Einstein's Big Idea

"Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one." (A thousand points to whoever guesses the person who said this.)

I am giving a talk on special relativity at the Harvard Student Lecture Series this Friday.  Let me come up with a quick rundown of the special theory.

1. The laws of physics hold for all inertial frames.
2. The speed of light (c = 3 x 10^8 m/s) is the same for all inertial frames.

Note: An inertial frame is one that is not accelerating (moving in one, straight direction and at constant speed).

The revolutionary claim is the latter.  If you are on the ground and your friend is on a moving train and shining light in the same direction, both of you will observe the light traveling at the same speed.  As a consequence of these two postulates, bizarre effects result: loss of simultaneity, time dilation, length contraction, E = mc^2 and more.

One interesting application is time travel.  You can travel into the future by going on a rocket moving close to the speed of light and coming back to Earth.  If you travel sufficiently fast, a one-week ride can lead you a hundred years into the future or more.  You can achieve this if you travel 99.9999982% of the speed of light.  If the rocket is 100,000 kg, you would need 4.7 x 10^25 Joules of energy.  With this amount of energy, you can sustain 10 billion people for a million years.

If I have enough time, I will write up a qualitative derivation of the results.  If you are interested in this stuff, check out the lecture I will give this Friday at 8pm in the Adams Pool Theater.  Alternatively, look up "special relativity" in Wikipedia.

Why Men are Jerks

"Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former." - Albert Einstein

This post is going to be a bit controversial but I think it needs to be said.  I was walking tonight with my friends and one of them asked why men tend to be more insensitive and make hurtful comments to women.  Here is what I think: men will do what it takes to get laid and having a jerk-like personality helps them achieve that goal.

Don't believe me?  Think about nerds and jocks (both male).  Nerds respect women more than jocks do.  Why?  When a girl gives a nerd attention, he will value it more since he is not used to it and wants to get laid.  A jock is not hesitant to blow a girl off since he's got girls lined up for him.  Despite the difference in respect, most girls pick the jock.  The nerd comes off as being too nice, uninteresting, and desperate.  The jock comes off as being dominant, challenging, and sexual.

We are a very intelligent species.

Sex at Harvard

The Harvard Independent came up with a very interesting sex survey done on Harvard students.  I was talking about this with my friend David the other day and supposedly a third of Harvard students never had sex in college.  Another third had one or two sexual partners.  Only 10% had several sexual partners during their four years.  I was pretty amazed by how low this was.  I thought that most of my peers have had much more.

Does this sound like atypical college behavior?  Perhaps other schools are not as chaste as Harvard...

A Physicist Gives Life Advice

Here is an interesting clip of Stephen Hawking:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I4I-XT5nH7g

Advice that Stephen Hawking gave to his children:
1. Remember to look up at the stars and not down at your feet.
2. Never give up work. Work gives you meaning and purpose and life is empty without it.
3. If you are lucky enough to find love, remember it is rare, and don't throw it away.

Truer words have seldom been spoken.  Stephen Hawking is a modern-day oracle.

The Necessity of Education Reform in America

Today was the first day of student registration for Harvard's High School Studies Program.  We had well over a hundred students coming in to take various classes, from quantum mechanics and geometry to digital art and American political parties.

It really is unfair how (at least in our country) some people are able have a great education while others within the same city are functionally illiterate.  To elaborate, most people can read words like "hamburger" and "Wal-Mart" but many cannot understand an article in the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal.  Our nation is the wealthiest in the world yet has a Gini coefficient comparable to Mexico's (The Gini coefficient is a measure of a country's income inequality: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gini_coefficient).  I genuinely wish for more college-educated Americans to go into changing our education system, making it more efficient and rigorous.  It would be fantastic to have more programs like Teach For America to send our best and brightest to the people who need them the most.  What we need right now is more people who are capable of critical thinking and generating innovative ideas in virtually every sphere of human intercourse (technology, academia, politics, religion, the arts, you name it).

How could we improve the American education system?  I am guessing that raising teacher salaries would be a good start.  Feel free to comment on any other suggestions or thoughts.


IMPORTANT: I would like to thank all of the board members who helped organize today's student registration, including Stephanie Bachar and also Michael Price for staying up so late to fix website bugs.