Epstein Secrets

Newton was an extraordinary man. He discovered many of the physical principles we use today, and his view of the Universe reigned unchallenged until Einstein’s discovery of relativity. He was also, by many accounts, a nasty piece of work. Not only was he a famous academic, he also head of the Royal Mint. H

k. Who cares why? In 1964, John Bell, an Irish physicist working at the Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire (“CERN’), devised a way to test Einstein’s hidden variable theory. He pointed out that if photons possess hidden variables and we randomly measure them with a detector set at three angles, w

n to our classical certainty? What is the state of the cat before I - a sentient observer — open the box? Was the result of the decay measured by the Geiger counter, the cat, or are we waiting for someone to open the box and observe the result? The Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics — named a

to reach for a gun every time he hears mention of it. The thought experiment works like this. A cat is put in a box with a radioactive substance, a Geiger counter and a vial of poison. If the counter detects a radioactive decay it breaks the bottle and the cat dies, if no decay is detected the cat lives

determined by phenomena that lie well beneath the surface of our experience—phenomena that don't rely in any way upon our existence. In this sense, Einstein was wrong: "God" does appear to play dice with the universe, or universes. So far we have been lucky. But like playing at the craps table, our luck

ot implemented. Novel ideas generally stagnate and die without the courage to implement them. I bring this up here because perhaps the true mark of Einstein's ge- nius was not his mathematical prowess (although, contrary to conven- tional wisdom, he was mathematically talented), but his creativity and hi

But even closer to home, relativistic time dilation has an impact. We on Earth are all bombarded every day by cosmic rays from space. If you had a Geiger counter and stood out in a field, the counter would click at a regular rate every few seconds, as it recorded the impact of high-energy particles c

quantum craziness of reality was taken by an unlikely explorer, Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac. In one sense, Dirac was the perfect man for the job. As Einstein is re- puted to have later said of him, "This balancing on the dizzying path between genius and madness is awful! When I think of Dirac, an old jok

en- tored him throughout the rest of his career. Bothe was spectacularly lucky to be mentored by Planck and, shortly thereafter, by Hans Geiger, of Geiger counter fame. Geiger, in my mind, is one of the most talented experimental physicists to have been over- looked for a Nobel Prize. Geiger had begun