Original Face

Who do you think you are, Einstein?

    Christie's auction house is putting up a 1954 letter of Albert Einstein's for bid this afternoon.  In it, he wrote, that he has no sense that Jews are the "chosen people" and that he finds religions and ideas of a god to be "childish" and "superstitious."  Ok.  So what?  I have a hard time wondering why this is a story at all, let alone why it is leading today's news programs.
    Einstein was an extraordinary theoretical physicist whose contributes to that field over turned centuries of established physics knowledge, but I he has admitted that he never studied theology or philosophy.  His ideas on God are as meaningful as John the Evangelist's ideas on natural science.  If his comments were on baseball, music or cooking, they would be amusing, but ignored.  But since all of us wonder about ultimate reality we look for someone who is smart in a field to tell us what to think.  There is a categorical confusion when prominence in a field, especially in fields as arcane as modern theoretical physics or theology, makes that person's pronouncements on matters that have nothing to do with their area of expertise, important and transforming. 
    What I or you believe to be the ultimate nature of our lives should not be influenced by Einstein's comments.  If I wouldn't trust him to tell me how to make a carrot cake, I certainly wouldn't trust him with my soul.

"I don't believe in medication..."

I always roll my eyes when someone tells me that they "don't believe" in medication for attention deficit disorder.  Huh?  What does that mean?  That you don't "believe" that the malady exists? 

It is absolutely the case that too many primary school teachers suffer from "i don't like boys being boys-itis" and seek medication to get them to act like little girls.  This is an abuse of medication and, ahem, it just doesn't work.  Boys, as the old saying goes, will be boys and while the meds may have them act zombied out they will not become little girls, sitting nicely in their seats with rosy cheeks and an apple for teacher.

However, to imply that because the diagnosis is abused by some teachers, the disease is non-existent.  Until we have a PET or fMRI scan that can target attention issues, it will be a clinical diagnosis, that is a "soft' or judgment call on the part of the physician.  Dr. Charles Barlow, the chief of neurology at Boston Children's Hospital when I was a resident used to say that the best way to know if a kid had attention deficit was to let him be for 5 minutes.  If you, the examiner, were exhausted just watching -- then the hyperactive form of the disease is present.  Also give them a couple of tasks to perform such as bringing a paper to the front desk or getting some pencils from the waiting room.  If they wander off task, then they have the inattentive form.  It always seemed to work.  Love when that happens.

It is a real brain disease and just like diseases of the heart, the liver, the kidneys, using medication to treat this disease does not imply a moral weakness. It means that the child is being appropriately assisted to overcome his affliction.

Today a long term study has been published out of the Mayo Clinic which followed over 5000 kids on some form of Ritalin, or another amphetamine, for a number of years.  Surprise, surprise: they all did better-- in school, socially and otherwise.  In other words, just like insulin for diabetes, amphetamines help kids (and adults too) with attention issues. 

Ask someone who has the illness what the meds do for them.  One kid told me "they make me feel more like me.  I like being in control of me."  Another said it was putting on a pair of glasses, "everything comes into focus."

Maybe now that this study is out, people afflicted with attention deficit will not hear others say that they don't "believe" in drugs for the condition.  Thanks, Mayo Clinic.

Officer, I didn't have any idea I was going THAT fast...

There was a saying during the height of the "flower power" revolution of the late 1960s:  "speed kills."  Of course at that time the cliche was referring to amphetamines but if the news out of Germany bears up, a group of physicists has surpassed the "speed limit" for light and thus negated the underlying "constant" of Einstein's concept of the physical laws of the universe.

Einstein's theory of "special relativity" actually states the general case whereas the theory of "general relativity" is about a particular situation.  Confused?  Good, then you are in the right frame of mind to start thinking about modern physics...believe me it gets sooooo much more weird from here.

The revolutionary idea is that all aspects of time and space in the universe are always to be understood "in relation" to each other.  When it is said that a train is traveling at 30 mph (don't worry there are no other trains or passengers in this word problem...) it is always a statement which has validity in the context of some frame of reference, say against "static "frame of the earth.  Of course if the frame is the Milky Way, that same train is moving much faster; if the frame is another train, it may be slower. 

You intuit this.  Remember being on a train or subway pulling out of a station at the same time that the train on the next track is moving too.  Your train may appear stationary or much quicker than it would had there been no other train next to it.  Your train may seem to move backward if that next door train starts moving and yours does not -- and you have no other way to establish an other "third" frame.

Bottom line-- there is, to Einstein's physics no "objective" reality.  Hold on...but I said that there was a constant that these German scientists have messed with recently. Right.  OK, there IS one thing in the universe that is outside of these relative measurements-- the speed of light, or to use its Einsteinian abbreviation: "c"  (You remember E=mc(squared) ).

"c" is 299,792,458 meter/second or 186,000 miles/second..now there have been ideas that the speed can be slower due to friction in non vacuum spaces and in the bizarre world of teeny tiny quantum mechanics...ok, in quantum no one the hell knows...but in the rest of the physical universe it was like the fact that my old man would be ripping mad if I was out after curfew...you could bank on it.

The fact that there is this one constant makes the rest of the theory make mathematical sense.  Without it, it's back to the drawing board.

Now, of course, some wise ass will always ask, "What makes light so damn special, eh?  Why is it the single constant in the universe."  I dunno and neither did Einstein.  What is more he didn't much care.  It worked, and that was good enough. Of course, if these German physicists are corroborated, those wise ass questions will be a bit more prescient than generations of physics 101 professors would like to admit. 

I suppose, it's open season in theoretical physics again.  Anyone got any bright ideas?

 

No mummy jokes, I promise

Big news from the world of Egyptian archeology tonight.  The mummy of the most important female pharoah in Egypt, Hatshepsut, has been found.  The Discovery Channel is responsible for funding the work leading to the this major find.  Check out the url:

http://www.newsvine.com/_news/2007/06/27/806408-egypt-says-
mummy-of-queen-discovered