logo
Private conversations with Albert Einstein published as book

Private conversations with Albert Einstein published as book

Yahoo2 days ago
Records from Albert Einstein's final years are being published as a book around 20 years after their discovery, as transcripts of telephone conversations the physicist had between 1953 and 1955, publisher Heyne Verlag announced on Monday.
The records by Johanna Fantova, considered to be Einstein's last close female friend, describe events from the last year and a half before the scientist's death at the age of 76.
Einstein (1879-1955), who fled Nazi Germany for the United States in 1933, reportedly shared his daily experiences in US exile with Fantova over the phone. Fantova, who first met Einstein in Germany but also moved to the US, transcribed his statements with his consent, the publisher said.
The 62-page typescript in German was discovered by chance in 2004 at the Firestone Library of Princeton University, where Fantova once worked as a curator. The materials lay unprocessed in the archive for a long time.
The diary entries are now set to be published for the first time in an annotated edition with additional findings on September 24. The title of the book by Peter von Becker is: "I am a Magnet for All the Maniacs. The Einstein Transcripts – His Life, His Last Love, His Legacy."
In the diary, Einstein - who revolutionized physics with his Theory of Relativity - shares his thoughts on politics, science, everyday life and love.
For instance, he criticized the arms race of the superpowers and the rearmament of Germany, and commented on the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians, according to the publisher.
Solve the daily Crossword
Orange background

Try Our AI Features

Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:

Comments

No comments yet...

Related Articles

The Hidden Value Of Anecdotes, Anomalies And Outliers
The Hidden Value Of Anecdotes, Anomalies And Outliers

Forbes

timean hour ago

  • Forbes

The Hidden Value Of Anecdotes, Anomalies And Outliers

The case for anecdotes, anomalies and outliers. getty James Spangler invented the portable vacuum cleaner out of necessity. He was a janitor at a department store but suffered from chronic asthma. Every time he swept the floor with a broom, dust would kick up and irritate his lungs. A personal dilemma led to the creation of an entirely new product category. Within a year, William Hoover purchased the patent and made the vacuum cleaner a commercial success. During the same time, Henry Ford introduced the principles of Taylorism to his assembly lines. Taylorism applies scientific methods to analyze workflows to improve efficiency and productivity. When Henry Ford introduced the first moving assembly line, it cut the time to build a T-model from 12 hours to 1.5 hours. Since then, many more companies have adopted the principles of scientific management. Marketing and advertising have undergone a similar shift from mad men to math men. Big ideas have given way to big data, complex attribution models and digital dashboards. But there is a hidden cost associated with obsessing over the manageable and measurable. Brands miss out on outliers that deviate from the norm. Nearly all breakthrough ideas and innovations begin on the periphery, not the centre. Brands have access to millions of data points, including CRM profiles, email data, transaction history, ad impressions, social media engagement, survey responses, product reviews, and more. However, such data is increasingly aggregated—delivered via digital dashboards—far removed from the context and emotional reality of the humans represented in the data. Binary codes of 0 and 1 fail to reflect the messiness of human life. The so-called average doesn't exist in the real world. If we only look at the aggregate, we miss the all-important outliers. These outliers are the seeds of the future, but are rarely captured in big data. Most economists were blindsided by the 2008 financial crisis. The overreliance on macro indicators like GDP growth, low unemployment and steady inflation overlooked outliers, weaker signals and emerging trends from the edges. The signs were apparent from the rising default rates on subprime mortgages in California, Nevada, and Florida. Had the economists stepped outside their models and talked with mortgage brokers, homeowners or construction workers, they would have seen what was happening long before the data confirmed the crisis. Similar signals are often missed in business because marketers are no longer talking with real people on the ground. In the words of John le Carré: "A desk is a dangerous place from which to view the world.' What's more, data is only a reflection of the past. It offers a rearview mirror picture. Not a forward-looking window into the future. The past can be a poor reflection of the future. We end up making investment decisions for an aggregated average consumer who doesn't exist in the real world. In 1983, Hermès' CEO Jean-Louis Dumas was randomly seated next to actress and singer Jane Birkin on a flight from Paris to London. Birkin was struggling to cram her wicker bag in the overhead compartment when its contents spilt on Dumas. She then asked the CEO of Hermès to design a handbag larger than the Kelly with pockets. Birkin famously sketched her ideal bag on an aeroplane sickness bag and the rest is history. The Hermès Birkin is now one of the most iconic and renowned bags in the world. Today, Hermès generates $15 billion in revenue, with a substantial portion of total sales coming from the Birkin bag. It can be easy to forget that the centrepiece of Hermès $200 billion luxury empire was born from a single random human interaction. Modern algorithms would overlook such anecdotal evidence because it is not statistically representative. Similarly, Ray-Ban aviators were made in the 1930s to protect U.S. pilots from the sun's glare at high altitudes. The lens was not invented for mass consumption, but for an extreme and exceptional use case. Nearly a century later, sunglasses are worn by millions of people, including Hollywood celebrities and the general public. During a business trip to promote chicken ramen, Japanese businessman Momofuku Ando observed busy American workers breaking up noodles in half before adding boiling water. The anecdotal observation inspired Ando to invent the cup noodle. Today, cup noodles are sold in over 100 countries worldwide, with cumulative global sales exceeding 50 billion units. Outliers and anecdotal observations make a disproportionate impact on value creation and business outcomes. The current fixation with statistically representative samples prevents brands from exploring the periphery where the future is already emerging. Most brands have little to no mechanism to scan for anecdotes and outliers. Marketing technology can help brands analyze millions of interactions in real-time. Enabling marketers to streamline workflows, track performance and drive personalization at scale. The purpose of this article isn't to advocate for a return to pre-digital marketing practices. On the contrary, it serves as a reminder not to overlook outliers as a powerful engine of innovation. In a world saturated with aggregated data, AI-generated content and synthetic panels, we shouldn't forget how outliers and extreme users introduce new ideas, products and behaviours to the market. Brands are drowning in data, but struggling with innovation and value creation. In uncertain times, managing, measuring and optimizing the core is important, but brands should be equally open to anecdotes and outliers that can unlock future growth. After all, deviation from the norm is a prerequisite for innovation.

Physicists Blast Gold to Astonishing Temperatures, Overturning 40 Years of Physics
Physicists Blast Gold to Astonishing Temperatures, Overturning 40 Years of Physics

Yahoo

time2 hours ago

  • Yahoo

Physicists Blast Gold to Astonishing Temperatures, Overturning 40 Years of Physics

Physicists superheated gold to 14 times its melting point, disproving a long-standing prediction about the temperature limits of solids Gold usually melts at 1,300 kelvins—a temperature hotter than fresh lava from a volcano. But scientists recently shot a nanometers-thick sample of gold with a laser and heated it to an astonishing 19,000 kelvins (33,740 degrees Fahrenheit)—all without melting the material. The feat was completely unexpected and has overturned 40 years of accepted physics about the temperature limits of solid materials, the researchers report in a paper published in the journal Nature. 'This was extremely surprising,' says study team member Thomas White of the University of Nevada, Reno. 'We were totally shocked when we saw how hot it actually got.' The measured temperature is well beyond gold's proposed 'entropy catastrophe' limit, the point at which the entropy, or disorder, in the material should force it to melt. Past that limit, theorists had predicted solid gold would have a higher entropy than liquid gold—a clear violation of the laws of thermodynamics. By measuring such a blistering temperature in a solid in the new study, the researchers disproved the prediction. They realized that their solid gold was able to become so superheated because it warmed incredibly quickly: their laser blasted the gold for just 45 femtoseconds, or 45 quadrillionths of a second—a 'flash heating' that was far too fast to allow the material time to expand and thus kept the entropy within the bounds of known physics. 'I would like to congratulate the authors on this interesting experiment,' says Sheng-Nian Luo, a physicist at Southwest Jiaotong University in China, who has studied superheating in solids and was not involved in the new research. 'However, melting under such ultrafast, ultrasmall, ultracomplex conditions could be overinterpreted.' The gold in the experiment was an ionized solid heated in a way that may have caused a high internal pressure, he says, so the results might not apply to normal solids under regular pressures. The researchers, however, doubt that ionization and pressure can account for their measurements. The extreme temperature of the gold 'cannot reasonably be explained by these effects alone,' White says. 'The scale of superheating observed suggests a genuinely new regime.' [Sign up for Today in Science, a free daily newsletter] To take the gold's temperature, the team used another laser—in this case, the world's most powerful x-ray laser, which is three kilometers (1.9 miles) long. The machine, the Linac Coherent Light Source at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in California, accelerates electrons to more than 99 percent the speed of light and then shoots them through undulating magnetic fields to create a very bright beam of one trillion (1012) x-ray photons. When this laser fired at the superheated sample, the x-ray photons scattered off atoms inside the material, allowing the researchers to measure the atoms' velocities to effectively take the gold's temperature. 'The biggest lasting contribution is going to be that we now have a method to really accurately measure these temperatures,' says study team member Bob Nagler, a staff scientist at SLAC. The researchers hope to use the technique on other types of 'warm dense matter,' such as materials meant to mimic the insides of stars and planets. Until now, they've had no good way to take the temperature of matter in such toasty states, which usually last just fractions of a second. After the gold trial, the team turned its laser thermometer on a piece of iron foil that had been heated with a laser shock wave to simulate conditions at the center of our planet. 'With this method, we can determine what the melting temperature is,' Nagler says. 'These questions are super important if you want to model the Earth.' The temperature technique should also be useful for predicting how materials used in fusion experiments will behave. The National Ignition Facility at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, for example, shoots lasers at a small target to rapidly heat and compress it to ignite thermonuclear fusion. Physicists can now determine the melting point for different targets—meaning the whole field could be heating up in the near future. Solve the daily Crossword

Lightning Kills Way More Trees Than Anyone Thought, New Research Suggests
Lightning Kills Way More Trees Than Anyone Thought, New Research Suggests

Gizmodo

time6 hours ago

  • Gizmodo

Lightning Kills Way More Trees Than Anyone Thought, New Research Suggests

We've all seen dramatic footage of lightning striking a mighty tree, its branches going up in flames. But how often does this actually happen? Researchers didn't know how much lightning impacted forests—until now. Researchers at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) have developed a computer model to provide what they claim to be the first estimate of lightning's impact on forest ecosystems around the world. According to their study, lightning affects forests more than previously thought. Specifically, they suggest that around 320 million trees die each year from lightning strikes, not including the trees that die in lightning-induced wildfires. 'Lightning is an important yet often overlooked disturbance agent in forest ecosystems,' the researchers explained in the study, published last month in the journal Global Change Biology. To make their estimate, they integrated observational data and global lightning patterns into a well-known global vegetation simulation. The computer model indicates that trees killed by lightning represent 2.1% to 2.9% of all plant biomass loss annually. While plants and trees absorb CO2 through photosynthesis during their lifetimes, they release a significant amount of it back into the atmosphere when they die and decay. As such, these figures are crucial to better understanding Earth's carbon cycling. With the combined model, 'we're now able not only to estimate how many trees die from lightning strikes annually, but also to identify the regions most affected and assess the implications for global carbon storage and forest structure,' Andreas Krause, lead author of the study and researcher at the Chair of Land Surface-Atmosphere Interactions, explained in a TUM statement. The biomass decay caused by the lightning-killed trees is estimated to emit between 770 million and 1.09 billion tons of carbon dioxide annually. According to the researchers, this is surprisingly high. For comparison, living plants burned in wildfires release around 1.26 billion tons of CO2 every year. Both of these figures, however, are dwarfed by the total wildfires CO2 emissions (including the combustion of deadwood and soil material), which is approximately 5.85 billion tons per year. 'Most climate models project an increase in lightning frequency in the coming decades, so it's worth paying closer attention to this largely overlooked disturbance,' said Krause. 'Currently, lightning-induced tree mortality is highest in tropical regions. However, models suggest that lightning frequency will increase primarily in middle- and high-latitude regions, meaning that lightning mortality could also become more relevant in temperate and boreal forests.' The researchers argue that ecosystem models need to account for lightning mortality in order to better predict vegetation dynamics. Interestingly, though, not all trees die after getting struck by lightning—in fact, some kinda like it.

DOWNLOAD THE APP

Get Started Now: Download the App

Ready to dive into a world of global content with local flavor? Download Daily8 app today from your preferred app store and start exploring.
app-storeplay-store