Einstein and Eddington

Jag har just fått ner en film från 2008 på
datorn som jag inte ens visste att den fanns.



In the jubilee year of 2005 (a hundred years after Einsteins first
five astonishing papers (of which the Nobel Price Comity
(Svenska Vetenskabsakademien) only understood the next
simplest 16 years later - and therefor gave him the Nobel Price))
while Gravity Probe B was still hot (see http://einstein.stanford.edu/)
i internet-stumbled on Einsteins humble letter to the Mount Palomar
Observatory regarding the detection of "the bending of light".

Einstein knew little of astronomy at that time, but he knew that
they had the worlds largest telescopes up that mountain. I think
that it was Edwin Hubble himself that answered in a short letter
that; We can't do that with our instruments, but if you wait until
the next solar eclipse maybe it can be done with a small telescope.

Little did i know that it was Sir Eddington that lead the biggest expedition
under the shadow of the moon. Professor Eddington was a quite funny man
who always begun his first lecture with newbies by writing this number.

15747724136275002577605653961181555468044717914527116709366231425076185631031296

And when he had finished and his students where at half asleep he said:
I believe that this number tells how many Protons there are in the Universe.
And the same number goes for the number of electrons. This number was
derived from the assumption that the "fine structure constant" was exactly
1/136. When it turned out to be more like 1/137 he rewrote his number and
was subsequently named Sir Arthur Adding-One in the funny magazine Punch.
And we can laugh even more at his grand universal theory since the constant
nowadays only measures

But there are other Eddington numbers still going strong.
This i found just now on Wikipedia:

Eddington number (cycling)

Eddington is credited with devising a measure of a cyclist's long distance riding achievements. The Eddington Number in this context is defined as E, the number of days a cyclist has cycled more than E miles. For example an Eddington Number of 70 would imply that a cyclist has cycled more than 70 miles in a day on 70 occasions. Achieving a high Eddington number is difficult since moving from, say, 70 to 75 will probably require more than five new long distance rides since any rides shorter than 75 miles will no longer be included in the reckoning.

The construct of the Eddington Number for cycling is identical to the h-index that quantifies both the actual scientific productivity and the apparent scientific impact of a scientist.

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Eddington was fortunate to live in an era when also the half-crazy scientists
where allowed to do physical experiments. Nowadays everybody must conform
to a common view to get recognized. It is no surprice that experimental physics
has gone nowhere (except for finding more already predicted heavy particles)
in the last 50 years. The only place for curious people like Albert, Arthur and
me is in "The Theory of Everything" which evolves quite rapidly due to a couple
of hundreds of pure theoretical hackers. But it is quite a difficult job to get a grip
and hang on to this fast-moving train regardless of your prior mathematical knowledge.

P.S. The movie i have listened to while writing this is not of my liking.
Probably because i know these guys in a quite different way, and
can even understand some of their native mathematical languages.

And just now the Nobel Prize winner Fritz Haber showed up in the movie.
He is my hatered object Nr 1 among the winners. There was no surprise
when his wife took a pistol and shoot herself in the head when she finally
understood what he was up to once again (but even worse a that time).