals may rust wood may become ash and smoke 

But matter the tiny atoms that make up all substances none of it is ever lost the crowning glory of this opus was their remarkable use of static electricity to cause oxygen and hydrogen to recombine back into water what is happening as the french revolution exploded the royal family and whole swaths of aristocrats lost their heads on the guillotine to the french revolutionaries of 1790 lavoisier meant one thing and one thing only he was the despised tax collector who’d built that wall around paris lavoisier’s job as a tax collector brought him under suspicion he was denounced by a failed scientist turned radical journalist jean-paul maher that was it that was you what lavoisier did is absolutely central to science and especially to equals mc squared because what he said is if you take a bunch of matter you can break it apart you can recombine it you can do anything to it and the stuff of the matter 

Won’t go away if the mob burned paris to the ground utterly raised it shattered the bricks into the rubble and dust and burned the buildings into ashes and smoke turns out if you put a huge dome over paris and weighed all the smoke and all the ashes and all the rubble it would add up to the exact same way as the original city and the air around it before nothing disappears a century later all of nature had been classified into two great domains there was energy the forces that animated objects and there was mass the physical stuff that made up those objects the whole of 19th century science rested on these two mighty pillars the laws that governed one did not apply to the other but young newly enrolled physics student albert einstein didn’t like laws einstein what happened to you it is more than a little ironic having been reprimanded yesterday by that idiot professor perney for poor attendance that i should in fact attend a practical lesson 

Which was as long as it was boring and utterly pointless by the way only to be the victim of an explosion of my own apparatus so it was your own fault then thank you and how are you today from marriage extremely well at einstein all the better for seeing you have escaped the physics laboratory with your life well in order not to alarm you any further i pledge to forever continue my studies here at the cafe bahnhof reading only the great masters of theoretical physics and restoring the babbling nonsense of the polytechnicians it’s about all you ever do it’s getting a little stuffy in here for ally marriage would you care to take a walk with me if there’s something i’d like to discuss with you why hart einstein of course perhaps you’d like me to tell you what you have missed in lectures this week einstein wasn’t exactly a model student he excelled in certain subjects especially physics and math but he wasn’t very diligent in a lot of his other classes he was undoubtedly very questioning which seems to have annoyed most of his professors throughout his life he would pursue his fascinations with just incredible determination we know from his letters that einstein even from the age of 16 was literally obsessed with the nature of light 

Everyone he could speak to his friends his colleagues even his then girlfriends malevo merrick who had become his wife everyone he badgered with the question what is light what would i see if i rode on a beam of light what a beam of light by what method do you propose to ride on this beam of light as a method is not important let us just imagine we two are young radical bohemian experimenters hand in hand on a journey to the outer reaches of the universe and we are riding on the front of a wave of light i really don’t know what you are suggesting here einstein do you wish to hold my hand on ridicule me where to cure you no never i merely want you to help me to understand what would we seize you think if we were together and we sped up and up until we caught up to the front of a beam of light it was einstein’s relentless pursuit of light which would bring about a revolution in science with light he would reinvent the universe and find a hidden pathway that would unite energy and mass 

Light moves incredibly fast 670 million miles per hour that’s why scientists use the term c it stands for celeritas latin for swiftness long before the 19th century scientists had computed the speed of light but no one knew what light actually was back in england a man we’ve already met was willing to make an educated guess after sir humphrey davies death michael faraday became professor faraday one of the most important experimenters in the world the scientific establishment still found it hard to accept that electricity and magnetism were just two aspects of the same phenomenon which faraday called electromagnetism but now he has an even more outrageous proposal for his audience invisible lines that can emanate from electricity in a while from a magnet or even from the sun for it is my contention that light itself is just one form of these vibrating lines of electromagnetism for 15 years faraday struggled to convince the skeptics 

That light was an electromagnetic wave but he lacked the advanced mathematics to back up his idea eventually someone came to his rescue professor james clark maxwell believed in faraday’s farsighted vision and he had the mathematical skill to prove it maxwell and the aging faraday became close friends james forgive me a word of advice don’t get old michael how are you i’m fine memory isn’t too good well i thought you might like to see what i’ve just published oh yes yes splendid so your results show that that when electricity flows along a wire what it actually does is create a little bit of magnetism and as that magnetic charge moves it creates a little piece of electricity electricity electricity and magnetism are interwoven like a never-ending braid so it is always pulsing forward it’s wonderful one michael michael there’s something very crucial in maths this electricity-producing magnetism and magnetism producing electricity can only ever happen at a very particular speed the equations are very clear about it they come up with just one number 670 million miles per hour 

I’m not sure it was the speed of light that is the speed of light you were right all along light is an electromagnetic wave maxwell had proven faraday right electricity and magnetism are just two aspects of a deeper unity a force now called electromagnetism which travels at 670 million miles per hour in its visible form it is nothing other than light itself and nothing fascinated the young einstein more than light we have lectures in half an hour oh let me think professor weber and his life training monologue or you mozart and james clark maxwell we can’t we’ll get a warning our project is too precious to waste time listening to those dollars come with me we’ll read maxwell and think about the electromagnetic theory of light oh why my dear little johnny how you enchant a lady she’s very pretty yes but can she soar and dance like our dark souls do 

maxwell’s equations contained an incredible prediction they said you could never catch up to a beam of light even if you were traveling at 670 million miles an hour you would still see lights squiggle away from you at 670 million miles an hour you see how she stairs that way yes you see how for her it is static yes she and the wave are traveling at the same speed we see the wave moving through the water but relative to her it just sits there so is light like that common sense would say that if you cut up to a light beam there would be a wave of light just sitting there maybe it would be shimmering a bit of electricity and a bit of magnetism so if she was traveling alongside the light wave it wouldn’t be moving it would be static but maxwell says you can’t have static light maybe maxwell is wrong maybe if you catch up to light it is static albert like a wave next to a boat imagine if i was sitting still and holding a mirror to my face and the light travels from my face to the mirror 

And i see my face yes however if i end the mirror we’re traveling at the speed of light you’re going at the same speed as the light leaving your face exactly the light never reaches the mirror so would i be invisible that doesn’t make sense young einstein was starting to realize that light was unlike any other kind of wave einstein was about to enter a surreal universe where energy mass and the speed of light intermingled in a way no one had ever suspected but there was one last mathematical ingredient that einstein would need the everyday process of squaring long before the french revolution scientists were not sure how to quantify motion equations that explained how objects moved and collided were in their infancy a crucial contribution to this subject would come from an unusual source meet the aristocratic sixteen-year-old daughter of one of king louis xiv’s courtiers emily de chatelet quickly father’s coming…!!