Break out the rap, get on your stunt bike, ... celebrate Einstein's genius

[HuckleB]

Break out the rap, get on your stunt bike, it's time to celebrate Einstein's genius

Year-long celebration of physicist aimed at attracting children to neglected subject
http://www.guardian.co.uk/life/science/story/0,12996,1384129,00.html

"Yo yo yo! Give it up for the main man from da IoP, John Enderby!" boomed the camouflage-jacketed man in a baseball cap, inviting the septugenarian Professor Sir John Enderby, fellow of the Royal Society and president of Britain's Institute of Physics, to join him on stage at the Science Museum in London. The rapper, DJ Vader, author of a ditty called Einstein (not enough time), was on hand yesterday to help launch Einstein Year, Britain's celebration of physics that coincides with the 100th anniversary of Einstein's annus mirabilis.

In a single year, the world's most famous physicist published landmark works that warped our notions of space and time, helped prove atoms are real and drew the remarkable conclusion that mass and energy are one and the same.

After a full-length rap from DJ Vader, the launch of Einstein Year continued its quest for cool with Ben Wallace, a BMX stunt rider from Portsmouth, who performed an "Einstein flip", the first bicycle stunt to be designed by a physicist.

The stunt - a backward somersault during which the rider tries to fold the bike beneath him while upside down in mid-air - was created using computer models by Helen Czerski, a physicist at Cambridge University. "We wanted to use physics to push the boundaries of what is humanly possible on a bike," she said.

..."

[JohnnyRingo]

1. Albert Einstein....Still making cutting edge news 86 years later

...Amazing

I hate to politicize everything, but thankfully the current White House wasn't in power in his day....The terms "junk science" and "left wing wacko" would have been applied with derision:

Frame Dragging Confirmed

Summary - (Oct 22, 2004) When developing his General Theory of Relativity, Albert Einstein predicted that the Earth should drag space and time around with it as it rotates on its axis. NASA's Gravity Probe B spacecraft was launched earlier this year to help confirm this prediction, but an international team of researchers has beaten the spacecraft to a conclusion. By carefully tracking the position of the LAGEOS and LAGEOS 2 satellites - beachball-sized spheres covered in mirrors - they discovered that their orbit is being shifted by about two metres a year by this dragging effect by the Earth's gravity, almost exactly what was predicted by Einstein.

<excerpt>
"General relativity predicts massive rotating objects should drag space-time around themselves as they rotate," Pavlis said. "Frame dragging is like what happens if a bowling ball spins in a thick fluid such as molasses. As the ball spins, it pulls the molasses around itself. Anything stuck in the molasses will also move around the ball. Similarly, as the Earth rotates, it pulls space-time in its vicinity around itself. This will shift the orbits of satellites near Earth." The study is a follow-up to earlier work in 1998 where the authors' team reported the first direct detection of the effect.
<snip>
NASA and Stanford University, Palo Alto, Calif. developed Gravity Probe B. It will precisely check tiny changes in the direction of spin of four gyroscopes contained in an Earth satellite orbiting 400-miles directly over the poles. The experiment will test two theories relating to Einstein's Theory of General Relativity, including the Lense-Thirring Effect. These effects, though small for Earth, have far-reaching implications for the nature of matter and the structure of the universe.


< Entire article>
http://www.universetoday.com/am/publish/frame_dragging_confirmed.html

[GAspnes]

2. that's the last one, isn't it?

I've been watching the Gravity Probe B site, waiting for results and missed this entirely.

Nice to have his last prediction confirmed on his 100th anniversary.

[JohnnyRingo]

3. I didn't know it was the last unproven part of the theory

Thanx for the info.