Thursday, February 8

Albert, Invariants, Lester and Cats

Einstein once wrote a book that explained relativity for anyone with a high school education. He believed that even if you couldn't do all the math required, there wasn't anything stopping anyone from understanding relativity. I picked up the book at roughly that point in life and didn't find it terribly easy to understand. He used words I knew, but that doesn't mean I understood what he was getting it. (Of course, I have a degree in Physics, and got a near perfect score on my E&M final that was almost exclusively about relativity, so maybe I'm just relativity handicapped.) Anyway, it seems that Einstein was always trying to explain science to the common man. Just look at this Einstein quote which I have stolen blatantly from Tyler:

You see, wire telegraph is a kind of a very, very long cat. You pull his tail in New York and his head is meowing in Los Angeles. Do you understand this? And radio operates exactly the same way: you send signals here, they receive them there. The only difference is that there is no cat."

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