Exactly 100 years ago, Albert Einstein grappled with the implications of his revolutionary special theory of relativity and came to a startling conclusion: mass and energy are one, related by the formula E = mc2. In "Einstein's Big Idea," NOVA dramatizes the remarkable story behind this equation. E = mc2 was just one of several extraordinary breakthroughs that Einstein made in 1905, including the completion of his special theory of relativity, his identification of proof that atoms exist, and his explanation of the nature of light, which would win him the Nobel Prize in Physics. To honor the centenary of these achievements, 2005 has been declared the World Year of Physics by the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics. Among Einstein's ideas, E = mc2 is by far the most famous. Yet how many people know what it really means? In a thought-provoking and engrossing docudrama, NOVA illuminates this deceptively simple formula by unraveling the story of how it came to be. Based on David Bodanis's bestselling book E = mc2: A Biography of the World's Most Famous Equation, the program explores the lives of the men and women who helped develop the concepts behind each term in the equation: E for energy; m for mass; c for the speed of light; and 2 for "squared," the multiplication of one number by itself. Like a multi-plot novel building to a climactic scene, "Einstein's Big Idea" traces the stories of a fascinating range of characters, including: Einstein (played by Aidan McArdle: Ella Enchanted, Not Only But Always): In 1905 he was a 26-year-old family man stuck in a dead-end job at a Swiss patent office. In his spare time, he single-mindedly pursued an unconventional approach to physics. Mileva Maric (Shirley Henderson: Bridget Jones, Harry Potter): Einstein's first wife, a struggling scientist as well as a young mother, paid a heavy price for her husband's obsession. Michael Faraday (Stephen Robertson: Inside I'm Dancing): Starting out as a poor bookbinder, he rose to become one of the giants of 19th-century science. He studied how different forces could be changed into each other, laying the groundwork for the modern scientific concept of energy. Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier (Julian Rhind-Tutt: Madness of King George): This French aristocrat and amateur scientist was carted off to the guillotine during the French Revolutionbut not before he proved that total mass is never lost, no matter what sort of physical transformation a substance undergoes. James Clerk Maxwell (Richard Henshall): In the late 19th century, this young Scot showed that light is an electromagnetic wave with a very strange property: no matter how fast you travel, light always travels away from you at the same speed of 670 million miles per hour. Emilie du Châtelet (Helene De Fougeroles: Fanfan la Tulipe): A mathematical genius and lover to the French philosopher Voltaire, she clarified a long-standing debate, showing that the velocity of an object must be squared when calculating its total energy. Lise Meitner (Emily Woof: The Woodlanders): Working after Einstein proposed his famous equation, she was the first to show that a uranium atom can be split, converting a tiny amount of mass into a prodigious amount of energy, according to the formula E = mc2. This discovery eventually led to the development of the atomic bomb. The program also features comments from David Bodanis as well as from Michio Kaku of the City University of New York, James Gates of the University of Maryland, Patricia Fara of Cambridge University, David Kaiser of MIT, Judith Zinsser of Miami University, Ruth Lewin Sime of Sacramento City College, and Lisa Randall, Professor of Theoretical Physics at Harvard University. Genius by genius, idea by idea, "Einstein's Big Idea" shows how Einstein's remarkable predecessors provided the intellectual tools for his extraordinary breakthroughand will help you understand this famous equation as never before.
Einstein's wife.
The life of Mileva Marie Einstein.
Who was Mileva Maric? Why was she erased from Einstein's life story? What significance does she have? This documentary of Einstein's Wife consists of a one-hour documentary film. These tandem features explore the historical facts of Mileva Maric's life, and examine her dual roles as Albert Einstein's domestic and scientific partner. Given these facts, each observer must then decide, on their own, whether or not Einstein robbed Maric of her due. The timing of Einstein's Wife is the result of several events at the end of the past millennium. The West's first hint of Maric's existence came with a 1983 German translation of a Yugoslavian biography. Then the Princeton Press published the first of Einstein's 40,000 archived papers. By the early 1990s, there was open speculation that Maric was Einstein's intellectual collaborator. The debate remains open, in part because it appears that Einstein's executrix systematically destroyed potential evidence. And yet, the absolute proof of Maric's contributions may still be discovered in the pages of some unknown manuscript - if the owner of that document knows how remarkable Mileva was. The year 2005 marks the 50th anniversary of Albert Einstein's death, and the centenary of the publication of his theory of relativity.Einstein's Wife explores previously hidden scientific collaboration between Einstein and the first female theoretical physicist to enter a European university, his wife Mileva Maric. E = mc². The most powerful and eloquent equation in the world of physics. And possibly the number one reason we still revere Albert Einstein today. But was it all his own work? "Einsteins Wife" is the story of a pioneering female mathematician whose footnote in science history is not so much forgotten, as it is buried. Her fatal flaw, to become the lover and then the wife of the soon-to-be worlds favourite genius. In 1896 Mileva Maric, a courageous young woman of exceptional intellect, boldly entered the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology and enrolled in theoretical physics. Only one other person did the same, a young Albert Einstein. To Albert, Mileva was perfect. Not only did she share his passions, she cooked his meals, raised his children, corrected his calculations, translated his texts, and drafted his lecture notes. Then that magical equation was published and almost overnight Mileva became invisible. "Einsteins Wife" is a story of love, marriage, science and sexual discrimination. It casts new light on Einstein the man and the nature of scientific discovery and collaboration. It uncovers secret pacts and conspiracies, a daughter born out of wedlock and a son locked away in a mental institution for 30 years. Most importantly though, it re-assesses the claim that Albert Einstein, alone, developed The Special Theory of Relativity and the Photoelectric Effect, which took the Nobel Prize in 1921.
Einstein's Biggest Blunder
The revolution in cosmology which is leading to a new view of the Universe. The interest generated by the programme was reflected in Channel 4 receiving the highest number hits for any page on their website (second only to Big Brother). If there is one thing "every schoolgirl knows" about Einstein and his theory of relativity, its that the speed of light is constant. Yet today a small group of brilliant physicists and astronomers have risked their scientific reputations to question the validity of this idea. Could the speed of light of change? If so, it will herald a revolution in our understanding of the Universe as profound as that initiated by Einstein himself nearly a century ago. A whiff of heresy is in the air. There are very few beliefs in science that have the force of doctrine, but among them is the conviction that the speed of light is fixed. It forms the rock upon which Einstein built one of the 20th century's most enduring monuments, the General Theory of Relativity. But in science nothing is sacred, and several leading theoretical physicists are now toying with the delicious notion that the speed of light may not be constant after all - but may actually have varied during the 15 billion years the Universe has existed. To some, it remains anathema. "It took us a year to get the first paper published in Physical Review," says Dr Joâo Magueijo, a young Portuguese physicist, now a lecturer at Imperial College in London. "The scientists who were asked to comment just couldn't accept it. Finally the editor stepped in and it appeared." At the age of 11, Dr Magueijo was inspired by The Evolution of Physics, a slim volume by Einstein and Leopold Infeld. A dog-eared copy, in Portuguese, lies on his desk at Imperial College. "The best book ever written about physics," as he calls it, set him on a course that took him to the University of Lisbon, then Cambridge as a research fellow at St John's, and now London. But if he is right, Einstein's conviction that light travels at a fixed and unalterable speed is about to be dethroned. Dr Magueijo and colleagues with whom he has worked - Dr Andy Albrecht, of the University of California at Davis, and Professor John Barrow, of Cambridge - were not quite the first to have this idea. Dr John Moffat of the University of Toronto had floated it, but they were unaware of his work until he complained it hadn't been properly acknowledged in the Physical Review. Of course, nobody would make such a radical suggestion unless there were something amiss with existing cosmological theories. The Big Bang and its offspring, inflation, are extremely well-established. They can explain a lot of what we see when we look into the great beyond. They claim that the Universe began from a single point, and has been expanding outward ever since. Simple as this seems, it raises some puzzling dilemmas. If the speed of light is fixed and not infinite, it means that the Universe always has an edge beyond which we cannot see, simply because light has not had time to reach us from that edge. This "horizon" at present lies some 15 billion light years away. If we run the expansion backwards to a time soon after the Big Bang, we find that some parts of the Universe which we can now see would then have lain beyond the horizon. This is the puzzle. The Universe we can see is homogenous, the same temperature and density everywhere. Yet things are only the same temperature if they are in contact with one another, and a finite speed of light means that such contact was impossible early on. So why is the Universe homogenous? Inflation provides an answer by saying that all the visible Universe came originally from a small area that expanded - for a brief period - very much faster, smoothing out unevenness. But there is no real explanation for why this should have happened, nor any way of confirming that it did, since it is now long in the past. "There is too much that is ad hoc about it," says Dr Magueijo. Equally tricky is explaining why the Universe seems to be so exquisitely balanced. The amount of matter and energy it contains seems to lie just on the cusp between a Universe which would expand for ever, and one which would stop expanding and contract again into a Big Crunch. Cosmologists call such a Universe "flat". For this to have happened, the initial conditions, such as temperature, would have had to be exactly right - for which there is no good reason. Some argue that this question is irrelevant because if it hadn't been so, we wouldn't be here to worry about it anyway. The Universe, and life, could never have evolved. But most find this explanation rather feeble. There are yet more problems. One is the evidence, gathered in the past few years by two teams studying supernova explosions, that the expansion of the Universe seems to be speeding up under the influence of an anti-gravitational force that pushes things apart. Einstein believed such a force was necessary because in the static Universe he depicted, it would be needed to prevent gravity dragging everything together. He put it in his equations as the "cosmological constant" and gave it the Greek letter lambda. When, rather late in the day, he was convinced by Edwin Hubble's evidence that the Universe was actually expanding and lambda was not needed, he called it his greatest blunder. The supernova evidence has revived lambda, but that in turn raises a new difficulty. "In any universe with reasonable starting conditions, lambda would quickly come to dominate," says Dr Maguiejo. "The Universe would be thrown apart so quickly each galaxy would soon be isolated from all the others. But this hasn't happened. We need to know why." All these problems can be solved by the simple assumption that the speed of light was once much greater than it is today. It solves the horizon problem because faster light would have enabled all parts of the Universe to remain in touch. And it solves the lambda problem because the energy in lambda depends on the speed of light. "A sharp drop in the speed of light soon after the beginning of the Universe's expansion keeps lambda subservient," Dr Maguiejo says. It also provides a simpler explanation of why the Universe is flat, no longer requiring precise starting conditions. There is just a glimmer of astronomical evidence that the theory may be right. By looking at quasars at different distances away from us - and hence at different times in the past - Professor Barrow and Dr John Webb at Cambridge, with colleagues in Australia and the US, have found a hint that the speed of light may indeed have changed. "The most distant clouds have different spectra," says Dr Webb in an Equinox documentary, Einstein's Biggest Blunder, to be broadcast on April 17. "So either fundamental particles behaved differently in the past or the speed of light differed. We've spent a year trying to work out what we have done wrong and we can't find anything. "If this is corroborated, it would be evidence that the speed of light did change. That would be a profound result - the first evidence that the laws of physics were not always the same." Few will accept the theory unless it makes predictions about the Universe that can be tested by astronomical observation. Dr Maguiejo hopes to come up with such a test soon. Meanwhile, he says the "varying speed of light theory" - it will need a snappier name - answers one of the more tantalising questions about the Big Bang. What triggered it? If the speed of light can vary, then the history of the Universe is a kind of dance to the music of lambda, he says. As our Universe ages, lambda comes to dominate, forcing it apart until galaxies form island universes, cut off from the main. At some point this process can suddenly turn energy into matter. In other words, it sets the scene for a fresh Big Bang, or a series of bangs, which will start the whole process again. If so, the Universe keeps rising like a phoenix from the wreckage of the one before - not a one-off, but a continuous process with no beginning and no end.
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Albert Einstein (1879-1955), German-born American physicist and Nobel laureate, best known as the creator of the special and general theories of relativity and for his bold hypothesis concerning the particle nature of light. He is perhaps the most well-known scientist of the 20th century. Einstein was born in Ulm on March 14, 1879, and spent his youth in Munich, where his family owned a small shop that manufactured electric machinery. He did not talk until the age of three, but even as a youth he showed a brilliant curiosity about nature and an ability to understand difficult mathematical concepts. At the age of 12 he taught himself Euclidean geometry. Einstein hated the dull regimentation and unimaginative spirit of school in Munich. When repeated business failure led the family to leave Germany for Milan, Italy, Einstein, who was then 15 years old, used the opportunity to withdraw from the school. He spent a year with his parents in Milan, and when it became clear that he would have to make his own way in the world, he finished secondary school in Aarau, Switzerland, and entered the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zürich. Einstein did not enjoy the methods of instruction there. He often cut classes and used the time to study physics on his own or to play his beloved violin. He passed his examinations and graduated in 1900 by studying the notes of a classmate. His professors did not think highly of him and would not recommend him for a university position. For two years Einstein worked as a tutor and substitute teacher. In 1902 he secured a position as an examiner in the Swiss patent office in Bern. In 1903 he married Mileva Marić, who had been his classmate at the polytechnic. They had two sons but eventually divorced. Einstein later remarried. 
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