Ernest Rutherford "The Newtan of Atomic Physics"

Ernest Rutherford
"The Newtan of Atomic Physics"



“It is given to but few men to achieve immortality, still less to achieve Olympian rank, during their own lifetime. Lord Rutherford achieved both. In a generation that witnessed one of the greatest revolutions in the entire history of science he was universally acknowledged as the leading explorer of the vast infinitely complex universe within the atom, a universe that he was first to penetrate.”
The New York Times

“Ernest Rutherford is one of the most illustrious scientists of all time. He is to the atom what Darwin is to evolution, Newton to mechanics, Faraday to electricity and Einstein to relativity. His pathway from rural child to immortality is a fascinating one”
Dr John A.Campbell of the Physics Department, University of Canterbury,
New Zealand and the author of the book, "Rutherford : Scientist Supreme"


Ernest Rutherford was one of the first and most creative researchers in atomic physics. He is regarded as one of the greatest experimentalists of all times. He was also great scientific theorista, whose ideas were based on rigorous experimentation. Einstein called him “a second Newton.” Rutherford’s pioneering discoveries shaped modern science, created nuclear physics and changed our understanding about the structure of the atom. He discovered the transmutation of elements that is elements are not immutable, they can change their structure naturally by changing from heavy elements to slightly lighter elements. He was first to split the atom, he converted nitrogen into oxygen. He discovered alpha and beta rays. He set forth the laws of radioactive decay. He identified alpha particles as helium nuclei. Rutherford proposed the nuclear model of the atom. Rutherford’s model, a small nucleus surrounded by orbiting electrons, became the basis for how we see the atom today.
His many other lesser known discoveries such as dating the age of Earth were enough to make a scientist famous. The first method invented to detect individual nuclear particles by electrical means, the Rutherford-Geiger detector, evolved into the Geiger-Muller tube. The modern smoke detector can be traced back to 1899 when, at McGill University in Canada, Rutherford blew tobacco smoke into his ionisation chamber and observed the change in ionisation
Among his associates were the following 12 Nobel Laureates: Edward Appleton, Patrick Blackett, Niels Bohr, James Chadwick, John Cockroft, Peter Kapitza, Cecil Powell, George Paget Thomson, Ernest Walton, Otto Hahn, G de Hevesy and Frederick Soddy. Among his other famous students were H. G. J. Moseley and Chaim Weizmann. Moseley, who died in action in the First World War in 1915 at the age of 27, demonstrated the fundamental importance of the atomic number. Moseley described Moseley's law for frequency of x-ray spectral lines.
Rutherford had an extraordinary capacity of work. His students nicknamed him “the crocodile”, because they thought, “the crocodile cannot turn its head…it must always go forward with all devouring jaws.”
Rutherford in his appearance was far from a scientist. Weizmann described Rutherford as being “youthful, energetic, boisterous. He suggested anything but a scientist. He talked readily and vigorously on any subject under the Sun, often without knowing anything about it… He was quite devoid of any political knowledge or feelings, being entirely taken up with his epoch-making scientific work. He was a kindly person but did not suffer fools gladly.” James Chadwick wrote : “ In appearance Rutherford was more like a successful businessman or Dominion farmer than a scholar…when I knew him he was of massive build, had thinning hair, a moustache and a ruddy complexion. He wore lose, rather baggy clothes, except on formal occasions. A little under six feet in height, he was noticeable but by no means impressive…it seemed impossible for Rutherford to speak softly. His whisper could be heard all over the room, and in any company he dominated through the sheer volume and nature of his voice, which remained tinged with an antipodean flavour despite his many years in Canada and England. His laughter was equally formidable.”
Rutherford was born on August 30, 1871 at Bridgewater, a small town close to Nelson, New Zealand. His father James Rutherford, a Scottish wheelwright (a person who makes and repairs wheels and wheeled vehicles), had migrated with his family to New Zealand in 1840s. Rutherford’s mother Martha Rutherford (nee Thomson), who with her widowed mother, also emigrated to New Zealand in 1855. In 1877 Rutherford family moved to Foxhill, Nelson Province. Rutherford attended Foxhill School, Nelson Province (1877-1883). In 1883, the family moved to Havelock, Marlborough Sounds, also near Nelson, where Rutherford attended Havelock School (1883-1886). In his early years Rutherford did not show any special inclination towards science. Ioan James wrote: “In his spare time the boy enjoyed tinkering with clocks and making models of the waterwheels his father used in his mills. By the age of ten he had read a scientific textbook, but otherwise there was not yet any sign of special interest in science; he was expecting to become a farmer when he grew up.”
In 1887, Ernest won a scholarship to attend Nelson College, which was rather an English grammar school. This scholarship, which Rutherford won on his second attempt, was the only scholarship available to assist a Marlborough boy to attend secondary school. He studied three years at the Nelson College. He won, again on second attempt, one of the ten scholarships available nationally to assist attendance at a college of the University of New Zealand. This scholarship enabled him to attend the Canterbury College (1890-1894) in Christchurch. He studied Pure and Applied Mathematics, Physics, Latin, English and French. He was a regular player of rugby. He participated in the activities of a student debating society called the Dialectic Society. He also participated in the activities of the recently formed Science Society. In 1892 he passed BA.
His mathematical ability won him the one Senior Scholarship in Mathematics available in New Zealand. This made possible for him to study for his Master's degree. He studied both mathematics and physics. Rutherford was much influenced by one of his teachers Alexander Bickerton, who was a liberal freethinker. As a part of the physics course requirement Rutherford had to carry out an original investigation. Inspired by Nikola Tesla’s use of his high frequency Tesla coil to transmit power without wires, Rutherford decided to find out whether iron was magnetic at very high frequencies of magnetising current. As a part of this investigation Rutherford developed two devices; a timing device which could switch circuits in less than one hundred thousandth of a second and a magnetic detector of very fast current pulses. In 1893, Rutherford obtained a Master of Arts degree with double First Class Honours, in Mathematics and Mathematical Physics and in Physical Science (Electricity and Magnetism).
Rutherford wanted to be a school teacher. However, even after trying three times he failed to obtain a permanent school-teacher’s job. For a brief period he toyed with the idea of pursuing a career in medicine. He was also thinking to carry out more research in electrical science and to meet his financial requirements he thought of taking up private tutoring. Rutherford taught briefly at the local high school. In a tiny basement workshop Rutherford began investigating the radio waves earlier discovered by Hertz. He devised a magnetometer capable of detecting radio signals over short distances. The device could be used in lighthouse-to-shore communication. Rutherford did not knew that the device had already been developed by Joseph Henry. Rutherford decided to try for the scholarship given by the Royal Commissioners for the Exhibition of 1851. These scholarships allowed graduates of universities in the British Empire to go anywhere in the world and work subjects seemingly useful for industries in their home. For the graduate students of the Universities of New Zealand one scholarship was available every second year. A candidate had to be enrolled at the University for becoming eligible for applying for the scholarship. Thus in 1894 Rutherford returned to Canterbury College where he took geology and chemistry for a B.Sc degree. For the research work required of a candidate, Rutherford decided to extend his researches carried out for his MA degree. There were two candidates for the only scholarship available for the students of the New Zealand University—Rutherford and James Maclaurin of Auckland University College. The scholarship was first offered to Maclaurin. However, the terms of the scholarship were not acceptable to Maclaurin and so he declined the offer. Rutherford being the only other candidate was awarded the scholarship.
Rutherford left New Zealand in 1895. Before leaving New Zealand, Rutherford had established himself as an outstanding researcher and innovator working at the forefront of electrical technology. He decided to work with J J Thomson of Cambridge University’s Cavendish Laboratory. His decision to work with Thomson was influenced by the fact that Thomson was the leading authority of electromagnetic phenomena, in which Rutherford had developed an interest. Rutherford happened to be the Cambridge University’s first non-Cambridge-graduate research student.
Thomson, who was quick to realise Rutherford’s exceptional ability as a researcher invited him to become a member of the team to study of the electrical conduction of gases. Rutherford developed several ingenious techniques to study the mechanism whereby normally insulating gases become electrical conductors when a high voltage is applied across them. Rutherford used X-rays, immediately they were discovered, to cause electrical conduction in gases. He repeated his experiments with radioactive rays after their discovery in 1896. He became interested in understanding the the phenomenon of radioactivity itself. In 1898 Rutherford discovered two distinct radioactive rays—alpha and beta rays.
In 1898, Rutherford accepted a professorship at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. The laboratories at McGill were very well equipped. The laboratory was financed by a tobacco millionaire who considered smoking a disgusting habit. Rutherford described the laboratory there as ‘the best of its kind in the world’, and used it to work on radioactive emissions.
At McGill University, Rutherford’s first important discovery was radon, a radioactive gas and a member of the family of noble gases. In this he was assisted by his first research student, Harriet Brookes and R. B. Owens, McGill’s professor of electrical engineering. Rutherford jointly with Frederick Soddy discovered the disintegration theory of radioactivity, a phenomenon in which some heavy atoms spontaneously decay into slightly lighter atom. He, assisted by Otto Hahn, monitored the sequence of decay products. In 1904, Rutherford published his book on “Radioactivity”, in which he set forth the principles of radioactivity. This was the first textbook on the subject and which defined the fields for decades. The book was considered as a classic as soon as it appeared. Lord Raleigh while reviewing the book wrote: “Rutherford’s book has no rival as an authoritative exposition of what is known of the properties of radio-active bodies. A very large share of that knowledge is due to the author himself. His amazing activity in that field has excited universal admiration. Scarcely a month had passed for several years without some important contribution from his pupils he has inspired, on this branch of science; and what is more wonderful still, there has been in all this vast mass of work scarcely a single conclusion which has since been shown to be ill-founded….”
In 1907, Arthur Schuster offered to relinquish the Langworthy chair of physics at the University of Manchester on condition that Rutherford was invited to succeed him. The University authorities accepted the condition of Schuster and Rutherford accepted the offer. Rutherford spent fourteen productive years at the Manchester University. The discoveries made at the Manchester University included the demonstration of the identity of alpha particles as ionized (doubly positively charged) helium atoms (with his student Thomas Royds), a theory of scattering of alpha particles, and the nuclear model of the atom. Radioactivity was originally discovered by Henry Becquerel in uranium in 1896 and then in thorium by G. C. Schmidt (1865-1949). Subsequently two more radioactive elements viz., radium and polonium were discovered by Pierre and Marie Curi. Rutherford’s studies demonstrated that the radioactive emission consisted of at least two kinds of rays—alpha rays and beta rays. Later a third kind of radioactive rays, gamma rays was discovered. Rutherford jointly with Soddy proposed that radioactive decay occurs by successive transformation, with different and random amounts of time spent between ejection of the successive rays. The time spent may vary from years to a fraction of a second. The radioactive decay is a random process but it is governed by an average time in which half of the atoms of a given sample would decay.
At the Manchester University, Rutherford continued his researches on alpha particles at the McGill University. He and two of his colleagues Geiger and E. Marsden (1889-1970), were carrying out an experiment in which they shot alpha particles at a very thin piece of gold foil, in vacuum. To their surprise they found that most of the alpha particle passed through the gold foil in a straight line, some passed through the gold foil but changed their direction slightly and a small number (1 in 8000 particles) actually bounced back. Based on this experiment Rutherford concluded that the atom must be mainly empty space and that the positive charge was not spread out but it was located in the centre. Rutherford describing his astonishment at the results wrote: “It was quite the most incredible event that ever happened to me in my life. It was as incredible as if you fired a 15-inch shell at a piece of tissue paper and it came back and hit you. On consideration, I realized that this scattering backwards must be the results of a single collision, and when I made calculations I saw that it was impossible to get anything of that order of magnitude unless you took a system in which the mass of the atom was concentrated in a minute nucleus.” In 1911Rutherford proposed that atoms possess a very small but massive structure at their centre, holding all the positive charge that is required to balance the combined negative charge of all the electrons circling around the positively charged centre (nucleus). This was the first correct structure of the atom.
Rutherford’s research group at Manchester included Niels Bohr, who extended Rutherford’s model into the theory of atomic structure that became the guiding principle in nuclear physics for a decade; Gyorgy Hevesy, who developed the technique of radioactive tracers and defined the concept of isotopes; and Henry Moseley, whose work on characteristic X-rays established the concept and the significance of atomic number. While recalling his days at Rutherford’s laboratory at Manchester, Bohr wrote: “The effect (the large-angle scattering of alpha particles) though to all intents insignificant was disturbing to Rutherford, and he felt it difficult to reconcile with the general idea of atomic structure then favoured by the physicists. Indeed it was not the first, nor has it been the last, time that Rutherford’s critical judgment and intuitive power have called forth a revolution in science by inducing him to throw himself with his unique energy into the study of a phenomenon, the importance of which would probably escape other investigators on account of the smallness and apparently spurious nature of the effect. This confidence in his judgment and our admiration for his powerful personality was the basis for the inspiration felt by all in his laboratory, and made us all try our best to deserve the kind and untiring interest he took in the work of everyone. However modest the result might be, an approving word from him was the greatest encouragement for which any of us could wish.”
During the First World War (1914-1918) helped to mobilize British scientists for participating in the war effort. He led a delegation of British and French scientists to Washington. Rutherford worked on sonic methods for detecting submarines. In 1919, Rutherford returned to Cambridge to succeed Thomson as Cavendish Professor of Physics and Director of the Cavendish Laboratory at the Cambridge University. Within months after his return from the war research, Rutherford discovered that nuclei could be disintegrated by artificial means. He disintegrated nitrogen nuclei by striking with alpha particles into carbon nuclei. Later jointly with Chadwick, Rutherford showed that most light atoms could be broken by alpha particles. Like in Manchester, Rutherford built a strong research group at the Cavendish Laboratory. In addition to Chadwick, who on his own proved the existence of neutron in 1932, the group included John Douglas Cockroft (1897-1967) and Ernest Thomas Sinton Walton (1903-1995), who made the first the accelerator that disintegrated an atom with an accelerated particle beam; Charles Thomson Rees Wilson (1869-1959), the inventor of the cloud chamber; Patrick Maynard Stuart Blackett (1897-1974), the discoverer of positron; Pjotr Leonidovich Kapitza (1894-1984), who made the world’s most powerful magnet; and Francis Aston (1877-1945) who demonstrated experimentally the agrrement between apparent atomic and true isotopic weights.
Ray Spangenburger and Diane K. Moser wrote: “Rutherford’s idea of an atomic nucleus was a zinger, one for which he has earned the title, “the Newton of atomic physics”. It seemed to solve all the problems with the raisins-in-poundcake model of atoms. Yet even this model had a few problems. To build a more accurate vision of nature of the atom would require the application of an amazing concept called “the quantum” set forth by a somewhat dour German scientist named Max Planck. Like Roentgen’s X-rays, this idea would virtually turn physics upside-down, with implications not just for the concept of atoms, but virtually everything about our understanding of how world works.”
Rutherford was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of London in 1903 at the early age of thirty-two. In 1904, he was awarded the Rumford Medal by the Royal Society. He was awarded the 1908 Nobel Prize “for his investigations into the disintegration of the elements, and the chemistry of radioactive substances”. He was given Nobel Prize in Chemistry and not in Physics. Arne Westgren, a chemist of the Swedish Academy of Science wrote: “Rutherford had also been suggested by several nominations for the Physics Prize, but at a joint meeting the two Nobel Committees decided that it would be most suitable, considering the fundamental importance of his work for chemical research, to award him the Prize for Chemistry.” Rutherford himself was very much surprised by the decision of the Nobel Foundation to award him Prize in Chemistry. In his Nobel banquet speech, on 11 December 1908, Rutherford said: “…. [he had] dealt with many different transformations with various periods of time, but that the quickest he had met was his own transformation in one moment from a physicist to a chemist.” He was knighted in 1914. He was awarded the Order of Merit in 1921. In 1922, he received the Copley Medal of the Royal Society. He served as the President of the Royal Society from 1925 to 1930 and subsequently he became the chairman of the important advisory council which had been set up to allocate public money for the support of scientific and industrial research in the United Kingdom. In1931, he was made Baron Rutherford of Nelson, a place in New Zealand from where he came. The element with atomic number 104 was named after Rutherford.
Rutherford died on October 19, 1937. He was buried in Westminister Abbey close to Isaac Newton. We would like to end this write-up by quoting James Chadwick on Rutherford. Chadwick wrote: “He (Rutherford)…a volcanic energy and an interest enthusiasm—his most obvious characteristic—and an immense capacity for work. A `clever’ man with these advantages can produce notable work, but he would not be Rutherford. Rutherford had no cleverness—just greatness. He had the most astonishing insight into physical processes, and in a few remarks he would illuminate a whole subject. There is a stock phrase—“to throw light on a subject.” This is exactly what Rutherford did. To work with him was a continual joy and wonder. He seemed to know the answer before the experiment was made, and was ready to push on with irrestible urge to the next. He was indeed a pioneer—a word he often used—at his best in exploring an unknown country, pointing out the really important features and leaving the rest for others to survey at leisure. He was, in my opinion, the greatest experimental physicist since Faraday.”
References
1. Dardo, Mauro, Nobel Laureates and Twentieth-Century Physics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.
2. Heilbron, J. L., “Rutherford, Ernest (1871-1937)” in The Oxford Companion to the History of Modern Science edited by J. L. Heilbron, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.
3. James, Ioan, Remarkable Physicists: From Galileo to Yukawa, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
4. Jones, Geoff, Jones, Marry, and Acaster, David, Chemistry, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.
5. The Cambridge Dictionary of Scientists (second Edition), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
6. Chambers Biographical Dictionary (Centenary Edition), New York: Chambers Harrap Publishers Ltd., 1997.

Albert Einstein All Motion is Relative

Albert Einstein
All Motion is Relative




Albert Einstein (14 March 1879 – 18 April 1955) was the only son of Hermann and Pauline Einstein. He grew up in Munich, where his father and his uncle ran a small electrochemical plant. Einstein was a slow child and disliked the regimentation of school. His scientific interests were awakened early and at home by the mysterious compass his father gave him when he was about four; by the algebra he learned from his uncle; and by the books he read, mostly popular scientific works of the day. A geometry text which he devoured at the age of twelve made a particularly strong impression.
When his family moved to Milan after a business failure, leaving the fifteen-year-old boy behind in Munich to continue his studies, Einstein quit the school he disliked and spent most of a year enjoying life in Italy. Persuaded that he would have to acquire a profession to support himself, he finished the Gymnasium in Aarau, Switzerland, and then studied physics and mathematics at the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule (the Polytechnic) in Zurich, with a view toward teaching.

After graduation Einstein was unable to obtain a regular position for two years and did occasional tutoring and substitute teaching, until he was appointed an examiner in the Swiss Patent Office at Berne. The seven years Einstein spent at this job, with only evenings and Sundays free for his own scientific work, were years in which he laid the foundations of large parts of twentieth-century physics. They were probably also the happiest years of his life. He liked the fact that his job was quite separate from his thoughts about physics, so that he could pursue these freely and independently, and he often recommended such an arrangement to others later on. In 1903 Einstein married Mileva Maric, a Serbian girl who had been a fellow student in Zurich. Their two sons were born in Switzerland.
Einstein received his doctorate in 1905 from the University of Zurich for a dissertation entitled, “Eine neue Bestimmung der Moleküldimensionen” (“A New Determination of Molecular Dimensions”), a work closely related to his studies of Brownian motion. It took only a few years until he received academic recognition for his work, and then he had a wide choice of positions. His first appointment, in 1909, was as associate professor (extraordinarius) of physics at the University of Zurich. This was followed quickly by professorships at the German University in Prague, in 1911, and at the Polytechnic in Zurich, in 1912. Then, in the spring of 1914, Einstein moved to Berlin as a member of the Prussian Academy of Sciences and director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics, free to lecture at the university or not as he chose. As it turned out, he found the scientific atmosphere in Berlin very stimulating, and he greatly enjoyed having colleagues like Max Planck, Walther Nernst, and, later, Erwin Schödinger and Max von Laue. During World War 1, Einstein’s scientific work reached a culmination in the general theory.of’relativity, but in most other ways his life did not go well.
Mileva Einstein and their two sons spent the war years in Switzerland and the Einsteins were divorced soon after the end of the war. Einstein then married his cousin Elsa, a widow with two daughters. Einstein’s health suffered, too. One of his few consolations was his continued correspondence and occasional visits with his friends in the Netherlands-Paul Ehrenfest and H. A. Lorentz, especially the latter, whom Einstein described as having “meant more to me personally than anybody else I have met in my lifetime” and as “the greatest and noblest man of our times.”
Einstein became suddenly famous to the world at large when the deviation of light passing near the sun, as predicted by his general theory of relativity, was observed during the solar eclipse of 1919. His name and the term relativity became household words. The publicity, even notoriety, that ensued changed the pattern of Einstein’s life.
In 1933 Einstein was considering an arrangement that would have allowed him to divide his time between Berlin and the new Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. But when Hitler came to power in Germany, he promptly resigned his position at the Prussian Academy and joined the Institute. Princeton became his home for the remaining twenty-two years of his life. He became an American citizen in 1940.
During the 1930’s Einstein was convinced that the menace to civilization embodied in Hitler’s regime could be put down only by force. In 1939, at the request of Leo Szilard, Edward Teller, and Eugene Wigner, he wrote a letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt pointing out the dangerous military potentialities offered by nuclear fission and warning him of the possibility that Germany might be developing nuclear weapons. This letter helped to initiate the American efforts that eventually produced the nuclear reactor and the fission bomb, but Einstein neither participated in nor knew anything about these efforts.
Einstein received a variety of honours in his lifetime – from the 1921 Nobel Prize in physics to an offer (which he did not accept) of the presidency of Israel after Chaim Weizmann’s death in 1952.
One of Einstein’s last acts was his signing of a plea, initiated by Bertrand Russell, for the renunciation of nuclear weapons and the abolition of war. He was drafting a speech on the current tensions between Israel and Egypt when he suffered an attack due to an aortic aneurysm; he died a few days later. But despite his concern with world problems and his willingness to do whatever he could to alleviate them, his ultimate loyalty was to his science. As he said once with a sigh to an assistant during a discussion of political activities: “Yes, time has to be divided this way, between politics and our equations. But our equations are much more important to me, because politics is for the present, but an equation like that is something for eternity.”
Einstein’s early interests lay in statistical mechanics and intermolecular forces. However, his predominant concern throughout the career was the search for a unified foundation for all of physics. The disparity between the discrete particles of matter and the continuously distributed electromagnetic field came out most clearly in Lorentz’ (1853-1928) electron theory, where matter and field were sharply separated for the first time. This theory strongly influenced Einstein. The problems generated by the incompatibility between mechanics and electromagnetic theory at several crucial points claimed his attention. His strengths with these problems led to his most important early work – the special theory of relativity and the theory of quanta in 1905.
The discovery of X-rays, radioactivity, the electron and the quantum theory brought about a sea change in our ideas and understanding of phenomena at the atomic level. The world of Physics was, however, changing in far reaching ways - with ramifications for our understanding of the very shape of time, space and the universe. This part of the revolution was brought about Albert Einstein, a brilliant and creative theorist and the only thinker ever to be ranked in the same class as Newton. To understand this part of the revolution, we shall need to go back to James Clerk Maxwell (1831-1879) and his ideas about light.
Ether – Unbroken from star to star

Maxwell had introduced a revolutionary set of equations that predicted the existence of electromagnetic fields and established that magnetism, electricity and light were a part of the same spectrum: the electromagnetic spectrum. Light, he maintained, was a wave, not a particle, and he thought that it travelled through an invisible medium he called “the ether”, which filled all space. But physicists began to see a problem, not with Maxwell’s electromagnetic field equations, but with his ideas about the ether.
Maxwell wasn’t the first to come up with this idea that some invisible medium called the ether must fill the vastness of space, extending “unbroken from star to star”. It dated back to the time of ancient Greeks. “There can be no doubt,” Maxwell said in a lecture in 1873, “that the interplanetary and interstellar spaces are not empty but are occupied by a material substance or body, which is certainly the largest, and probably the most uniform, body of which we have any knowledge”. The idea of the ether seemed necessary because, if light was a wave, it seemed obvious that it had to be a wave travelling in some medium. But accepting what “seems obvious” is not the way to do good science; if the ether existed, it should be possible to find some proof of its existence.
The most famous “failed” experiment

Albert Michelson (1852-1931), an American Physicist, had an idea . If the ether that filled the universe were stationary, then the planet Earth would meet resistance as it moved through the ether, creating a current, a sort of “wind”, in the ether. So it followed that a light beam moving with the current ought to be carried along by it, whereas a light beam travelling against the current should be slowed. While studying with Hermann von Helmholtz (1821-1894) in Germany, in 1881 Michelson built an instrument called an interferometer, which could split a beam of light, running the two halves perpendicular to each other, and then rejoin the split beam in a way that made it possible to measure differences in the speeds with great precision.
Michelson ran his experiment, but he was puzzled by his results. They showed no differences in light velocity for the two halves of the light beam. He concluded, “The result of the hypothesis of a stationary ether is …. shown to be incorrect, and the necessary conclusion follows that the hypothesis is erroneous”.
But may be his results were wrong. He tried his experiment again and again, each time trying to correct for any possible error. Finally, in 1887, joined by Edward Morley, Michelson tried a test in Cleveland, Ohio. Using improved equipment, and taking every imaginable precaution against inaccuracy, this time surely they would succeed in detecting the ether. But the experiment failed again. Let us briefly describe the salient features of this momentous experiment.
The Experiment

If there is an ether pervading space, we move through it with at least the 3x104 m/sec speed of the earth’s orbital motion about the sun; if the sun is also in motion, our speed through the ether is even greater (Motions of the Earth through a hypothetical ether). From the point of view of an observer on the earth, the ether is moving past the earth. To detect this motion, we can use the pair of light beams formed by a half silvered mirror (The Michelson - Morley experiment). One of these light beams is directed to a mirror along a path perpendicular to the ether current, while the other goes to a mirror along a path parallel to the ether current. The optical arrangement is such that both beams return to the same viewing screen. The purpose of the clear glass plate is to ensure that both beams pass through the same thickness of air and glass.
If the path lengths of the two beams are exactly the same, they will arrive at the screen in phase and will interfere constructively to yield a bright field of view. The presence of an ether current in the direction shown, however, would cause the beams to have different transit times in going from the half silvered mirror to the screen, so that they would no longer arrive at the screen in phase but would interfere destructively. In essence this is the famous experiment performed in 1887 by Michelson and Morley.
In the actual experiment the two mirrors are not perfectly perpendicular, with the result that the viewing screen appears crossed with a series of bright and dark interference fringes due to differences in path length between adjacent light waves (Fringe Pattern observed in Michelson - Morley experiment). If either of the optical paths in the apparatus is varied in length, the fringes appear to move across the screen as reinforcement and cancellation of the waves succeed one another at each point. The stationary apparatus, then, can tell us nothing about any time difference between the two paths. When the apparatus is rotated by 90°, however, the two paths change their orientation relative to the hypothetical ether stream, so that the beam formerly requiring the time tA (along parth A) for the round trip now required tB (along path B) and vice versa. If these times are different, the fringes will move across the screen during the rotation.
This information can be used to calculate the fringe shift expected on the basis of the ether theory. The expected fringe shift ‘n’ in each path when the apparatus is rotated by 90° is given by
n = Dv2 / ?c2 ;
Here, D is the distance between half silvered mirror and each of the other mirrors (made about 10 metres using multiple reflections), v is the ether speed - which is the Earth’s orbital speed 3x104 (m/s), c is the speed of the light = 3x108 m/sec, and l is the wave length of light used, about 5000Å (1Å=10-10m), one then obtains n=0.2 fringe.
Since both paths experience this fringe shift, the total shift should amount to 2n or 0.4 fringe. A shift of this magnitude is readily observable, and therefore, Michelson and Morley looked forward to establishing directly the existence of the ether. To everybody’s surprise, no fringe shift whatever was found. When the experiment was performed at different seasons of the year and in different locations, and when experiments of other kinds were tried for the same purpose, the conclusions were always identical: no motion through the ether was detected.
The negative result of the Michelson-Morley experiment had two consequences. First, it rendered untenable the hypothesis of the ether by demonstrating that the ether has no measurable properties – an ignominious end for what had once been a respected idea. Second, it suggested a new physical principle: the speed of light in free space is the same everywhere, regardless of any motion of source or observer. As a result, the Michelson-Morley experiment has become the most famous “failed” experiment in the history of science. They had started out to study the ether, only to conclude that the ether did not exist. But if this were true, how could light move in “waves” without a medium to carry it? What’s more, the experiment indicated that the velocity of light is always constant.
It was a completely unexpected conclusion. But the experiment was meticulous and the results irrefutable. Lord Kelvin (1824-1907), said in a lecture in 1900 at the Royal Institution that Michelson and Morley’s experiment had been “carried out with most searching care to secure a trustworthy result,” casting “a nineteenth century cloud over the dynamic theory of light”. The conclusion troubled physicists everywhere, though. Apparently, they were wrong about the existence of the ether – and if they were wrong, then light was a wave that somehow could travel without a medium to travel through. What’s more, the Michelson - Morley results seemed to call into question the kind of Newtonian relativity that had been around for a couple of centuries and by this time was well tested; the idea that the speed of an object can differ, depending upon the reference frame of the observer. Suppose two cars are travelling along on a road. (There weren’t many cars or roads in 1887, but one gets the idea.). One car is going 80 kms per hour, the other 75 kms per hour. To the driver of the slower car, the faster car would be gaining ground at a rate of 5 kms per hour. Why would light be any different?
But that’s just what the Michelson and Morley experiment had shown; Light does behave differently. The velocity of light is always constant – no matter what. Astronauts travelling in their spaceship at a speed of 2,90,000 km/sec alongside a beam of light (which travels at 3,00,000 km/sec) would not perceive the light gaining on them by 10,000 km/sec. They would see light travelling at a constant 3,00,000 km/sec. The speed of light is a universal absolute!

The Four Dimensions
According to Einstein's views, space and time are more intimately connected with one another than it was supposed before and with in certain limits, the notion of space may be substituted by the notion of time and vice versa. To make this statement more clear, let us consider a passenger in a train having his meal in the dining car. The waiter serving him will know that the passenger ate his soup, meals and dessert in. the same place, that is, at the same able in the dining car. But, from the point of view of a person on the ground, the same passenger consumed the three courses at points along the track separated by many kilometres. We Can hence make the following trivial statement: Events taking place in the same place but at different times in a moving system will be considered by a ground observer as taking place at different places.
Now, following Einstein's idea concerning the reciprocity of space and time, let us replace in the above statement the word "place" by the word "time" and vice versa. The statement will now read: Events taking place at the same time but In different places in a moving system will be considered by a ground observer as taking place at different times. This statement is far from being trivial. It means that if, for example, two passengers at the far ends of the dining car had their after-dinner coffee sipped simultaneously from the point of view of the dining-car waiter, the person standing on the ground will insist that the coffee was sipped at different times! Since according to the principle of relativity, neither Of the two reference systems should be 'preferred to the other (the train moves relative to the ground or the ground moves relative to the train), we do not have any reason to take the waiter's impression as being true and ground observer's impression as being wrong or vice versa. Of course, this would not be apparent to you If you were the ground observer. This is so because the distance of, say, 30 metres between two passengers sipping their after dinner coffee at opposite ends of the dinning car translates into a time interval of only 10-8 seconds, and there is no wonder that this is not apparent to our senses. It would become appreciable when the train travels close to the speed of light.
The transformation of time intervals into space Intervals and vice versa was given a simple geometrical interpretation by the German mathematician H. Minkowski. He proposed that time or duration be considered as the fourth dimension supplementing the three spatial dimensions (x, y, z) and that transformation from one system of reference to another be considered as a rotation of co-ordinates systems in this four dimensional space. A point in these four dimensional space is called an event. Relativistic effects like the length contraction and the time dilation then become consequences of the rotation of these space-time coordinates.
These effects being relative, each of the two observers moving with respect to one another will see the other fellow as somewhat flattened in the direction of his motion and will consider his watch to be slow!
The Special Theory of Relativity:
Surprisingly, Einstein never received a Nobel prize for the most important paper that he published in 1905, the one that dealt with a theory that came to be known as the special theory of relativity.
He also tossed out the idea of the ether, which Michelson and Morley had called into question. Maxwell needed it because he thought light travelled in waves, and if that were so, he thought, it needed some medium in which to travel. But what if, as Max Planck’s (1858-1947) quantum theory stated, light travels in discrete packets or quanta? Then it would act more like particles and wouldn’t require any medium to travel in.
By making these assumptions — that the velocity of light is a constant, that there is no ether, that light travels in quanta and that motion is relative — he was able to show why the Michelson - Morley experiment came out as it did, without calling the validity of Maxwell’s electromagnetic equations into question. But, where does “relativity” enter?
We mentioned earlier the role of the ether as a universal frame of reference with respect to which light waves were supposed to propagate. Whenever we speak of “motion”, of course, we really mean motion relative to a “frame of reference”. The frame of reference may be a road, the earth’s surface, the sun, the center of our galaxy; but in every case we must specify it. Stones dropped in New Delhi and in Washington both fall “down”, and yet the two move in opposite directions relative to the earth’s center. Which is the correct location of the frame of reference in this situation, the earth’s surface or its center? The answer is that all frames of reference are equally correct, although one may be more convenient to use in a specific case. If there were an ether pervading all space, we could refer all motion to it, and the inhabitants of New Delhi and Washington would escape from their quandary. The absence of an ether, then, implies that there is no universal frame of reference, so that all motion exists solely relative to the person or instrument observing it.
The theory of relativity resulted from an analysis of the physical consequences implied by the absence of a universal frame of reference. The special theory of relativity treats problems involving the motion of frames of reference at constant velocity (that is, both constant speed and constant direction) with respect to one another; the general theory of relativity, proposed by Einstein a decade later, treats problems involving frames of reference accelerated with respect to one another. The special theory has had a profound influence on all of physics.
The paper in which the young Albert Einstein in 1905 set out the special theory of relativity confronted common sense with several new and disquieting ideas. It abolished the ether, and it showed that matter and energy are equivalent. The new ideas derive from the central conception of relativity: that time does not run at the same pace for every observer. This bold conception lies at the heart of modern physics, all the way from the atomic to the cosmic scale. Yet it is still hard to grasp, and the paradoxes it pose continue to puzzle and to stimulate each generation of physicists.
Two Axioms
The special theory of relativity is based upon two axioms. The first states that the laws of physics may be expressed in equations having the same form in all frames of reference moving at constant velocity with respect to one another. This axiom expresses the absence of a universal frame of reference. If the laws of physics had different forms for different observers in relative motion, it could be determined from these differences which objects are “stationary” in space and which are “moving”. But because there is no universal frame of reference, this distinction does not exist in nature; hence the above axiom. Consequently, this axiom implies that two observers, each of whom appears to the other to be moving with a constant speed in a straightline, cannot tell which of them is moving.
The second axiom of special relativity states that the speed of light in free space has the same value for all observers, regardless of their state of motion. This axiom follows directly from the result of the Michelson - Morley experiment, and implies that when both observers measure the speed of light, they will get the same answer.
Neither of these axioms was new in itself. The first axiom had long been implicit in the accepted laws of mechanics. The second one was beginning to be accepted as the natural interpretation of Michelson and Morley’s experiment in 1887. What was new, then, in Einstein’s analysis was not one axiom or the other but the confrontation of the two. They form the two principles of relativity not singly but together. This is how Einstein presented them jointly at the beginning of his paper.
So basically, in the special theory of relativity Einstein revamped Newtonian physics such that when he worked out the formulas, the relative speed of light always stayed the same. It never changes relative to anything else, even though other things change relative to each other. Mass, space and time all vary depending upon how fast you move. As observed by others, the faster you move, the greater your mass, the less space you take up and the more slowly time passes for you! The more closely you approach the speed of light, the more pronounced these effects become. Let us have a look at some of the consequences of the theory of relativity.
Time Dilation
It follows at once from the two axioms combined that we have to revise the traditional idea of time. By tradition we take it for granted that time is the same everywhere and for everyone. Why not? It seems natural to assume that time is a universal “now” for every traveller anywhere in the universe. But, according to the theory of special relativity, time cannot run at the same pace for two observers, one of whom is moving relative to the other, if they are to get the same speed (that is for light) when they time a beam of light that is moving with one of them. Consider this example.
If you were an astronaut travelling at 90 percent of the speed of light (about 2,70,000 kms per second), you could travel for five years (according to your calendar watch) and you’d return to Earth to find that 10 years had passed for the friends you’d left behind. Or, if you could rev up your engines to help you travel at 99.99 percent of the speed of light, after traveling for only 6 months you’d find that 50 years had sped by our Earth during your absence!
Clocks moving with respect to an observer appear to tick less rapidly than they do when at rest with respect to him. If we, in the S frame, or the stationary frame of reference, observe the length of time t some event requires in a frame of reference S’ in motion relative to us, our clock will indicate a longer time interval than the t0 determined by a clock in the moving frame. This effect is called time dilation.
According to the theory of relativity, t and to are related as
t = t0 /SQRT (1-v2/c2 )
where v is the speed of the frame of reference S’ (the moving frame) with respect to S (the stationary frame in which the observer is situated). Obviously t is greater than t0 as v cannot be greater than c. thus, a stationary clock measures a longer time interval between events occurring in a moving frame of reference than does a clock in the moving frame.
So the laws of relativity say that time is relative; it does not always flow at the same rate for the two travellers moving relative to each other. For example, moving clocks slow down. In the 1960s a group of scientists at the University of Michigan took two sets of atomic clocks with an accuracy to 13 decimal places. They put one set of airplanes flying around the world. The other identical set remained behind on the ground. When the airplanes with the clocks landed, and those clocks were compared to the clocks that stayed still, the clocks that had ridden on the airplanes had actually ticked fewer times than those that had stayed on the ground.
It may also be remarked that when v approaches c, the processes in the moving frame S’ appear to further slow down to an observer in S. When v=c, t becomes infinitely long! This equation then sets a speed limit on the moving frame S’ which is equal to the speed of light.
Let us now consider a common objection raised against the theory of relativity. Since there is no absolute motion of any sort, there is no “preferred” frame of reference. It is always possible to choose a moving object as a fixed frame of reference without violating any natural law. When the earth is chosen as a frame, the astronaut makes the long journey, returns, finds himself younger than his stay-at-home brother. All well and good. But what happens when the spaceship is taken as the frame of reference (S)? Now, it must be assumed that the earth makes a long journey away from the ship and back again. In this case, it is the twin on the ship who is the stay-at-home. When the earth gets back to the spaceship, will not the earth rider be the younger? If so, the situation is more than a paradoxical affront to common sense. It is a flat logical contradiction. Clearly each twin cannot be younger than the other! A paradox! Not really. The application of the theory of relativity shows that the twin that travelled indeed remains young than his twin stay-at-home brother!

The Twin Paradox
Indeed, all sorts of objections were raised against relativity. One of the earliest, most persistent objections centred around a paradox that had been mentioned by Einstein in his 1905 paper himself. The workd “paradox” is used in the sense of something opposed to common sense, not something logically contradictory. It is usually described as a thought experiment involving twins. They synchronize their watches. One twin gets into a spaceship and makes a long trip through the space. When he returns, the twins compare their watches. According to the special theory of relativity, the traveller’s watch will show a slightly earlier time. In other words, time on the spaceship would have gone at a slower rate than time on the earth!
It may seem at first sight that the two observers who part and then meet again must necessarily be in a symmetrical relation. Whatever journey each has made is, after all, relative; and it may therefore seem as if each observer is free to say that he has not travelled at all and that all the travelling has been done by the other. Indeed, we may ask, does not the first axiom of relativity say this? Does not the first axiom say that two observers cannot tell which of them has moved and which of them has stayed still?
No, it does not. What the first axiom of relativity says is something much sharper, something much more restricted and more precise. The first axiom says that if each of two observers seems to the other to be moving at a constant speed in a straight line, they cannot tell which of them is moving. But the axiom says nothing about observers in arbitrary motion. It says nothing about them if they do not move in straight lines and nothing about them if they do not move at a constant speed.
Here is the crux of the matter. Two observers who separate and meet again cannot fulfill the conditions of the first axiom of relativity throughout such a journey. Suppose one of them remains still. Then the other can travel in a straight line going and coming, but if he does this, he must turn back at some point-that is, he must change his speed. Or the traveller can move at a constant speed, but if he does this, he cannot move in a straight line-he must move in a curve if he is to come back to his starting point. Two observers who part and meet again can fulfill one condition of the first axiom of relativity, if they wish, but they cannot fulfill both.
And at once, as soon as a traveller departs from the conditions of the first axiom, he knows that he is moving. He feels the outside forces that produce a change of motion. If he is traveling in a straight line and has to come to rest, he knows physically that he is decelerating; he can tell that he is, by carrying an accelerometer and looking at it. Indeed, all he needs to carry is a bucket of water: if the surface begins to tilt, he knows that he is changing speed. In the same way, if the traveler is rounding a curve, he can tell that he is moving by the acceleration he feels-or by carrying an accelerometer or a bucket of water. We cannot detect a constant speed in a straight line: that is the first axiom of relativity. But we can detect any accelerated motion: that is a physical fact we have all experienced. Lying in a sleeping compartment in the dark at night, we may not be able to tell whether the train is moving or not. But we can tell when the train brakes, and we can tell when it rounds a bend. We can tell because we are thrown about; we act as our own accelerometer.
Therefore if I stay at home and you go on a journey and come back, the relation between us is not symmetrical. You can tell that you have traveled, even if you travel in a dark train-you can tell by carrying an accelerometer. And I can tell that I have stayed at home, because my accelerometer has recorded no change of speed or of direction. The traveller who makes a round trip can be distinguished from the stay-at-home.
Now consider what happens to your clock, the traveller’s. Imagine your round trip broken down into a series of short, straight paths, along each of which you can keep your speed constant. Then along each short path your clock seems to me to run slower than mine. When you return, your clock should be behind mine, by the sum of these losses; and you should have aged less than I. Can this be so? It can, and it. The difference in our timekeeping does not contradict any symmetry you may find in the situation. It does not contradict your finding that, along any short path, my clock also seems to you to be running slower than yours. Your findings do not add up because you do not remain faithful to the first axiom of relativity: your view of my time changes every time you move abruptly from one straight path to another. Only my view of your time losses accumulates steadily, because only I remain faithful to the first axiom of relativity throughout.
Source: The Clock Paradox
by J. Bronowski


Length Contraction
Relativity also says that the faster an object moves, the more its size shrinks in the direction of its motion, as seen by a stationary observer. This implies that the length of an object in motion with respect to a stationary observer appears to be shorter than when it is at rest with respect to him, a phenomenon known as the Lorentz - FitzGerald contraction.
Because the relative velocity of the two frames S and S’ the one moving with velocity v with respect to the frame S, appears only as v2 in the equations, it does not matter which frame we call S and which S’. If we find that the length of a rocket is L0 when it is on its launching pad, we willl find from the ground that its length L when moving with the speed v is L = L0 Ö1-v2/c2, while to a man in the rocket, objects on the earth behind him appear shorter than they did when he was on the ground by the same factor Ö1-v2/c2. The length of an object is a maximum when measured in a reference frame in which it is moving. The relativistic length contraction is negligible for ordinary speeds, but, it is an important effect at speeds close to the speed of light. At a speed v=1500 km/sec or about 0.005 percent of the speed of light, L measured in the moving frame S’ would be about 99.9985% of L0, but when v is about 90% of the speed of light L would be only about 44% of L0! It is worth emphasising the fact that the contraction in length occurs only in the direction of the relative motion.
A Striking Illustration
A striking illustration of both time dilation and the length contraction occurs in the decay of unstable particles called m mesons. m mesons are created high in the atmosphere (several kilometres above the surface of the Earth) by fast cosmic ray particles arriving at the Earth from space and reach sea level in profusion travelling at 0.998 of the velocity of light. m mesons ordinarily would decay into electrons only in 2 x 10-6 seconds. During this time they may travel a distance of only 600 metres. However, relative to mesons, the distance (through which they travel) gets shortened while relative to us, their life span gets increased. Hence, despite their brief life-spans, it is possible for mesons to reach the ground from the considerable altitudes at which they are formed.
Heavier the Faster
One more interesting consequence of the special theory of relativity is that as the objects approach the speed of light, their mass approaches infinity. The mass m of a body measured while in motion in terms of m0 when measured at rest are related by,
m = m0 Ö1-v2/c2
The mass of a body moving at the speed of v relative to an observer is larger than its mass when at rest relative to the observer by the factor 1/ Ö1-v2/c2.
Relativistic mass increases are significant only at speeds approaching that of light. At a speed one tenth that of light the mass increase amounts to only 0.5 per cent, but this increase is over 100 per cent at a speed nine tenths that of light. Only atomic particles such as electrons, protons, mesons, and so on can have sufficiently high speeds for relativistic effects to be measurable, and in dealing with these particles the “ordinary” laws of physics cannot be used. Historically, the first confirmation of this effect was discovery by Bucherer in 1908 that the ratio e/m of the electron’s charge to its mass is smaller for fast electrons than for slow ones; this equation, like the others of special relativity, has been verified by so many experiments that it is now recognized as one of the basic formulas of physics.
Mass? Energy? Or Mass Energy?
Here is yet another astounding consequnce of the theory of relativity. Using his famous equation, E=mc2, Einstein showed that energy and mass are just two facets of the same thing. In this equation, E is energy, m is mass and c2 is the square of the speed of light, which is a constant. So the amount of energy E, is equal to the mass of an object multiplied by the square of the speed of light.
In addition to its kinetic, potential, electromagnetic, thermal, and other familiar guises, then, energy can manifest itself as mass. The conversion factor between the unit of mass (kg) and the unit of energy (joule) is c2, so 1 kg of matter has an energy. content of 9 x 1016 joules. Even a minute bit of matter represents a vast amount of energy.
Since mass and energy are not independent entities, the separate conservation principles of energy and mass are properly a single one, the principle of conservation of “mass energy”. Mass can be created or destroyed, but only if an equivalent amount of energy simultaneously vanishes or comes into being, and vice versa.
It is this famous mass energy conversion relationship that is responsible for generation of energy in stars, atomic bombs, and the nuclear reactors!
Where common sense fails
The consequences of relativity described in the preceding paragraphs seems completely against all common sense. But common sense is based on everyday experience, and things don’t get really strange with relativity until you venture into the very, very fast. Let us understand this aspect in some detail. Consider a rifleman in a jeep moving with velocity v with respect to the ground. The rifleman shoots a bullet in the forward direction with the muzzle velocity V. Now, the velocity of the bullet with respect to the ground, in accordance with the theory of relativity, will be, not V+v, but (V + v) / (1 + vV/c2), where c is the velocity of light. If both velocities V and v are small compared to the velocity of light, the second term in the denominator is practically zero and the old “common sense” formula holds. But either V or v, or both approach the velocity of light, the situation will be quite different. Consider V = v =0.75 c. According to the common sense, the velocity of the bullet with respect to the ground should be 1.5 c, i.e. 50 per cent more than the velocity of light. However, putting V = 0.75 c and v = 0.75 c in the above formula, we get 0.96 c for the velocity of bullet with respect to the ground, which is still less than the speed of light! In the limiting case, if we make V, and the velocity of the jeep v = c, we obtain, (c + c) / (1 + (c2) / c2) = c
Fantastic as it may look at first sight, Einstein’s law for the addition of two velocities is correct and has been confirmed by direct experiments. Thus Einstein’s theory of relativity leads us to the conclusion that it is impossible to exceed the velocity of light by adding two (or more) velocities no matter how close each of these velocities is to that of light! The velocity of light, therefore, assumes the role of a universal speed limit, which cannot be exceeded no matter what we do! No matter how counter intuitive the idea of relativity may seem, we may remember that every experimental test of this theory till date has confirmed that Einstein was right!
The General Theory of Relativity:
How does the general theory of relativity differ from the special theory? Let us have a brief look.
Strangely enough, it was another four years after Einstein’s publication of his papers on the photoelectric effect, Brownian motion and the special theory of relativity, before he succeeded in securing a teaching position at the University of Zurich — and a poorly paying one at that. But by 1913, thanks to the influence of Planck, the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute near Berlin created a position for him. Ever since his 1905 publications, Einstein had been working on a bigger theory: his general theory of relativity. The special theory had applied only to steady movement in a straight line. But what happened when a moving object sped up or slowed down or curved in a spiral path? In 1916, he published his general theory of relativity, which had vast implications, especially on the cosmological scale. Many physicists consider it the most elegant intellectual achievement of all time .
The general theory preserves the tenets of the special theory while adding a new way of looking at gravity — because gravity is the force that causes acceleration and deceleration and curves the paths of moons around planets, of planets around the sun, and so on. Einstein realized that there is no way to tell the difference between the effects of gravity and the effects of acceleration. So he abandoned the idea of gravity as a force and talked about it instead as an artifact of the way we observe objects moving through space and time. According to Einstein’s relativity, a fourth dimension — time — joins the three dimensions of space (height, length and width), and the four dimensions together form what is known as the space time continuum.
To illustrate the idea that acceleration and gravity produce essentially the same effects, Einstein used the example of an elevator, with its cables broken, falling from the top floor of a building. As the elevator falls, the effect on the occupants is “weightlessness”, as if they were aboard a spaceship. For that moment they are in free fall around the Earth. If the people inside couldn’t see anything outside the elevator, they would have no way to tell the difference between this experience and the experience of flying aboard a spaceship in orbit.
Einstein made use of this equivalence to write equations that saw gravity not as a force, but as a curvature in space time — much as if each great body were located on the surface of a great rubber sheet (A heavy object placed on a streched rubber sheet makes an indentation. The presence of the Sun "indents" space-time in an analogous manner) . A large object, such as a star, bends or warps space time, much like a large ball resting on a rubber sheet would cause a depression or sagging on its surface. The distortions caused by masses in the shape of space and time result in what we call gravity. What people call the “force” of gravity is not really a characteristic of objects like stars or planets, but comes from the shape of space itself.
In fact, this curvature has been confirmed experimentally. Einstein made predictions in three areas in which his general theory was in conflict with Newton’s theory of gravity:
1. Einstein’s general theory allowed for a shift in a perihelion (the point nearest the Sun) of a planet’s orbit as shown in (Figure). Such a shift in Mercury’s orbit had baffled astronomers for years to which the general theory of relativity offered an explanation.
2. Light in an intense gravitational field should show a red shift as it fights against gravity to leave a star. Indeed, comparing the vibration frequencies of spectral lines in sunlight with light emitted by terrestrial sources, astronomers have found that in the former case all vibration periods are lengthened (or frequencies reduced implying the "red shift") by about 2 x 10-4 per cent, which is exactly the value predicted by Einstein’s theory. Consequenlty, the spectrum observed appears to shift towards the red and as observed on the Earth, exhibiting the gravitational red shift.
3. Light should be deflected by a gravitational field much more than Newton predicted (The deviation of light from a star when the light passes closed to the sun). On March 29, 1919, a total solar eclipse occurred over Brazil and the coast of West Africa. In the darkened day-time sky, the measurements of the nearby stars were taken. Then they were compared with those taken in the midnight sky six months earlier when the same stars had been nowhere near the Sun. The predicted deflection of the star-light was observed and Einstein was proved right. He rapidly became the most famous scientist in the world, and his name became a household word.

Always a Catalyst
Germany – one of the premier cradles of great work in all the sciences – rapidly became less and less hospitable to the large group of outstanding scientists who worked there, especially the many who, like Einstein, were counted among the Nazis’ Jewish targets. By the 1930s an exodus had begun, including many non-Jewish scientists who left on principle, no longer willing to work where their colleagues were persecuted. In 1930, Einstein left Germany for good. He came to the United States to lecture at the California Institute of Technology, and never went back to Germany afterward. He accepted a position at the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, where he became a permanent presence, and in 1940 he became an American citizen.
Always a catalyst among his colleagues for thoughtful reflection, Einstein remained active throughout his life in the world of Physics. But even this renegade found, as Planck did, that Physics was changing faster than he was willing to accept. On the horizon loomed challenges to reason that he was never able to accept – such as Niels Bohr’s complementarity and Werner Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. “God does not play dice with the universe,” Einstein would grumble, or “God may be subtle, but He is not malicious.” During the last decades of his life Einstein spent much of his time searching for a way to embrace both gravitation and electromagnetic phenomena. He never succeeded, but continued to be, to his final days, a solitary quester, putting forward his questions to nature and humanity, seeking always the ultimate beauty of truth.
Einstein received the Nobel prize in Physics for the year 1921, not for relativity, but for the interpretation of the photoelectric effect. It was given “for his services to theoretical physics, and especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect”.
Relativity – Any challenge?
True, there have been a few challenges to the theory of relativity once in a while – both theoretical and experimental. Nearly three decades ago, our own E.C.G. Sudarshan had predicted the possibility of “Tachyons” – the particles that travelled at a speed greater than light, but, in a different realm. They could not travel at a speed lower than the speed of light. It may be noted that such particles cannot carry any information.
There have even been challenges to the constancy of the speed of light in vacuum. Recently, there has been a measurement by a team of Italian physicists that appears to indicate that they can send a faster-than-light pulse of microwaves over more than a metre. In Einstein’s theory, time races forwards as if on a light beam. If an object were to travel faster than c, it would move backwards in time, violating the principle of causality which says that cause must always precede the effect. The alternative seems nonsensical as illustrated by the following limerick:
There was a young lady named Bright whose speed was far faster than light
She went out one day In a relative way And returned the previous night.
General Relativity and Black Holes
The Universe is expanding, exactly as the pure equations of general relativity predicted in 1917. Then, Einstein himself refused to believe the evidence of his own theory! Indeed, Einstein’s equations provide the basis for the highly successful Big Bang description of the birth and evolution of the entire Universe. Within the expanding Universe, general relativity is required to explain the workings of exotic objects where space-time is highly distorted by the presence of matter where large masses produce strong gravitational fields. The most extreme version of this, and one that has caught the popular imagination, is the phenomenon of black holes. Black holes would trap light by their gravitational pull – or, in terms of general relativity, by bending space-time around themselves so much that it becomes closed, pinched off from the rest of the Universe. If a star keeps the same mass but shrinks inwards, or stays the same size while accumulating mass, density increases. Eventually, the distortion of space-time around it increases until, a situation is reached where the object collapses aand folds space-time around itself, disappearing from all outside view. Not even light can escape from its gravitational grip, and it has become a black hole The notion of such stellar mass black holes seemed no more than a mathematical trick – something that surely could not be allowed to exist in the real Universe, until 1968, and the discovery of pulsars which are rapidly spinning neutron stars. A good deal of our understanding about black holes is due to the work of the legendary physicist of today, Stephen Hawking.

Nobel Prizes awarded for work on Relativity and/or its applications.
1902 Hendrik Antoon Lorentz the Netherlands in Physics in recognition of his extraordinary service he rendered by his researches into the influence of magnetism upon radiation phenomena
1907 Albrt Abraham Michelson USA in Physics for his optical precision instruments and the spectroscopic and metrological investigations carried out with their aid
1927 Arthur Holly Compton USA in Physics for his his discovery of the effect named after him
1933 Paul Adrien Mauric Dirac Great Britain in Physics for the discovery of new productive forms of atomic theory
1938 Enrico Fermi Italy in Physics for his demonstrations of the existence of new radioactive elements produced by neutron irradiation, and for his related discovery of nuclear reactions brought about by slow neutrons
1961 Rudolf Ludwig Mössbauer Germany in Physics for his researches concerning the resonance absorption of gamma radiation and his discovery in this connection of the effect which bears his name
Murray Gell-Mann USA in Physics for his contributions and discoveries concerning the classification of elementary particles and their interactions
1969 Sir Martin Ryle Great Britain in Physics for his pioneering research in radio astrophysics: for his observations and inventions, in particular of the aperture synthesis technique
1974 Antony Hewish Great Britain in Physics for his decisive role in the discovery of pulsars
1983 Subramanyan Chandrasekhar USA in Physics for his theoretical studies of the physical processes of importance to the structure and evolution of the stars
1984 Carlo Rubbia Italy in Physics for their decisive contributions to the large project, which led to the discovery of the field particles W and Z, communicators of weak interaction
Simon van der Meer the Netherlands -do-
1993 Russell A. Hulse USA in Physics for the discovery of a new type of pulsar, a discovery that has opened up new possibilities for the study of gravitation
Joseph H. Taylor Jr USA -do-
Note: It is interesting to note that Albert Einstein – the father of relativity – did not receive Nobel Prize for propounding the theory of relativity. He was awarded Nobel Prize in Physics for his services to Theoretical Physics, and especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect.

Relativity: Glossary
Important terms used in connection with Relativity are given below. The terms given do not necessarily appear in the present article.
Aphelion: The point of a planetary orbit farthest from the Sun.
Black hole: Black hole is a collapsed object, such as a star, that has become invisible. It is formed when a massive star runs out of thermonuclear fuel and is crushed by its own gravitational force. It has such a strong gravitational force that nothing can escape from its surface, not even light. Thoush invisible, it can capture matter and light from the outside.
Cosmological constant: The multiplicative constant for a term proportional to the metric in Einstein’s equation relating the curvature of space to the energy-momentum tensor.
Cosmology: The study of the overall structure of the physicala universe.
coulomb: A unit of electric charge, defined as the amount of eletric charge that crosses a surface in 1 second when a steady current of 1 absolute ampere is flowing across the surface. Abbreviated coul.
Curvature of space: The deviation of a spacelike three-dimensional subspace of curved space-time from euclidean geometry.
Curved space-time: A four-dimensional space, in which there are no straight lines but only curves, which is a generalization of the Minkowski universe in the general theory of relativity.
Equivalence principle: In general relativity, the principle that the observable local effects of a gravitational field are indistinguishable from those arising from acceleration of the frame of reference. Also known as Einstein’s equivalence principle; principle of equivalence.
Event: A point in space-time.
FitzGerald-Lorentz contraction: The contraction of a moving body in the direction of its motion when it speed is comparable to the speed of light. Also known as Lorentz contraction: Lorentz-FitzGerald contraction.
Four-vector: A set of four quantities which transform under a Lorentz transformation in the same way as the three space coordinates and the time coordinate of an event. Also known as Lorentz four-vector.
Four-velocity: A four-vector whose components are the rates of change of the space and time coordinates of a particle with respect to the particle’s proper time.
Frame of reference: A coordinate system for the purpose of assigning positions and times to events. Also known as refrence frame.
Geodesic: A curve joining two points in a Riemannian manifold which has minimum length.
Geodesic coordinates: Coordinates in the neighbourhood of a point P such that the gradient of the metric tensor is zero at P.
Geodesic motion: Motion of a particle along a geodesic path in the four dimensional space-time continuum; according to general relativitiy, this is the motion which occurs in the absence of nongravitational forces.
Gravitation: The mutual attraction between all masses in the universe. Also known as gravitational attraction.
Gravitational collapse: The implosion of a star or other astronomical body from an initial size to a size hundreds or thousands of times smaller.
Gravitational constant: The constant of proportionality in Newton’s law of gravitation, equal to the gravitational force between any two particles times the square of the distance between them, divided by the product of their masses. Also known as constant of gravitation.
Gravitational field: The field in a region in space in which a test particle would experience a gravitational force; quantitatively, the gravitational force per unit mass on the particle at a particular point.
Gravitational-field theory: A theory in which gravity is treated as a field, as opposed to a theory in which the force acts instantneously at a distance.
Gravitational radiation: A propagating gravitational field predicted by general relativity, which is produced by some change in the distribution of matter; it travels at the speed of light, exerting forces on masses in its path. Also known as gravitational wave.
Gravitational red shift: A displacement of spectral lines towards the red when the gravitational potential at the observer of the light is greater than at its source.
Gravitational wave: A propagating gravitational field predicted by general relativity, which is produced by some change in the distribution of matter; it travels at the speed of light, exerting forces on masses in its path. Also known as gravitational radiation.
Graviton: A theoretically deduced particle postulated as the quantum of the gravitational field, having a rest mass and charge of zero and a spin of 2.
Gravity: The gravitational attraction at the surface of a planet or other celestial body.
Lorentz-FitzGerald contraction: The contraction of a moving body in the direction of its motion when its speed is comparable to the speed of light. Also known as FitzGerald-Lorentz contraction.
Lorentz four-vector: A set of four quantities which transform under a Lorentz transformation in the same way as the three space coordinates and the time coordinate of an event. Also known as Four-vector.
Lorentz frame: Any of the family of inertial coordinate systems, with three space coordinates and one time coordinate, used in the special theory of relativity; each frame is in uniform motion with respect to all the other Lorentz frames, and the interval between any two events is the same in all frames.
Lorentz invariance: The property, possessed by the laws of physics and of certain physical quantities, of being the same in any Lorentz frame, and thus unchanged by a Lorentz transformation..
Lorentz transformation: Any of the family of mathematical transformations used in the special theory of relativity to relate the space and time variables of different Lorentz frames.
Mass-energy conservation: The principle that energy cannot be created or destroyed; however, one form of energy is that which a particle has because of its rest mass, equal to this mass times the square of the speed of light.
Mass-energy relation: The relation whereby the total energy content of a body is equal to its inertial mass times the square of the speed of light.
Minkowski metric: The metric tensor of the Minkowski world used in special relativity; it is a 4 X 4 matrix whose nonzero entries lie on the diagonal, with one entry (corresponding to the time coordinate) equal to 1, and three entries (corresponding to space coordinates) equal to –1; sometimes, the negative of this matrix is used.
Minkowski universe: Space time as described by the four coordinates (x, y, z, ict), where i is the imaginary unit of c is the speed of light; Lorentz transformations of space-time are orthogonal transformations of the Minkowski world. Also known as Minkowski world.
Minkowski world: Space time as described by the four coordinates (x, y, z, ict), where i is the imaginary unit of c is the speed of light; Lorentz transformations of space-time are orthogonal transformations of the Minkowski world. Also known as Minkowski universe.
Neutron star: A star that is supposed to occur in the final stage of stellar evolution; it consists of a superdense mass mainly of neutrons, and has a strong gravitational attraction from which only neutrinos and high-energy photons could escape so that the star is invisible.
Principle of covariance: In classical physics and in special relativity, the principle that the laws of physics take the same mathematical form in all inertial reference frames.
Principle equivalence: In general relativity, the principle that the observable local effects of a gravitational field are indistinguishable from those arising from acceleration of the frame of reference. Also known as Einstein’s equivalence principle; Equivalence principle.
Pulsar: Variable star whose luminosity fluctuates as the star expands and contracts; the variation in brightness is thought to come from the periodic change of radiant energy to gravitational energy and back. Also known as pulsating star.
Pulsating star: Variable star whose luminosity fluctuates as the star expands and contracts; the variation in brightness is thought to come from the periodic change of radiant energy to gravitational energy and back. Also known as pulsar.
Quasar: Quasi-stellar astronomical object, often a radio source; all quasars have large red shifts; they have small optical diameter, but may have large radio diameter. Also known as quasi-stellar object (QSO).
Relative: Related to a moving point; apparent, as relative wind, relative movement.
Relative momentum: The momentum of a body in a reference frame in which another specified body is fixed.
Relative motion: The continuous change of position of a body with respect to a second body, that is, in a reference frame where the second body is fixed.
Relativistic beam: A beam of particles travelling at a speed comparable with the speed of light.
Relativistic electrodynamics: The study of the interaction between charged particles and electric and magnetic fields when the velocities of the particles are comparable with that of light.
Relativistic kinematics: A description of the motion of particles compatible with the special theory of relativity, without reference to the causes of motion.
Relativistic mass: The mass of a particle moving at a velocity exceeding about one-tenth the velocity of light; it is significantly larger than the rest mass.
Relativistic mechanics: Any form of mechanics compatible with either the special or the general theory of relativity.
Relativistic particle: A particle moving at a speed comparable with the speed of light.
Relativistic quantum theory: The quantum theory of particles which is consistent with the special theory of relativity, and thus can describe particles moving close to the speed of light.
Relativistic theory: Any theory which is consistent with the special or general theory of relativity.
Relativity: Theory of physics which recognizes the universal character of the propagation speed of light and the consequent dependence of space, time, and other mechanical measurements on the motion of the observer performing the measurements; it has two main divisions, the special theory and the general theory.
Schwarzchild radius: For a given body of matter, a distance equal to the mass of the body times the gravitational constant divided by the square of the speed of light. Also known as gravitational radius.
Slowing of clocks: According to the special theory of relativity, a clock appears to tick less rapidly to an observer moving relative to the clock than to an observer who is at rest with respect to the clock. Also known as time dilation effect.
Space coordinates: A three-dimensional system of cartesian coordinates by which a point is located by three magnitudes indicating distance from three planes which intersect at a point.
Spacelike surface: A three-dimensional surface in a four-dimensional space-time which has the property that no event on the surface lies in the past or the future of any other event on the surface.
Spacelike vector: A four vector in Minkowski space whose space component has a magnitude which is greater than the magnitude of its time component multiplied by the speed of light.
Space-time: A four-dimensional space used to represent the universe in the theory of relativity, with three dimensions corresponding to ordinary space and the fourth to time. Also known as space-time continuum.Space-time continuum: A four-dimensional space used to represent the universe in the theory of relativity, with three dimensions corresponding to ordinary space and the fourth to time. Also known as space-time.
Special relativity: The division of relativity theory which relates the observations of observers moving with constant relative velocities and postulates that natural laws are the same for all such observers.
Time-dilation effect: According to the special theory of relativity, a clock appears to tick less rapidly to an observer moving relative to the clock than to an observer who is at rest with respect to the clock. Also known as slowing of clocks.
References:
1. Concepts of Modern Physics Arthur Beiser McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1967 A standard text-book explaining concepts of the Modern Physics in a simple, clear and lucid style.
2. The History of Science From 1895 to 1945 Ray Spangerburg and Diane K. Moser Universities Press (India) Ltd., 1999 Highly readable. A set of five volumes on history of science from the ancient Greeks until 1990s.
3. Mr. Tompkins in Paperback George Gamow Cambridge University Press 1965 A masterpiece from a master science populariser-cum-scientist, combining Mr. Tompkins in Wonderland and Mr. Tompkins explores the atom. Highly entertaining.
4. Physics: Foundations and Frontiers
George Gamow and John M. Cleveland
Prentice Hall of India 1966
A wonderful exposition illustrating basic principles of physics at elementary level.
5. Observation of superluminal behavior in wave propagation
Mugnai, D., Ranfagni, A, and Ruggeri, R,
Physical Review Letters 84(2000)4830
This paper was about the indication that a faster-than-light pulse may be possible and hence challenging the constancy of speed of light in vacuum.
6. The Feynman Lectures on Physics (Vo. I)
Richard P. Feynman, Rober B. Leighton and
Mathew Sands
Addison-Wesley Publishing Company 1963
A set of three volumes of lectures delivered by the Nobel Laureate Richard P. Feynman to undergraduate students at California Institute of Technology. Just superb.
7. The ABC of Relativity
Bertrand Russel
(Revised edition, edited by Felix Pirani)
George Allen & Unwin Ltd. 1958
Though first published in 1927, this book has been a classic till date.
8. The Twin Paradox
in The Night is Large
collected essays (1938-1995)
by Martin Gardner Penguin Books, 1996
An entertaining article by a journalist and writer well known for his recreational mathematicscolumn in Scientific American and several books on the same topic.
9. The Clock Paradox
by J. Bronowski
Scientific American
January 1963
A highly instructive article written in a lucid style.
10. Dictionary of Scientific Biography
Vol. IV
Editor-in-Chief, Charles Coulston Gillispie
Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York 1975
A wonderful resource in 14 volumes.
11. A Brief History of Time: From the big bang to black holes
Stephen Hawking
Bantam Books 1988
This is probably the best single book on astrophysics and applications of general relativity for the common reader.
12. Introduction to Cosmology
Second Edition
J.V. Narlikar
Cambridge University Press 1993
An introductory text book on modern cosmology at undergraduate level.
13. htt://www.nobel.se
Official website of the Nobel Foundation – A treasure house on Nobel Laureates.

Archimedes One of the Greatest Greek Mathematicians of Antiquity

Archimedes
One of the Greatest Greek Mathematicians of Antiquity


Give me a place to stand and rest my lever on, and I can move the Earth.
Archimedes
Archimedes, who combined a genius for mathematics with a physical insight, must rank with Newton, who lived nearly two thousand years later, as one of the founders of mathematical physics.
Alfred North Whitehead


Archimedes was the finest scientist and mathematician of the ancient world but little firmly known of his life, although legends exist. He is known to have used experiments to test his theories, which he then expressed mathematically.
The Cambridge Dictionary of Scientists (Second Edition) 2002
It is no exaggeration to describe Archimedes as the creator of the science of mechanics. Naturally before his time many isolated facts had been discovered, but it was only with him that mechanics became a unified body of theory capable of yielding new and unexpected practical applications.
A Dictionary of Scientists, Oxford University Press, 1999.

The word “Eureka” is a Greek word (heureka) for “I have found”. Today it means “to find”, “to discover” and used as an exclamation inserted into an utterance without grammatical connection to it. As a noun it means an important discovery. The word has found place in English dictionary because of exclamation supposedly uttered by Archimedes when he discovered a way to determine the purity of gold by applying the principle of relative density or specific gravity. Archimedes is regarded as one of the greatest “working scientists” and mathematicians of the antiquity. His approximation of (?) between 3×1/2 and 3x10/71 was the most accurate of his time and he devised a new way to approximate square root. He had anticipated the invention of differential calculus as he devised ways to approximate the slope of tangent lines of his figures. Archimedes revolutionized mechanics, founded the scientific discipline called hydrostatics and established the precise study of more complex solids. He invented an early form of calculus and developed an advanced understanding of numerology. Archimedes was as much an applied mathematician as a pure mathematician.
In his own time he used to be known as “the wise one”, “the master” and “the great geometer.” The fame of Archimedes in his own time was mainly due to his proximity to King Hieron II, the then ruler of Syracuse and his son Gelon. It is believed that Archimedes was related to the monarch. He was also the tutor of Gelon. It seems Archimedes made a hobby out of solving the king’s most complicated problems to the utter amazement of the sovereign. Today Archimedes is best known for the following:
i. For his discovery of the relation between the surface and volume of a sphere and its circumscribing cylinder.

ii. For his formulation of a hydrostatic principle known as Archimedes’ principle.

iii. For his invention of the Archimedes’ screw—a device for raising water by means of a rotating broad-threaded screw or spiral bent tube within an inclined hollow cylinder.
Archimedes designed all sorts of pumps and the Archmedean water screw is still in use in some parts of the world. The story of Archimedes jumping from the bath naked is usually linked with his discovery of the principle of hydrostatics. One really does not know whether this incident was actually responsible for formulating his hydrostatic principle. The story has several sources and we do not know which is the correct one. The description of the incident by the Roman architect Vitruvius is considered as the most reliable one by many. But then we should remember that Vitruvius wrote two centuries after the event took place. According to the version of the story given by Vitruvius, King Hieron decided to get a gold wreath prepared for dedicating it to the gods. (Some version says it was a crown). This way he had decided to celebrate his continuing good fortune. The king gave a lump of gold to a local artist for the purpose. However, when the artist returned with the completed gold wreath the king felt that the artist did not use all the gold given to him. The weight of the gold wreath was same as that of the gold given to him by the king. The king thought that the artist had mixed less expensive silver with gold. The king asked Archimedes to look into the problem. Archimedes also did not have a ready-made answer for the king but he promised to think about it. The legend says that one morning, several days later, Archimedes was still thinking about the problem when lowered himself in a bath. While doing so Archimedes noticed that some of the water was displaced by his body and flowed over the edge of the tub. In a flash he understood how to solve the problem posed by the king. Archimedes solved the problem by grasping the concept of relative density. He was so excited at his sudden discovery that he leapt from the bath and started running naked through the streets while shouting “ureka! Eureka!” (I have found it). He requested the king to make him available a lump of gold weighing the same as the wereath. After receiving the piece of gold, he immersed it in a tub of water filled to the brim and measured the water displaced by it. In the same way he immersed the wreath and measured the overflow. The water displaced by the wreath was more than the gold. In this way Archimedes found that the wreath was mixed with other metal of lower density.
Archimedes discovered the laws of levers and used pulleys. After the discovery of the laws of the levers, he boasted “Give me a place to stand and rest my lever on, and I can move the Earth.” As such it was not possible to challenge the statement directly. So he was asked to move a ship which had required a large group of labourers to put into position. Archimedes moved the ship easily by using a compound pulley system.
Archimedes was born in 287 B.C. in a noble family of Syracuse, Cicily. Syracuse was the most powerful city-state in Cicily. Besides being an aristocrat, Archimedes’ father was an astronomer and a mathematician. This information comes from one of Archimedes’ works, The Sandreckoner. Most of the information about Archimedes’ life comes from the writing of Plutarch (in Greek Plutarchos c.46-c.120 AD), who lived three centuries later. Plutarch’s best known work Parallel Lives compares eminent Greeks with their Roman counterparts. Plutrach’s Lives concentrate on the moral character of each subject rather than on the political events of the time. As a result a minor incident or anecdote will acquire a greater importance in the narrative than it would in a standard history or biography. Plutarch in his Life of Alexander wrote: “I am writing biography, not history, and the truth is that the most brilliant exploits often tell us nothing of the virtues or vices of the men who reformed them, while on the other hand a chance remark or a joke may reveal far more of a man’s character than the mere feat or winning battles in which thousands fall, or of marshalling great armies or laying siege to the cities.” In Plutarch’s writings Archimedes finds mention as a mere insertion in the biography of the Roman General, Marcus Claudius Marcellus (c. 268-c.208 B.C.), who was known as the Sword of Rome. Of course, there were other sources including Archimedes’ own stray comments here and there in his prefaces to the treatises he wrote.
Archimedes studied at Alexandria in Egypt. The city of Alexandria was founded in B.C. by the Alexander the Great. It is at Alexandria that Alexander the Great was buried in a resplendent gold coffin in BC. Its location is not known today. By the early 2nd century BC Alexandria was emerging as the greatest centre of learning in the Mediterranean world. In this regard it surpassed even Athens. The famous library of Alexandria attracted scholars from all over Hellenistic world. Its collection of manuscripts included Aristotle’s extensive collection—the greatest private collection of the Greek era. Euclid worked at Alexandria. However, Euclid probably had died before Archimedes arrived at Alexandria. But then Archimedes would certainly have read Euclid’s geometry textbook Elements. This famous book laid the foundation of geometry. It was also likely that Archimedes had studied with one Euclid’s pupils. At Alexandria,
Archimedes befriended two fellow students with whom he was to remain in correspondence throughout his life. These two friends—Conon of Samos and Eratosthenes of Cyrene were fine mathematicians.
According to one legend Archimedes visited Spain after leaving Alexandria. A story, mentioned by Leonardo da Vinci in his notebooks, narrates that Archimedes acted as a military engineer for King Ecliderides of Cliodastri. Diodorus, a historian of Cicily and who lived in the first century BC, speaks of Archimedes’ Screw being used for pumping water from the silver mines of Rio Tinto in southern Spain. According to Diodorus, Archimedes invented his screw just for this purpose. Some other legends speak of Archimedes returning to Egypt for a second time. During his second trip to Egypt he was said to have employed on the largescale irrigation works as a measure to control the flooding of the Nile Delta. And as per these reports Archimedes
screw was invented during this time.
Among the treatises of Archimedes which have survived are: On Plane Equilibriums (two books), Quadrature of the Parabola, On the Sphere and Cylinder (two books), On Spirals, On Conoids and Spheroids, On Floating Bodies (two books), Measurement of a Circle and The Sandreckoner. Another of his work titled The Method has been found in a tenth century manuscript discovered by J L Heiberg, a Professor of Philology at the University of Copenhagen. There are references to Archimedes’ other works which have been lost. The surviving works of Archimedes give a unique insight the workings of him. Most of these works are easy to follow even for nonmathematicians. All of his known works were of a theoretical character. He left no written work on his practical inventions. As he had a very low opinion about these inventions he did not consider it worth writing about them. Thus Plutarch wrote: “Archimedes possessed so high a spirit, so profound a soul, and such treasure of scientific knowledge, that though these inventions had now obtained him the renown of more than human sagacity, yet he did not leave behind him any commentary or writing on such subjects…”. However, it is certain that his interest in mechanics deeply influenced his mathematical thinking. He not only wrote works on theoretical mechanics and hydrostatics but he also used mechanical reasoning as a heuristic device for the discovery of new mathematical theorems as evident in his Method Concerning Mechanical Theorems. He published his works in the form of correspondence with important mathematicians of his time. The only manuscript that Archimedes wrote on practical matters was On Spheremaking. The manuscript, which is now lost, is referred to by the Greek mathematician Pappus of Alexandria, who lived in the 4th century AD.
Archimedes used to remain engrossed in some problem or the other all the time. He was most interested in geometry. Even while taking bath (which used to be a rare occurrence for Archimedes), he used to draw geometrical figures even on his naked body. Thus Plutarch wrote: “oftimes Archimedes’ servants got him against his will to the baths, to wash and anoint him, and yet being there, he would ever be drawing out of the geometrical figures, even in the very embers of the chimney. And while they were anointing of him with oils and sweet savours, with his fingers he drew lines upon his naked body, so far was he taken from himself, and brought into ecstasy or trance, with the delight he had in the study of geometry.”
Archimedes invented many machines, which were used as engines of war. Among his war machines were enormous mirrors to focus the Sun’s rays and set fire to the Roman ships, and a variety of catapults. His huge catapults hurled 500 pound boulders at the enemy soldiers. He played an important role in the defense of Syracuse against the siege laid by the Romans in 213 BC by effectively deploying his war machines. His single handed effort long delayed the capture of the city. This is how Plutarch described the impact of Archimedes’ war machines. “…when Archimedes began to ply his engines, he at once shot against the land forces all sorts of missile weapons, and immense masses of stone that came down with incredible noise and violence; against which no man could stand; for they knocked down those upon whom they fell in heaps, breaking all their ranks and files. In the meantime huge poles thrust out from the walls over ships and sunk some by great weights which they let down from on high upon them; others they lifted up into the air by an iron hand or beak like a crane’s beak and when, they had drawn them up by the prow, and set them on end upon the poop, they plunged them to the bottom of the sea; or else the ships, drawn by the engines within, and whirled about, were dashed against steep rocks that stood jutting out under the walls, with great destruction of the soldiers that were aboard them. A ship was frequently lifted up to a great height in the air (a dreadful thing to behold), and was rolled to and fro, and kept swinging, until the mariners were all thrown out, when at length it was dashes against the rock, or let fall.” Syracuse was eventually captured by the Roman General Marcellus in the autumn of 212 or spring of 211 BC.
It is believed that Archimedes created two spheres, which were brought to Rome by Marcellus. Among these two spheres, one was a solid one on which were engraved or painted the stars and constellations. It should be mentioned that Archimedes was not the first to construct such a celestial globe. Perhaps the Greek geometers Thales and Eudoxos first constructed such globes. Marcellus placed this sphere in the Temple of Virtue.
The second sphere was an original and ingenious work. It was a miniature planetarium—a mechanical model showing the motions of the Sun, Moon, and planets as viewed from the Earth. Archimedes’ planetarium was an intricate device. While constructing the planetarium, Archimedes accepted the Earth-centred view of the universe—the universe, with the Earth at its centre. Archimedes’ device was capable of tracing the motions of the Sun, Moon and planets about the Earth with reference to the spheres of fixed stars during the course of the day. With its help the successive phases of the Moon and the lunar eclipses could also be illustrated. Cicero (106-43 BC), the Roman statesman, philosopher, and a great orator, was very much impressed by this ingenious device by Archimedes. Cicero thought that Archimedes was “endowed with greater genius that one would imagine it possible for a human being to possess” to able to construct such a device. Archimedes’ planetarium has been quoted by many ancient writers in prose as well as in verse. Many considered it as one of the first Christian proofs of existence of God or a divine creator. The logic was very simple for such an argument—just as Archimedes’s planetarium required a creator, there must be a creator of greater intelligence to be capable of producing the cosmos—the object which the human intelligence attempted to imitate.
Archimedes was killed by a Roman soldier when the City of Syracuse was taken by the Romans. The year was 212 B.C. It is said that Marceless, the Roman General in charge had issued orders to his soldiers not to harm Archimedes and to treat him with respect. The legend goes to state that Archimedes was found while engaged in drawing a geometrical diagram in the sand, the city burning around him. Archimedes was unaware of the taking of the city by the Romans. There are many versions of the story of his killing. Plutarch recounts three versions which had come down to him.
The first version says: “Archimedes…was…, as fate would have it, intent upon working out some problem by a diagram , and having fixed his mind alike and his eyes upon the subject of his speculation, he never noticed the incursion of the Romans, nor that the city was taken. In this transport of study and contemplation, a soldier, unexpectedly coming up to him, commanded him to follow to Marcellus; which he declining to do before he had worked out his problem to a demonstration, the soldier, enraged, drew his sword and ran him through.”
The second version: “…a Roman soldier, running upon him with a drawn sword, offered to kill him; and that Archimedes, looking back, earnestly besought him to hold his hand a little while, that he might not leave what he was then at work upon inconclusive and imperfect; but the soldier, nothing moved by his entreaty, instantly killed him,” The third version: “…as Archimedes was carrying to Marcellus mathematical instruments, dials, spheres, and angles, by which the magnitude of the sun might be measured to the sight, some soldiers seeing him, and thinking that he carried gold in a vessel, slew him.” The Romans placed on his tombstone the figure of a sphere inscribed inside a cylinder and the 2:3 ratio of the volumes between them, the solution to the problem Archimedes considered his greatest achievement. Cicero, while describing how he searched for Archimedes tomb wrote: “…and found it enclosed all around and covered with brables and thickets; for I remembered certain doggerel lines inscribed, as I had heard, upon his tomb, which stated that a sphere along with a cylinder had been put on top of his grave. Accordingly, after taking a good look around…, I noticed a small column arising a little above the bushes, on which there was a figure of a sphere and a cylinder…Slaves were sent in with sickles…and when a passage to the place was opened we approached the pedestal in front of us; the epigram was traceable with about half of lines legible, as the latter portion was worn away.”
For Further Reading
1. Archimedes & The Fulcrum by Paul Strathern. London: Arrow Books, 1998.
2. The History of Science: From the Ancient Greeks to the Scientific Revolutions by Ray Spangenburg and Diane K. Moser. Hyderabad: Universities Press (India) Limited, 1999.
3. The Cambridge Dictionary of Scientists (Second Edition) by David, Ian, John & Margaret Millar, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
4. A Dictionary of Scientists Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.
5. The Macmillan Encyclopaedia. London: Macmillan London Limmited, 1981.
6. Chambers Biographical Dictionary (Centenary Edition). Edinburgh:Chambers Harrap Publishers Ltd.
7. http://scidiv.bcc.ctc.edu/Math/Archimedes.html
8. http://www.crystallinks.com/archimedes.html