World Greates

Great News for the World

2009-06-10T10:45:00.000-07:00

Great News for the World
With his massive pledge to the Gates Foundation, Warren Buffett is changing the way people think about giving Warren Buffett's gift of $31 billion to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is the largest gift in history by a multiple of 20, excluding the Gateses' $29 billion gift (see BusinessWeek.com, 6/27/06, It will eventually drive the Gates Foundation's endowment to double its size. Indeed, the endowment of the Gates Foundation—already the richest in the U.S.—will be larger than the combined endowments of the other 9 foundations

Velupillai Prabhakaran-LTTE

2009-05-24T08:42:00.000-07:00

18, 2009[1][2][6]) was the founder and leader of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), a militant organization that sought to create an independent Tamil state in the north and east of Sri Lanka. LTTE waged a violent secessionist campaign in Sri Lanka that led to it being designated a terrorist organization by 32 countries.[7]
Prabhakaran was wanted by Interpol for terrorism, murder, organized crime and terrorism conspiracy.[8] He also had arrest warrants against him in Sri Lanka and India. On May 18, 2009, the Sri Lankan Government announced that Velupillai Prabhakaran had been killed, while trying to escape advancing troops, in an ambulance.[1][2][9][10] However, UK-based Tamil Tiger spokesperson Selvarasa Pathmanathan claimed that Prabhakaran was "still alive".[11]. On May 19, Sri Lanka's Defence Ministry revealed that a body by the shore of Nandikadal lagoon had been identified as Prabhakaran. Sri Lanka media showed video of the body.[12] However, the LTTE later confirmed Prabhakaran's death,[13] stating that their leader had "attained martyrdom

Velupillai Prabhakaran was born in the northern coastal town of Velvettithurai on November 26, 1954, to Thiruvenkadam Velupillai and Vallipuram Parvathy.[15][16] Angered by what he saw as discrimination against Tamil people by successive Sri Lankan governments, he joined the student group TIP during the standardization debates.[17] In 1972 Prabhakaran founded the Tamil New Tigers (TNT)[18] which was a successor to many earlier organizations that protested against the post-colonial political direction of the country, in which the minority Sri Lankan Tamils were pitted against the majority Sinhalese people.Political situation[›]
In 1975, after becoming heavily involved in the Tamil movement, he carried out the first major political murder by a Tamil militant group, assassinating the mayor of Jaffna, Alfred Duraiappah, by shooting him at point-blank range when he was about to enter the Hindu temple at Ponnaalai. The assassination was in response to the 1974 Tamil conference incident, for which the Tamil radicals had blamed Duraiappah,[19] because he backed the then ruling Sri Lanka Freedom Party. He was also seen by Tamil militants as betraying the Tamil nationalist sentiments in the Jaffna Peninsula, by allying with the Sinhalese majority government.[20]

[edit] Tamil Tigers

[edit] Founding of the LTTE
On May 5, 1976, the TNT was renamed the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), commonly known as the Tamil Tigers.[21]
Religion is not a major factor in his philosophy or ideology, but the LTTE can be characterized as anti-Buddhist.[22] The LTTE is also an organization that does not cite any material from religion or religious texts in any of its ideological documents and propaganda but are driven only by the idea of Sri Lankan Tamil nationalism and considers it as the only single-minded approach and inspiration towards the attainment of an independent Tamil Eelam.

[edit] Press conference at Killinochchi
Prabhakaran's first and only major press conference was held in Killinochchi on April 10, 2002.[23] It was reported that more than 200 journalists from the local and foreign media attended this event, and they had to go through a 10-hour security screening before the event[23] in which Anton Balasingham introduced the LTTE leader as the "President and Prime minister of Tamil Eelam."
A number of questions were asked about LTTE's commitment towards the erstwhile peace process and Prabhakaran and Dr. Anton Balasingham jointly answered the questions.
Answering a question from one of the reporters Prabhakaran said that he has instructed the LTTE cadres to kill him if he compromised on the goal of independent state.[23]
Repeated questions of his involvement in the Rajiv Gandhi assassination were only answered in a sober note by both Balasingham and Prabhakaran. They called it a "tragic incident" ("Thunbiyal Chambavam", as quoted in Tamil) and they requested the press "not to dig into an incident that happened 10 years ago."
During the interview he stated that the right condition has not risen to give up the demand of Tamil Eelam. He further mentioned that "There are three fundamentals. That is Tamil homeland, Tamil nationality and Tamil right to self-determination. These are the fundamental demands of the Tamil people. Once these demands are accepted or a political solution is put forward by recognising these three fundamentals and our people are satisfied with the solutions we will consider giving up the demand for Eelam." He further added that Tamil Eelam was not only the demand of the LTTE but also the demand of the Tamil people. [23]
Prabhakaran also answered a number of questions in which he reaffirmed their commitment towards peace process, quoted "We are sincerely committed to the peace process. It is because we are sincerely committed to peace that we continued a four month cessation of hostilities" and was also firm in de-proscription of the LTTE by Sri Lanka and India, "We want the government of India to lift the ban on the LTTE. We will raise the issue at the appropriate time."
Prabhakaran also insisted firmly that only de-proscription would bring forth an amenable solution to the ongoing peace process mediated by Norway: "We have informed the government, we have told the Norwegians that de-proscription is a necessary condition for the commencements of talks."[24][25]

Bangaru Usharani

2009-05-17T08:21:00.000-07:00

Bangaru Usharani win on Megastar Chiranjeevi at palakole Assembly in Andhra Pradesh in Indian Elections 2009.

Smt. Bangaru Usha Rani is the Congress candidate for Palacole Assembly Constituency (West Godavari District) 2009 Andhra Pradesh Legislative Assembly Elections.

Prafulla Chandra

2009-02-18T08:36:00.000-08:00

Prafulla Chandra

Prafulla Chandra was a great scientist. But he had several other interests also, in which he shone equally well.He had an abiding interest in literature. He knew by heart many passages from Shakespeare's plays and the poems of Tagore and of Madhusudan Dutt. He was well read in English literature. In 1932 he wrote his autobiography in English and named it 'The Life and Experience of a Bengali Chemist'. It was praised every where. Later, he himself translated it into Bengali. The book was called 'Atma Charita'. In recognition of his service to Bengali literature he was twice electedPresident of the Bengali Literary Conference.Prafulla Chandra was the President of the National Council of Education. He believed that it was not enough for students to acquire degrees like Bachelor of Science or Master of Science; they should endeavor to acquire real knowledge. In his opinion, to take degrees just to get government jobs was a waste. The students should rather get technical education and start their own business. Young men should enter trade and industries by themselves. He said that the medium of instruction in schools and colleges should be the mother tongue. It is much easier to acquire knowledge in one's own language.Social service was a great. Ideal in Prafulla Chandra's life. He used to remember what he had told his mother in his youth: "I will earn money and regain the Property of the family". He said a nobler ideal was to spend one's wealth in the service of fellow-beings. He practiced what he taught; he spent all his earnings on his students and the needy people around him.Prafulla Chandra used to keep only a small portion of his income for his own needs. He spent the rest to help poor students and schools and colleges. He had shares valued at a lake rupees in the Bengal Chemical company; these he gave away as an endowment. The profit from this was used for the benefit of poor widows, orphans, and to help spinning and the production of Khadi. The rest of his property was given to the Brahmo Samaj, a religious organization, and to a high school in Raruli founded in the name of his father.It was his strong desire that Hindus should set right the defects in their society like untouchability, child marriage and the giving of dowry. He severely opposed these evils.He had a scientific outlook and worked sincerely. He was never satisfied with mere words. When people underwent suffering because of floods, famines or earthquakes, he worked actively to help them. He would organize committees for their relief and with their help procure food, clothes and money for the victims. He worked hard day and night for such causes.In 1921 there was a famine in Khulna District and in 1922 a severe flood in North Bengal, Thousands of people lost all their possessions.When they begged for help, the government did not pay muchattention. Prafulla Chandra organized a relief committee which included leading European and Indian citizens of Calcutta. He made his college the center of relief operations. With the help of his students and of the citizens, he collected clothes and food as well Es large sums of money. These were quickly given to the needy victims. In 1931, there was again a big flood in Bengal. Prafulla Chandra again helped thousands and thousands of people troubled by the flood.Pratulla Chandra had great respect for the Charaka and Khadi movement started by Gandhiji. At first he was doubtful whether the crude spinning wheel could achieve what an industry could easily do. But when he saw that the spinning wheel gave both work and earnings to the poor villagers, he was convinced of its usefulness. He himself began to spin yarn with the Charaka at least for an hour everyday. Till the end of his life he used to wear only Khadi clothes. Because of his very great love of Khadi, some of his friends called him 'Charakashri' or 'Sir Khaddar'!Prafulla Chandra was very affectionate towards his students. He was overjoyed when they received awards of honors. He used to repeat the Sanskrit saying, 'A man may desire victory always but he should welcome defeat at the hands of his own disciples'. Famous Indian scientists like Meghnad Saha and Shanthi Swarup Bhatnagar were among his students. Prafulla Chandra followed a regular timetable. He had strict control over his diet and habits, and was regular in his exercises, He would not waste time. He always wore clean Khadi clothes. But they were often not passed. He would not allow others to serve him. He himself washed his clothes and polished his shoes. But he was very generous in. helping others. One day a student who was taking care of his daily food bought plantains for an Anna and a halt (equivalent to 9 Paise), instead of the usual halt an Anna (3 paise). He had spent more money so that his teacher might have bigger and tastierteacher-Might have bigger scolded him fruits. ButPrafulla Chandra for wasting precious money. The same day a social worker by name Ghosh came to him and appealed for help to an orphanage, which was short of funds.Prafulla Chandra called the same student and asked him to look into his bank Pass Book and see what the balance was. He had Rs. 3,500 at credit. Prafulla Chandra wrote out a cheque for Rs. 3,000 and gave it to Mr.Ghosh. The student was astonished that his teacher, who had scolded him in the morning for the sake of just one Anna, now gave away three thousand rupees without any hesitation!Prafulla Chandra was very simple in his clothes. He was unhappy when he saw Indians dressed in European style. Sometimes his simple clothes used to land him in difficulties. Once he was appointed as a member of a government committee. The meeting of the committee was held at the Grand Hotel, Calcutta. Prafulla Chandra went there early and was waiting for others. The servant there thought that Prafulla Chandra also was a servant waiting for his master. He asked him, "When is your master coming?"The operator of a lift in a hotel once refused to take him in the lift. He said, "People like you should climb the stairs. The lift is for Europeans." Prafulla Chandra would not permit such an insult to Indian clothes. He complained to the management and got the operator warned.For many years, Prafulla Chandra used to spend an hour or two at Calcutta's large maiden every evening, in the company of his friends and students. All subjects under the sun were discussed there freely and solutions offered with confidence and finality. Old and young were equally free to participate and give their opinion.Whenever he got some leisure, Prafulla Chandra used to go to his native village Raruli and spend his time there with the simple villagers. He helped them as much as he could. He never forgot his life in the village.At the 70th birthday celebrations ofPrafulla Chandra, poet Rabindranath Tagore praised his exemplary life. He said, "in the Upanishads, we learn 'the one became Many". Acharya Prafulla Chandra has devoted his life to his students; he now lives in the hearts of many.In his 75th year Prafulla Chandra Ray retired from the Professor's post. In 1941 the Calcutta University and the public celebrated his eightieth birthday.Acharya Prafulla Chandra Ray passed away on the 16th of June 1944; he died in the same room he had occupied for twenty-five years. He was 83 years old at the time.When India was still under foreign rule and when facilities for scientific research were very meager in the Country, Acharya Ray achieved great fame even in distant countries by his brilliant research. He discovered Mercurous Nitrite, when scientists did not know that such a chemical could exist. When it was thought that Indians were backward and that they should learn everything from the West, he wrote his famous book 'The History of Hindu Chemistry. This book served to open the eyes of many Indians and foreigners. When he grew up, he found the family burdened with debts. He not only repaid the debts but also spent large sums of money earned by him to help students and the poor, and on scientific research. When catastrophes like famine, flood or earthquake struck, this scientist -professor led the way to bring relief to the victims. He did not confine himself to his laboratory. Acharya Prafulla Chandra Ray was a great scientist who was endowed with noble human qualities. He was also a great patriot and social worker.

Louis Pasteur

2008-11-27T06:53:00.000-08:00

Louis Pasteur

Let us pay homage to Louis Pasteur, the scientific genius who informed the world about the intricate relationship between health and diseases. Certainly the importance of Pasteur's research can be etched on the annals of medical development, particularly the first vaccines devised for humans. He also challenged the myth on spontaneous generation, thereby setting the stage for modern biology and biochemistry.

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Louis Pasteur

Louis Pasteur was born in Dole, France but grew up in Arbois, an only son of a poorly educated tanner. In his early years his interests were bound with fishing and portrait painting. In fact, many contemporaries can attest to this home grown talent. All this however changed during his studies at the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris. It was at this school that Pasteur was molded on the profession that he was destined to be in; thus started the long and arduous journey of scientific discovery.

Not known to many, Louis Pasteur the father of microbiology and immunology, was a chemist and while working for his doctorate degree in chemistry he was assigned to crystallize tartaric acid. His research on the molecular structures of this compound led to the launching of a new science called stereochemistry. This discovery held deeper meaning for Pasteur, since the asymmetrical organic molecules were found indicative of living processes. It was this particular discovery that honed Pasteur with the "inescapable forward moving logic" in his study of alcohol fermentation.

After his marriage to the Marie Laurent, daughter of the Strasbourg University Rector, Louis Pasteur moved to Lille, France, an industrial town with distilleries and factories. It was here that his theory about fermentation was put to good use. In the summer of 1856, he was confronted with a problem on improper fermentation. Instead of the by-product alcohol, lactic acid was produced. In the course of his research Louis Pasteur subjected the mixture to high temperature; killing in effect the microorganism, thereby sterilizing (pasteurizing) it before introducing pure cultures of microbes and yeast from where a predictable fermentation was achieved.

Amidst the jubilation on the help extended by Louis Pasteur with distillers on the fermentation process, a debate was ongoing in the scientific world on the theory of "spontaneous generation". Pasteur joined the fray and debunked the theory that beetles, maggots, eels and microbes could arise simultaneously from decaying matter. By a simple experiment he was able to prove that under no circumstance can microscopic beings be born into the world without germs, without parents similar to themselves. Thus he single handedly extinguished the fire on "spontaneous generation".

Louis Pasteur, through his research, was able to provide relief to the French silk industry by giving the silkworm growers the ability to select which type is applicable to their requirements. But the crowning achievement of his career was his "germ theory of disease". It brought to the open how specific microorganisms can bring about important diseases such as cholera, diphtheria, scarlet fever, childbirth fever, syphilis and smallpox. Though the medical community was late to admit, in the end they did follow Pasteur's lead.

In the course of his lifetime Louis Pasteur was able to develop vaccines for anthrax and chicken cholera, helping the dairy and poultry industry rise on its feet. The last research that Louis Pasteur did for humanity involved the development of the anti-rabies vaccine which proved to be very successful.

Rumor Has It …

Louis Pasteur once tickled pygmies in African while on a goodwill mission. According the legend Louis Pasteur was lost in the Jungles of the Congo, captured by pygmies and was about to be eaten in a ceremony of cannibals. The quick-witted Louis Pasteur told the chief a knock-knock joke, followed by a knock on the head and escaped a boiling pot and into the jungle. What was this knock-knock joke? Something to do with an orange and a banana.

Subhash Chandra Bose

2008-10-06T01:09:00.000-07:00

Subhas Chandra Bose

Subhash Chandra Bose (January 23, 1897-August 18, 1945) also known as Netaji, was a prominent leader of the Indian independence movement against British colonial rule. Bose helped to organize and later led the Indian National Army, put together with Indian prisoners-of-war and plantation workers from Singapore and other parts of Southeast Asia.

“Give me blood and I shall give you freedom” was one of the most popular statements made by him, whereby he urges the people of India to join him in his freedom movement.

Early life

Subhash Chandra Bose was born to an affluent Bengali family in Cuttack, Orissa. His father, Janakinath Bose, was a public prosecutor who believed in orthodox nationalism and later became a member of the Bengal Legislative Council. With eight brothers and six sisters, Bose’s family was large, but disciplined. He loved to read and was fascinated with religion, discipline, and self-control. As a youth, he did social service and after reading Vivekananda’s writings, “selfless service” became the motto guiding his life.

Recognizing his son’s intellect, Bose’s father was determined that Bose should become a high-ranking civil servant. He attended the Protestant European School and the Ravenshaw Collegiate School in Cuttack and later graduated with honours from the Scottish Church College, Calcutta. He was placed second in his university examinations and participated as a member of the India Defence Corps, then a newly-formed military training unit at the University of Calcutta. Afterwards he travelled to England and attended Fitzwilliam Hall at the University of Cambridge.

In 1920, Bose took the Indian Civil Service entrance examination and was ranked second. However, he resigned from the prestigious Indian Civil Service in April 1921 despite his high ranking in the merit list, and went ahead to join the freedom movement. After returning to India, he joined the Congress party and was particularly active in its youth wing. Bose’s ideas did not match with that of Gandhi’s belief in non-violence. So he returned to Kolkata to work under Chittaranjan Das, the Bengali freedom fighter and co-founder (with Motilal Nehru) of the Swarajya (Self Rule) Party. In 1921, Bose organised a boycott of the celebrations to mark the Prince of Wales’ visit to India. This led to his being imprisoned. In April 1924, Bose was elected the Chief Executive Officer of the newly constituted Calcutta Corporation. Later, in October that year, Bose was arrested as a suspected terrorist. First, he was in Alipore jail and later he was exiled to Mandalay in Burma.

In June 1925, Bose was deeply struck by the sudden loss of his mentor Chittaranjan Das. At the end of 1926 he was nominated in absentia, as a candidate for the Bengal Legislative Assembly. On May 16, 1927 he was released from jail due to ill-health. The two years in Mandalay increased his confidence and strength. By December 1927, Bose with Jawaharlal Nehru became the the General Secretary of the Congress. On January 23, 1930, Bose was once again arrested for leading an “Independence” procession. After being released from jail on September 25, he was elected as the Mayor of the City of Calcutta. He was incarcerated eleven times by the British over a span of twenty years, either in India or in Rangoon. He spent many years in various capacities as the Chief Executive Officer of the Calcutta Municipal Corporation (where Chittaranjan Das had previously been Mayor), and later as Mayor himself. With Jawaharlal Nehru he was one of the radical Left wing leaders of the Congress Party. He was exiled from India, during the mid 1930s to Europe, where he stated India’s cause for self-rule before gatherings and conferences (like the Second Communist International). After his father’s death the British authorities allowed him to land at Calcutta’s airport only for the religious rites, which would be followed by his swift departure. During this time he traveled extensively in India and in Europe before stating his political opposition to Gandhi. He became the president of the Haripura Indian National Congress in 1938, against Gandhi’s wishes. He was elected for a second term in 1939 in Tripura Congress Session; Gandhi had supported Pattabhi Sitaramayya and commented “Pattavi’s defeat is my defeat” after learning the election results. Although Bose won the election, Gandhi’s continued opposition led to the resignation of the Working Committee. In the face of this gesture of no-confidence Bose himself resigned. Bose then formed an independent party, the All India Forward Bloc.

Actions during the Second World War

Bose advocated the approach that the political instability at war-time Britain should be taken advantage of-rather than simply wait for the British to grant political “Home Rule” after the end of the war (which was the view of Gandhi, Nehru and a section of the Congress leadership) at the time. In this he was influenced by the examples of Italian statesmen Giuseppe Garibaldi and Giuseppe Mazzini. During his stay in Europe from 1933 to 1936, he met several European leaders and thinkers, including Benito Mussolini, Eduard Benes, Karl Seitz, Eamon De Valera, Romain Rolland, and Alfred Rosenberg. He came to believe that India could achieve political freedom only if it had political, military and diplomatic support from outside and that an independent nation necessitated the creation of a national army. His correspondence reveals that despite his sheer dislike for British subjugation, he was deeply impressed by their methodical and systematic approach and their steadfastedly disciplinarian outlook towards life. In England, he exchanged ideas with British Labour Party leaders and political thinkers on the future of India. He came to accept the view that a free India needed Socialist authoritarianism, on the lines of Turkey’s Kemal Ataturk for at least two decades.

In Germany

At the start of World War II, Bose escaped his incarceration at home by taking the guise of a Pathan insurance agent (“Ziaudddin”) to Afghanistan and from there to Moscow with the passport of an Italian nobleman “Count Orlando Mazzotta”. From Moscow he reached Rome and from there he traveled to Germany where he instituted the Special Bureau for India under Adam von Trott zu Solz, broadcasting on the German-sponsored Azad Hind Radio. He founded the Free India Centre in Berlin and created the Indian Legion (consisting of some 4500 soldiers) out of Indian prisoners of war who had previously fought for the British in North Africa, but had capitulated to Erwin Rommel’s Afrika Korps. The Azad Hind legion was attached to the Waffen SS, and they swore their allegiance to Hitler and Bose for the independence of India.

Bose was deeply dissapointed with Hitler when the Germans invaded the Soviet Union and decided to leave Nazi Germany. Besides, Hitler had shown little interest for the cause of Indian independence. He travelled by submarine around the Cape of Good Hope to Imperial Japan, which helped him to raise his army in Singapore. This was the only civilian-transfer across two different submarines of two different navies in World War II.

In Japan

The Indian National Army (INA) consisted of some 85,000 regular troops, a separate women’s army unit named after Rani Lakshmi Bai (in a regular army, the women’s army unit was the first of its kind in Asia), who gave her life in the First War of Independence in 1857. These were under the aegis of a provisional government, with its own currency, court and civil code, named the “Provisional Government of Free India” (or the Arzi Hukumate Azad Hind) and recognised by nine Axis states: Germany, Japan, Italy, Croatia, Nationalist China, Siam, Burma, Manchukuo and the Philippines. This government had participated as a delegate or observer in the so-called Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.

En route to India, some of Bose’s troops assisted in the Japanese victory over the British in the battles of Arakan and Meiktila, along with the Burmese National Army led by Ba Maw and Aung San. The Provisional Government and the INA were established in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands in the Bay of Bengal, part of the British Indian Empire. On Indian mainland, the Indian Tricolor was raised for the first time in the town in Moirang, in Manipur, in northeastern India. The other towns of Kohima and Imphal, were placed under siege by divisions of the Japanese, the Burmese and the Gandhi and Nehru Brigades of I.N.A.. At the time of the Great Bengal Famine of 1943, during which millions died of starvation, Bose had offered (through radio) Burmese rice to the victims of the famine. The British authorities in India (and in the UK) refused the offer.

When the Japanese were defeated at the battles of Kohima and Imphal, the Provisional Government’s aim of establishing a base in mainland India was lost forever and the INA was forced to pull-back along with the defeated Japanese Imperial Army. Japan’s surrender after the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki also led to the eventual surrender of the Indian National Army.

Political views

Even though Bose and Gandhi had differing ideologies, the latter called Bose the “Patriot of Patriots” (Bose had called Gandhi “Father of the Nation”). He has been given belated recognition in India, and especially in West Bengal; Calcutta’s civil airport and a university have been named after him. Many of the symbols of the Bose’s provisional government, which were also associated with the Congress, have been adopted in independent India: Rabindranath Tagore’s “Jana Gana Mana”, which was the national song of the Provisional Government of Azad Hind is independent India’s National Anthem, and the tricolour as India’s national flag.

His alliance with the Axis continues to be controversial; many in India consider him a hero for his forceful stance against oppressive British imperialism. In working with the Japanese he was however fighting his own countrymen, who defended India within the unpoliticised volunteer British Indian Army against the Japanese invasion.

At the time of the start of the Second World War, great divisions existed in the Indian independence movement about whether to exploit the weakness of the British to achieve independence. Some felt that any distinctions between the political allegiances and ideologies of the warring factions of Europe were inconsequential in the face of the possibility of Indian independence, and that it was hypocritical of the British to condemn pro-democracy Indians for allying themselves with anti-democratic Axis forces when the British themselves showed so little respect for democracy or democratic reforms in India. Others felt that it was inappropriate to seek concessions when Britain itself was in peril, and found their distaste for Nazi Germany outweighed their concerns about Independence.

Bose, in particular, was accused of ‘collaborating’ with the Axis; he counter-attacked the allegation criticising the British campaign during World War-II, saying that while Britain was fighting for the freedom of the European nations under Nazi control, it did not grant its own colonies, including India their rightful independence. It may be observed that along with Nehru, Bose had organized and led protest marches against the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931, and of China itself in 1938, when he was Congress president. During that period, Chinese leader Chiang Kai Shek was feted in India and medical aid and food supplies were sent to Chinese areas which suffered the worst brunt of Japanese imperialism. That he eventually abandoned his political stance (which initially was that of Gandhi and Nehru) reflects his deep discontent with the nature of the British rule, and a growing belief that the formation of an Indian free state was nowhere on the British political roadmap. At the Tripura Congress session, he made his views quite explicit: Britain had forced a war on India, without bothering to consult Indians.

It is interesting to note that Bose’s earlier correspondences (prior to 1939) reflect his deep disapproval of the racist practices of and annulment of democratic institutions in Nazi Germany. Though Bose did ally himself with the Axis powers, there is little to suggest he shared any of their doctrines of racial superiority; instead it appears he was motivated to join them largely out of political pragmatism.

Re-evaluation of Netaji

The INA is fondly remembered by some Japanese and Indian historians who see Japanese efforts to support Bose as supporting the view that it was fighting a war on behalf of the oppressed peoples of Asia, in addition, the INA is seen by some as an organisation devoid of the divisive energies of parochialism that have since plagued India.

Gandhi called Bose the “Patriot of Patriots” (Bose had called Gandhi “Father of the Nation”). Bose’s portrait is also hung in the Indian Parliament and a statue has been erected in front of the West Bengal Legislative Assembly.

Bose was posthumously awarded the Bharat Ratna, India’s highest civilian award in 1992, but it was later withdrawn in response to a Supreme Court of India directive following a Public Interest Litigation filed in the Court against the “posthumous” nature of the award. The Award Committee could not give conclusive evidence of Bose’s death and thus it invalidated the “posthumous” award.

Death

Bose is supposed to have died in a plane crash over Taiwan while flying to Tokyo. However, his body was never recovered, and conspiracy theories concerning his possible survival abound. One such claims that Bose actually died in Siberia, while in Soviet captivity. Mr. Harin Shah, an Indian journalist, visited Taipei and was shown a plane crash site (supposedly of Bose’s plane).

However, the Taiwan Government told an Indian journalist investigating into Bose’s death that Bose could not have died in a plane crash in the country, stating that there “were no plane crashes at Taipei between 14 August and 20 September 1945.”

Despite this testimony three separate Indian government investigations have concluded that Bose died in the plane crash, although a fourth one-man board convened in 1999, the Mukherjee Commission, will not issue its conclusions until 14 May 2005.

Nelson Mandela

2008-10-06T01:00:00.000-07:00

Nelson Rolihlahla MANDELA

Profile of Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela

Nelson Mandela's greatest pleasure, his most private moment, is watching the sun set with the music of Handel or Tchaikovsky playing.

Locked up in his cell during daylight hours, deprived of music, both these simple pleasures were denied him for decades. With his fellow prisoners, concerts were organised when possible, particularly at Christmas time, where they would sing. Nelson Mandela finds music very uplifting, and takes a keen interest not only in European classical music but also in African choral music and the many talents in South African music. But one voice stands out above all - that of Paul Robeson, whom he describes as our hero.

The years in jail reinforced habits that were already entrenched: the disciplined eating regime of an athlete began in the 1940s, as did the early morning exercise. Still today Nelson Mandela is up by 4.30am, irrespective of how late he has worked the previous evening. By 5am he has begun his exercise routine that lasts at least an hour. Breakfast is by 6.30, when the days newspapers are read. The day s work has begun.

With a standard working day of at least 12 hours, time management is critical and Nelson Mandela is extremely impatient with unpunctuality, regarding it as insulting to those you are dealing with.

When speaking of the extensive travelling he has undertaken since his release from prison, Nelson Mandela says: I was helped when preparing for my release by the biography of Pandit Nehru, who wrote of what happens when you leave jail. My daughter Zinzi says that she grew up without a father, who, when he returned, became a father of the nation. This has placed a great responsibility of my shoulders. And wherever I travel, I immediately begin to miss the familiar - the mine dumps, the colour and smell that is uniquely South African, and, above all, the people. I do not like to be away for any length of time. For me, there is no place like home.

Mandela accepted the Nobel Peace Prize as an accolade to all people who have worked for peace and stood against racism. It was as much an award to his person as it was to the ANC and all South Africa s people. In particular, he regards it as a tribute to the people of Norway who stood against apartheid while many in the world were silent.

We know it was Norway that provided resources for farming; thereby enabling us to grow food; resources for education and vocational training and the provision of accommodation over the years in exile. The reward for all this sacrifice will be the attainment of freedom and democracy in South Africa, in an open society which respects the rights of all individuals. That goal is now in sight, and we have to thank the people and governments of Norway and Sweden for the tremendous role they played.

Personal Tastes

Breakfast of plain porridge, with fresh fruit and fresh milk.
A favourite is the traditionally prepared meat of a freshly slaughtered sheep, and the delicacy Amarhewu (fermented corn-meal).

Biographical Details

Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela was born in a village near Umtata in the Transkei on the 18 July 1918. His father was the principal councillor to the Acting Paramount Chief of Thembuland. After his father s death, the young Rolihlahla became the Paramount Chief s ward to be groomed to assume high office. However, influenced by the cases that came before the Chief s court, he determined to become a lawyer. Hearing the elders stories of his ancestors valour during the wars of resistance in defence of their fatherland, he dreamed also of making his own contribution to the freedom struggle of his people.

After receiving a primary education at a local mission school, Nelson Mandela was sent to Healdtown, a Wesleyan secondary school of some repute where he matriculated. He then enrolled at the University College of Fort Hare for the Bachelor of Arts Degree where he was elected onto the Student's Representative Council. He was suspended from college for joining in a protest boycott. He went to Johannesburg where he completed his BA by correspondence, took articles of clerkship and commenced study for his LLB. He entered politics in earnest while studying in Johannesburg by joining the African National Congress in 1942.

At the height of the Second World War a small group of young Africans, members of the African National Congress, banded together under the leadership of Anton Lembede. Among them were William Nkomo, Walter Sisulu, Oliver R. Tambo, Ashby P. Mda and Nelson Mandela. Starting out with 60 members, all of whom were residing around the Witwatersrand, these young people set themselves the formidable task of transforming the ANC into a mass movement, deriving its strength and motivation from the unlettered millions of working people in the towns and countryside, the peasants in the rural areas and the professionals.

Their chief contention was that the political tactics of the old guard' leadership of the ANC, reared in the tradition of constitutionalism and polite petitioning of the government of the day, were proving inadequate to the tasks of national emancipation. In opposition to the old guard', Lembede and his colleagues espoused a radical African Nationalism grounded in the principle of national self-determination. In September 1944 they came together to found the African National Congress Youth League (ANCYL).

Mandela soon impressed his peers by his disciplined work and consistent effort and was elected to the Secretaryship of the Youth League in 1947. By painstaking work, campaigning at the grassroots and through its mouthpiece Inyaniso' (Truth) the ANCYL was able to canvass support for its policies amongst the ANC membership. At the 1945 annual conference of the ANC, two of the League s leaders, Anton Lembede and Ashby Mda, were elected onto the National Executive Committee (NEC). Two years later another Youth League leader, Oliver R Tambo became a member of the NEC.

Spurred on by the victory of the National Party which won the 1948 all-White elections on the platform of Apartheid, at the 1949 annual conference, the Programme of Action, inspired by the Youth League, which advocated the weapons of boycott, strike, civil disobedience and non-co-operation was accepted as official ANC policy.

The Programme of Action had been drawn up by a sub-committee of the ANCYL composed of David Bopape, Ashby Mda, Nelson Mandela, James Njongwe, Walter Sisulu and Oliver Tambo. To ensure its implementation the membership replaced older leaders with a number of younger men. Walter Sisulu, a founding member of the Youth League was elected Secretary-General. The conservative Dr A.B. Xuma lost the presidency to Dr J.S. Moroka, a man with a reputation for greater militancy. The following year, 1950, Mandela himself was elected to the NEC at national conference.

The ANCYL programme aimed at the attainment of full citizenship, direct parliamentary representation for all South Africans. In policy documents of which Mandela was an important co-author, the ANCYL paid special attention to the redistribution of the land, trade union rights, education and culture. The ANCYL aspired to free and compulsory education for all children, as well as mass education for adults.

When the ANC launched its Campaign for the Defiance of Unjust Laws in 1952, Mandela was elected National Volunteer-in-Chief. The Defiance Campaign was conceived as a mass civil disobedience campaign that would snowball from a core of selected volunteers to involved more and more ordinary people, culminating in mass defiance. Fulfilling his responsibility as Volunteer-in-Chief, Mandela travelled the country organising resistance to discriminatory legislation. Charged and brought to trial for his role in the campaign, the court found that Mandela and his co-accused had consistently advised their followers to adopt a peaceful course of action and to avoid all violence.

For his part in the Defiance Campaign, Mandela was convicted of contravening the Suppression of Communism Act and given a suspended prison sentence. Shortly after the campaign ended, he was also prohibited from attending gatherings and confined to Johannesburg for six months.

During this period of restrictions, Mandela wrote the attorneys admission examination and was admitted to the profession. He opened a practice in Johannesburg, in partnership with Oliver Tambo. In recognition of his outstanding contribution during the Defiance Campaign Mandela had been elected to the presidency of both the Youth League and the Transvaal region of the ANC at the end of 1952, he thus became a deputy president of the ANC itself.

Of their law practice, Oliver Tambo, ANC National Chairman at the time of his death in April 1993, has written:

To reach our desks each morning Nelson and I ran the gauntlet of patient queues of people overflowing from the chairs in the waiting room into the corridors... To be landless (in South Africa) can be a crime, and weekly we interviewed the delegations of peasants who came to tell us how many generations their families had worked a little piece of land from which they were now being ejected... To live in the wrong area can be a crime... Our buff office files carried thousands of these stories and if, when we started our law partnership, we had not been rebels against apartheid, our experiences in our offices would have remedied the deficiency. We had risen to professional status in our community, but every case in court, every visit to the prisons to interview clients, reminded us of the humiliation and suffering burning into our people.

Nor did their professional status earn Mandela and Tambo any personal immunity from the brutal apartheid laws. They fell foul of the land segregation legislation, and the authorities demanded that they move their practice from the city to the back of beyond, as Mandela later put it, miles away from where clients could reach us during working hours. This was tantamount to asking us to abandon our legal practice, to give up the legal service of our people... No attorney worth his salt would easily agree to do that, said Mandela and the partnership resolved to defy the law.

Nor was the government alone in trying to frustrate Mandela s legal practice. On the grounds of his conviction under the Suppression of Communism Act, the Transvaal Law Society petitioned the Supreme Court to strike him off the roll of attorneys. The petition was refused with Mr Justice Ramsbottom finding that Mandela had been moved by a desire to serve his black fellow citizens and nothing he had done showed him to be unworthy to remain in the ranks of an honourable profession.

In 1952 Nelson Mandela was given the responsibility to prepare an organisational plan that would enable the leadership of the movement to maintain dynamic contact with its membership without recourse to public meetings. The objective was to prepare for the contingency of proscription by building up powerful local and regional branches to whom power could be devolved. This was the M-Plan, named after him.

During the early fifties Mandela played an important part in leading the resistance to the Western Areas removals and to the introduction of Bantu Education. He also played a significant role in popularising the Freedom Charter, adopted by the Congress of the People in 1955.

In the late fifties, Mandela s attention turned to the struggles against the exploitation of labour, the pass laws, the nascent Bantustan policy, and the segregation of the open universities. Mandela arrived at the conclusion very early on that the Bantustan policy was a political swindle and an economic absurdity. He predicted, with dismal prescience, that ahead there lay a grim programme of mass evictions, political persecutions, and police terror. On the segregation of the universities, Mandela observed that the friendship and inter-racial harmony that is forged through the admixture and association of various racial groups at the mixed universities constitute a direct threat to the policy of apartheid and baasskap, and that it was to remove that threat that the open universities were being closed to black students.

During the whole of the fifties, Mandela was the victim of various forms of repression. He was banned, arrested and imprisoned. For much of the latter half of the decade, he was one of the accused in the mammoth Treason Trial, at great cost to his legal practice and his political work. After the Sharpeville Massacre in 1960, the ANC was outlawed, and Mandela, still on trial, was detained.

The Treason Trial collapsed in 1961 as South Africa was being steered towards the adoption of the republic constitution. With the ANC now illegal the leadership picked up the threads from its underground headquarters. Nelson Mandela emerged at this time as the leading figure in this new phase of struggle. Under the ANC's inspiration, 1,400 delegates came together at an All-in African Conference in Pietermaritzburg during March 1961. Mandela was the keynote speaker. In an electrifying address he challenged the apartheid regime to convene a national convention, representative of all South Africans to thrash out a new constitution based on democratic principles. Failure to comply, he warned, would compel the majority (Blacks) to observe the forthcoming inauguration of the Republic with a mass general strike. He immediately went underground to lead the campaign. Although fewer answered the call than Mandela had hoped, it attracted considerable support throughout the country. The government responded with the largest military mobilisation since the war, and the Republic was born in an atmosphere of fear and apprehension.

Forced to live apart from his family, moving from place to place to evade detection by the government s ubiquitous informers and police spies, Mandela had to adopt a number of disguises. Sometimes dressed as a common labourer, at other times as a chauffeur, his successful evasion of the police earned him the title of the Black Pimpernel. It was during this time that he, together with other leaders of the ANC constituted a new specialised section of the liberation movement, Umkhonto we Sizwe, as an armed nucleus with a view to preparing for armed struggle. At the Rivonia trial, Mandela explained : "At the beginning of June 1961, after long and anxious assessment of the South African situation, I and some colleagues came to the conclusion that as violence in this country was inevitable, it would be wrong and unrealistic for African leaders to continue preaching peace and non-violence at a time when the government met our peaceful demands with force.

It was only when all else had failed, when all channels of peaceful protest had been barred to us, that the decision was made to embark on violent forms of political struggle, and to form Umkhonto we Sizwe...the Government had left us no other choice."

In 1961 Umkhonto we Sizwe was formed, with Mandela as its commander-in-chief. In 1962 Mandela left the country unlawfully and travelled abroad for several months. In Ethiopia he addressed the Conference of the Pan African Freedom Movement of East and Central Africa, and was warmly received by senior political leaders in several countries. During this trip Mandela, anticipating an intensification of the armed struggle, began to arrange guerrilla training for members of Umkhonto we Sizwe.

Not long after his return to South Africa Mandela was arrested and charged with illegal exit from the country, and incitement to strike.

Since he considered the prosecution a trial of the aspirations of the African people, Mandela decided to conduct his own defence. He applied for the recusal of the magistrate, on the ground that in such a prosecution a judiciary controlled entirely by whites was an interested party and therefore could not be impartial, and on the ground that he owed no duty to obey the laws of a white parliament, in which he was not represented.

Mandela prefaced this challenge with the affirmation: I detest racialism, because I regard it as a barbaric thing, whether it comes from a black man or a white man.

Mandela was convicted and sentenced to five years imprisonment. While serving his sentence he was charged, in the Rivonia Trial, with sabotage. Mandela s statements in court during these trials are classics in the history of the resistance to apartheid, and they have been an inspiration to all who have opposed it. His statement from the dock in the Rivonia Trial ends with these words:

I have fought against white domination, and I have fought against black domination. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve. But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.

Mandela was sentenced to life imprisonment and started his prison years in the notorious Robben Island Prison, a maximum security prison on a small island 7Km off the coast near Cape Town. In April 1984 he was transferred to Pollsmoor Prison in Cape Town and in December 1988 he was moved the Victor Verster Prison near Paarl from where he was eventually released. While in prison, Mandela flatly rejected offers made by his jailers for remission of sentence in exchange for accepting the bantustan policy by recognising the independence of the Transkei and agreeing to settle there. Again in the 'eighties Mandela rejected an offer of release on condition that he renounce violence. Prisoners cannot enter into contracts. Only free men can negotiate, he said.

Click image for map

Released on 11 February 1990, Mandela plunged wholeheartedly into his life's work, striving to attain the goals he and others had set out almost four decades earlier. In 1991, at the first national conference of the ANC held inside South Africa after being banned for decades, Nelson Mandela was elected President of the ANC while his lifelong friend and colleague, Oliver Tambo, became the organisation's National Chairperson.

Nelson Mandela has never wavered in his devotion to democracy, equality and learning. Despite terrible provocation, he has never answered racism with racism. His life has been an inspiration, in South Africa and throughout the world, to all who are oppressed and deprived, to all who are opposed to oppression and deprivation.

In a life that symbolises the triumph of the human spirit over man s inhumanity to man, Nelson Mandela accepted the 1993 Nobel Peace Prize on behalf of all South Africans who suffered and sacrificed so much to bring peace to our land.

A Brief Biography

Mandela's words, "The struggle is my life," are not to be taken lightly.

Nelson Mandela personifies struggle. He is still leading the fight against apartheid with extraordinary vigour and resilience after spending nearly three decades of his life behind bars. He has sacrificed his private life and his youth for his people, and remains South Africa's best known and loved hero.

Mandela has held numerous positions in the ANC: ANCYL secretary (1948); ANCYL president (1950); ANC Transvaal president (1952); deputy national president (1952) and ANC president (1991).

He was born at Qunu, near Umtata on 18 July 1918.

His father, Henry Mgadla Mandela, was chief councillor to Thembuland's acting paramount chief David Dalindyebo. When his father died, Mandela became the chief's ward and was groomed for the chieftainship.

Mandela matriculated at Healdtown Methodist Boarding School and then started a BA degree at Fort Hare. As an SRC member he participated in a student strike and was expelled, along with the late Oliver Tambo, in 1940. He completed his degree by correspondence from Johannesburg, did articles of clerkship and enrolled for an LLB at the University of the Witwatersrand.

In 1944 he helped found the ANC Youth League, whose Programme of Action was adopted by the ANC in 1949.

Mandela was elected national volunteer-in-chief of the 1952 Defiance Campaign. He travelled the country organising resistance to discriminatory legislation.

He was given a suspended sentence for his part in the campaign. Shortly afterwards a banning order confined him to Johannesburg for six months. During this period he formulated the "M Plan", in terms of which ANC branches were broken down into underground cells.

By 1952 Mandela and Tambo had opened the first black legal firm in the country, and Mandela was both Transvaal president of the ANC and deputy national president.

A petition by the Transvaal Law Society to strike Mandela off the roll of attorneys was refused by the Supreme Court.

In the 'fifties, after being forced through constant bannings to resign officially from the ANC, Mandela analysed the Bantustan policy as a political swindle. He predicted mass removals, political persecutions and police terror.

For the second half of the 'fifties, he was one of the accused in the Treason Trial. With Duma Nokwe, he conducted the defence.

When the ANC was banned after the Sharpeville massacre in 1960, he was detained until 1961 when he went underground to lead a campaign for a new national convention.

Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK), the military wing of the ANC, was born the same year. Under his leadership it launched a campaign of sabotage against government and economic installations.

In 1962 Mandela left the country for military training in Algeria and to arrange training for other MK members.

On his return he was arrested for leaving the country illegally and for incitement to strike. He conducted his own defence. He was convicted and jailed for five years in November 1962. While serving his sentence, he was charged, in the Rivonia trial, with sabotage and sentenced to life imprisonment.

A decade before being imprisoned, Mandela had spoken out against the introduction of Bantu Education, recommending that community activists "make every home, every shack or rickety structure a centre of learning".

Robben Island, where he was imprisoned, became a centre for learning, and Mandela was a central figure in the organised political education classes.

In prison Mandela never compromised his political principles and was always a source of strength for the other prisoners.

During the 'seventies he refused the offer of a remission of sentence if he recognised Transkei and settled there.

In the 'eighties he again rejected PW Botha's offer of freedom if he renounced violence.

It is significant that shortly after his release on Sunday 11 February 1990, Mandela and his delegation agreed to the suspension of armed struggle.

Mandela has honorary degrees from more than 50 international universities and is chancellor of the University of the North.

He was inaugurated as the first democratically elected State President of South Africa on 10 May 1994 - June 1999

Nelson Mandela retired from Public life in June 1999. He currently resides in his birth place - Qunu, Transkei.

Bhagat Singh

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Bhagat Singh

Bhagat Singh was born on September 27, 1907, in Khatkar Kalan, Punjab, in British India. His grandfather Arjan Singh, father Kishan Singh and uncle Ajit Singh, were all active in the freedom struggle.

While studying at the local D.A.V. School in Lahore, in 1916, young Bhagat Singh came into contact with some well-known political leaders like Lala Lajpat Rai and Ras Bihari Bose.

In response to Mahatma Gandhi’s call for non-cooperation against British rule in 1921, Bhagat Singh left his school and joined the National College newly opened at Lahore. At this college, which was a centre of revolutionary activities, he came into contact with revolutionaries such as Bhagwati Charan, Sukhdev and others. He became a member of the Hindustan Republican Association formed by the revolutionaries of Uttar Pradesh and was initiated into their firebrand activities.

The revolutionaries were branded as terrorists by the British government. They believed that given the unjust and oppressive nature of British rule, it was legitimate on their part to use violence as a weapon to overthrow the foreigners. So, they used bombs and guns against Britishers and robbed establishments belonging to the British or their sympathisers.

Their ideas differed from the Gandhian idea of a freedom movement based on non-violence or ahimsa. Gandhi’s ideas went on to become more prominent as the Indian freedom movement progressed.

But it is not merely as a bold militant-type figure that Bhagat Singh is remembered today. He was also a thinker who was steeped in the best traditions of socialistic thought, the theory that advocated collective or state ownership of the means of production – land, labour and capital. This is borne out in the numerous letters, pamphlets and articles that he wrote in the course of a short but turbulent life.

In a letter to an Indian publication, The Tribune of December 24, 1929, Bhagat Singh explained beautifully the meaning he and fellow socialists tried to convey by the phrase, Long Live Revolution. He wrote that by revolution, they did not so much mean violence, as “the spirit, the longing for a change for the better.” Since people generally get accustomed to the established order of things and begin to tremble at the very idea of a change, they needed to be roused from their lethargy and the revolutionary spirit had to be instilled in them.

A brutal attack by the police on veteran freedom fighter Lala Lajpat Rai at an anti-British procession caused his death on November 17 1928, in Lahore.

Bhagat Singh determined to avenge Lajpat Rai’s death by shooting the British official responsible for the killing, Deputy Inspector General Scott. He shot down Assistant Superintendent Saunders instead, mistaking him for Scott.

Then he made a dramatic escape from Lahore to Calcutta and from there to Agra, where he established a bomb factory.

The British government responded to the act by imposing severe measures like the Trades Disputes Bill. It was to protest against the passing of the Bill that he threw bombs in the Central Assembly Hall while the Assembly was in session. The bombs did not hurt anyone, but the noise they made was loud enough to wake up an enslaved nation from a long sleep.

After throwing the bombs, Bhagat Singh and his friend deliberately courted arrest by refusing to run away from the scene. During his trial, Bhagat Singh refused to employ any defence counsel.

In jail, he went on hunger strike to protest the inhuman treatment of fellow-political prisoners by jail authorities. Along with fellow comrades, Sukh Dev and Raj Guru, he was awarded the death sentence for his terroristic activities by a special tribunal on October 7, 1930.

Despite great popular pressure and numerous appeals by political leaders of India, Bhagat Singh and his associates were hanged in the early hours of March 23, 1931. Their bodies were cremated on the bank of the Sutlej in Ferozepur. Bhagat Singh was just 23 at that time. Old timers say that in many places, not a single hearth fire burned that day.

The last paragraph of the leaflet that he distributed (and wrote) in the Assembly Hall said: “We are sorry that we who attach such great sanctity to human life, we who dream of a very glorious future when man will be enjoying perfect peace and full liberty, have been forced to shed human blood. But sacrifice of individuals at the altar of the revolution will bring freedom to all, rendering exploitation of man by man impossible. Inquilaab Zindaabad (Long live the revolution).”

There was a time when the very mention of the name of the young revolutionary stirred the passions of most Indians. Today, the name evokes little emotion.

The method of remembering him, too, has become mechanical. The day Bhagat Singh was hanged is observed as Martyr’s Day, when the chief minister of Punjab makes a trip for a memorial function in Bhagat Singh’s memory. Needless to say, the politicians have used this occasion more for their ends.

And as for the children of the village, the high point for them is seeing the helicopter in which the chief minister travels.

Bhagat Singh continues to be martyred by the very people of the country whose freedom he fought for. And that is the biggest irony of all.

Mahatma Gandhi

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Mahatma Gandhi

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was born in the town of Porbander in the state of what is now Gujarat on 2 October 1869. He had his schooling in nearby Rajkot, where his father served as the adviser or prime minister to the local ruler. Though India was then under British rule, over 500 kingdoms, principalities, and states were allowed autonomy in domestic and internal affairs: these were the so-called 'native states'. Rajkot was one such state.

Mahatma Gandhi is one of the most famous Indians ever to have walked the planet. His campaigns of passive resistance and civil disobedience proved to be a great success; through his work, the less privileged people of the world have gained a higher quality of life.

After successfully studying law at University College, London, Gandhi returned to India. He tried in vain to set up a law firm in Bombay in 1891, but soon found work as a legal advisor in Durban, South Africa.

It must have been quite a culture shock for the young man on arriving in that country. Apartheid was thriving, so anybody who was not white was treated as inferior, second class citizens. Gandhi decided to do something about this problem though, and began his method of passive resistance and non-cooperation, drawing on the likes of Tolstoy and Jesus as his inspirations. It was by no means an easy ride. He regularly endured terms of imprisonment, and was harshly beaten several times. Twenty years of this type of campaigning paid off, when in 1914 the South African government made several concessions to the Indian people living there.

After the First World War, Gandhi decided to concentrate on improving life in his native India. His ideology was well received and he soon had a healthy following that regularly practised passive resistance. The British government didn’t like the campaigning and deemed it to be revolutionary. Consequently, British troops massacred many innocent Indians at a demonstration in 1920.

This caused Gandhi to instigate a policy of non-cooperation towards the Brits. Indians began removing their children from government run schools and masses of people began squatting in the streets to protest. Even when faced with physical punishments, such as being beaten with a truncheon, they would refuse to move.

In retaliation Britain imprisoned Gandhi, but he was soon released. In 1924, he was forced to call an end to the campaign of non-cooperation due to rising levels of violence from India towards Britain. Ironically, the opposite of what he preached was starting to take place. Six years later he began another campaign against the payment of tax, and many of his followers joined him on a demonstration march to the sea. In 1934, he formally resigned from politics, having been imprisoned several more times. When imprisoned, Gandhi would begin fasting in protest. The British hated this, because they knew that if he died whilst being wrongly imprisoned the repercussions from the Indian people would be catastrophic.

In 1947 India gained independence, something that Gandhi had worked towards for a long time. He was against partition though, wishing that those of Moslem and Hindu faith could live peacefully side-by-side. He was also very critical of the caste system, whereby some Indians of high social standing were deemed ‘untouchable’. Tragically, a crazed Hindu assassinated Gandhi in 1949.

If he had wanted, Gandhi could have lived a very comfortable life as a lawyer. Instead he devoted it to prayer, fasting and meditation. He wore basic clothes and lived off fruit, vegetables and milk. He gave up his personal comfort to bring well-being to millions of others.

A THIN INDIAN MAN WITH NOT MUCH hair sits alone on a bare floor, wearing nothing but a pair of cheap spectacles, studying the clutch of handwritten notes in his hand. The black – and – white photograph takes up a full page in the newspaper. In the top left-hand corner of the page, in full color, is a small rainbow – stripe apple. Below this, there’s a slangily American injection to “Think Different”. Such is the present-day power of business. Even the greatest of the dead may summarily be drafted into its image ad campaign. Once, a half-century ago, this bony man shaped a nation’s struggle for freedom. But that, as they say, is history. Now Gandhi is modeling for Apple. His thoughts don’t really count in this new incarnation. What counts is that he is considered to be “on message”, in line with the corporate philosophy of Apple.

The advertisement is odd enough to be worth dissecting a little. Obviously it is rich in unintentional comedy. M. K. Gandhi, as the photograph itself demonstrates, was a passionate opponent of modernity and technology, preferring the pencil to the typewriter, the loincloth to the business suite, the plowed field to the belching manufactory. Had the word processor been invented in his lifetime, he would almost certainly found it abhorrent. The very term word processor, with its overly technological ring, is unlikely to have found favor.

“Think Different”. Gandhi in his younger days a sophisticated and westernized lawyer, did indeed change his thinking more radically than most people do. Ghanshyam Das Birla, one of the merchant princes who backed him, once said, “He was more modern than I. But he made a conscious decision to go back to the Middle Ages”. This is not, presumably, the revolutionary new direction of thought that the good folks at Apple are seeking to encourage.

Gandhi today is up for grabs. He has become abstract, a historical, postmodern, no longer a man in and of his time but a free-floating concept, a part of available stock of cultural symbols, an image that can be borrowed, used, distorted, reunited to fit many different purposes, and to the devil with historicity or truth.

Richard Attenborough’s much-Oscared movie Gandhi, struck me, when it was first released, as an example of this type of unhistorical Western saint making. Here was Gandhi-as-guru, purveying that fashionable product, the Wisdom of the East; and Gandhi-as-Christ, dying (and, before that, frequently going on hunger strike) so that other might live. His philosophy of nonviolence seemed to work by embarrassing the British into leaving; freedom could be won, film appeared to suggest, by being more moral than your oppressor, whose moral code could then oblige him to withdraw.

But such is the efficacy of this symbolic Gandhi that the film, for all its simplification and Hollywoodizations, had a powerful and positive effect on many contemporary freedom struggles. South African anti-apartheid campaigners and democratic voices all over South America have enthused to me about the film’s galvanizing effects. This posthumous, exalted “International Gandhi” has apparently become a totem of real inspirational force.

The trouble with the idealized Gandhi is that he’s darned so dull, little more than a dispenser of homilies and nostrums (“An eye for an eye will make the whole world go blind”) with just the odd flash of wit (asked what he thought of Western civilization, he gave the celebrated reply, “I think it would be a great idea”). The real man, if it is still possible to use such a term after the generations of hagiography and reinvention, was infinitely more interesting, one of the most complex and contradictory personalities of the century. His full name – Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, was memorably – and literallt – translated into English by the novelist G. V. Desani as “Action – Slave Fascination – Moon Grocer”, and he was rich and devious a figure as that glorious name suggests.

Entirely unafraid of the British, he was nevertheless afraid of the dark, and always slept with a light burning by his bedside. He believed passionately in the unity of all the peoples of India., yet his failure to keep the Muslim leader Mohammed Ali Jinnah within the Indian National Congress’s fold led to the partition of the country. (For all his vaunted selflessness and modesty, he made no move to object when Jinnah was attacked during a Congress session for calling him “Mr. Gandhi” instead of “Mahatma”, and booed off the stage by the Gandhi’s supporters. Later his withdrawal, under pressure from Jwaharlal Nehru and Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, of a last-ditch offer to Jinnah of the prime ministership itself, ended the last faint chance of avoiding partition.)

He was determined to live his life as an ascetic, but, as the poet Sarojini Naidu joked, it cost the nation a fortune to keep Gandhi living in poverty. His entire philosophy privileged the village way over that of the city, yet he was always financially dependent on the support of industrial billionaires like Birla. His hunger strikes could stop riots and massacres, but he also once went on hunger strike to force one of his capitalist’s employees to break their strike against the harsh conditions of employment.

He sought to improve the conditions of the untouchables, yet in today’s India, these peoples, now calling themselves Dalits and forming and increasingly well-organized with the effective political grouping, have rallied around the memory of their own leader, Bhimarao Ramji Ambedkar, an old rival of Gandhi’s. As Ambedkar’s star has risen among the Dalits, so Gandhi’s stature has been reduced.

The creator of the political philosophies of passive resistance and constructive nonviolence, but spent much of his life far from the political arena, refining his more eccentric theories of vegetarianism, bowel movements, and the beneficial properties of human excrement.

Forever scarred by the knowledge that, as a sixteen-year-old youth, he’d been making love to his wife, Kasturba, at the moment of his father’s death, Gandhi later forswore sexual relations but went on into his old age with what he called his “brahmacharya experiments”, during which naked young man would be asked to lie with all night so that he could prove that he had mastered his physical urges. (He believed that total control over his “vital fluids” would enhance his spiritual powers).

He, and he alone, was responsible for the transformation of the demand for independence into nationwide mass movement that mobilized every class of society against the imperialist, yet the free India that came into being, divided and committed to a program of modernization and industrialization, was not the India of his dreams. His sometime disciple, Nehru, was the arch proponent of modernization, and it was Nehru’s vision, not Gandhi’s that was eventually – and perhaps inevitably – preferred.

Gandhi began by believing that the politics of passive resistance and nonviolence should be effective in any situation, at any time, even against a force as malign as Nazi Germany. Later he was obliged to revise his opinion, and concluded that while the British had responded to such techniques because of their own nature, other oppressors might not.

Gandhian nonviolence is widely believed to be the method by which India gained independence. (The view is assiduously fostered inside India as well as outside it.) Yet the Indian revolution did indeed become violence, and this violence so disappointed Gandhi that he stayed away from the Independence celebrations in protest. Moreover, the ruinous economic impact of World War II on Britain and – as British writer Patrick French says in his book Liberty or Death: India’s Journey to Independence and Division – the gradual collapse of the Raj’s bureaucratic hold over India from the mid ‘30’s onward did as much to bring about freedom as any action of Gandhi’s. It is probable, in fact, that Gandhian techniques were not the key determinants of India’s arrival at freedom. They gave independence its outward character and were its apparent cause, but darker and deeper historical forces produced the desired effect.

These days few people pause to consider the complex character of Gandhi’s personality, the ambiguous nature of his achievement and legacy, or even the real cause of Indian independence. These are hurried, sloganizing times, and we don’t have the time or, worse, the inclination to assimilate many-sided truths. The harshest truth of all is that Gandhi is increasingly irrelevant in the country whose “little father” – Bapu – he was. As the analyst Sunil Khilnani has pointed out, India came into being a secularized state, but Gandhi’s vision was essentially religious. However, he “recoiled” from Hindu nationalism. His solution was to forge an Indian identity out of the shared body of ancient narratives. “He turned to the legends and stories from the India’s popular religious traditions, preferring their lessons to the supposed ones of the history”.

It didn’t work. In today’s India, Hindu nationalism is rampant in the form of the Bhartiya Janta Party. During the recent elections, Gandhi and his ideas have scarcely been mentioned.

In the early 1970s the writer Ved Mehta spoke to one of Gandhi’s leading political associates, a former Governor-General of independent India, C.Rajagopalachari. His verdict on Gandhi’s legacy is disenchanted, but in today’s India, on the fast track to free-market capitalism, it still rings true: “The glamour of modern technology, money, and power is to seductive that no one – I mean no one – can resist it. The handful of Gandhian who still believe in his philosophy of a simple life in a simple society are mostly cranks”.

What, then is greatness? In what does it reside? If a man’s project fails, or survives only in irredeemably tarnished form, can the force of his example still merit the extreme accolade? For Jawaharlal Nehru, the defining image of Gandhi was “as I saw him marching, staff in hand, to Dandi on the Salt March in 1930. Here was the pilgrim on his quest of truth, quite, peaceful, determined, and fearless, who would continue that quest and pilgrimage, regardless of consequences”. Nehru’s daughter Indira Gandhi later said, “More than his words, his life was his message”. These days, that message is better heeded outside India. Albert Einstein was one of many to praise Gandhi’s achievement; Martin Luther King Jr., the Dalai Lama, and all the world’s peace movement have followed in his footsteps. Gandhi, who gave up cosmopolitanism to gain a prove resilient, smart, tough, sneaky and, yes, ethical enough to avoid assimilation by global Mc Culture ( Mac culture too). Against this new empire, Gandhian intelligence is a better weapon than Gandhian piety. And passive resistance? We’ll see.

Biography of Mahatma Gandhi

Mahatma Gandhi is called the Tather of the Nation’. He was born as Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi on October 2, 1869. He had an orthodox upbringing. At the age of 13, he was married to Kasturba. He went to England to study Law.

After returning to India, he began to practice Law. He went to South Africa for legal work in 1894. There he fought for the right of Indians. After his return to India, he joined the freedom struggle. He headed a protest against the exploitation of the Indigo workers in Champaran.

Gandhi started the Non-Cooperation Movement in 1920. He called off the movement because of a violent incident at Chauri Chaura. He also launched the Civil Disobedience Movement after breaking the salt law in 1930. In 1942, Gandhi exhorted Indians to ‘Do or Die’ employing any measures they saw fit while opposing the British. On August 15, 1947, India attained Independence under his leadership. His life came to an end on January 31,1948 when he was assassinated by Nathuram Godse.

Che Guevara

2008-10-05T20:14:00.000-07:00

Che Guevara
Though communism may have lost its fire, he remains the potent symbol of rebellion and the alluring zeal of revolution

By ARIEL DORFMAN

By the time Ernesto Guevara, known to us as Che, was murdered in the jungles of Bolivia in October 1967, he was already a legend to my generation, not only in Latin America but also around the world.

Dr Ernesto Rafael Guevara de la Serna (June 14, 1928¹ – October 9, 1967), commonly known as Che Guevara, was an Argentine-born Marxist revolutionary and Cuban guerrilla leader. Guevara was a member of Fidel Castro’s "26th of July Movement", which seized power in Cuba in 1959. After serving various important posts in the new government, Guevara left Cuba in 1966 with the hope of fomenting revolutions in other countries, first in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and later in Bolivia, where he was captured in a CIA-organized military operation. Some believe that the CIA wanted to keep him alive for interrogation but he was executed by the Bolivian army, although this is disputed. After his death, Guevara became a hero of Third World socialist revolutionary movements, as a theorist and tactician of asymmetric warfare.

Youth

Guevara was born in Rosario, Argentina, the eldest of five children in a family of mixed Spanish and Irish descent as his paternal great-grandfather was an Irish immigrant. The date of birth recorded on his birth certificate was June 14, 1928. The birth certificate may have been deliberately falsified to help shield the family from a scandal relating to his mother’s having been three months pregnant when she was married.

Guevara’s ancestor Patrick Lynch, founder of the Argentine branch of the Lynches, was born in Ireland in 1715. He left for Bilbao, Spain, and traveled from there to Argentina. Francisco Lynch (Guevara’s great-grandfather) was born in 1817, and Ana Lynch (his grandmother) in 1861. Her son Ernesto Guevara Lynch (Guevara’s father) was born in 1900. Lynch married Celia de la Serna and had five children.

In this upper-middle class family with significantly left-wing views, Guevara became known for his dynamic and radical perspective even as a boy.

Though suffering from the crippling bouts of asthma that were to handicap him throughout his life, he excelled as an athlete. In 1948, he entered the University of Buenos Aires to study medicine. There he also excelled as a scholar and completed his medical studies in March 1953.

He spent many of his holidays traveling around Latin America. In 1951, Guevara’s older friend, Alberto Granado, a biochemist and a political radical, suggested that Guevara take a year off his medical studies to embark on a trip they had talked of doing for years, traversing South America on a Norton 500 cc motorcycle nicknamed La Poderosa meaning the "the mighty one", with the idea of spending a few weeks volunteering at a leper colony in Peru on the banks of the Amazon River during the trip. Guevara and the 29-year-old Alberto soon set off from their hometown of Alta Gracia. Guevara narrated this journey in The Motorcycle Diaries, translated in 1996 (and turned into a motion picture of the same name in 2004).

Cuban revolutionary leader Ernesto "Che" Guevara at Havana airport in 1962

Through his first-hand observations of the poverty and powerlessness of the masses, he decided that the only remedy for Latin America’s social inequities lay in revolution. His travels also taught him to look upon Latin America not as a collection of separate nations but as one cultural and economic entity, the liberation of which would require an intercontinental strategy. He began to develop his idea of a united South America without borders, united in a common ‘mestizo’ culture, an idea which would figure greatly in his later revolutionary activities. Upon his return to Argentina, he completed his medical studies as quickly as he could, to enable him to continue his travels around South America.

Guatemala

Following his graduation from the University of Buenos Aires medical school in 1953, Guevara went on to Guatemala, where President Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán headed a left-populist government that, through various reforms, particularly land reform, was attempting to bring about a social revolution. Around this time, Guevara also acquired his famous nickname, "Che", due to his Argentine roots. Che (pronounced /tÊƒe/) is a slang term meaning "hey!" in Argentina. It is markedly Argentinian. In English, the misspelling "Ché" (with an acute accent) and the mispronunciation /ÊƒeÉª/ are fairly common, probably under French influence.

The overthrow of the Arbenz government by a 1954 CIA-backed coup d’état cemented Guevara’s view of the United States as an oppressive imperialist power that would consistently oppose governments attempting to address the socioeconomic inequality endemic to Latin America and other developing third world countries.

This helped strengthen his conviction that Marxist socialism was the only true way to remedy such problems. Following the coup, Guevara volunteered to fight, but Arbenz told his supporters to leave the country, and Guevara briefly took refuge in the Argentine consulate. Cuba Guevara met Fidel Castro and Fidel’s brother Raúl in Mexico City where the two sought refuge after being exiled from Cuba. The Castro brothers were preparing to return to Cuba with an expeditionary force in an attempt to overthrow General Fulgencio Batista, who had assumed dictatorial powers following a coup d’état during the 1952 presidential elections. Guevara quickly joined what became known as the "26th of July Movement".

Castro, Guevara, and 80 other guerrillas departed from Tuxpan, Veracruz, aboard the cabin cruiser Granma in November 1956. (The name was most likely a tribute to the grandmother of the previous owner, an American.) Guevara was the only non-Cuban aboard.

Shortly after disembarking in a swampy area near Niquero in the southeast, the expeditionary unit was attacked by Batista’s forces. Only 15 rebels survived.

Guevara, the group’s physician, laid down his knapsack containing medical supplies in order to pick up a box of ammunition dropped by a fleeing comrade, a moment which he later recalled as marking his transition from doctor to combatant.

The rebels slowly grew in strength, seizing weapons and winning support and recruits from the local peasants in rural areas and intellectuals and workers in urban areas. Guevara exhibited great courage, skills in combat, and ruthlessness, and soon became one of Castro’s ablest and most trusted aides. Guevara took responsibility for the execution of informers, insubordinates, deserters and spies in the revolutionary army. He personally executed Eutimio Guerra, a suspected Batista informant, with a single shot from his .32(7.65mm) caliber pistol.

Within months, Guevara rose to the highest rank, Comandante (Major), in the revolutionary army.

His march on Santa Clara in late 1958, where his column derailed an armored train filled with Batista’s troops and took over the city, was the final straw that forced Batista to flee the country. Guevara recorded the two years spent in overthrowing Batista’s regime in a detailed account entitled Pasajes de la Guerra Revolucionaria (English translation, Reminiscences of the Cuban Revolutionary War, 1968), first published in 1963. The book was composed of series of articles that appeared in Verde Olivo, a weekly publication of the Revolutionary Armed Forces. A newer translation was published in 1996, entitled Episodes of the Cuban Revolutionary War.

Revolutionary government

After Castro’s troops entered the capital of Havana on January 2, 1959, a new socialist government was established. Shortly thereafter, Guevara became a Cuban citizen and divorced his Peruvian wife, Hilda Gadea, with whom he had one daughter. Later, he married a member of Castro’s army, Aleida March. The couple would have four children together.

Che Guevara became as prominent in the new government as he had been in the revolutionary army. After serving as the military commander of the La Cabana fort, Guevara became an official at the National Institute of Agrarian Reform, president of the National Bank of Cuba, and Minister of Industries. In this capacity, Guevara faced the challenge of adapting Cuba’s capitalist agrarian economy into a socialist industrial economy. After negotiating a trade agreement with the Soviet Union in 1960, Guevara represented Cuba on many commercial missions and delegations to Soviet-aligned nations in Africa and Asia after the United States imposed an embargo on the nation.

In 1959, Guevara was appointed commander of the La Cabana Fortress prison. During his term as commander of the fortress from 1959-1963, he oversaw the hasty trials and executions of many former Batista regime officials, including members of the BRAC secret police (some sources say 156 people, others estimate as many as 500). Poet and human rights activist Armando Valladares, who was imprisoned at La Cabana, documented Guevara’s particular and personal interest in the interrogation, torture, and execution of prisoners.

Guevara helped guide the Castro regime on its leftward and pro-Communist path.

An active participant in the economic and social reforms brought about by Castro’s government, he became known in the West for his fiery attacks on U.S. foreign policy in Africa, Asia, and especially Latin America.

During this period, he defined Cuba’s policies and his own views in many speeches, articles, letters, and essays, the most important of which are two books on guerrilla warfare. El socialismo y el hombre en Cuba (1965; Man and Socialism in Cuba, 1967) is an examination of Cuba’s new brand of socialism and Communist ideology. His highly influential manual on guerrilla strategy and tactics (English translation, Guerrilla Warfare, 1961) advocated peasant-based revolutionary movements in the developing countries.

Prior to the Cuban Missile Crisis, Guevara was part of a Cuban delegation to Moscow in early 1962 with Raúl Castro where he endorsed the planned placement of Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba. Guevara believed that the placement of Soviet missiles would protect Cuba from any direct military action against it from the United States.

Jon Lee Anderson reports that after the crisis Guevara told Sam Russell, a British correspondent for the socialist newspaper Daily Worker, that if the missiles had been under Cuban control, they would have fired them.

Guevara’s book, Guerrilla Warfare, was seen for a time as the definitive philosophy for fighting irregular wars. Guevara believed that a small group (foco) of guerrillas, by violently targeting the government, could actively foment revolutionary feelings among the general populace, so that it was not necessary to build broad organizations and advance the revolutionary struggle in measured steps before launching armed insurrection. However, the failure of his "Cuban Style" revolution in Bolivia was thought to have been due to his lack of grassroots support there, and hence this strategy is now thought by some to be ineffective.

Congo

He persuaded Castro to back him in the first covert Cuban involvement in Africa. Guevara desired to first work with the pro-Lumumba, Marxist Simba movement in the former Belgian Congo (later Zaire and currently the Democratic Republic of the Congo).

In 1964, Guevara was assisted for a time in the former Belgian Congo by guerrilla leader Laurent-Désiré Kabila, who helped Lumumba supporters lead a revolt that was eventually suppressed in 1965 by the Congolese army as well as the Chinese People’s Liberation Army. Guevara dismissed Kabila as insignificant. "Nothing leads me to believe he is the man of the hour," Guevara wrote. [1]

Guevara was only 35 at that time and had never had any formal military training. His asthma prevented him from going in to military service in Argentina, a fact of which he was proud, given his opposition to the government.

He had the experiences of the Cuban revolution, including his successful march on Santa Clara, Cuba, in late 1958, which was central to Batista finally being overthrown by Castro’s forces. However, as Guevara was to discover, working under the direction of a gifted revolutionary leader does not make oneself a gifted revolutionary leader.

U.S. Army Special Forces advisors working with the Congolese army were able to monitor Guevara’s communications, arrange to ambush the rebels and the Cubans whenever they attempted to attack, and interdict Guevara’s supply lines. Guevara proved unable to supplant the native Simba leadership, and in fact was forced to place his troops under Simba command. Later that same year, ill, humiliated and with only a few survivors of the force he had brought into the country, Guevara left the Congo.

Disappearance from Cuba

After April 1965 Guevara dropped out of public life and then vanished altogether. Guevara was not seen in public after his return to Havana on March 14 from a three-month tour of the People’s Republic of China, the United Arab Republic (Egypt), Algeria, Ghana, and Congo-Brazzaville. Guevara’s whereabouts were the great mystery of 1965 in Cuba, as he was regarded as second in power to Castro himself.

His disappearance was variously attributed to the relative failure of the industrialization scheme he had advocated while minister of industry, to pressure exerted on Castro by Soviet officials disapproving of Guevara’s pro-Chinese Communist outlook as the Sino-Soviet split grew more pronounced, and to serious differences between Guevara and the Cuban leadership regarding Cuba’s economic development and ideological line.

Guevara’s pro-Chinese orientation was increasingly problematic for Cuba as the Cuban economy became more and more dependent on the Soviet Union. Since the early days of the Cuban revolution Guevara had been considered an advocate of Maoist strategy in Latin America and the originator of a plan for swift industrialization of Cuba. According to Western observers of the Cuban situation, the fact that Guevara was opposed to Soviet recommendations that Castro seemed obliged to agree to might have been the reason for his disappearance.

Indeed, by this point Guevara had grown more skeptical of the Soviet Union.

He saw the Northern Hemisphere, led by the U.S. in the West and the Soviets in the East, as the exploiter of the Southern Hemisphere. But he strongly supported the Communist side in the Vietnam War, despite North Vietnam’s pro-Soviet position, and urged his comrades in South America to create "many Vietnams".

Pressed by international speculations on Guevara’s fate, Castro said on June 16 that the people would be informed about Guevara when Guevara himself wished to let them know. Numerous rumors about his disappearance spread both inside and outside Cuba.

On October 3 of that year, Castro revealed an undated letter purportedly written to him by Guevara some months earlier in which Guevara reaffirmed his enduring solidarity with the Cuban Revolution but stated his intention to leave Cuba to fight abroad for the cause of the revolution. He explained that "other nations are calling for the help of my modest efforts" and that, having "always identified with the world outcome of our Revolution", he had decided to go and fight as a guerrilla in different parts of the world. In the letter Guevara announced his resignation from all his positions in the government, in the party, and in the Army, and renounced his Cuban citizenship, which had been granted to him in 1959 in recognition of his efforts on behalf of the revolution.

During an interview with four foreign correspondents on November 1, Castro remarked that he knew where Guevara was but that he would not disclose the place, and added, denying reports that his former comrade-in-arms was dead, that "he is in the best of health." Despite Castro’s assurances the fate of Guevara remained a mystery at the end of 1965. Guevara’s movements and whereabouts remained a secret for the next two years.

Bolivia

Speculation continued during the year as to the whereabouts of the former Minister of Industry and Director of the National Bank. In a speech at the May Day rally in Havana, the Acting Minister of the armed forces, Maj. Juan Almeida, announced that Guevara was "serving the revolution somewhere in Latin America". The persistent reports that he was assisting the guerrillas in Bolivia were ultimately proven true.

A parcel of jungle land in Nancahazu was purchased by native Bolivian Communists and turned over to him for use as a training area. The evidence suggests that this training was more hazardous than combat to Guevara and the Cubans accompanying him. Little was accomplished in the way of building a guerrilla army. On learning of his presence in Bolivia, President René Barrientos is alleged to have expressed the desire to see Guevara’s head displayed on a pike in downtown La Paz.

He ordered the Bolivian Army to hunt Guevara and his followers down.

Guevara’s guerrillas, numbering about 120, were well equipped and scored a number of early successes in difficult terrain in the mountainous Camiri region of the country against Bolivian regulars. In September, however, the Army managed to eliminate two guerrilla groups, reportedly killing one of the leaders.

Guevara’s hope of fomenting revolution in Bolivia appears to have been predicated upon a number of misconceptions. He had expected to deal only with the country’s military government. However, there was a U.S. presence in Bolivia. After the U.S. government learned of his location, CIA operatives were sent into Bolivia to aid the anti-insurrection effort. He had expected to deal with a poorly trained and equipped national army. Instead, the Bolivian Army was being trained by U.S.

Army Special Forces advisors, including a recently organized elite battalion of Rangers trained in jungle warfare. Guevara had also not received the expected assistance and cooperation from the local dissidents when he undertook his journey. Moreover, Bolivia’s Moscow-oriented Communist Party did not aid him in the insurrection.

Guevara and his associates found themselves hamstrung in Bolivia by the American aid and military trainers to the Bolivian government and a lack of assistance from his allies. In addition, the CIA also helped anti-Castro Cuban exiles set up interrogation houses for those Bolivians thought to be assisting Guevara and/or his guerrillas. Some were tortured for information.

The Bolivians were notified of the location of Guevara’s guerrilla encampment by a deserter. On October 8, the encampment was encircled and Guevara was captured while leading a patrol in the vicinity of La Higuera. His surrender was offered after being wounded in the legs and having his rifle destroyed by a bullet. According to soldiers present at the capture, during the skirmish as soldiers approached Guevara he allegedly shouted, "Do not shoot! I am Che Guevara and worth more to you alive than dead". Barrientos ordered his execution immediately upon being informed of Guevara’s capture. Guevara was taken to an old schoolhouse and executed, bound by his hands to a board. He had already suffered several wounds in the battle which resulted in his capture.

The executioner was a sargeant in the Bolivian army, who had drawn a short straw and had to shoot Guevera. Several versions exist about what happened next. Some say the executioner was too nervous, left, and was forced back inside. Others say he was so nervous he refused to look Guevara in the face and shot him in the side and the throat, which was the fatal wound. Che Guevara did have some last words before his death; he allegedly said to his executioner, "I know you are here to kill me. Shoot, coward, you are only going to kill a man".

A CIA agent and veteran of the U.S. invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs, Felix Rodriguez headed the hunt for Guevara in Bolivia. After hearing of Guevara’s capture Rodriguez relayed the information to CIA headquarters at Langley, Virginia via CIA stations in various South American nations. After the execution, Rodriguez took Guevara’s Rolex watch, often proudly showing it to reporters during the ensuing years. Rodriguez had removed Guevara’s hands to send to different parts of the world to verify his identity.

A side issue connected with the guerrillas was the arrest and trial of Régis Debray. In April 1967 government forces captured Debray, a young French Marxist theoretician and writer, and accused him of collaborating with the guerrillas. Debray claimed that he had merely been acting as a reporter, and that Che, who had mysteriously disappeared several years earlier, was leading the guerrillas.

As Debray’s trial—which had become an international cause celebre—was beginning in early October, Bolivian authorities on October 11 reported that Guevara had been shot and killed in an engagement with government forces on October 9. The former Cuban leader’s body was publicly displayed and photographed, and fingerprints were offered as proof of identification.

On October 15 Castro admitted that the death had occurred and proclaimed three days of public mourning throughout Cuba. The death of Guevara was regarded as a severe blow to the socialist revolutionary movements throughout Latin America.

In 1997, the skeletal remains of Guevara’s body were exhumed, positively identified by DNA matching and returned to Cuba, where he is revered as a heroic revolutionary leader. On the 12 July 1997 Guevara’s remains were buried with full military honours in the city of Santa Clara, in the province of Villa Clara, where Guevara won the decisive battle of the Cuban Revolution.

The Bolivian Diary

Also removed was Guevara’s diary, which documented events in the guerrilla war being fought in Bolivia. The first entry is on 7th November 1966 shortly after Guevara’s arrival at a farm in the Bolivian jungle and the last entry is on 7th October 1967 just before his capture. The diary tells how the guerillas are forced to begin operations due to discovery by the Bolivian Army, the eventual split of the group, and their general failure. It records the split between Guevara and the Bolivian Communist Party that resulted in Guevara having significantly fewer soldiers than originally anticipated. It shows that Guevara had a great deal of difficulty recruiting from the local populace, due mainly to the fact that the guerrilla group had learned Quechua and not the local languages of the Bolivian Amazon, such as Guarani. As the campaign drew to an unexpected close, Guevara became increasingly ill. He suffered from asthma, and most of his last offensives were carried out to obtain medicine.

The Bolivian Diary was quickly and crudely translated by Ramparts magazine and circulated around the world. Fidel Castro has denied involvement with this.

Hero cult

While pictures of Guevara’s dead body were being circulated and the circumstances of his death were being debated, Guevara’s legend began to spread. Demonstrations in protest against his assassination occurred throughout the world, and articles, tributes, and poems were written about his life and death.

Even liberal elements that felt little sympathy with Guevara’s Communist ideals during his lifetime expressed admiration for his spirit of self-sacrifice. He is singled out from other revolutionaries by many young people in the West because he rejected a comfortable background to fight for global revolution. And when he gained power in Cuba, he gave up all the trappings of privilege and power in Cuba in order to return to the revolutionary battlefield and ultimately, to die.

In the late 1960s, he became a popular icon for revolution and youthful political ideals in Western culture. A dramatic photograph of Guevara taken by photographer Alberto Korda [2] in 1961 (see Che Guevara (photo)) soon became one of the century’s most recognizable images, and the portrait was simplified and reproduced on a vast array of merchandise, such as T-shirts, posters, and baseball caps. Guevara’s reputation even extended into theatre, where he is depicted as the narrator in Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical Evita.

This portrays Guevara as becoming disillusioned with Eva Perón and her dictator husband, Juan Domingo Perón because of Peron’s increasing corruption and tyranny. The narrator role involves creative license, because Guevara’s only interaction with Eva Perón was to write her a facetious letter in his youth, asking for a Jeep.

Some believe that Guevara, called "the most complete human being of our age" by the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, may yet prove to be the most important thinker and activist in Latin America since Simón Bolívar, leader of the South American independence movement and hero to subsequent generations of nationalists throughout Latin America.

In the movies

Movies and actors who have portrayed Che Guevara:
El ‘Che’ Guevara at the Internet Movie Database – Francisco Rabal (1968)
Che! at the Internet Movie Database – Omar Sharif (1969)
Evita at the Internet Movie Database – Antonio Banderas (1996)
Hasta la victoria siempre at the Internet Movie Database – Alfredo Vasco (1999)
The Motorcycle Diaries (Diarios de motocicleta) – Gael García Bernal (2004)
Che: The Movie at the Internet Movie Database – Benicio Del Toro (announced to begin production in 2005)

NIKOLA TESLA

2008-10-05T19:30:00.000-07:00

Nikola Tesla

Nikola Tesla (July 9, 1856 - January 7, 1943) was a physicist, inventor, and electrical engineer of unusual intellectual brilliance and practical achievement. He was of Serb descent and worked mostly in the United States.

Tesla is most famous for conceiving the rotating magnetic field principle (1882) and then using it to invent the induction motor together with the accompanying alternating current long-distance electrical transmission system (1888). His patents and theoretical work still form the basis for modern alternating current electric power systems.

He also developed numerous other electrical and mechanical devices including the fundamental principles and machinery of wireless technology, including the high frequency alternator, the "AND" logic gate and the Tesla coil, as well as other devices such as the bladeless turbine, the spark plug and numerous other inventions.

Early Years

Tesla was born to a Serbian family in the village of Smiljan near Gospic, in the Lika region in Krajina, Croatia (then part of the Austrian Empire). According to legend, he was born precisely at midnight during an electrical storm.

His father was Rev. Milutin Tesla, a priest in the Serbian Orthodox Church Metropolitanate of Sremski Karlovci. Milutin was born on 19 February 1819 in the village of Meduc, county Medak in Lika, Austrian Empire, as son of Nikola Tesla (b. 1789 in the military frontier, settled after his service in the Napoleonic Wars in Gospic in 1815) and Ana Kalinic, from the famous frontier Kalinic family. Tesla's family asserted its last name as such in Lika. His paternal origin is thought to be of the Draganic family from the Tara valley area below the geographical entity known as Old Vlach, from one of the local Serb clans; however genealogical research shows that Nikola is from the Herzegovinian noble Komnenovic (modern-day Old Herzegovina in Montenegro), from its Orlovic subgroup that traces its origin from the semi-mythic Pavle Orlovic that bore Prince Lazar's banner at the Battle of Kosovo in 1389. His mother was Duka Mandic, herself a daughter of a Serbian Orthodox Church priest. She came from a family domiciled in Lika and Banija, but with deeper origins to Kosovo. She was talented in making home craft tools. She memorized many Serbian epic poems, but never learned to read. His godfather, Jovan Drenovac, was a captain in the army protecting the Military Frontier.

Nikola was one of five children, having one brother (Dane, who was killed in a horse-riding accident when Nikola was five) and three sisters (Milka, Angelina and Marica). His family moved to Gospic in 1862. Tesla went to school in Karlovac. He finished a four year term in the span of three years.

Tesla then studied electrical engineering at the Austrian Polytechnic in Graz (1875). While there, he studied the uses of alternating current. Some sources say he received Baccalaureate degrees from the university at Graz. However, the university says that he did not receive a degree and did not continue beyond the first semester of his third year, during which he stopped attending lectures. In December 1878 he left Graz and broke all relations with his family. His friends thought that he had drowned in Mura. He went to Maribor, Slovenia, where he was first employed as an assistant engineer for a year. He suffered a nervous breakdown during this time. Tesla was later persuaded by his father to attend the Charles-Ferdinand University in Prague, which he attended for the summer term of 1880. Here he was influenced by Ernst Mach. However after his father died he left the university, having completed only one term.

Tesla engaged in reading many works, memorizing complete books, supposedly having a photographic memory. Tesla related in his autobiography that he experienced detailed moments of inspiration. During his early life, Tesla was stricken with illness time and time again. He suffered a peculiar affliction in which blinding flashes of light would appear before his eyes, often accompanied by hallucinations. Much of the time the visions were linked to a word or idea he might have come across; just by hearing the name of an item, he would involuntarily envision it in realistic detail. Modern-day synesthetes report similar symptoms. Tesla would visualise an invention in his brain in precise form before moving to the construction stage; a technique sometimes known as picture thinking. Tesla also often had flashbacks to events that had happened previously in his life; this began to happen during childhood.

Hungary and France

In 1881, he moved to Budapest, Hungary, to work under Tivadar Puskas in a telegraph company,the National Telephone Company. There, he met Nebojsa Petrovic, a young inventor from Austria. Although their encounter was brief, they did work on a project together using twin turbines to create continual power. On the opening of the telephone exchange in Budapest, 1881, Tesla became the chief electrician to the company, and was later engineer for the country's first telephone system. He also developed a device that, according to some, was a telephone repeater or amplifier, but according to others could have been the first loudspeaker.

In 1882 he moved to Paris, France, to work as an engineer for the Continental Edison Company, designing improvements to electric equipment. In the same year, Tesla conceived the induction motor and began developing various devices that use rotating magnetic fields (for which he received patents in 1888).

Soon thereafter, Tesla hastened from Paris to his mother's side as she lay dying, arriving hours before her death in April, 1892. Her last words to him were, "You've arrived, Nidzo, my pride." After her death, Tesla fell ill. He spent two to three weeks recuperating in Gospic and the village of Tomingaj near Gracac, the birthplace of his mother.

United States

On June 6, 1884, Tesla first arrived in the US in New York City. He had little besides a letter of recommendation from Charles Batchelor, his manager in his previous job. In the letter of recommendation to Thomas Edison, Charles Batchelor wrote, "I know two great men and you are one of them; the other is this young man." Edison hired Tesla to work for his company Edison Machine Works. Tesla's work for Edison began with simple electrical engineering and quickly progressed to solving the company's most difficult problems. Tesla was offered the task of a complete redesign of the Edison company's direct current generators.

During his employment, Tesla claims Edison offered him $50,000 (equivalent to about $1 million in 2006, adjusted for inflation if he redesigned Edison's inefficient motor and generators, an improvement in both service and economy.

Tesla said he worked night and day to redesign them and gave the Edison company several profitable new patents in the process. During the year of 1885, when Tesla inquired about the payment on the work, Edison replied to him, "Tesla, you don't understand our American humor," and reneged on his promise. This anecdote is somewhat doubtful, since at Tesla's salary of $18 per week the bonus would have amounted to over 53 years pay, and the amount was equal to the initial capital of the company.Tesla resigned when he was refused a raise to $25 per week.

Tesla eventually found himself digging ditches for a short period of time - coincidentally for the Edison company. Edison had also never wanted to hear about Tesla's AC polyphase designs, believing that DC electricity was the future. Tesla focused intently on his AC polyphase system, even while digging ditches.

Middle Years

In 1886, Tesla formed his own company, Tesla Electric Light & Manufacturing. The initial financial investors disagreed with Tesla on his plan for an alternating current motor and eventually relieved him of his duties at the company. Tesla worked in New York as a common laborer from 1886 to 1887 to feed himself and raise capital for his next project.

In 1887, he constructed the initial brushless alternating current induction motor, which he demonstrated to the American Institute of Electrical Engineers (now IEEE) in 1888. In the same year, he developed the principles of his Tesla coil and began working with George Westinghouse at Westinghouse Electric & Manufacturing Company's Pittsburgh labs. Westinghouse listened to his ideas for polyphase systems which would allow transmission of alternating current electricity over large distances.

In April of 1887, Tesla began investigating what would later be called X-rays using his own single node vacuum tubes (similar to his patent #514,170 ). This device differed from other early X-ray tubes in that they had no target electrode. The modern term for the phenomenon produced by this device is bremsstrahlung (or braking radiation). We now know that this device operated by emitting electrons from the single electrode through a combination of field emission and thermionic emission. Once liberated, electrons are strongly repelled by the high electric field near the electrode during negative voltage peaks from the oscillating HV output of the Tesla Coil, generating X-rays as they collide with the glass envelope. He also used Geissler tubes. By 1892, Tesla became aware of what Wilhelm Röntgen later identified as effects of X-rays.

In the early research, Tesla devised several experimental setups to produce X-rays. Tesla held that, with his circuits, the "instrument will [... enable one to] generate Roentgen rays of much greater power than obtainable with ordinary apparatus." He also commented on the hazards of working with his circuit and single node X-ray producing devices. Of his many notes in the early investigation of this phenomenon, he attributed the skin damage to various causes. One of the options for the cause, which is not in conformity with conventional x-ray production, was that the ozone generated rather than the radiation was responsible.

Tesla continued research in the field and, later, observed an assistant severely "burnt" by X-rays in his lab. He performed several experiments prior to Roentgen's discovery (including photographing the bones of his hand; later, he sent these images to Roentgen) but didn't make his findings widely known; much of his research was lost in the 5th Avenue lab fire of March 1895.

A "world system" for "the transmission of electrical energy without wires" that depends upon the electrical conductivity was proposed in which transmission in various natural mediums with current that passes between the two point are used to power devices. In a practical wireless energy transmission system using this principle, a high-power ultraviolet beam might be used to form a vertical ionized channel in the air directly above the transmitter-receiver stations. The same concept is used in virtual lightning rods, the electrolaser electroshock weapon, and has been proposed for disabling vehicles.

Tesla demonstrated "the transmission of electrical energy without wires" that depends upon electrical conductivity as early as 1891. The Tesla effect (named in honor of Tesla) is the archaic term for an application of this type of electrical conduction (that is, the movement of energy through space and matter; not just the production of voltage across a conductor).

On July 30, 1891, he became a naturalized citizen of the United States at the age of 35. Tesla established his 35 South Fifth Avenue laboratory in New York during this same year. Later, Tesla would establish his Houston Street laboratory in New York at 46 E. Houston Street. There, at one point while conducting mechanical resonance experiments with electro-mechanical oscillators he generated a resonance of several surrounding buildings but, due to the frequencies involved, not his own building, causing complaints to the police.

As the speed grew he hit the resonant frequency of his own building and belatedly realizing the danger he was forced to apply a sledge hammer to terminate the experiment, just as the astonished police arrived. He also lit vacuum tubes wirelessly at both of the New York locations, providing evidence for the potential of wireless power transmission. Some of Tesla's closest friends were artists. He befriended Century Magazine editor Robert Underwood Johnson, who adapted several Serbian poems of Jovan Jovanovic Zmaj (which Tesla translated). Also during this time, Tesla was influenced by the Vedic philosophy teachings of the Swami Vivekananda.

When Tesla was 36 years old, the first patents concerning the polyphase power system were granted. He continued research of the system and rotating magnetic field principles. Tesla served, from 1892 to 1894, as the vice president of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers, the forerunner (along with the Institute of Radio Engineers) of the modern-day IEEE.

From 1893 to 1895, he investigated high frequency alternating currents. He generated AC of one million volts using a conical Tesla coil and investigated the skin effect in conductors, designed tuned circuits, invented a machine for inducing sleep, cordless gas discharge lamps, and transmitted electromagnetic energy without wires, building the first radio transmitter. In St. Louis, Missouri, Tesla made a demonstration related to radio communication in 1893. Addressing the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and the National Electric Light Association, he described and demonstrated in detail its principles. Tesla's demonstrations were written about widely through various media outlets. Tesla also investigated harvesting energy that is present throughout space. He believed that it was just merely a question of time when men will succeed in attaching their machinery to the very wheelwork of nature.

At the 1893 World's Fair, the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, an international exposition was held which for the first time devoted a building to electrical exhibits. It was an historic event as Tesla and George Westinghouse introduced visitors to AC power by using it to illuminate the Exposition. On display were Tesla's fluorescent lamps and single node bulbs.

Tesla also explained the principles of the rotating magnetic field and induction motor by demonstrating how to make an egg made of copper stand on end in his demonstration of the device he constructed known as the "Egg of Columbus".

Also in the late 1880s, Tesla and Edison became adversaries in part due to Edison's promotion of direct current (DC) for electric power distribution over the more efficient alternating current advocated by Tesla and Westinghouse. Until Tesla invented the induction motor, AC's advantages for long distance high voltage transmission were counterbalanced by the inability to operate motors on AC. As a result of the "War of Currents," Edison and Westinghouse went nearly bankrupt, so in 1897, Tesla released Westinghouse from contract, providing Westinghouse a break from Tesla's patent royalties. Also in 1897, Tesla researched radiation which led to setting up the basic formulation of cosmic rays.

When Tesla was forty-one years old, he filed the first basic radio patent (U.S. Patent 645,576 ). A year later, he demonstrated a radio controlled boat to the US military, believing that the military would want things such as radio controlled torpedoes. Tesla had developed the "Art of Telautomatics", a form of robotics, as well as the technology of remote control.

In 1898, a radio-controlled boat was demonstrated to the public during an electrical exhibition at Madison Square Garden. These devices had an innovative coherer and a series of logic gates. Tesla called his boat a "teleautomaton" and said of it, "You see there the first of a race of robots, mechanical men which will do the laborious work of the human race."

Radio remote control remained a novelty until the 1960s. In the same year, Tesla devised an "electric igniter" or spark plug for Internal combustion gasoline engines. He gained U.S. Patent 609,250 , "Electrical Igniter for Gas Engines", on this mechanical ignition system. Tesla lived in the former Gerlach Hotel, renamed The Radio Wave building, at 49 W 27th St. (between Broadway and Sixth Avenue), Lower Manhattan, before the end of the century where he conducted the radio wave experiments. A commemorative plaque was placed on the building in 1977 to honor his work.

Wireless and the AIEE

Tesla served as the Vice-President of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers (now part of the IEEE) from 1892 to 1894. From 1893 to 1895, he investigated high frequency alternating currents. He generated AC of one million volts using a conical Tesla coil and investigated the skin effect in conductors, designed tuned circuits, invented a machine for inducing sleep, cordless gas discharge lamps, and transmitted electromagnetic energy without wires, effectively building the first radio transmitter.

In St. Louis, Missouri, Tesla made a demonstration related to radio communication (he demonstrated radio energy crossing space (one side of a stage to the other) in 1893. Addressing the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and the National Electric Light Association, he described and demonstrated in detail its principles. Heinrich Hertz had made such demonstrations, repeatedly, five years previously. Hertz' demonstrations were not public (they were conducted during his physics lectures) but strictly speaking neither were Tesla's (the Franklin Institute didn't open to the general public until 1934).

Tesla held over forty U.S. patents (circa 1888) covering our entire system of Polyphase Alternating Current (AC). These patents are so novel that nobody could ever challenge them in the courts.

Tesla's four-tuned circuits (two on the receiving side and two on the transmitting side, secured by U.S. patents #645,576 and #649,621) were the basis of the U.S. Supreme Court decision (Case #369 decided June 21, 1943) to overturn Marconi's basic patent on the invention of radio.

Alternating-current power transmission

The Death Ray Machine

Fluorescent lights

Induction motor

Polyphase alternating-current system

Radio

Rotating magnetic field principle

Telephone repeater

Tesla coil transformer

Wireless communication

World's Fair Exposition

At the 1893 World's Fair, the World Columbian Exposition in Chicago, Illinois, an international exposition was held which for the first time devoted a building to electrical exhibits. It was a historic event as Tesla and George Westinghouse introduced visitors to AC power by using it to illuminate the Exposition. In protest, Edison would not allow use of any of his lightbulbs for this event.

As if lighting the Exposition was not enough, Tesla explained the principles of the rotating magnetic field and induction motor by demonstrating how to make an egg (made of copper) stand on end in his version of the Egg of Columbus.

War of currents

In the "War of Currents" era in the late 1880s, Nikola Tesla and Thomas Edison became adversaries due to Edison's promotion of direct current (DC) for electric power distribution over the more efficient alternating current (AC) advocated by Tesla.

1896-1899

When Tesla was 41 years old, he filed the first basic radio patent (No. US645576). A year later, he demonstrated a remote controlled boat to the US military, believing that the military would want things such as radio-guided torpedoes. In 1898 a radio controlled boat was also demonstrated to the public during an electrical exhibition at Madison Square Garden. These devices had an innovative coherer and a series of logic gates. Radio remote control remained a novelty until the Space Age. In the same year, Tesla devised an electric igniter for gasoline engines which was nearly identical to ideas about the same process used by modern internal combustion engines.

In 1896, according to an interview he gave in 1916, Tesla invented a type of loudspeaker. The sounds were of the quality of the telephones of that time. The invention was never patented nor released publicly (till years later by Tesla himself).

As a result of the "War of Currents" Edison and Westinghouse were almost bankrupt, so in 1897 Tesla released Westinghouse from contract providing Westinghouse a break from Tesla's AC motor royalties.

Colorado Springs

In 1899, Tesla decided to move and began research in Colorado Springs, Colorado, where he could have room for his high-voltage high-frequency experiments. He chose this location primarily because of the frequent thunderstorms, the high altitude (where the air, being at a lower pressure, had a lower dielectric breakdown strength, making it easier to ionize), and the dryness of the air (minimizing leakage of electric charge through insulators). Also, the property was free and electric power available from the El Paso Power Company. Today, magnetic intensity charts also show that the ground around his lab possesses a denser magnetic field than the surrounding area. Tesla reached Colorado Springs on May 17, 1899. Upon his arrival he told reporters that he was conducting experiments transmitting signals from Pikes Peak to Paris.

Tesla kept a diary of his experiments in the Colorado Springs lab where he spent nearly nine months. It consists of 500 pages of handwritten notes and nearly 200 drawings, recorded chronologically between June 1, 1899 and January 7, 1900, as the work occurred, containing explanations of his experiments. He was developing a system for wireless telegraphy, telephony and the transmission of power, experimented with high-voltage electricity and the possibility of wireless transmitting and distributing large amounts of electrical energy over long distances. He also conceived a system for geophysical exploration--seismology--which he called telegeodynamics, based on his reciprocating mechanical oscillator patented in 1894, and explained that a long sequence of small explosions could be used to find ore and create earthquakes large enough to destroy the Earth. He did not experiment with this as he felt there would not be "a desirable outcome".

Much of what Tesla discovered while in this lab has been lost to history and Tesla's own secrecy. To this very day there is talk of Tesla's Death Ray being invented there as well as communication with other planets. How much of this is true is now unknown, but has made Tesla's time at this remote lab a wellspring for Urban legends about him.

Laboratory construction

Tesla, a local contractor, and several assistants commenced the construction of the laboratory shortly after arriving in Colorado Springs. The lab was established on Knob Hill, east of the Colorado School for the Deaf and Blind and one mile (1.6 km) east of downtown. Its primary purposes were experiments with high frequency electricity and other phenomena, and secondary--research into wireless transmission of electrical power.

Tesla's design of the lab was a building fifty feet by sixty feet (15 by 18 m) with eighty-foot (24 m) ceilings. A one-hundred-forty-two foot (43 m) conducting aerial with a thirty-inch (760 mm) copper-foil-covered wooden ball was erected on the roof. The roof was rolled back to prevent fire from sparks and other dangerous effects of the experiments. The laboratory had sensitive instruments and equipment.

Magnifying transmitter

Missing imageTesla_colorado_444px.jpgDouble exposure publicity photo of Tesla sitting in his laboratory in Colorado Springs with his "magnifying transmitter" generating millions of volts of electricity. The arcs are about 22 feet (7 m) long.

The lab possessed the largest Tesla Coil ever built, fifty-two feet (16 m) in diameter, known as the Magnifying Transmitter (further MT). Not identical to a classic Tesla Coil, it was a three-coil magnifying system requiring different forms of analysis than lumped-constant coupled resonant coils presently described to most. It resonated at a natural quarter wavelength frequency and could work in a continuous-wave mode and in a partially damped-wave resonant mode.

According to accounts, Tesla used it to transmit tens of thousands of watts of power wirelessly; it could generate millions of volts of electricity and produce lightning bolts more than one-hundred feet (30 m) long. Tesla posted a large fence around it with a sign "Keep Out - Great Danger".

Tesla became the first man to create electrical effects on the scale of lightning. The MT produced thunder which was heard as far away as Cripple Creek. People near the lab would observe sparks emitting from the ground to their feet and through their shoes. Some have observed electrical sparks from the fire hydrants (Tesla for a time grounded out to the plumbing of the city). The area around the laboratory would glow with a blue corona (similar to St. Elmo's Fire).

One of Tesla's experiments with the MT destroyed Colorado Springs Electric Company's generator by backfeeding the city's power generators, and blacked out the city. The company denied Tesla further access to the backup generator's feed if he did not repair the primary generator at his own expense; it was working again in a few days.

Tuned circuits

Tesla also constructed many smaller resonance transformers and discovered the concept of tuned electrical circuits. He also developed a number of coherers for separating and perceiving electromagnetic waves and designed rotating coherers which he used to detect the unique types of electromagnetic phenomenon he observed. They had a mechanism of geared wheels driven by a coiled spring-drive mechanism which rotated small glass cylinders. These experiments were the final stage of years of work on synchronized tuned electrical circuits.

These transceivers were constructed to demonstrate how signals could be "tuned in". Tesla logged in his diary on July 3, 1899 that a separate resonance transformer tuned to the same high frequency as a larger high-voltage resonance transformer would transceive energy from the larger coil, acting as a transmitter of wireless energy, which was used to confirm Tesla's patent for radio during later disputes in the courts. These air core high-frequency resonate coils were the predecessors of systems from radio to radar and medical magnetic resonance imaging devices.

Propagation and resonance

On July 3, 1899, Tesla discovered terrestrial stationary waves within the earth. He demonstrated that the Earth behaves as a smooth polished conductor and possesses electrical vibrations. He experimented with waves characterized by a lack of vibration at points, between which areas of maximum vibration occur periodically. These standing waves were produced by confining waves within constructed conductive boundaries. Tesla demonstrated that the Earth could respond at predescribed frequencies of electrical vibrations. At this time, Tesla realized that it was possible to transceive power around the globe. A few years later, George Westinghouse stopped funding Tesla's research when Tesla showed him that he could offer free electricity to the whole world by simply "ramming a stick in the earth in your backyard". Westinghouse said he would go bankrupt if that happened.

Tesla conducted experiments contributing to the understanding of electromagnetic propagation and the Earth's resonance. It is well documented (from various photos from the time) that he lit hundreds of lamps wirelessly at a distance of up to twenty-five miles (40 km). He transmitted signals several kilometres and lit neon tubes conducting through the ground. He researched ways to transmit energy wirelessly over long distances. He transmitted extremely low frequencies through the ground in his experiments and made mathematical calculations and computations based on his experiments and discovered that the resonant frequency of the Earth was approximately 8 Hz (Hertz). In the 1950s, researchers confirmed resonant frequency was in this range (interesting to note, Theta brain waves also cycle in this range).

Cosmic waves

In the Colorado Springs lab, Tesla recorded what he concluded were extraterrestrial radio signals and announced his findings in some of the scientific journals of the time. [5] His announcements and data were rejected by the scientific community who did not believe him. He notes measurements of repetitive signals from his receiver which are substantially different from the signals he had noted from storms and earth noise. Specifically, he later recalled that the signals appeared in groups of clicks 1, 2, 3, and 4 clicks together. He stated in the article "A Giant Eye to See Round the World", of February 25, 1923, that:

"Twenty-two years ago, while experimenting in Colorado with a wireless power plant, I obtained extraordinary experimental evidence of the existence of life on Mars. I had perfected a wireless receiver of extraordinary sensitiveness, far beyond anything known, and I caught signals which I interpreted as meaning 1--2--3--4. I believe the Martians used numbers for communication because numbers are universal."

Clearly, Tesla felt the signal groups originated on the planet Mars. In 1996 Corum and Corum published an analysis of Jovian plasma torus signals which indicate that there was a correspondence between the setting of Mars at Colorado Springs, and the cessation of signals from Jupiter in the summer of 1899 when Tesla was there. Further, analysis by the Corums indicate that Tesla's transceiver was sensitive in the 18 kHz gap in the Kennelly-Heaviside layer which would have allowed that reception from Jupiter. Therefore, there is evidence the signals Tesla noticed came from Jupiter, among other possible sources. Tesla spent the latter part of his life trying to signal Mars.

It is important to recognize that when he says he "recorded" these signals, it is meant that he wrote down the data and his impressions of what he had heard. He did release reports at the time. Tesla¹s initial announcement of the existence of extraterrestrial radio signals was in 1899. In March of 1907, Tesla wrote about signaling to Mars in Harvard Magazine and how it was a problem of electrical engineering. Additional descriptions come from remembrances twenty years later. All this was met with resistance and disbelief by his contemporaries.

Colorado Departure

Tesla left Colorado Springs on January 7, 1900. The lab was torn down, broken up, and its contents sold to pay debts. The Colorado experiments prepared Tesla for his next project, the establishment of a wireless power transmission facility that would be known as Wardenclyffe. On March 21, 1900, Tesla was granted US685012 patent for the means for increasing the intensity of electrical oscillations.

Later Years

In 1900, with $150,000 (51 % from J. Pierpont Morgan), Tesla began planning the Wardenclyffe Tower facility. In June 1902, Tesla's lab operations were moved to Wardenclyffe from Houston Street. The tower was finally dismantled for scrap during World War I. Newspapers of the time labeled Wardenclyffe "Tesla's million-dollar folly." In 1904, the US Patent Office reversed its decision and awarded Guglielmo Marconi the patent for radio, and Tesla began his fight to re-acquire the radio patent. On his 50th birthday in 1906, Tesla demonstrated his 200 hp (150 kW) 16,000 rpm bladeless turbine. During 19101911 at the Waterside Power Station in New York, several of his bladeless turbine engines were tested at 1005000 hp.

Since the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to Marconi for radio in 1909, Thomas Edison and Tesla were mentioned as potential laureates to share the Nobel Prize of 1915 in a press dispatch, leading to one of several Nobel Prize controversies. Some sources have claimed that due to their animosity toward each other neither was given the award, despite their enormous scientific contributions, and that each sought to minimize the other one's achievements and right to win the award, that both refused to ever accept the award if the other received it first, and that both rejected any possibility of sharing it.

In the following events after the rumors, neither Tesla nor Edison won the prize (although Edison did receive one of 38 possible bids in 1915, and Tesla did receive one bid out of 38 in 1937).

Earlier, Tesla alone was rumored to have been nominated for the Nobel Prize of 1912. The rumored nomination was primarily for his experiments with tuned circuits using high-voltage high-frequency resonant transformers.

In 1915, Tesla filed a lawsuit against Marconi attempting, unsuccessfully, to obtain a court injunction against the claims of Marconi. After Wardenclyffe, Tesla built the Telefunken Wireless Station in Sayville, Long Island. Some of what he wanted to achieve at Wardenclyffe was accomplished with the Telefunken Wireless. In 1917, the facility was seized and torn down by the Marines, because it was suspected that it could be used by German spies.

Prior to World War I, Tesla looked overseas for investors to fund his research. When the war started, Tesla lost the funding he was receiving from his European patents. After the war ended, Tesla made predictions regarding the relevant issues of the post-World War I environment, in a printed article (December 20, 1914).

Tesla believed that the League of Nations was not a remedy for the times and issues. Tesla started to exhibit pronounced symptoms of obsessive-compulsive disorder in the years following. He became obsessed with the number three; he often felt compelled to walk around a block three times before entering a building, demanded a stack of three folded cloth napkins beside his plate at every meal, etc. The nature of OCD was little understood at the time and no treatments were available, so his symptoms were considered by some to be evidence of partial insanity, and this undoubtedly hurt what was left of his reputation.

At this time, he was staying at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, renting in an arrangement for deferred payments. Eventually, the Wardenclyffe deed was turned over to George Boldt, proprietor of the Waldorf-Astoria to pay a $20,000 debt. In 1917, around the time that the Wardenclyffe Tower was demolished by Boldt to make the land a more viable real estate asset, Tesla received AIEE's highest honor, the Edison Medal.

Tesla, in August 1917, first established principles regarding frequency and power level for the first primitive RADAR units.

In 1934, Emile Girardeau, working with the first French RADAR systems, stated he was building RADAR systems "conceived according to the principles stated by Tesla". By the twenties, Tesla was reportedly negotiating with the United Kingdom government about a ray system. Tesla had also stated that efforts had been made to steal the so called "death ray". It is suggested that the removal of the Chamberlain government ended negotiations.

On Tesla's seventy-fifth birthday in 1931, Time magazine put him on its cover. The cover caption noted his contribution to electrical power generation. Tesla received his last patent in 1928 for an apparatus for aerial transportation which was the first instance of VTOL aircraft. By the end of 1931, Tesla released "On Future Motive Power" which covered an ocean thermal energy conversion system.

In 1934, Tesla wrote to consul Jankovic of his homeland. The letter contained the message of gratitude to Mihajlo Pupin who initiated a donation scheme by which American companies could support Tesla. Tesla refused the assistance, and chose to live by a modest pension received from Yugoslavia and to continue researching.

In 1936, Tesla stated "I'm equally proud of my Serbian origin and my Croatian homeland."

Field Theories

When he was eighty-one, Tesla stated he had completed a dynamic theory of gravity. He stated that it was "worked out in all details" and that he hoped to soon give it to the world. The theory was never published. At the time of his announcement, it was considered by the scientific establishment to exceed the bounds of reason. Some believe that Tesla never fully developed the Unified Field Theory.

The bulk of the theory was developed between 1892 and 1894, during the period that he was conducting experiments with high frequency and high potential electromagnetism and patenting devices for their utilization. It was completed, according to Tesla, by the end of the 1930s. Tesla's theory explained gravity using electrodynamics consisting of transverse waves (to a lesser extent) and longitudinal waves (for the majority). Reminiscent of Mach's principle.

Nikola Tesla, with Ruder Boskovic's book Theoria Philosophiae Naturalis, sits in front of the spiral coil of his high-frequency transformer at East Houston Street, New York.

Directed-energy Weapon

Later in life, Tesla made some remarkable claims concerning a "teleforce" weapon. The press called it a "peace ray" or death ray.

In total, the components and methods included:

An apparatus for producing manifestations of energy in free air instead of in a high vacuum as in the past. This, according to Tesla in 1934, was accomplished.

A mechanism for generating tremendous electrical force. This, according to Tesla, was also accomplished.

A means of intensifying and amplifying the force developed by the second mechanism.

A new method for producing a tremendous electrical repelling force. This would be the projector, or gun, of the invention.

Tesla worked on plans for a directed-energy weapon between the early 1900s till the time of his death. In 1937, Tesla composed a treatise entitled "The Art of Projecting Concentrated Non-dispersive Energy through the Natural Media" concerning charged particle beams. Tesla published the document in an attempt to expound on the technical description of a "superweapon that would put an end to all war". This treatise of the particle beam is currently in the Nikola Tesla Museum archive in Belgrade. It described an open ended vacuum tube with a gas jet seal that allowed particles to exit, a method of charging particles to millions of volts, and a method of creating and directing nondispersive particle streams (through electrostatic repulsion).

Records of his indicate that it was based on a narrow stream of atomic clusters of liquid mercury or tungsten accelerated via high voltage (by means akin to his magnifying transformer). Tesla gave the following description concerning the particle gun's operation:

[The nozzle would] send concentrated beams of particles through the free air, of such tremendous energy that they will bring down a fleet of 10,000 enemy airplanes at a distance of 200 miles from a defending nation's border and will cause armies to drop dead in their tracks.

The weapon could be used against ground based infantry or for antiaircraft purposes. Tesla tried to interest the US War Department in the device. He also offered this invention to European countries. None of the governments purchased a contract to build the device. He was unable to act on his plans.

Theoretical Inventions

Tesla began to theorize about electricity and magnetism's power to warp, or rather change, space and time and the procedure by which man could forcibly control this power. Near the end of his life, Tesla was fascinated with the idea of light as both a particle and a wave, a fundamental proposition already incorporated into quantum physics.

This field of inquiry led to the idea of creating a "wall of light" by manipulating electromagnetic waves in a certain pattern. This mysterious wall of light would enable time, space, gravity and matter to be altered at will, and engendered an array of Tesla proposals that seem to leap straight out of science fiction, including anti-gravity airships, teleportation, and time travel.

The single strangest invention Tesla ever proposed was probably the "thought photography" machine. He reasoned that a thought formed in the mind created a corresponding image in the retina, and the electrical data of this neural transmission could be read and recorded in a machine. The stored information could then be processed through an artificial optic nerve and played back as visual patterns on a viewscreen.

Another of Tesla's theorized inventions is commonly referred to as Tesla's Flying Machine, which appears to resemble an ion-propelled aircraft. Tesla claimed that one of his life goals was to create a flying machine that would run without the use of an airplane engine, wings, ailerons, propellers, or an onboard fuel source. Initially, Tesla pondered about the idea of a flying craft that would fly using an electric motor powered by grounded base stations. As time progressed, Tesla suggested that perhaps such an aircraft could be run entirely electro-mechanically. The theorized appearance would typically take the form of a cigar or saucer.

Death

Tesla died of heart failure alone in Room 3327 of the New Yorker Hotel, some time between the evening of January 5 and the morning of January 8, 1943, at the age of 86.[90] Despite selling his AC electricity patents, Tesla was destitute and died with significant debts. Later that year the US Supreme Court upheld Tesla's patent number U.S. Patent 645,576 in effect recognizing him as the inventor of radio.

Immediately after Tesla's death became known, the Federal Bureau of Investigation instructed the government's Alien Property Custodian office to take possession of his papers and property, despite his US citizenship. His safe at the hotel was also opened.

At the time of his death, Tesla had been continuing work on the teleforce weapon, or death ray, that he had unsuccessfully marketed to the US War Department. It appears that his proposed death ray was related to his research into ball lightning and plasma and was imagined as a particle beam weapon.

The US government did not find a prototype of the device in the safe. After the FBI was contacted by the War Department, his papers were declared to be top secret. The so-called "peace ray" constitutes a part of some conspiracy theories as a means of destruction. The personal effects were seized on the advice of presidential advisers, and J. Edgar Hoover declared the case "most secret", because of the nature of Tesla's inventions and patents. One document states that "[he] is reported to have some 80 trunks in different places containing transcripts and plans having to do with his experiments". Charlotte Muzar reported that there were several "missing" papers and property.

Legacy

Tesla did not like to pose for portraits. He did it only once for princess Vilma Lwoff-Parlaghy. His wish was to have a sculpture made by his close friend Ivan Mestrovic, who was at that time in United States, but he died before getting a chance to see it. Mestrovic made a bronze bust (1952) that is held in the Nikola Tesla Museum in Belgrade and a statue (1955/56) placed at the Ruder Boskovic Institute in Zagreb. This statue was moved to Nikola Tesla Street in Zagreb's city centre on the 150th anniversary of Tesla's birth, with the Ruder Boskovic Institute to receive a duplicate. In 1976, a bronze statue of Tesla was placed at Niagara Falls, New York. A similar statue was also erected in his hometown of Gospic in 1986.

The SI unit tesla (T) for measuring magnetic flux density or magnetic induction (commonly known as the magnetic field ) was named in Tesla¹s honour at the Conférence Générale des Poids et Mesures, Paris in 1960.

The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) of which Tesla had been vice president also created an award in recognition of Tesla. Called the IEEE Nikola Tesla Award, it is given to individuals or a team that has made outstanding contributions to the generation or utilization of electric power, and is considered the most prestigious award in the area of electric power.

The Tesla crater on the far side of the Moon and the minor planet 2244 Tesla are also named after him.

Nikola Tesla Wikipedia

Nikola Tesla Google Videos

The Tesla Coil

Quotes

"There manifests itself in the fully developed being, Man, a desire mysterious, inscrutable and irresistible: to imitate nature, to create, to work himself the wonders he perceives. Long ago he recognized that all perceptible matter comes from a primary substance, or tenuity beyond conception, filling all space, the Akasa or luminiferous ether, which is acted upon by the life giving Prana or creative force, calling into existence, in never ending cycles all things and phenomena. The primary substance, thrown into infintesimal whirls of prodigious velocity, becomes gross matter; the force subsiding, the motion ceases and matter disappears, reverting to the primary substance." - Man's Greatest Achievement, 1907

"So astounding are the facts in this connection, that it would seem as though the Creator, himself had electrically designed this planet." - Tesla describing what is now known as Schumann Resonance (7.8Hz) in The Transmission of Electrical Energy Without Wires As A Means Of Furthering World Peace 1905.

"Of all the frictional resistances, the one that most retards human movement is ignorance, what Buddha called 'the greatest evil in the world.' The friction which results from ignorance can be reduced only by the spread of knowledge and the unification of the heterogeneous elements of humanity. No effort could be better spent."

"Science is but a perversion of itself unless it has as its ultimate goal the betterment of humanity."

CARL SAGAN

2008-10-05T19:28:00.000-07:00

Carl Sagan: A life in the cosmos

Carl Edward Sagan (November 9, 1934 December 20, 1996) was an American astronomer and science popularizer. He pioneered exobiology and promoted the Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence (SETI). He is world-famous for his popular science books and the television series Cosmos, which he co-wrote and presented. In his works he frequently advocated the scientific method.

Education and scientific career

Carl Sagan was born in Brooklyn, New York. His father, Sam Sagan, was a Jewish garment worker and his mother, Rachel Molly Gruber, was a housewife. Sagan attended the University of Chicago, where he received a bachelor's degree (1955) and a master's degree (1956) in physics, before earning his doctorate (1960) in astronomy and astrophysics. He taught at Harvard University until 1968, when he moved to Cornell University.

Sagan became a full professor at Cornell in 1971 and directed a lab there. He contributed to most of the unmanned space missions that explored our solar system. He conceived the idea of adding an unalterable and universal message on spacecraft destined to leave the solar system, that could be understood by any extraterrestrial intelligence that might find it. The first message that was actually sent into space was a gold-anodized plaque attached to the space probe Pioneer 10. He continued to refine his designs and the most elaborate such message he helped to develop was the Voyager Golden Record that was sent out with the Voyager space probes.

Scientific achievements

Sagan was among the first to hypothesize that Titan and Jupiter's moon Europa may possess oceans (a subsurface ocean in the case of Europa) or lakes. Thus making the hypothesized water ocean on Europa potentially habitable for life. Europa's subsurface ocean was later indirectly confirmed by the spacecraft Galileo.

He furthered insights regarding the atmosphere of Venus, seasonal changes on Mars, and Saturn's moon Titan. Sagan established that the atmosphere of Venus is extremely hot and dense. He also perceived global warming as a growing, man-made danger and likened it to the natural development of Venus into a hot life-hostile planet through greenhouse gases. He suggested that the seasonal changes on Mars were due to windblown dust, not to vegetation changes, as others had proposed.

Scientific advocacy

Sagan was a proponent of the search for extraterrestrial life. He urged the scientific community to listen with large radio telescopes for signals from intelligent extraterrestrial lifeforms. He advocated sending probes to other planets. Sagan was Editor in Chief of Icarus (a professional journal concerning planetary research) for 12 years. He cofounded the Planetary Society and was a member of the SETI Institute Board of Trustees.

He was well known as a coauthor of the scientific paper that predicted nuclear winter would follow nuclear war. Sagan famously predicted that smoky oil fires in Kuwait (set by Saddam Hussein's army) would cause an ecological disaster of black clouds. Retired atmospheric physicist Fred Singer dismissed Sagan's prediction as nonsense, predicting that the smoke would dissipate in a matter of days.

Social concerns

Sagan believed that the Drake equation suggested that a large number of extraterrestrial civilizations would form, but that the lack of evidence of such civilizations (the Fermi paradox) suggests that technological civilizations tend to destroy themselves rather quickly. This stimulated his interest in identifying and publicizing ways that humanity could destroy itself, with the hope of avoiding such destruction and eventually becoming a space-faring species.

Sagan, a life-long follower of liberalism, became more politically active after marrying leftist Ann Druyan and performed acts of civil disobedience at nuclear weapons sites during the Nuclear Freeze era. He spoke out against President Ronald Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative, or "Star Wars" program, which he felt was technically impossible to build and perfect, far more expensive to create than for an enemy to defeat through decoys and other means, and destabilizing to Cold War nuclear weapons disarmament progress.

Carl Sagan was an avid user of marijuana, although he never publicly admitted it during his life. Under the pseudonym "Mr. X," he wrote an essay concerning cannabis smoking in the 1971 book Marihuana Reconsidered, whose editor was Lester Grinspoon. In the essay Sagan commented that marijuana encouraged some of his works and enhanced experiences. After Sagan's death, Grinspoon disclosed this to Sagan's biographer Keay Davidson. When the biography, entitled Carl Sagan: A Life, was published in 1999, the marijuana exposure stirred some media attention.

Popularization of science

Sagan's capability to convey his ideas allowed many people to better understand the cosmos. He delivered the 1977/1978 Christmas Lectures for Young People at the Royal Institution. He wrote (with Ann Druyan, eventually his third wife) and narrated the highly popular thirteen part PBS television series Cosmos (modeled on Jacob Bronowski's The Ascent of Man); he also wrote books to popularize science (The Dragons of Eden, which won a Pulitzer Prize, Broca's Brain, etc.) and a novel, Contact, that was a best-seller and had a film adaptation starring Jodie Foster in 1997. The film won the 1998 Hugo Award.

From Cosmos and his frequent appearances on The Tonight Show, Sagan became associated with the catch phrase "billions and billions." (He never actually used that phrase in Cosmos, but his distinctive delivery and frequent use of billions made this a favorite phrase of Johnny Carson and others doing the many affectionate impressions of him. Sagan took this in good humor, and his final book was entitled Billions and Billions - see below.) The humorous unit of the Sagan has now been coined to stand for any count of at least 4,000,000,000.

He wrote a sequel to Cosmos, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space, which was selected as a notable book of 1995 by The New York Times. Carl Sagan also wrote an introduction for the best selling book by Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time.

Sagan presents a speculation concerning the origin of the swastika symbol in his book, Comet. Sagan hypothesized that a comet approached so close to Earth in antiquity that the jets of gas streaming out of it were visible, bent by the comet's rotation. The book Comet reproduces an ancient Chinese manuscript that shows comet tail varieties; most are variations on simple comet tails, but the last shows the comet nucleus with four bent arms extending from it, showing a swastika.

Sagan caused mixed reactions among other professional scientists. On the one hand, there was general support for his popularization of science, his efforts to increase scientific understanding among the general public, and his positions in favor of skepticism and against pseudoscience.

On the other hand, there was some unease that the public would misunderstand some of the personal positions and interests that Sagan took as being part of the scientific consensus rather than his own personal views, and there was some unease, which some believe to have been motivated in part by professional jealousy, that scientific views contrary to those that Sagan took (such as on the severity of nuclear winter) were not being sufficiently presented to the public.

His comments on the Kuwait oil well fires during the first Gulf War were shown later to be in error; Sagan himself acknowledged his error in print.Late in his life, Sagan's books developed his skeptical, naturalistic view of the world.

In The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, he presented tools for testing arguments and detecting fallacious or fraudulent ones, essentially advocating wide use of the scientific method.

In The Demon-Haunted World, Sagan gave a list of errors he had made (including his predictions about the effects of the Kuwaiti oil fires) as an example of how science is self-correcting.

The compilation Billions and Billions: Thoughts on Life and Death at the End of the Millennium, published after Sagan's death, contains essays written by Sagan, such as his views on abortion, and Ann Druyan's account of his death as a non-believer.

Personality

In 1994, Apple Computer began developing the Power Macintosh 7100. They chose the internal code name "Carl Sagan," in honor of the astronomer.

Though the project name was strictly internal and never used in public marketing, when Sagan learned of this internal usage, he sued Apple Computer to use a different project name - other projects had names like "Cold fusion" and "Piltdown Man", and he was displeased at being associated with what he considered pseudoscience.

Though Sagan lost the suit, Apple engineers complied with his demands anyway, renaming the project "BHA" (Butthead Astronomer). Sagan sued Apple for libel over the new name, claiming that it subjected him to contempt and ridicule. Sagan lost this lawsuit as well; still, the 7100 saw another name change: it was now called "LAW" (Lawyers Are Wimps).

Sagan is regarded by most as an atheist or agnostic, observing statements such as: "The idea that God is an oversized white male with a flowing beard who sits in the sky and tallies the fall of every sparrow is ludicrous. But if by 'God' one means the set of physical laws that govern the universe, then clearly there is such a God. This God is emotionally unsatisfying... it does not make much sense to pray to the law of gravity."

Sagan married three times; the famous biologist Lynn Margulis (mother of Dorion Sagan) in 1957, artist Linda Salzman (mother of Nick Sagan) in 1968, and author Ann Druyan (mother of Sasha and Sam) in 1981, to whom he remained married until his death.

Legacy

After a long and difficult fight with myelodysplasia, Sagan died at the age of 62, on December 20, 1996, at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, Washington. Sagan was a significant figure, and his supporters credit his importance to his popularisation of the natural sciences, opposing both restraints on science and reactionary applications of science, defending democratic traditions, resisting nationalism, defending humanism, and arguing against geocentric and anthropocentric views.

The landing site of the unmanned Mars Pathfinder spacecraft was renamed the Carl Sagan Memorial Station in honor of Dr. Sagan on July 5, 1997. Asteroid 2709 Sagan is also named in his honor.

The 1997 movie Contact, based on Sagan's novel of the same name, and finished after his death, ends with the dedication "For Carl."In an episode of Star Trek: Enterprise, a quick shot is shown of the relic rover Sojourner, part of the Mars Pathfinder mission, placed by a historical marker at Carl Sagan Memorial Station on the Martian surface. The marker displays a quote from Sagan: "Whatever the reason you're on Mars, I'm glad you're there, and I wish I was with you."

WILHELM CONRAD RONTGEN

2008-10-05T19:27:00.000-07:00

Wilhelm Conrad Rontgen

Rontgen, Wilhelm Conrad - born March 27, 1845, Lennep, Prussia [now Remscheid, Ger.] d. Feb. 10, 1923, Munich - German physicist who was a recipient of the first Nobel Prize for Physics, in 1901, for his discovery of X rays, which heralded the age of modern physics and revolutionized diagnostic medicine.

Rontgen studied at the Polytechnic in Zürich and then was professor of physics at the universities of Strasbourg (1876-79), Giessen (1879-88), Wurzburg (1888-1900), and Munich (1900-20). His research also included work on elasticity, capillary action of fluids, specific heats of gases, conduction of heat in crystals, absorption of heat by gases, and piezoelectricity.

In 1895, while experimenting with electric current flow in a partially evacuated glass tube (cathode-ray tube), Röntgen observed that a nearby piece of barium platinocyanide gave off light when the tube was in operation.

He theorized that when the cathode rays (electrons) struck the glass wall of the tube, some unknown radiation was formed that traveled across the room, struck the chemical, and caused the fluorescence.

Further investigation revealed that paper, wood, and aluminum, among other materials, are transparent to this new form of radiation. He found that it affected photographic plates, and, since it did not noticeably exhibit any properties of light, such as reflection or refraction, he mistakenly thought the rays were unrelated to light.

In view of its uncertain nature, he called the phenomenon X-radiation, though it also became known as Rontgen radiation.

He took the first X-ray photographs, of the interiors of metal objects and of the bones in his wife's hand.

MAX PLANCK

2008-10-05T19:25:00.000-07:00

Max Planck

Max Karl Ernst Ludwig Planck was born on 23 April in Kiel Germany. He was the sixth child in a family devoted to the church and state. His father was a prominent jurist and professor of law at the University of Kiel. At the age of 9, his father received a post at the University of Munich, and Planck attended the Maximilian Gymnasium. While there Planck succeeded very well in all subjects and he gained an interest in physics and mathematics finally graduating at the age of 17.

He found it difficult to make a decision on what career he was going to aim for, finally settling for physics rather than music or classical philogy, since he believed he had his greatest originality within that physics. He was an excellent pianist and found great pleasure in playing, having the gift of absolute pitch. Another passion of his was hiking, mountain climbing and taking long walks as regularly as possible.

In 1874 Planck entered the University of Munich, and was unimpressed with his physics professor there, Professor Phillip von Jolly. He did, however, find intellectual stimulation through self study. Planck was deeply impressed by the law of conservation of energy and he became convinced that the second law of termodynamics was an absolute law of nature.

Planck based his doctoral dissertation on the second law of thermodynamics and in July 1879, at the young age of 21 he received his doctoral degree. Following this he completed his qualifying dissertation at Munich and he employed as a lecturer (Privatdozent). With the help of his father in 1885 he took up the position of associate professor at the University of Kiel becoming a full professor in 1892 at the University of Berlin when Kirchoff died. Planck lectured on all branches of theoretical physics and had nine doctoral students study under him.

Planck was intrigued by the law discovered by his colleague Wilhelm Wien in 1896. He made several attempts at deriving this law, starting from the second law of thermodynamics as a base Experimental evidence was coming to light which showed that Wiens law broke down completely at low frequencies but was perfectly viable at high frequencies.

Plank guessed that, since the entropy of radiation depended mathematically on it's energy in the high frequency range due to Wiens law, and that because he knew what the dependance was in the low frequency region, he should somehow combine these two properties in some simple manner resulting in a formula relating frequency, to the energy of radiation. The formula was hailed a great success, but Planck noted that it was just a formula; a lucky guess which still had to be derived from first principles inorder to give it a proper scientific standing.

In 1900, at the age of 42, Planck achieved this, but in the process he had to abandon one of his greatest beliefs - that the second law of thermodynamics was an absolute law of nature. He was forced to accept Ludwig Boltzmann's statistical explanation for the second law. Planck also had to assume that the black body oscillators could only absorb and emit energy in discrete amounts of energy - packets of energy which he called quanta. Only by carrying out a statistical analysis of these quanta of energy could Planck derive his formula.

Each quanta contained an energy directly proportional to a constant, h, multiplied by the frequency of oscillation of the particular blackbody oscillator associated with that quanta. Using his formula he calculated a value for Boltzmanns constant, Avogadros numer, the charge of the electron as well as the constant h. As time passed others came to realise that because of the finite, non-zero value of h, the world at atomic dimensions could not be explained with classical mechanics. The quantum age had truly begun!

Planck was very reluctant to introduce his revolutionary idea on the quantisation of energy, and only by being forced by pure logic did he do so. It took a number of years before Planck's ideas were generally recognised and it was the likes of Einstein, Bohr and Poincare who developed the quantum idea further in the early half of the century.

In 1912 Planck became the permanent scretary of the mathematics and physics sections of the Prussian Academy of Sciences and continued to hold the post until 1938.

In 1918 he received the Nobel Prize for Physics for his work on introducing the quantum. Along side Einstein and Schrodinger, he sternly opposed the statistical view held by Bohr, Born, Heisenberg and many others which was introduced to quantum mechanics in 1925-26. Planck retired in 1928, with Erwin Shrodinger taking his place until the Nazis took power in 1933.

In 1930 Planck became the president of the Kaiser Wilhelm society (now known as the Max Planck Society) until 1937.

Planck suffered many personal tragedies, including losing two sons and daughters at an early age. One of his sons, Erwin, was killed by the Gestapo due to a failed bombing of Hitler in 1944. This incident left Planck without the will to live. He died on the 4th October, 1947 aged 89.

ISAAC NEWTON

2008-10-05T18:15:00.000-07:00

Isaac Newton

Sir Isaac Newton, President of the Royal Society, (4 January 1643 - 31 March 1727) [OS: 25 December 1642 20 March 1727] was an English mathematician, physicist, astronomer, alchemist, and natural philosopher who is generally regarded as one of the greatest scientists and mathematicians in history.

Newton wrote the Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, in which he described universal gravitation and the three laws of motion, laying the groundwork for classical mechanics. By deriving Kepler's laws of planetary motion from this system, he was the first to show that the motion of objects on Earth and of celestial bodies are governed by the same set of natural laws. The unifying and deterministic power of his laws was integral to the scientific revolution and the advancement of heliocentrism.

Among other scientific discoveries, Newton realised that the spectrum of colours observed when white light passes through a prism is inherent in the white light and not added by the prism (as Roger Bacon had claimed in the thirteenth century), and notably argued that light is composed of particles.

He also developed a law of cooling, describing the rate of cooling of objects when exposed to air.

He enunciated the principles of conservation of momentum and angular momentum.

Finally, he studied the speed of sound in air, and voiced a theory of the origin of stars.

Despite this renown in mainstream science, Newton actually spent more time working on alchemy than physics, writing considerably more papers on the former than the latter.

Newton played a major role in the development of calculus, sharing credit with Gottfried Leibniz. He also made contributions to other areas of mathematics, for example the generalised binomial theorem. The mathematician and mathematical physicist Joseph Louis Lagrange (17361813), said that "Newton was the greatest genius that ever existed and the most fortunate, for we cannot find more than once a system of the world to establish."

Early Years

Born in the hamlet of Woolsthorpe, Newton was the only son of a local yeoman, also Isaac Newton, who had died three months before, and of Hannah Ayscough. That same year, at Arcetri near Florence, Galileo Galilei had died; Newton would eventually pick up his idea of a mathematical science of motion and bring his work to full fruition. A tiny and weak baby, Newton was not expected to survive his first day of life, much less 84 years.

Education

From the age of about twelve until he was seventeen, Newton was educated at The King's School in Grantham (where his signature can still be seen upon a library window sill). He was removed from school and by Oct 1659 he was to be found at Woolsthorpe, where his mother attempted to make a farmer of him. He was, by later reports of his contemporaries, thoroughly unhappy with the work. It appears to be Henry Stokes, master at the King's School, who persuaded his mother to send him back to school so that he might complete his education.

In June 1661 he matriculated to Trinity College, Cambridge. At that time, the college's teachings were based on those of Aristotle, but Newton preferred to read the more advanced ideas of modern philosophers such as Descartes and astronomers such as Galileo, Copernicus and Kepler.

When Newton arrived in Cambridge in 1661, the movement now known as the scientific revolution was well advanced, and many of the works basic to modern science had appeared. Astronomers from Copernicus to Kepler had elaborated the heliocentric system of the universe. Galileo had proposed the foundations of a new mechanics built on the principle of inertia. Led by Descartes, philosophers had begun to formulate a new conception of nature as an intricate, impersonal, and inert machine. Yet as far as the universities of Europe, including Cambridge, were concerned, all this might well have never happened. They continued to be the strongholds of outmoded Aristotelianism, which rested on a geocentric view of the universe and dealt with nature in qualitative rather than quantitative terms.

Like thousands of other undergraduates, Newton began his higher education by immersing himself in Aristotle's work. Even though the new philosophy was not in the curriculum, it was in the air. Some time during his undergraduate career, Newton discovered the works of the French natural philosopher René Descartes and the other mechanical philosophers, who, in contrast to Aristotle, viewed physical reality as composed entirely of particles of matter in motion and who held that all the phenomena of nature result from their mechanical interaction.

A new set of notes, which he entitled Quaestiones Quaedam Philosophicae (Certain Philosophical Questions), begun sometime in 1664, usurped the unused pages of a notebook intended for traditional scholastic exercises; under the title he entered the slogan "Amicus Plato amicus Aristoteles magis amica veritas" ("Plato is my friend, Aristotle is my friend, but my best friend is truth").

Newton's scientific career had begun.

The "Quaestiones" reveal that Newton had discovered the new conception of nature that provided the framework of the scientific revolution. He had thoroughly mastered the works of Descartes and had also discovered that the French philosopher Pierre Gassendi had revived atomism, an alternative mechanical system to explain nature. The "Quaestiones" also reveal that Newton already was inclined to find the latter a more attractive philosophy than Cartesian natural philosophy, which rejected the existence of ultimate indivisible particles.

The works of the 17th-century chemist Robert Boyle provided the foundation for Newton's considerable work in chemistry. Significantly, he had read Henry More, the Cambridge Platonist, and was thereby introduced to another intellectual world, the magical Hermetic tradition, which sought to explain natural phenomena in terms of alchemical and magical concepts. The two traditions of natural philosophy, the mechanical and the Hermetic, antithetical though they appear, continued to influence his thought and in their tension supplied the fundamental theme of his scientific career.

Although he did not record it in the "Quaestiones," Newton had also begun his mathematical studies. He again started with Descartes, from whose La Géometrie he branched out into the other literature of modern analysis with its application of algebraic techniques to problems of geometry. He then reached back for the support of classical geometry. Within little more than a year, he had mastered the literature; and, pursuing his own line of analysis, he began to move into new territory. He discovered the binomial theorem, and he developed the calculus, a more powerful form of analysis that employs infinitesimal considerations in finding the slopes of curves and areas under curves.

Work during the plague years

When Newton received the bachelor's degree in April 1665, the most remarkable undergraduate career in the history of university education had passed unrecognized. On his own, without formal guidance, he had sought out the new philosophy and the new mathematics and made them his own, but he had confined the progress of his studies to his notebooks.

Then, in 1665, the plague closed the university, and for most of the following two years he was forced to stay at his home, contemplating at leisure what he had learned. During the plague years Newton laid the foundations of the Calculus and extended an earlier insight into an essay, "Of Colors," which contains most of the ideas elaborated in his Opticks.

It was during this time that he examined the elements of circular motion and, applying his analysis to the Moon and the planets, derived the inverse square relation that the radially directed force acting on a planet decreases with the square of its distance from the Sun--which was later crucial to the law of universal gravitation. The world heard nothing of these discoveries. He chose not to share concepts he had discovered unless he was asked.

Mathematical Research

Newton became a fellow of Trinity College in 1669. In the same year he circulated his findings in De Analysi per Aequationes Numeri Terminorum Infinitas (On Analysis by Infinite Series), and later in De methodis serierum et fluxionum (On the Methods of Series and Fluxions), whose title gave rise to the "method of fluxions". Despite the fact that only a handful of savants were even aware of Newton's existence, he had arrived at the point where he had become the leading mathematician in Europe.

Newton and Gottfried Leibniz developed the calculus independently, using different notations. Although Newton had worked out his method years before Leibniz, he published almost nothing about it until 1693, and did not give a full account until 1704. Meanwhile, Leibniz began publishing a full account of his methods in 1684. Moreover, Leibniz's notation and "differential Method" were universally adopted on the Continent, and after 1820 or so, in the British Empire.

Newton claimed that he had been reluctant to publish his calculus because he feared being mocked for it. Starting in 1699, other members of the Royal Society accused Leibniz of plagiarism, and the dispute broke out in full force in 1711. Thus began the bitter calculus priority dispute with Leibniz, which marred the lives of both Newton and Leibniz until the latter's death in 1716. This dispute created a divide between British and Continental mathematicians that may have retarded the progress of British mathematics by at least a century.

Newton is generally credited with the generalized binomial theorem, valid for any exponent. He discovered Newton's identities, Newton's method, classified cubic plane curves (polynomials of degree three in two variables), made substantial contributions to the theory of finite differences, and was the first to use fractional indices and to employ coordinate geometry to derive solutions to Diophantine equations.

He approximated partial sums of the harmonic series by logarithms (a precursor to Euler's summation formula), and was the first to use power series with confidence and to revert power series. He also discovered a new formula for pi.He was elected Lucasian professor of mathematics in 1669.

In that day, any fellow of Cambridge or Oxford had to be an ordained Anglican priest. However, the terms of the Lucasian professorship required that the holder not be active in the church (presumably so as to have more time for science). Newton argued that this should exempt him from the ordination requirement, and Charles II, whose permission was needed, accepted this argument. Thus a conflict between Newton's religious views and Anglican orthodoxy was averted.

Optics

Replica of Newton's 6-inch reflecting telescope of 1672 for the Royal Society

From 1670 to 1672 he lectured on optics. During this period he investigated the refraction of light, demonstrating that a prism could decompose white light into a spectrum of colours, and that a lens and a second prism could recompose the multicoloured spectrum into white light. He also showed that the coloured light does not change its properties, by separating out a coloured beam and shining it on various objects.

Newton noted that regardless of whether it was reflected or scattered or transmitted, it stayed the same color. Thus the colors we observe are the result of how objects interact with the incident already-colored light, not the result of objects generating the color. Many of his findings in this field were criticized by later theorists, the most well-known being Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who postulated his own color theories.

From this work he concluded that any refracting telescope would suffer from the dispersion of light into colours, and invented a reflecting telescope (today known as a Newtonian telescope) to bypass that problem.

By grinding his own mirrors, using Newton's rings to judge the quality of the optics for his telescopes, he was able to produce a superior instrument to the refracting telescope, due primarily to the wider diameter of the mirror. (Only later, as glasses with a variety of refractive properties became available, did achromatic lenses for refractors become feasible.)

In 1671 the Royal Society asked for a demonstration of his reflecting telescope. Their interest encouraged him to publish his notes On Color, which he later expanded into his Opticks.

When Robert Hooke criticized some of Newton's ideas, Newton was so offended that he withdrew from public debate. The two men remained enemies until Hooke's death.

In one experiment, to prove that color perception is caused by pressure on the eye, Newton slid a darning needle around the side of his eye until he could poke at its rear side, dispassionately noting "white, darke & colored circles" so long as he kept stirring with "ye bodkin."

Newton argued that light is composed of particles, but he had to associate them with waves to explain the diffraction of light (Opticks Bk. II, Props. XII-XX).

Later physicists instead favored a purely wavelike explanation of light to account for diffraction.

Today's quantum mechanics restores the idea of "wave-particle duality", although photons bear very little resemblance to Newton's corpuscles (e.g., corpuscles refracted by accelerating toward the denser medium).

Newton is believed to have been the first to explain precisely the formation of the rainbow from water droplets dispersed in the atmosphere in a rain shower.

Influence of the Hermetic Tradition

In his Hypothesis of Light of 1675, Newton posited the existence of the ether to transmit forces between particles. Newton was in contact with Henry More, the Cambridge Platonist who was born in Grantham, on alchemy, and now his interest in the subject revived.

During a period of isolation, Newton was greatly influenced by the Hermetic tradition with which he had been familiar since his undergraduate days.

Newton, always somewhat interested in alchemy, now immersed himself in it, copying by hand treatise after treatise and collating them to interpret their arcane imagery. Under the influence of the Hermetic tradition, his conception of nature underwent a decisive change.

Until that time, Newton had been a mechanical philosopher in the standard 17th-century style, explaining natural phenomena by the motions of particles of matter. Thus, he held that the physical reality of light is a stream of tiny corpuscles diverted from its course by the presence of denser or rarer media. He felt that the apparent attraction of tiny bits of paper to a piece of glass that has been rubbed with cloth results from an ethereal effluvium that streams out of the glass and carries the bits of paper back with it.

This mechanical philosophy denied the possibility of action at a distance; as with static electricity, it explained apparent attractions away by means of invisible ethereal mechanisms.

Newton's Hypothesis of Light of 1675, with its universal ether, was a standard mechanical system of nature. Some phenomena, such as the capacity of chemicals to react only with certain others, puzzled him, however, and he spoke of a "secret principle" by which substances are "sociable" or "unsociable" with others.

About 1679, Newton abandoned the ether and its invisible mechanisms and began to ascribe the puzzling phenomena - chemical affinities, the generation of heat in chemical reactions, surface tension in fluids, capillary action, the cohesion of bodies, and the like, to attractions and repulsions between particles of matter.

More than 35 years later, in the second English edition of the Opticks, Newton accepted an ether again, although it was an ether that embodied the concept of action at a distance by positing a repulsion between its particles. The attractions and repulsions of Newton's speculations were direct transpositions of the occult sympathies and antipathies of Hermetic philosophy--as mechanical philosophers never ceased to protest.

Newton, however, regarded them as a modification of the mechanical philosophy that rendered it subject to exact mathematical treatment. As he conceived of them, attractions were quantitatively defined, and they offered a bridge to unite the two basic themes of 17th-century science--the mechanical tradition, which had dealt primarily with verbal mechanical imagery, and the Pythagorean tradition, which insisted on the mathematical nature of reality. Newton's reconciliation through the concept of force was his ultimate contribution to science.

John Maynard Keynes, who acquired many of Newton's writings on alchemy, stated that "Newton was not the first of the age of reason: he was the last of the magicians."

Newton's interest in alchemy cannot be isolated from his contributions to science. He lived at a time when there was no clear distinction between alchemy and science. Had he not relied on the occult idea of action at a distance, across a vacuum, he might not have developed his 'theory of gravity.'

In 1704 Newton wrote Opticks, in which he expounded his corpuscular theory of light. He considered light to be made up of extremely subtle corpuscles, that ordinary matter was made of grosser corpuscles and speculated that through a kind of alchemical transmutation "Are not gross Bodies and Light convertible into one another,...and may not Bodies receive much of their Activity from the Particles of Light which enter their Composition?" Newton also constructed a primitive form of a frictional electrostatic generator, using a glass globe (Optics, 8th Query). Controversy

Among the most important dissenters to Newton's paper was Robert Hooke, one of the leaders of the Royal Society who considered himself the master in optics and hence he wrote a condescending critique of the unknown parvenu. One can understand how the critique would have annoyed a normal man. The flaming rage it provoked, with the desire publicly to humiliate Hooke, however, bespoke the abnormal. Newton was unable rationally to confront criticism. Less than a year after submitting the paper, he was so unsettled by the give and take of honest discussion that he began to cut his ties, and he withdrew into virtual isolation.

In 1675, during a visit to London, Newton thought he heard Hooke accept his theory of colors. He was emboldened to bring forth a second paper, an examination of the colour phenomena in thin films, which was identical to most of Book Two as it later appeared in the Opticks.

The purpose of the paper was to explain the colors of solid bodies by showing how light can be analyzed into its components by reflection as well as refraction. His explanation of the colors of bodies has not survived, but the paper was significant in demonstrating for the first time the existence of periodic optical phenomena.

He discovered the concentric coloured rings in the thin film of air between a lens and a flat sheet of glass; the distance between these concentric rings (Newton's rings) depends on the increasing thickness of the film of air. In 1704 Newton combined a revision of his optical lectures with the paper of 1675 and a small amount of additional material in his Opticks.

A second piece which Newton had sent with the paper of 1675 provoked new controversy. Entitled "An Hypothesis Explaining the Properties of Light," it was in fact a general system of nature. Hooke apparently claimed that Newton had stolen its content from him, and Newton boiled over again. The issue was quickly controlled, however, by an exchange of formal, excessively polite letters that fail to conceal the complete lack of warmth between the men.

Newton was also engaged in another exchange on his theory of colors with a circle of English Jesuits in Liège, perhaps the most revealing exchange of all. Although their objections were shallow, their contention that his experiments were mistaken lashed him into a fury. The correspondence dragged on until 1678, when a final shriek of rage from Newton, apparently accompanied by a complete nervous breakdown, was followed by silence. The death of his mother the following year completed his isolation. For six years he withdrew from intellectual commerce except when others initiated a correspondence, which he always broke off as quickly as possible.

Gravity and Motion

In 1679, Newton returned to his work on mechanics, i.e., gravitation and its effect on the orbits of planets, with reference to Kepler's laws of motion, and consulting with Hooke and Flamsteed on the subject. He published his results in De Motu Corporum (1684). This contained the beginnings of the laws of motion that would inform the Principia.

The Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (now known as the Principia) was published on 5 July 16871 with encouragement and financial help from Edmond Halley.

In this work Newton stated the three universal laws of motion that were not to be improved upon for more than two hundred years. He used the Latin word gravitas (weight) for the force that would become known as gravity, and defined the law of universal gravitation. In the same work he presented the first analytical determination, based on Boyle's law, of the speed of sound in air.

With the Principia, Newton became internationally recognised. He acquired a circle of admirers, including the Swiss-born mathematician Nicolas Fatio de Duillier, with whom he formed an intense relationship that lasted until 1693. The end of this friendship led Newton to a nervous breakdown.

Later Life

In the 1690s Newton wrote a number of religious tracts dealing with the literal interpretation of the Bible. Henry More's belief in the infinity of the universe and rejection of Cartesian dualism may have influenced Newton's religious ideas. A manuscript he sent to John Locke in which he disputed the existence of the Trinity was never published.

Later works - The Chronology of Ancient Kingdoms Amended (1728) and Observations Upon the Prophecies of Daniel and the Apocalypse of St. John (1733) - were published after his death.

He also devoted a great deal of time to alchemy.

Newton was also a member of the Parliament of England from 1689 to 1690 and in 1701, but his only recorded comments were to complain about a cold draft in the chamber and request that the window be closed.

Newton moved to London to take up the post of warden of the Royal Mint in 1696, a position that he had obtained through the patronage of Charles Montagu, 1st Earl of Halifax, then Chancellor of the Exchequer. He took charge of England's great recoining, somewhat treading on the toes of Master Lucas (and finagling Edmond Halley into the job of deputy comptroller of the temporary Chester branch). Newton became perhaps the best-known Master of the Mint upon Lucas' death in 1699, a position Newton held until his death. These appointments were intended as sinecures, but Newton took them seriously, retiring from his Cambridge duties in 1701, and exercising his power to reform the currency and punish clippers and counterfeiters.

As Master of the Mint Newton unofficially moved the Pound Sterling to the gold standard from silver in 1717; great reforms at the time and adding considerably to the wealth and stability of England. It was his work at the Mint, rather than his earlier contributions to science, that earned him a knighthood from Queen Anne in 1705.

Newton was made President of the Royal Society in 1703 and an associate of the French Académie des Sciences. In his position at the Royal Society, Newton made an enemy of John Flamsteed, the Astronomer Royal, by prematurely publishing Flamsteed's star catalogue.

Newton died in London on March 20th, 1727, and was buried in Westminster Abbey. His half-niece, Catherine Barton Conduitt, served as his hostess in social affairs at his house on Jermyn Street in London; he was her "very loving Uncle", according to his letter to her when she was recovering from smallpox. Newton died intestate and his considerable estate was divided between his half-nieces and half-nephews.

After his death, Newton's body was discovered to have had massive amounts of mercury in it, probably resulting from his alchemical pursuits. Mercury poisoning could explain Newton's eccentricity in late life.

Religious and Occult Studies

The law of gravity became Newton's best-known discovery. He warned against using it to view the universe as a mere machine, like a great clock. He said, "Gravity explains the motions of the planets, but it cannot explain who set the planets in motion. God governs all things and knows all that is or can be done."

His scientific fame notwithstanding, Newton's study of the Bible and of the early Church Fathers were among his greatest passions. He devoted more time to the study of the Scriptures, the Fathers, and to Alchemy than to science, and said, "I have a fundamental belief in the Bible as the Word of God, written by those who were inspired. I study the Bible daily."

Newton himself wrote works on textual criticism, most notably An Historical Account of Two Notable Corruptions of Scripture.

Newton also placed the crucifixion of Jesus Christ at 3 April, AD 33, which is now the accepted traditional date. He also attempted, unsuccessfully, to find hidden messages within the Bible.

Despite his focus on theology and alchemy, Newton tested and investigated these ideas with the scientific method, observing, hypothesising, and testing his theories. To Newton, his scientific and religious experiments were one and the same, observing and understanding how the world functioned.

Newton rejected the church's doctrine of the trinity, and was probably a follower of arianism. In a minority view, T.C. Pfizenmaier argues that he more likely held the Eastern Orthodox view of the Trinity rather than the Western one held by Roman Catholics, Anglicans, and most Protestants.

In his own day, he was also accused of being a Rosicrucian (as were many in the Royal Society and in the court of Charles II).

In his own lifetime, Newton wrote more on religion than he did on natural science. He believed in a rationally immanent world, but he rejected the hylozoism implicit in Leibniz and Baruch Spinoza. Thus, the ordered and dynamically informed universe could be understood, and must be understood, by an active reason, but this universe, to be perfect and ordained, had to be regular.

Newton and Robert Boyle's mechanical philosophy was promoted by rationalist pamphleteers as a viable alternative to the pantheists and enthusiasts, and was accepted hesitantly by orthodox preachers as well as dissident preachers like the latitudinarians.

Thus, the clarity and simplicity of science was seen as a way to combat the emotional and metaphysical superlatives of both superstitious enthusiasm and the threat of atheism, and, at the same time, the second wave of English deists used Newton's discoveries to demonstrate the possibility of a "Natural Religion."

The attacks made against pre-Enlightenment "magical thinking," and the mystical elements of Christianity, were given their foundation with Boyle¹s mechanical conception of the universe. Newton gave Boyle¹s ideas their completion through mathematical proofs, and more importantly was very successful in popularising them.

The perceived ability of Newtonians to explain the world, both physical and social, through logical calculations alone is the crucial idea in the disenchantment of Christianity.

Newton saw God as the master creator whose existence could not be denied in the face of the grandeur of all creation.

But the unforeseen theological consequence of his conception of God, as Leibniz pointed out, was that God was now entirely removed from the world¹s affairs, since the need for intervention would only evidence some imperfection in God¹s creation, something impossible for a perfect and omnipotent creator.

Leibniz's theodicy cleared God from the responsibility for "l'origine du mal" by making God removed from participation in his creation. The understanding of the world was now brought down to the level of simple human reason, and humans, as Odo Marquard argued, became responsible for the correction and elimination of evil.

On the other hand, latitudinarian and Newtonian ideas taken too far resulted in the millenarians, a religious faction dedicated to the concept of a mechanical universe, but finding in it the same enthusiasm and mysticism that the Enlightenment had fought so hard to extinguish.

Newton and the Counterfeiters

As warden of the royal mint, Newton estimated that 20% of the coins taken in during The Great Recoinage were counterfeit. Counterfeiting was treason, punishable by death by drawing and quartering. Despite this, convictions of the most flagrant criminals could be extremely difficult to achieve; however, Newton proved to be equal to the task.

He gathered much of that evidence himself, disguised, while he hung out at bars and taverns. For all the barriers placed to prosecution, and separating the branches of government, English law still had ancient and formidable customs of authority.

Newton was made a justice of the peace and between June 1698 and Christmas 1699 conducted some 200 cross-examinations of witnesses, informers and suspects. Newton later ordered all records of his interrogations to be destroyed. Newton won his convictions and in February 1699, he had ten prisoners waiting to be executed.

Newton's greatest triumph as the king's attorney was against William Chaloner. One of Chaloner's schemes was to set up phony conspiracies of Catholics and then turn in the hapless conspirators whom he entrapped. Chaloner made himself rich enough to posture as a gentleman.

Petitioning Parliament, Chaloner accused the Mint of providing tools to counterfeiters (a charge also made by others). He proposed that he be allowed to inspect the Mint's processes in order to improve them. He petitioned Parliament to adopt his plans for a coinage that could not be counterfeited, while at the same time striking false coins. After being exposed by Newton, Chaloner was hanged, drawn and quartered on March 23, 1699.

Enlightenment Philosophers

Enlightenment philosophers chose a short history of scientific predecessors - Galileo, Boyle, and Newton principally - as the guides and guarantors of their applications of the singular concept of Nature and Natural Law to every physical and social field of the day. In this respect, the lessons of history and the social structures built upon it could be discarded.

It was Newton¹s conception of the universe based upon Natural and rationally understandable laws that became the seed for Enlightenment ideology. Locke and Voltaire applied concepts of Natural Law to political systems advocating intrinsic rights; the physiocrats and Adam Smith applied Natural conceptions of psychology and self-interest to economic systems and the sociologists criticised the current social order for trying to fit history into Natural models of progress. Monboddo and Samuel Clarke resisted elements of Newton's work, but eventually rationalised it to conform with their strong religious views of nature.

Newton's Legacy

Newton's laws of motion and gravity provided a basis for predicting a wide variety of different scientific or engineering situations, especially the motion of celestial bodies. His calculus proved vitally important to the development of further scientific theories.

Finally, he unified many of the isolated physics facts that had been discovered earlier into a satisfying system of laws. Newton's conceptions of gravity and mechanics, though not as accurate as Einstein's Theory of Relativity or quantum mechanics, still represent an enormous step in the evolution of human understanding of the universe. For this reason, he is generally considered one of history's greatest scientists.

GALILEI GALILEO

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Galileo Galilei

Born: 15 Feb 1564 in Pisa (now in Italy)
Died: 8 Jan 1642 in Arcetri (near Florence) (now in Italy)

Galileo Galilei was an Italian natural philosopher, astronomer, and mathematician who made fundamental contributions to the sciences of motion, astronomy, and strength of materials and to the development of the scientific method.

His formulation of (circular) inertia, the law of falling bodies, and parabolic trajectories marked the beginning of a fundamental change in the study of motion.

His insistence that the book of nature was written in the language of mathematics changed natural philosophy from a verbal, qualitative account to a mathematical one in which experimentation became a recognized method for discovering the facts of nature.

Finally, his discoveries with the telescope revolutionized astronomy and paved the way for the acceptance of the Copernican heliocentric system, but his advocacy of that system eventually resulted in an Inquisition process against him.

Early life and career

Galileo was born in Pisa, Tuscany, on February 15, 1564, the oldest son of Vincenzo Galilei, a musician who made important contributions to the theory and practice of music and who may have performed some experiments with Galileo in 1588-89 on the relationship between pitch and the tension of strings.

The family moved to Florence in the early 1570s, where the Galilei family had lived for generations. In his middle teens Galileo attended the monastery school at Vallombrosa, near Florence, and then in 1581 matriculated at the University of Pisa, where he was to study medicine.

However, he became enamoured with mathematics and decided to make the mathematical subjects and philosophy his profession, against the protests of his father. Galileo then began to prepare himself to teach Aristotelian philosophy and mathematics, and several of his lectures have survived.

In 1585 Galileo left the university without having obtained a degree, and for several years he gave private lessons in the mathematical subjects in Florence and Siena.

During this period he designed a new form of hydrostatic balance for weighing small quantities and wrote a short treatise, La bilancetta ("The Little Balance"), that circulated in manuscript form.

He also began his studies on motion, which he pursued steadily for the next two decades.

In 1588 Galileo applied for the chair of mathematics at the University of Bologna but was unsuccessful.

His reputation was, however, increasing, and later that year he was asked to deliver two lectures to the Florentine Academy, a prestigious literary group, on the arrangement of the world in Dante's Inferno.

He also found some ingenious theorems on centres of gravity (again, circulated in manuscript) that brought him recognition among mathematicians and the patronage of Guidobaldo del Monte (1545-1607), a nobleman and author of several important works on mechanics.

As a result, he obtained the chair of mathematics at the University of Pisa in 1589.

There, according to his first biographer, Vincenzo Viviani (1622-1703), Galileo demonstrated, by dropping bodies of different weights from the top of the famous Leaning Tower, that the speed of fall of a heavy object is not proportional to its weight, as Aristotle had claimed.

The manuscript tract De motu (On Motion), finished during this period, shows that Galileo was abandoning Aristotelian notions about motion and was instead taking an Archimedean approach to the problem.

But his attacks on Aristotle made him unpopular with his colleagues, and in 1592 his contract was not renewed.

His patrons, however, secured him the chair of mathematics at the University of Padua, where he taught from 1592 until 1610.

Although Galileo's salary was considerably higher there, his responsibilities as the head of the family (his father had died in 1591) meant that he was chronically pressed for money.

His university salary could not cover all his expenses, and he therefore took in well-to-do boarding students whom he tutored privately in such subjects as fortification.

He also sold a proportional compass, or sector, of his own devising, made by an artisan whom he employed in his house. Perhaps because of these financial problems, he did not marry, but he did have an arrangement with a Venetian woman, Marina Gamba, who bore him two daughters and a son.

In the midst of his busy life he continued his research on motion, and by 1609 he had determined that the distance fallen by a body is proportional to the square of the elapsed time (the law of falling bodies) and that the trajectory of a projectile is a parabola, both conclusions that contradicted Aristotelian physics.

Telescope Discoveries

At this point, however, Galileo's career took a dramatic turn.

In the spring of 1609 he heard that in the Netherlands an instrument had been invented that showed distant things as though they were nearby.

By trial and error, he quickly figured out the secret of the invention and made his own three-powered spyglass from lenses for sale in spectacle makers' shops.

Others had done the same; what set Galileo apart was that he quickly figured out how to improve the instrument, taught himself the art of lens grinding, and produced increasingly powerful telescopes.

In August of that year he presented an eight-powered instrument to the Venetian Senate (Padua was in the Venetian Republic).

He was rewarded with life tenure and a doubling of his salary.

Galileo was now one of the highest-paid professors at the university.

In the fall of 1609 Galileo began observing the heavens with instruments that magnified up to 20 times.

In December he drew the Moon's phases as seen through the telescope, showing that the Moon's surface is not smooth, as had been thought, but is rough and uneven.

In January 1610 he discovered four moons revolving around Jupiter.

He also found that the telescope showed many more stars than are visible with the naked eye.

These discoveries were earthshaking, and Galileo quickly produced a little book, Sidereus Nuncius (The Sidereal Messenger), in which he described them.

He dedicated the book to Cosimo II de Medici (1590-1621), the grand duke of his native Tuscany, whom he had tutored in mathematics for several summers, and he named the moons of Jupiter after the Medici family: the Sidera Medicea, or Medicean Stars Galileo was rewarded with an appointment as mathematician and philosopher of the grand duke of Tuscany, and in the fall of 1610 he returned in triumph to his native land.

Galileo was now a courtier and lived the life of a gentleman.

Before he left Padua he had discovered the puzzling appearance of Saturn, later to be shown as caused by a ring surrounding it, and in Florence he discovered that Venus goes through phases just as the Moon does.

Although these discoveries did not prove that the Earth is a planet orbiting the Sun, they undermined Aristotelian cosmology: the absolute difference between the corrupt earthly region and the perfect and unchanging heavens was proved wrong by the mountainous surface of the Moon, the moons of Jupiter showed that there had to be more than one centre of motion in the universe, and the phases of Venus showed that it (and, by implication, Mercury) revolves around the Sun.

As a result, Galileo was confirmed in his belief, which he had probably held for decades but which had not been central to his studies, that the Sun is the centre of the universe and that the Earth is a planet, as Copernicus had argued. Galileo's conversion to Copernicanism would be a key turning point in the scientific revolution.

After a brief controversy about floating bodies, Galileo again turned his attention to the heavens and entered a debate with Christoph Scheiner (1573-1650), a German Jesuit and professor of mathematics at Ingolstadt, about the nature of sunspots (of which Galileo was an independent discoverer).

This controversy resulted in Galileo's Istoria e dimostrazioni intorno alle macchie solari e loro accidenti ("History and Demonstrations Concerning Sunspots and Their Properties," or "Letters on Sunspots"), which appeared in 1613.

Against Scheiner, who, in an effort to save the perfection of the Sun, argued that sunspots are satellites of the Sun, Galileo argued that the spots are on or near the Sun's surface, and he bolstered his argument with a series of detailed engravings of his observations.

Galileo's Copernicanism

Galileo's increasingly overt Copernicanism began to cause trouble for him. In 1613 he wrote a letter to his student Benedetto Castelli (1528-1643) in Pisa about the problem of squaring the Copernican theory with certain biblical passages. Inaccurate copies of this letter were sent by Galileo's enemies to the Inquisition in Rome, and he had to retrieve the letter and send an accurate copy. Several Dominican fathers in Florence lodged complaints against Galileo in Rome, and Galileo went to Rome to defend the Copernican cause and his good name.

Before leaving, he finished an expanded version of the letter to Castelli, now addressed to the grand duke's mother and good friend of Galileo, the dowager Christina. In his Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina, Galileo discussed the problem of interpreting biblical passages with regard to scientific discoveries but, except for one example, did not actually interpret the Bible. That task had been reserved for approved theologians in the wake of the Council of Trent (1545-63) and the beginning of the Catholic Counter-Reformation.

But the tide in Rome was turning against the Copernican theory, and in 1615, when the cleric Paolo Antonio Foscarini (c. 1565-1616) published a book arguing that the Copernican theory did not conflict with scripture, Inquisition consultants examined the question and pronounced the Copernican theory heretical. Foscarini's book was banned, as were some more technical and nontheological works, such as Johannes Kepler's Epitome of Copernican Astronomy.

Copernicus's own 1543 book, De revolutionibus orbium coelestium libri vi ("Six Books Concerning the Revolutions of the Heavenly Orbs"), was suspended until corrected.

Galileo was not mentioned directly in the decree, but he was admonished by Robert Cardinal Bellarmine (1542-1621) not to "hold or defend" the Copernican theory.

An improperly prepared document placed in the Inquisition files at this time states that Galileo was admonished "not to hold, teach, or defend" the Copernican theory "in any way whatever, either orally or in writing."

Galileo was thus effectively muzzled on the Copernican issue.

Only slowly did he recover from this setback. Through a student, he entered a controversy about the nature of comets occasioned by the appearance of three comets in 1618.

After several exchanges, mainly with Orazio Grassi (1583-1654), a professor of mathematics at the Collegio Romano, he finally entered the argument under his own name Il saggiatore (The Assayer), published in 1623, was a brilliant polemic on physical reality and an exposition of the new scientific method. Galileo here discussed the method of the newly emerging science, arguing:

Philosophy is written in this grand book, the universe, which stands continually open to our gaze. But the book cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language and read the letters in which it is composed.

It is written in the language of mathematics, and its characters are triangles, circles, and other geometric figures without which it is humanly impossible to understand a single word of it.

He also drew a distinction between the properties of external objects and the sensations they cause in us - i.e., the distinction between primary and secondary qualities.

Publication of Il saggiatore came at an auspicious moment, for Maffeo Cardinal Barberini (1568-1644), a friend, admirer, and patron of Galileo for a decade, was named Pope Urban VIII as the book was going to press. Galileo's friends quickly arranged to have it dedicated to the new pope.

In 1624 Galileo went to Rome and had six interviews with Urban VIII. Galileo told the pope about his theory of the tides (developed earlier), which he put forward as proof of the annual and diurnal motions of the Earth. The pope gave Galileo permission to write a book about theories of the universe but warned him to treat the Copernican theory only hypothetically.

The book, Dialogo sopra i due massimi sistemi del mondo, tolemaico e copernicano (Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, Ptolemaic & Copernican), was finished in 1630, and Galileo sent it to the Roman censor.

Because of an outbreak of the plague, communications between Florence and Rome were interrupted, and Galileo asked for the censoring to be done instead in Florence.

The Roman censor had a number of serious criticisms of the book and forwarded these to his colleagues in Florence.

After writing a preface in which he professed that what followed was written hypothetically, Galileo had little trouble getting the book through the Florentine censors, and it appeared in Florence in 1632.

In the Dialogue's witty conversation between Salviati (representing Galileo), Sagredo (the intelligent layman), and Simplicio (the dyed-in-the-wool Aristotelian), Galileo gathered together all the arguments (mostly based on his own telescopic discoveries) for the Copernican theory and against the traditional geocentric cosmology.

As opposed to Aristotle's, Galileo's approach to cosmology is fundamentally spatial and geometric: the Earth's axis retains its orientation in space as the Earth circles the Sun, and bodies not under a force retain their velocity (although this inertia is ultimately circular).

But in giving Simplicio the final word, that God could have made the universe any way he wanted to and still made it appear to us the way it does, he put Pope Urban VIII's favorite argument in the mouth of the person who had been ridiculed throughout the dialogue. The reaction against the book was swift.

The pope convened a special commission to examine the book and make recommendations; the commission found that Galileo had not really treated the Copernican theory hypothetically and recommended that a case be brought against him by the Inquisition.

Galileo was summoned to Rome in 1633.

During his first appearance before the Inquisition, he was confronted with the 1616 edict recording that he was forbidden to discuss the Copernican theory.

In his defense Galileo produced a letter from Cardinal Bellarmine, by then dead, stating that he was admonished only not to hold or defend the theory.

The case was at somewhat of an impasse, and, in what can only be called a plea bargain, Galileo confessed to having overstated his case.

He was pronounced to be vehemently suspect of heresy and was condemned to life imprisonment and was made to abjure formally.

There is no evidence that at this time he whispered, "Eppur si muove" ("And yet it moves").

It should be noted that Galileo was never in a dungeon or tortured; during the Inquisition process he stayed mostly at the house of the Tuscan ambassador to the Vatican and for a short time in a comfortable apartment in the Inquisition building.

After the process he spent six months at the palace of Ascanio Piccolomini (c. 1590-1671), the archbishop of Siena and a friend and patron, and then moved into a villa near Arcetri, in the hills above Florence. He spent the rest of his life there.

Galileo's daughter Sister Maria Celeste, who was in a nearby nunnery, was a great comfort to her father until her untimely death in 1634.

Galileo was then 70 years old. Yet he kept working. In Siena he had begun a new book on the sciences of motion and strength of materials.

There he wrote up his unpublished studies that had been interrupted by his interest in the telescope in 1609 and pursued intermittently since.

The book was spirited out of Italy and published in Leiden, Netherlands, in 1638 under the title Discorsi e dimostrazioni matematiche intorno a due nuove scienze attenenti alla meccanica Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences.

Galileo here treated for the first time the bending and breaking of beams and summarized his mathematical and experimental investigations of motion, including the law of falling bodies and the parabolic path of projectiles as a result of the mixing of two motions, constant speed and uniform acceleration.

By then Galileo had become blind, and he spent his time working with a young student, Vincenzo Viviani, who was with him when he died on January 8, 1642.

BEN FRANKLIN

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Benjamin Franklin

Ben Franklin - born Jan.17 [Jan. 6, Old Style], 1706, Boston d. April 17, 1790, Philadelphia - pseudonym Richrd Saunders - American printer and publisher, author, inventor and scientist, and diplomat.

Franklin, next to George Washington possibly the most famous 18th-century American, by 1757 had made a small fortune, established the Poor Richard of his almanacs (written under his pseudonym) as an oracle on how to get ahead in the world, and become widely known in European scientific circles for his reports of electrical experiments and theories.

What is more, he was then just at the beginning of a long career as a politician, in the course of which he would be chief spokesman for the British colonies in their debates with the king's ministers about self-government and would have a hand in the writing of the Declaration of Independence, the securing of financial and military aid from France during the American Revolution, the negotiation of the treaty by which Great Britain recognized its former 13 colonies as a sovereign nation, and the framing of the Constitution, which for more than two centuries has been the fundamental law of the United States of America.

And as impressive as Franklin's public service was, it was perhaps less remarkable than his contributions to the comfort and safety of daily life. He invented a stove, still being manufactured, to give more warmth than open fireplaces; the lightning rod and bifocal eyeglasses also were his ideas. Grasping the fact that by united effort a community may have amenities which only the wealthy few can get for themselves, he helped establish institutions people now take for granted: a fire company, a library, an insurance company, an academy, and a hospital. In some cases these foundations were the first of their kind in North America.

One might expect universal admiration for a man of such breadth and apparent altruism. Yet Franklin was disliked by some of his contemporaries and has ever since occasionally been attacked as a materialist or a hypocrite. D.H. Lawrence, the English novelist, regarded him as the embodiment of the worst traits of the American character. Max Weber, the German sociologist, made him the exemplar of the "Protestant ethic," a state of mind that contributed much, Weber thought, to the less admirable aspects of modern capitalism. Those who admire Franklin believe that his detractors have mistakenly identified him with Poor Richard, a persona of his own creation, or that they have relied too largely upon the incomplete self-portrait of his posthumously published Autobiography.

Early life (1706-23)

Franklin was born the 10th son of the 17 children of a man who was both soapmaker and candlemaker. He learned to read very early and had one year in grammar school and another under a private teacher, but his formal education ended when he was 10. At 12 he was apprenticed to his brother James, a printer. His mastery of the printer's trade, of which he was proud to the end of his life, was achieved between 1718 and 1723. In the same period he read tirelessly and taught himself to write effectively.

His first enthusiasm was for poetry, and in the first years of his apprenticeship he wrote two occasional ballads, no copies of which have survived. His father told him that "Verse-makers were always Beggars," and thereafter his interest in poetry was sporadic. Prose was another matter.

The Spectator, Joseph Addison and Richard Steele's famous periodical of essays, had appeared in England in 1711-12 and was to be imitated for the greater part of a century but seldom with the persistence of Franklin, the printer's apprentice.

He would read an essay, make a short note of the idea of each sentence, lay aside his notes for a few days, and then try to rewrite the essay. Comparison of his version with the original showed him the need to enlarge his vocabulary. Turning some Spectator papers into verse, and some days later reconverting them into prose, helped.

In 1721 James Franklin founded a Spectator-like weekly newspaper, the New-England Courant, to which readers were invited to contribute. Benjamin, now 16, read and perhaps set in type these contributions and decided that he could do as well himself.

In 1722 he wrote a series of 14 essays signed "Silence Dogood." Satire of New England funeral elegies and of the lip service paid the learned languages at Harvard College foreshadowed later literary techniques to be used by Franklin.

Late in 1722 James Franklin got into trouble with the provincial authorities and was forbidden to print or publish the Courant.

To keep the paper going, he discharged his younger brother from his original apprenticeship and made him the paper's nominal publisher. New indentures were drawn up but not made public. Some months later, after a bitter quarrel, Benjamin walked out, sure that James would not go to law and reveal the subterfuge he had devised. "It was not fair in me to take this Advantage," he wrote later, "and this I therefore reckon one of the first Errata [mistakes, in printer's lingo] of my Life."

Youthful adventures (1723-26)

Failing to find work in Boston or New York City, Franklin proceeded to Philadelphia. One of the dramatic scenes of the Autobiography is the description of his arrival on a Sunday morning, tired and hungry.

Finding a bakery, he asked for three pennies' worth of bread and got "three great Puffy Rolls." Carrying one under each arm and munching on the third, he walked up Market Street past the door of the Read family, where stood Deborah, his future wife. She saw him "& thought I made as I certainly did a most awkward ridiculous Appearance."

A few weeks later he was rooming at the Reads' and employed as a printer. By the spring of 1724 he was enjoying the companionship of other young men with a taste for reading and he was also being urged to set up in business for himself by the governor of Pennsylvania, Sir William Keith. At Keith's suggestion, Franklin returned to Boston to try to raise the necessary capital.

His father thought him too young for such a venture, so Keith offered to foot the bill himself and arranged Franklin's passage to England so that he could choose his type and make connections with London stationers and booksellers. Franklin exchanged "some promises" with Deborah Read and, with a young friend, James Ralph, as companion, boarded the London Hope in November, expecting to find the letters of credit and introduction that Keith had promised. Not until the ship was well out at sea did he realize that the governor had not kept his promise.

A fellow passenger, a Quaker merchant by the name of Thomas Denham, told him that Keith was unreliable; eventually Franklin could write charitably: "He wish'd to please every body; and, having little to give, he gave Expectations."

In London Franklin quickly found employment in his trade and was able to lend money to Ralph, who was trying to establish himself as a writer. The two young men enjoyed the theatre and the other pleasures of the city; before long Ralph found a milliner for a mistress.

When Ralph was in the country, teaching school, the milliner occasionally borrowed money from Franklin. "I grew fond of her Company," he remembered, "and being at this time under no Religious Restraints, & presuming on my Importance to her, I attempted Familiarities (another Erratum) which she repulsed with a proper Resentment, and acquainted him with my Behaviour."

Still another "erratum" in retrospect was A Dissertation on Liberty and Necessity, Pleasure and Pain (1725), a deistical pamphlet he was inspired to write after having set type for William Wollaston's moral tract The Religion of Nature Delineated. Franklin argued therein that since man has no real freedom of choice he is not morally responsible for his actions, perhaps consoling himself for his treatment of Deborah, to whom he had written only once.

By 1726 Franklin was tiring of London.

He considered becoming an itinerant teacher of swimming, but when Denham offered him a clerkship in his store in Philadelphia, with a prospect of fat commissions in the West Indian trade, he decided to return home.

Achievement of security and fame (1726-52)

Denham died, however, a few months after Franklin entered his store. The young man, now 20, returned to his trade and in 1728 was able to set up a partnership with a friend. Two years later he borrowed money to become sole proprietor.

His private life at this time was extremely complicated. Deborah Read had married, but her husband had deserted her and disappeared. One matchmaking venture failed because Franklin wanted a settlement to pay off his business debt.

A strong sexual drive, "that hard-to-be-govern'd Passion of Youth," was sending him to "low Women," and in the winter of 1730-31 he had a son, William, whose mother has never been identified. Franklin must have known that the child was expected when, his affection for Deborah having "revived," he "took her to Wife" on Sept. 1, 1730. Their common-law marriage lasted until Deborah's death in 1774. They had a son, who died at age four, and a daughter, Sarah, who survived them both. William was brought up in the household.

Franklin and his partner's first coup was securing the printing of Pennsylvania's paper currency. Franklin helped get this business by writing A Modest Enquiry into the Nature and Necessity of a Paper Currency (1729), and later he also became public printer of New Jersey, Delaware, and Maryland.

Other money-making ventures included the Pennsylvania Gazette, published by Franklin from 1729 and generally acknowledged as among the best of the colonial newspapers, and the Poor Richard's Almanacs, printed annually from 1732 to 1757.

Some failures, of course, occurred: a German-language newspaper that lasted less than a year and a monthly magazine that expired after six issues in 1741. Franklin was nevertheless generally prosperous; he made enough to invest capital in real estate and in partnerships or working arrangements with printers in the Carolinas, New York, and the British West Indies.

In 1748 he became a silent partner in the printing firm of Franklin and Hall, realizing in the next 18 years an average profit of almost £500 annually.

The first of his projects for social improvement by collective effort was the Junto, or Leather Apron club, organized in 1727 to debate questions of morals, politics, and natural philosophy and to exchange knowledge of business affairs.

The need of Junto members for easier access to books led in 1731 to the organization of the Library Company of Philadelphia. Through the Junto, Franklin proposed a paid city watch, or police force. A paper read to the same group resulted in the organization of a volunteer fire company.

In 1743 he called for a "constant correspondence" of men with scientific interests throughout the colonies, and later that year the American Philosophical Society was functioning.

In 1749 he published Proposals Relating to the Education of Youth in Pennsilvania; in 1751, the Academy of Philadelphia, from which grew the University of Pennsylvania, was founded. So successful was Franklin as a promoter that anyone with a good cause in mind was likely to turn to him for help.

Franklin was also early involved in politics. He was clerk of the Pennsylvania legislature from 1736 until 1751 and postmaster of Philadelphia from 1737 until 1753. Prior to 1748, though, his most important political service was his part in organizing a militia for the defense of the colony against possible invasion by the French and the Spaniards, whose privateers were operating in the Delaware River. His skill in appealing to the self-interest of the various factions in the commonwealth is demonstrated in Plain Truth; or, Serious Considerations on the Present State of the City of Philadelphia and Province of Pennsylvania (1747).

In the 1740s electricity was a novel and fashionable subject.

It was introduced to Philadelphians by an electrical machine sent to the Library Company by one of Franklin's English correspondents. In the winter of 1746-47, Franklin and three of his friends began to investigate electrical phenomena.

The Philadelphia weather favored them, as did the availability of talented instrument makers. Ingenious experiments and machines were devised and described in personal letters to England, which were relayed to the Royal Society of London or the Gentleman's Magazine.

These papers were collected in 1751 as Experiments and Observations on Electricity and were translated into French (1752), German (1758), and Italian (1774).

Franklin's fame spread rapidly.

The experiment he suggested to prove the identity of lightning and electricity was first made in France before he is believed to have tried the simpler but dangerous expedient of flying a kite in a thunderstorm. He and his associates concluded early that the "Electrical Fire" was "an Element diffused among, and attracted by other matter, particularly by Water and Metals." When a body with an overquantity approached one with an underquantity, a discharge equalized the electrical fire in the two.

This "one fluid" theory accounted for more of the observable phenomena than had any previous hypothesis, and his suggestion that buildings be protected from lightning by erecting pointed iron rods proved both practical and dramatic. Franklin may not have been as original as some admirers have thought, and his collaborators may not have received their full share of credit, but he invented many terms still used in discussing electricity (positive, negative, battery, conductor, and so on) and described the experiments with lucidity.

Public service (1753-85)

In 1753 Franklin became deputy postmaster general, in charge of mail in all the northern colonies. Thereafter he began to think in intercolonial terms. His "Plan of Union," adopted by the Albany Congress in 1754, would have established a general council, with representatives from the several colonies, to organize the common defense against the encroaching French and to supervise Indian relations with new settlements.

Reason was on Franklin's side, but neither the colonial legislatures nor the king's advisers were ready for such union, and this conflict has been regarded by some authorities as the key to his entire political career.

In 1755 Franklin was nearly ruined when he promised to stand good for the loss of horses and wagons supplied by Pennsylvania farmers to support General Edward Braddock's ill-fated campaign against Fort-Duquesne in the French and Indian War. For more than two months he faced the possibility of having to pay almost £20,000 out of his own pocket. The government eventually paid.

The need for funds to defend the frontier led the Pennsylvania legislature to seek to tax the lands of the Penn family, the proprietors under the colony's charter.

Either their consent or a change in the form of government was required. In the spring of 1757 Franklin was chosen to represent the legislature in this matter, which occupied him in London for most of his time until August 1762.

He negotiated a compromise, under which the Penns agreed to taxation of improved lands but not those unsurveyed. During this first mission he made close friends in England and wrote The Interest of Great Britain Considered with Regard to Her Colonies and the Acquisitions of Canada and Guadaloupe (1760). It was designed to urge the annexation of Canada when the war was over.

There were Englishmen who preferred to leave Canada to the French, as a check on the growing strength of the 13 colonies. A simpler check, Franklin wrote, would be for Parliament to pass a law requiring midwives to stifle every third or fourth child as soon as it was born.

The Treaty of Paris (1763), ending the Seven Years' War, gave Canada to Great Britain. By that time Franklin was back in Philadelphia, where, in conflict with the proprietors, the legislature decided that Pennsylvania ought to become a crown colony, and by the end of 1764 Franklin was back in London to negotiate in vain for a new charter.

The tribulations of Pennsylvania were submerged, however, in the flood of feeling surrounding the so-called Stamp Act crisis. Franklin opposed the Stamp Act, asserting that taxation ought to be the prerogative of the representative legislatures, but when it had been passed he made the mistake of underestimating American emotions; he ordered stamps for Franklin and Hall and nominated a friend for the post of stamp officer in Philadelphia. His fellow citizens were so outraged that Deborah, fearful of her house being mobbed, called on male relatives for armed defense.

In London Franklin, recognizing his error, quickly did an about-face and threw himself into the campaign for repeal of the statute. He regained his prestige by a dramatic appearance before the House of Commons, where he answered 174 questions from an audience partly friendly and partly hostile. The stenographic report of the exchange showed him returning often to the right of the colonies to levy internal taxes by their own legislation.

Although he failed to get the new charter, Franklin was kept on as London agent for Pennsylvania, and three other colonies relied on him to represent their interests--Georgia (1768), New Jersey (1769), and Massachusetts (1770). With this support and that of the British Whigs, the party of industrialists and dissenters in favor of parliamentary and philanthropic reform, he weathered the succession of crises ending with armed clashes at Lexington and Concord.

He was gradually forced to the realization that there could be no reconciliation and that his dream of a British empire of self-governing nations would not come true.

He did his best to present the American case to the British. Between 1765 and 1775 he published 126 newspaper articles on current controversies. At the end he was bitter, in such articles as "Rules by Which a Great Empire May Be Reduced to a Small One" and "An Edict by the King of Prussia," both first printed in 1773.

Taken together, they are a capsule history of the long-drawn-out contest. In January 1774, because he had helped publish the letters of Thomas Hutchinson, governor of Massachusetts, to his British superiors, Franklin was dismissed from the post office. In March 1775, aware that there might be war, he left for Philadelphia. The day after his arrival he was a delegate to the Second Continental Congress, for which he served on committees for the organization of a postal system and for the drafting of the Declaration of Independence and on a commission that vainly attempted to bring Canada into the war as an ally.

In September 1776, the Congress agreed to send a commission to France to seek economic and military assistance. As one of three commissioners, Franklin arrived in Paris just before Christmas and was immediately engaged in secret negotiations with Charles Gravier, Count de Vergennes, minister of foreign affairs.

Spies and informers infested his house, but Franklin was soon the hero of France, personifying the unsophisticated nobility of the New World, leading his people to freedom from the feudal past. His portrait was everywhere, on objets d'art from snuffboxes to chamber pots, his society sought after by diplomats, scientists, Freemasons, and fashionable ladies alike.

The adulation was not without its ridiculous side, but Franklin, with his fur hat and spectacles, rose to the occasion with wit and social grace.

The sought-for treaties were signed in February 1778 after the British general John Burgoyne and 5,000 men surrendered at Saratoga, N.Y., and it was clear that the rebellion would not be crushed easily. Substantial loans were given to the revolutionists, and by the final victory at Yorktown in 1781, an estimated 12,000 soldiers and 32,000 sailors had left France to support General George Washington.

Despite these strong bonds, the peace was difficult. Spain had entered the war in 1779, hoping to recover Gibraltar, but, because of the conflict of interests in Florida and Louisiana, refused to recognize American independence.

France had guaranteed that there would be no separate peace. Franklin worked with Vergennes until his fellow commissioners, John Adams and John Jay, overruled him on procedure, signing preliminary agreements with Great Britain late in 1782 without prior consultation with France.

The formal treaty was signed Sept. 3, 1783.

Franklin wanted to return home but was kept in Paris for two more years to help make trade treaties. His popularity unabated, he observed the first balloon ascension and served on a committee appointed by Louis XVI to report on "animal magnetism," or hypnotism, thought by a German physician to cure many, if not all, diseases.

Last years (1785-90)

At 79, with a large stone in his bladder that made travel by carriage an agony, Franklin was carried to the port of Le Havre in a litter. Back in Philadelphia he lived quietly but continued to take some part in public life. His most important service was as a member of the Constitutional Convention of 1787.

There he failed to convince his associates that an executive committee would be better than a president as head of state and that there should be a unicameral legislature. On the last day of the convention, a colleague read for him a plea that objections to the new form of government, his own among them, should be forgotten and that delegates should unanimously support the instrument that they had hammered out. Franklin's motion was promptly carried.

For the last year of his life he was bedridden, escaping severe pain only by the use of opium.

He died in 1790 at age 84.

Philadelphia gave him the most impressive funeral the city had ever seen, and in France, where Louis XVI was imprisoned, eulogies poured forth to the man who, to the French, was the symbol of enlightenment and freedom.

All Europeans remembered the epigram of Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot, the French economist: "He snatched the lightning from the skies and the sceptre from tyrants."

ALBERT EINSTEIN

2008-10-05T10:28:00.000-07:00

Albert Einstein

March 14, 1879 - April 18, 1955
Physicist and Mathematician
Nobel Laureate for Physics 1921

"There are only two ways to live your life.
One is as though nothing is a miracle.
The other is as if everything is."
- Albert Einstein -

Albert Einstein was a German-born theoretical physicist who is widely considered one of the greatest physicists of all time.

While best known for the theory of relativity (and specifically mass-energy equivalence, E=mc2), he was awarded the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics for his 1905 (Annus Mirabilis) explanation of the photoelectric effect and "for his services to Theoretical Physics". In popular culture, the name "Einstein" has become synonymous with great intelligence and genius. Einstein was named Time magazine's "Man of the Century."

He was known for many scientific investigations, among which were: his special theory of relativity which stemmed from an attempt to reconcile the laws of mechanics with the laws of the electromagnetic field, his general theory of relativity which extended the principle of relativity to include gravitation, relativistic cosmology, capillary action, critical opalescence, classical problems of statistical mechanics and problems in which they were merged with quantum theory, leading to an explanation of the Brownian movement of molecules; atomic transition probabilities, the probabilistic interpretation of quantum theory, the quantum theory of a monatomic gas, the thermal properties of light with a low radiation density which laid the foundation of the photon theory of light, the theory of radiation, including stimulated emission; the construction of a unified field theory, and the geometrization of physics.

Einstein was born on March 14, 1879, to a Jewish family, in Ulm, Württemberg, Germany. His father was Hermann Einstein, a salesman who later ran an electrochemical works, and his mother was Pauline née Koch. They were married in Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt.

At his birth, Albert's mother was reputedly frightened that her infant's head was so large and oddly shaped. Though the size of his head appeared to be less remarkable as he grew older, it's evident from photographs of Einstein that his head was disproportionately large for his body throughout his life, a trait regarded as "benign macrocephaly" in large-headed individuals with no related disease or cognitive deficits. His parents also worried about his intellectual development as a child due to his initial language delay and his lack of fluency until the age of nine, though he was one of the top students in his elementary school.

In 1880, shortly after Einstein's birth the family moved to Munich, where his father and his uncle founded a company manufacturing electrical equipment (Elektrotechnische Fabrik J. Einstein & Cie). This company provided the first lighting for the Oktoberfest as well as some cabling in the suburb of Schwabing.

Albert's family members were all non-observant Jews and he attended a Catholic elementary school. At the insistence of his mother, he was given violin lessons. Though he initially disliked the lessons, and eventually discontinued them, he would later take great solace in Mozart's violin sonatas.

When Einstein was five, his father showed him a small pocket compass, and Einstein realized that something in "empty" space acted upon the needle; he would later describe the experience as one of the most revelatory events of his life. He built models and mechanical devices for fun and showed great mathematical ability early on.

In 1889, a medical student named Max Talmud (later: Talmey), who regularly visited the Einsteins, introduced Einstein to key science and philosophy texts, including Kant's Critique of Pure Reason.

Einstein attended the Luitpold Gymnasium, where he received a relatively progressive education. In 1891, he taught himself Euclidean geometry from a school booklet and began to study calculus; Einstein realized the power of deductive reasoning from Euclid's Elements, which Einstein called the "holy little geometry book" (given by Max Talmud). At school, Einstein clashed with authority and resented the school regimen, believing that the spirit of learning and creative thought were lost in such endeavors as strict rote learning.

From 1894, following the failure of Hermann Einstein's electrochemical business, the Einsteins moved to Milan and proceeded to Pavia after a few months. Einstein's first scientific work, called "The Investigation of the State of Aether in Magnetic Fields", was written contemporaneously for one of his uncles. Albert remained in Munich to finish his schooling, but only completed one term before leaving the gymnasium in the spring of 1895 to join his family in Pavia. He quit a year and a half before the final examinations, convincing the school to let him go with a medical note from a friendly doctor, but this meant that he had no secondary-school certificate. That same year, at age 16, he performed a famous thought experiment by trying to visualize what it would be like to ride alongside a light beam. He realized that, according to Maxwell's equations, light waves would obey the principle of relativity: the speed of the light would always be constant, no matter what the velocity of the observer. This conclusion would later become one of the two postulates of special relativity.

Rather than pursuing electrical engineering as his father intended for him, he followed the advice of a family friend and applied at the Federal Polytechnic Institute in Zurich in 1895. Without a school certificate he had to take an admission exam, which he - at the age of 16 being the youngest participant did not pass. He had preferred travelling in northern Italy over the required preparations for the exam. Still, he easily passed the science part, but failed in general knowledge.

After that he was sent to Aarau, Switzerland to finish secondary school. He lodged with Professor Jost Winteler's family and became enamoured with Sofia Marie-Jeanne Amanda Winteler, commonly referred to as Sofie or Marie, their daughter and his first sweetheart. Einstein's sister, Maja, who was perhaps his closest confidant, was to later marry their son, Paul. While there, he studied Maxwell's electromagnetic theory and received his diploma in September 1896. Einstein subsequently enrolled at the Federal Polytechnic Institute in October and moved to Zurich, while Marie moved to Olsberg, Switzerland for a teaching post. The same year, he renounced his Württemberg citizenship to avoid military service.

In the spring of 1896, Mileva Maric started as a medical student at the University of Zurich, but after a term switched to the Federal Polytechnic Institute. She was the only woman to study in that year for the same diploma as Einstein. Maric's relationship with Einstein developed into romance over the next few years, though his mother objected because she was too old, not Jewish, and physically defective.

In 1900, Einstein was granted a teaching diploma by the Federal Polytechnic Institute. Einstein then submitted his first paper to be published, on the capillary forces of a straw, titled "Consequences of the observations of capillarity phenomena". In this paper his quest for a unified physical law becomes apparent, which he followed throughout his life. Through his friend Michele Besso, Einstein was presented with the works of Ernst Mach, and would later consider him "the best sounding board in Europe" for physical ideas. Einstein and Maric had a daughter, Lieserl Einstein, born in January 1902. Her fate is unknown; some believe she died in infancy, while others believe she was given out for adoption.

Works and Doctorate

Einstein could not find a teaching post upon graduation, mostly because his brashness as a young man had apparently irritated most of his professors. The father of a classmate helped him obtain employment as a technical assistant examiner at the Swiss Patent Office[8] in 1902. His main responsibility was to evaluate patent applications relating to electromagnetic devices. He also learned how to discern the essence of applications despite sometimes poor descriptions, and was taught by the director how "to express [him]self correctly". He occasionally corrected their design errors while evaluating the practicality of their work.

His friend from Zurich, Michele Besso, also moved to Bern and took a job at the patent office, and he became an important sounding board. Einstein also joined with two friends he made in Bern, Maurice Solovine and Conrad Habicht, to create a weekly discussion club on science and philosophy, which they grandly and jokingly named "The Olympia Academy." Their readings included Poincare, Mach, Hume, and others who influenced the development of the special theory of relativity.

Einstein married Mileva Maric on January 6, 1903. Einstein's marriage to Maric who was a mathematician, was both a personal and intellectual partnership: Einstein referred to Mileva as "a creature who is my equal and who is as strong and independent as I am". Ronald W. Clark, a biographer of Einstein, claimed that Einstein depended on the distance that existed in his marriage to Mileva in order to have the solitude necessary to accomplish his work; he required intellectual isolation. In an obituary of Einstein Abram Joffe wrote: "The author of [the papers of 1905] wasŠ a bureaucrat at the Patent Office in Bern, Einstein-Maric which has been taken as evidence of a collaborative relationship. However, most probably Joffe referred to Einstein- Maric ecause he believed that it was a Swiss custom at the time to append the spouse's surname to the husband's name. The extent of her influence on Einstein's work is a controversial and debated question.

In 1903, Einstein's position at the Swiss Patent Office had been made permanent, though he was passed over for promotion until he had "fully mastered machine technology". He obtained his doctorate under Alfred Kleiner at the University of Zürich after submitting his thesis "A new determination of molecular dimensions" ("Eine neue Bestimmung der Moleküldimensionen") in 1905.

During 1905, in his spare time, he wrote four articles that participated in the foundation of modern physics, without much scientific literature he could refer to or many fellow scientists with whom he could discuss the theories. Most physicists agree that three of those papers (on Brownian motion, the photoelectric effect, and special relativity) deserved Nobel Prizes. Only the paper on the photoelectric effect would be mentioned by the Nobel committee in the award; at the time of the award, it had the most unchallenged experimental evidence behind it, although the Nobel committee expressed the opinion that Einstein's other work would be confirmed in due course.

Some might regard the award for the photoelectric effect ironic, not only because Einstein is far better-known for relativity, but also because the photoelectric effect is a quantum phenomenon, and Einstein became somewhat disenchanted with the path quantum theory would take.

Einstein submitted this series of papers to the "Annalen der Physik". They are commonly referred to as the "Annus Mirabilis Papers" (from Annus mirabilis, Latin for 'year of wonders').

Albert Einstein

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"Einstein" redirects here. For other uses, see Einstein (disambiguation).

Albert Einstein
Albert Einstein, 1921
Born	14 March 1879(1879-03-14) Ulm, Württemberg, Germany
Died	18 April 1955 (aged 76) Princeton, New Jersey, USA
Residence	Germany, Italy, Switzerland, USA
Citizenship	Germany (1879–96, 1914–33) Switzerland (1901–55) United States (1940–55)
Ethnicity	Ashkenazi Jewish
Fields	Physics
Institutions	Swiss Patent Office (Berne) University of Zurich Charles University, Prague ETH Zurich Prussian Academy of Sciences Kaiser Wilhelm Institute University of Leiden Institute for Advanced Study
Alma mater	ETH Zurich University of Zurich
Doctoral advisor	Alfred Kleiner
Other academic advisors	Heinrich Friedrich Weber
Notable students	Ernst G. Straus
Known for	General relativity Special relativity Brownian motion Photoelectric effect Mass-energy equivalence Einstein field equations Unified Field Theory Bose–Einstein statistics EPR paradox
Notable awards	Nobel Prize in Physics (1921) Copley Medal (1925) Max Planck Medal (1929)
Religious stance	See main text
Signature

Albert Einstein (German: IPA: [ˈalbɐt ˈaɪ̯nʃtaɪ̯n] (Audio file) (help·info); English: IPA: /ˈælbɝt ˈaɪnstaɪn/) (14 March 1879 – 18 April 1955) was a German-born theoretical physicist. He is best known for his theory of relativity and specifically mass–energy equivalence, E = mc². Einstein received the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics "for his services to Theoretical Physics, and especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect."^[1]

Einstein's many contributions to physics include his special theory of relativity, which reconciled mechanics with electromagnetism, and his general theory of relativity, which was intended to extend the principle of relativity to non-uniform motion and to provide a new theory of gravitation. His other contributions include relativistic cosmology, capillary action, critical opalescence, classical problems of statistical mechanics and their application to quantum theory, an explanation of the Brownian movement of molecules, atomic transition probabilities, the quantum theory of a monatomic gas, thermal properties of light with low radiation density (which laid the foundation for the photon theory), a theory of radiation including stimulated emission, the conception of a unified field theory, and the geometrization of physics.

Einstein published over 300 scientific works and over 150 non-scientific works.^[2]^[3] Einstein is revered by the physics community,^[4] and in 1999 Time magazine named him the "Person of the Century". In wider culture the name "Einstein" has become synonymous with genius.

Youth and schooling

Albert Einstein was born into a Jewish family in Ulm, Württemberg, Germany on 14 March 1879. His father was Hermann Einstein, a salesman and engineer. His mother was Pauline Einstein (née Koch). In 1880, the family moved to Munich, where his father and his uncle founded a company, Elektrotechnische Fabrik J. Einstein & Cie, that manufactured electrical equipment.

The Einsteins were not observant of Jewish religious practices, and Albert attended a Catholic elementary school. Although Einstein had early speech difficulties, he was a top student in elementary school.^[5]^[6]

Albert Einstein in 1893 (age 14), taken before the family moved to Italy

When Einstein was five, his father showed him a pocket compass. Einstein realized that there must be something in the space, previously thought to be empty, that was moving the needle and later stated that this experience made "a deep and lasting impression".^[7] At his mother's insistence, he took violin lessons starting at age six, and although he disliked them and eventually quit, he later took great pleasure in Mozart's violin sonatas. As he grew, Einstein built models and mechanical devices for fun, and began to show a talent for mathematics.

In 1889, family friend Max Talmud, a medical student,^[8] introduced the ten-year-old Einstein to key science, mathematics, and philosophy texts, including Kant's Critique of Pure Reason and Euclid's Elements (Einstein called it the "holy little geometry book").^[8] From Euclid, Einstein began to understand deductive reasoning, and by the age of twelve, he had learned Euclidean geometry. Soon thereafter he began to investigate calculus.

In his early teens, Einstein attended the progressive Luitpold Gymnasium. His father intended for him to pursue electrical engineering, but Einstein clashed with authorities and resented the school regimen. He later wrote that the spirit of learning and creative thought were lost in strict rote learning.

In 1894, when Einstein was fifteen, his father's business failed, and the Einstein family moved to Italy, first to Milan and then, after a few months, to Pavia. During this time, Einstein wrote his first scientific work, "The Investigation of the State of Aether in Magnetic Fields".^[9] Einstein had been left behind in Munich to finish high school, but in the spring of 1895, he withdrew to join his family in Pavia, convincing the school to let him go by using a doctor's note.

Rather than completing high school, Einstein decided to apply directly to the ETH Zurich, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zürich, Switzerland. Lacking a school certificate, he was required to take an entrance examination, which he did not pass, although he got exceptional marks in mathematics and physics.^[10] Einstein wrote that it was in that same year, at age 16, that he first performed his famous thought experiment visualizing traveling alongside a beam of light (Einstein 1979).

The Einsteins sent Albert to Aarau, Switzerland to finish secondary school. While lodging with the family of Professor Jost Winteler, he fell in love with the family's daughter, Marie. (Albert's sister Maja later married Paul Winteler.)^[11] In Aarau, Einstein studied Maxwell's electromagnetic theory. At age 17 he graduated, renounced his German citizenship to avoid military service (with his father's approval), and finally enrolled in the mathematics program at ETH. Marie moved to Olsberg, Switzerland for a teaching post.

In 1896, Einstein's future wife, Mileva Marić, also enrolled at ETH, as the only woman studying mathematics. During the next few years, Einstein and Marić's friendship developed into romance. Einstein graduated in 1900 from ETH with a degree in physics.^[12] That same year, Einstein's friend Michele Besso introduced him to the work of Ernst Mach. The next year, Einstein published a paper in the prestigious Annalen der Physik on the capillary forces of a straw (Einstein 1901). On 21 February 1901, he gained Swiss citizenship, which he never revoked.^[13]

Patent office

The 'Einsteinhaus' on the Kramgasse in Berne where Einstein lived with Mileva on the first floor during his Annus Mirabilis

Following graduation, Einstein could not find a teaching post. After almost two years of searching, a former classmate's father helped him get a job in Berne, at the Federal Office for Intellectual Property,^[14] the patent office, as an assistant examiner. His responsibility was evaluating patent applications for electromagnetic devices. In 1903, Einstein's position at the Swiss Patent Office was made permanent, although he was passed over for promotion until he "fully mastered machine technology".^[15]

With friends he met in Berne, Einstein formed a weekly discussion club on science and philosophy, jokingly named "The Olympia Academy". Their readings included Poincaré, Mach, and Hume, who influenced Einstein's scientific and philosophical outlook.^[16]

During this period Einstein had almost no personal contact with the physics community.^[17] Much of his work at the patent office related to questions about transmission of electric signals and electrical-mechanical synchronization of time: two technical problems that show up conspicuously in the thought experiments that eventually led Einstein to his radical conclusions about the nature of light and the fundamental connection between space and time.^[15]^[16]

Marriage and family life

Einstein and Mileva Marić had a daughter, Lieserl Einstein, born in early 1902.^[18] Her fate is unknown.

Einstein married Mileva on 6 January 1903, although Einstein's mother had objected to the match because she had a prejudice against Serbs and thought Marić "too old" and "physically defective."^[19] ^[20] Their relationship was for a time a personal and intellectual partnership. In a letter to her, Einstein called Marić "a creature who is my equal and who is as strong and independent as I am."^[21] There has been debate about whether Marić influenced Einstein's work; however, most historians do not think she made major contributions.^[22]^[23]^[24] On 14 May 1904, Albert and Mileva's first son, Hans Albert Einstein, was born in Berne, Switzerland. Their second son, Eduard, was born in Munich on 28 July 1910.

Einstein and Marić divorced on 14 February 1919, having lived apart for five years. On 2 June of that year, Einstein married Elsa Löwenthal, who had nursed him through an illness. Elsa was Albert's first cousin maternally and his second cousin paternally. Together the Einsteins raised Margot and Ilse, Elsa's daughters from her first marriage.^[25] Their union produced no children.

Annus Mirabilis

Main article: Annus Mirabilis Papers

Albert Einstein, 1905

In 1905, while he was working in the patent office, Einstein had four papers published in the Annalen der Physik, the leading German physics journal. These are the papers that history has come to call the Annus Mirabilis Papers:

His paper on the particulate nature of light put forward the idea that certain experimental results, notably the photoelectric effect, could be simply understood from the postulate that light interacts with matter as discrete "packets" (quanta) of energy, an idea that had been introduced by Max Planck in 1900 as a purely mathematical manipulation, and which seemed to contradict contemporary wave theories of light (Einstein 1905a). This was the only work of Einstein's that he himself called "revolutionary."
His paper on Brownian motion explained the random movement of very small objects as direct evidence of molecular action, thus supporting the atomic theory. (Einstein 1905c)
His paper on the electrodynamics of moving bodies introduced the radical theory of special relativity, which showed that the observed independence of the speed of light on the observer's state of motion required fundamental changes to the notion of simultaneity. Consequences of this include the time-space frame of a moving body slowing down and contracting (in the direction of motion) relative to the frame of the observer. This paper also argued that the idea of a luminiferous aether—one of the leading theoretical entities in physics at the time—was superfluous. (Einstein 1905d)
In his paper on mass–energy equivalence (previously considered to be distinct concepts), Einstein deduced from his equations of special relativity what later became the well-known expression: $E = m c 2$ , suggesting that tiny amounts of mass could be converted into huge amounts of energy. (Einstein 1905e)

All four papers are today recognized as tremendous achievements—and hence 1905 is known as Einstein's "Wonderful Year". At the time, however, they were not noticed by most physicists as being important, and many of those who did notice them rejected them outright. Some of this work—such as the theory of light quanta—remained controversial for years.^[26]^[27]

At the age of 26, having studied under Alfred Kleiner, Professor of Experimental Physics, Einstein was awarded a PhD by the University of Zurich. His dissertation was entitled A New Determination of Molecular Dimensions. (Einstein 1905b)

Light and general relativity

See also: History of general relativity and Relativity priority dispute

One of the 1919 eclipse photographs taken during Arthur Stanley Eddington's expedition, which confirmed Einstein's predictions of the gravitational bending of light.

In 1906, the patent office promoted Einstein to Technical Examiner Second Class, but he had not given up on academia. In 1908, he became a privatdozent at the University of Bern.^[28] In 1910, he wrote a paper on critical opalescence that described the cumulative effect of light scattered by individual molecules in the atmosphere, i.e., why the sky is blue.^[29]

During 1909, Einstein published "Über die Entwicklung unserer Anschauungen über das Wesen und die Konstitution der Strahlung" ("The Development of Our Views on the Composition and Essence of Radiation"), on the quantization of light. In this and in an earlier 1909 paper, Einstein showed that Max Planck's energy quanta must have well-defined momenta and act in some respects as independent, point-like particles. This paper introduced the photon concept (although the term itself was introduced by Gilbert N. Lewis in 1926) and inspired the notion of wave–particle duality in quantum mechanics.

In 1911, Einstein became an associate professor at the University of Zurich. However, shortly afterward, he accepted a full professorship at the Charles University of Prague. While in Prague, Einstein published a paper about the effects of gravity on light, specifically the gravitational redshift and the gravitational deflection of light. The paper appealed to astronomers to find ways of detecting the deflection during a solar eclipse.^[30] German astronomer Erwin Finlay-Freundlich publicized Einstein's challenge to scientists around the world.^[31]

In 1912, Einstein returned to Switzerland to accept a professorship at his alma mater, the ETH. There he met mathematician Marcel Grossmann who introduced him to Riemannian geometry and more generally differential geometry, and at the recommendation of Italian mathematician Tullio Levi-Civita, Einstein began exploring the usefulness of general covariance (essentially the use of tensors) for his gravitational theory. Although for a while Einstein thought that there were problems with that approach, he later returned to it and by late 1915 had published his general theory of relativity in the form that is still used today (Einstein 1915). This theory explains gravitation as distortion of the structure of spacetime by matter, affecting the inertial motion of other matter.

After many relocations, Mileva established a permanent home with the children in Zurich in 1914, just before the start of World War I. Einstein continued on alone to Berlin, where he became a member of the Prussian Academy of Sciences. As part of the arrangements for his new position, he also became a professor at the Humboldt University of Berlin, although with a special clause freeing him from most teaching obligations. From 1914 to 1932 he was also director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics.^[32]

During World War I, the speeches and writings of Central Powers scientists were available only to Central Powers academics, for national security reasons. Some of Einstein's work did reach the United Kingdom and the United States through the efforts of the Austrian Paul Ehrenfest and physicists in the Netherlands, especially 1902 Nobel Prize-winner Hendrik Lorentz and Willem de Sitter of the Leiden University. After the war ended, Einstein maintained his relationship with the Leiden University, accepting a contract as an Extraordinary Professor; he travelled to Holland regularly to lecture there between 1920 and 1930.^[33]

In 1917, Einstein published an article in Physikalische Zeitschrift that proposed the possibility of stimulated emission, the physical process that makes possible the maser and the laser (Einstein 1917b). He also published a paper introducing a new notion, the cosmological constant, into the general theory of relativity in an attempt to model the behavior of the entire universe (Einstein 1917a).

1917 was the year astronomers began taking Einstein up on his 1911 challenge from Prague. The Mount Wilson Observatory in California, U.S., published a solar spectroscopic analysis that showed no gravitational redshift.^[34] In 1918, the Lick Observatory, also in California, announced that they too had disproven Einstein's prediction, although their findings were not published.^[35]

However, in May 1919, a team led by British astronomer Arthur Stanley Eddington claimed to have confirmed Einstein's prediction of gravitational deflection of starlight by the Sun while photographing a solar eclipse in Sobral, northern Brazil, and Príncipe.^[31] On 7 November 1919, leading British newspaper The Times printed a banner headline that read: "Revolution in Science – New Theory of the Universe – Newtonian Ideas Overthrown".^[36] In an interview Nobel laureate Max Born praised general relativity as the "greatest feat of human thinking about nature";^[37] fellow laureate Paul Dirac was quoted saying it was "probably the greatest scientific discovery ever made".^[38]

From this point on, the international media guaranteed Einstein's global renown. Although later scrutiny of the specific photographs taken on the Eddington expedition showed the experimental uncertainty to be of about the same magnitude as the effect Eddington claimed to have demonstrated, with a 1962 British expedition concluding that the method was inherently unreliable,^[36] the deflection of light during a solar eclipse has been confirmed by later, more accurate observations.^[39]

There was some resentment toward the newcomer Einstein's fame in the scientific community, notably among German physicists, who later started the Deutsche Physik (German Physics) movement.^[40]^[41]

Nobel Prize

Einstein, 1947. Age 68.

In 1922 Einstein was awarded the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics^[42], "for his services to Theoretical Physics, and especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect". This refers to his 1905 paper on the photoelectric effect: "On a Heuristic Viewpoint Concerning the Production and Transformation of Light", which was well supported by the experimental evidence by that time. The presentation speech began by mentioning "his theory of relativity [which had] been the subject of lively debate in philosophical circles [and] also has astrophysical implications which are being rigorously examined at the present time." (Einstein 1923) As stipulated in their 1919 divorce settlement, Einstein gave the Nobel prize money to his first wife, Mileva Marić.

Einstein traveled to New York City in the United States for the first time on 2 April 1921. When asked where he got his scientific ideas, Einstein explained that he believed scientific work best proceeds from an examination of physical reality and a search for underlying axioms, with consistent explanations that apply in all instances and avoid contradicting each other. He also recommended theories with visualizable results (Einstein 1954).^[43]

Unified field theory

Main article: Classical unified field theories

Max Planck presents Einstein with the inaugural Max Planck Medal, Berlin 28 June 1929

Einstein's research after general relativity consisted primarily of a long series of attempts to generalize his theory of gravitation in order to unify and simplify the fundamental laws of physics, particularly gravitation and electromagnetism. In 1950, he described this "unified field theory" in a Scientific American article entitled "On the Generalized Theory of Gravitation" (Einstein 1950).

Although he continued to be lauded for his work in theoretical physics, Einstein became increasingly isolated in his research, and his attempts were ultimately unsuccessful. In his pursuit of a unification of the fundamental forces, he ignored some mainstream developments in physics (and vice versa), most notably the strong and weak nuclear forces, which were not well understood until many years after Einstein's death. Einstein's goal of unifying the laws of physics under a single model survives in the current drive for the grand unification theory.^[44]

Collaboration and conflict

Bose–Einstein statistics

In 1924, Einstein received a description of a statistical model from Indian physicist Satyendra Nath Bose, based on a counting method that assumed that light could be understood as a gas of indistinguishable particles. Bose's statistics applied to some atoms as well as to the proposed light particles, and Einstein submitted his translation of Bose's paper to the Zeitschrift für Physik. Einstein also published his own articles describing the model and its implications, among them the Bose–Einstein condensate phenomenon that should appear at very low temperatures (Einstein 1924). It was not until 1995 that the first such condensate was produced experimentally by Eric Allin Cornell and Carl Wieman using ultra-cooling equipment built at the NIST-JILA laboratory at the University of Colorado at Boulder.^[45] Bose–Einstein statistics are now used to describe the behaviors of any assembly of "bosons". Einstein's sketches for this project may be seen in the Einstein Archive in the library of the Leiden University.^[46]

Schrödinger gas model

Einstein suggested to Erwin Schrödinger an application of Max Planck's idea of treating energy levels for a gas as a whole rather than for individual molecules, and Schrödinger applied this in a paper using the Boltzmann distribution to derive the thermodynamic properties of a semiclassical ideal gas. Schrödinger urged Einstein to add his name as co-author, although Einstein declined the invitation.^[47]

Einstein refrigerator

In 1926, Einstein and his former student Leó Szilárd, a Hungarian physicist who later worked on the Manhattan Project and is credited with the discovery of the chain reaction, co-invented (and in 1930, patented) the Einstein refrigerator, revolutionary for having no moving parts and using only heat, not ice, as an input.^[48]^[49]

Bohr versus Einstein

Einstein and Niels Bohr. Photo taken by Paul Ehrenfest during their 1925 Leiden visit.

In the 1920s, quantum mechanics developed into a more complete theory. Einstein was unhappy with the "Copenhagen interpretation" of quantum theory developed by Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg, wherein quantum phenomena are inherently probabilistic, with definite states resulting only upon interaction with classical systems. A public debate between Einstein and Bohr followed, lasting for many years (including during the Solvay Conferences). Einstein formulated thought experiments against the Copenhagen interpretation, which were all rebutted by Bohr. In a 1926 letter to Max Born, Einstein wrote: "I, at any rate, am convinced that He [God] does not throw dice." (Einstein 1969).^[50]

Einstein was never satisfied by what he perceived to be quantum theory's intrinsically incomplete description of nature, and in 1935 he further explored the issue in collaboration with Boris Podolsky and Nathan Rosen, noting that the theory seems to require non-local interactions; this is known as the EPR paradox (Einstein 1935). The EPR experiment has since been performed, with results confirming quantum theory's predictions.^[51]

Einstein's disagreement with Bohr revolved around the idea of scientific determinism. For this reason the repercussions of the Einstein-Bohr debate have found their way into philosophical discourse as well.

See also: Bohr-Einstein debates

Religious views

The question of scientific determinism gave rise to questions about Einstein's position on theological determinism, and whether or not he believed in a God. In 1929, Einstein told Rabbi Herbert S. Goldstein "I believe in Spinoza's God, who reveals Himself in the lawful harmony of the world, not in a God Who concerns Himself with the fate and the doings of mankind."^[52] In a 1950 letter to M. Berkowitz, Einstein stated that "My position concerning God is that of an agnostic. I am convinced that a vivid consciousness of the primary importance of moral principles for the betterment and ennoblement of life does not need the idea of a law-giver, especially a law-giver who works on the basis of reward and punishment."^[53] Einstein also stated: "I have repeatedly said that in my opinion the idea of a personal God is a childlike one. You may call me an agnostic, but I do not share the crusading spirit of the professional atheist whose fervor is mostly due to a painful act of liberation from the fetters of religious indoctrination received in youth." He is reported to have said in a conversation with Hubertus, Prince of Löwenstein-Wertheim-Freudenberg, "In view of such harmony in the cosmos which I, with my limited human mind, am able to recognize, there are yet people who say there is no God. But what really makes me angry is that they quote me for the support of such views."^[54] Einstein clarified his religious views in a letter he wrote in response to those who claimed that he worshipped a Judeo-Christian god: "It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal god and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it."^[55] In his book The World as I See It, he wrote: "A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, of the manifestations of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty, which are only accessible to our reason in their most elementary forms—it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute the truly religious attitude; in this sense, and in this alone, I am a deeply religious man."^[56]

In a 1930 New York Times article,^[57] Einstein distinguished three styles which are usually intermixed in actual religion. The first is motivated by fear and poor understanding of causality, and hence invents supernatural beings. The second is social and moral, motivated by desire for love and support. Einstein noted that both have an anthropomorphic concept of God. The third style, which Einstein deemed most mature, is motivated by a deep sense of awe and mystery. He said, "The individual feels … the sublimity and marvelous order which reveal themselves in nature … and he wants to experience the universe as a single significant whole." Einstein saw science as an antagonist of the first two styles of religion, but as a partner of the third style.

Einstein was also a Humanist and a supporter of Ethical Culture. He served on the advisory board of the First Humanist Society of New York.^[58]^[59] For the seventy-fifth anniversary of the New York Society for Ethical Culture, he noted that the idea of Ethical Culture embodied his personal conception of what is most valuable and enduring in religious idealism. He observed, "Without 'ethical culture' there is no salvation for humanity."^[60]

Einstein published a paper in Nature in 1940 entitled "Science and Religion"^[61] in which he said that: "a person who is religiously enlightened appears to me to be one who has, to the best of his ability, liberated himself from the fetters of his selfish desires and is preoccupied with thoughts, feelings and aspirations to which he clings because of their super-personal value … regardless of whether any attempt is made to unite this content with a Divine Being, for otherwise it would not be possible to count Buddha and Spinoza as religious personalities. Accordingly a religious person is devout in the sense that he has no doubt of the significance of those super-personal objects and goals which neither require nor are capable of rational foundation … In this sense religion is the age-old endeavour of mankind to become clearly and completely conscious of these values and goals, and constantly to strengthen their effects." He argued that conflicts between science and religion "have all sprung from fatal errors." "[E]ven though the realms of religion and science in themselves are clearly marked off from each other" there are "strong reciprocal relationships and dependencies … science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind … a legitimate conflict between science and religion cannot exist." In Einstein's view, "neither the rule of human nor Divine Will exists as an independent cause of natural events. To be sure, the doctrine of a personal God interfering with natural events could never be refuted … by science, for [it] can always take refuge in those domains in which scientific knowledge has not yet been able to set foot." (Einstein 1940, pp. 605–607)

In a letter to Eric Gutkind in 1954 Einstein said: "The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honorable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish."^[62] In the same letter, Einstein rejected the idea that the Jews are God's chosen people: "For me the Jewish religion like all others is an incarnation of the most childish superstitions. And the Jewish people to whom I gladly belong and with whose mentality I have a deep affinity have no different quality for me than all other people. As far as my experience goes, they are no better than other human groups, although they are protected from the worst cancers by a lack of power. Otherwise I cannot see anything 'chosen' about them."^[62]

His friend Max Jammer explored Einstein's views on religion thoroughly in the 1999 book Einstein and Religion: Physics and Theology.^[63]

Politics

Einstein and Indian poet and Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore during their widely publicized 14 July 1930 conversation

With increasing public demands, his involvement in political, humanitarian, and academic projects in various countries, and his new acquaintances with scholars and political figures from around the world, Einstein was less able to achieve the productive isolation that he needed in order to work.^[64] Due to his fame and genius, Einstein found himself called on to give conclusive judgments on matters that had nothing to do with theoretical physics or mathematics. He was not timid, and he was aware of the world around him, with no illusion that ignoring politics would make world events fade away. His very visible position allowed him to speak and write frankly, even provocatively, at a time when many people of conscience could only flee to the underground or keep doubts about developments within their own movements to themselves for fear of internecine fighting. Einstein flouted the ascendant Nazi movement, tried to be a voice of moderation in the tumultuous formation of the State of Israel and braved anti-communist politics and resistance to the civil rights movement in the United States. He participated in the 1927 congress of the League against Imperialism in Brussels.^[65]

Zionism

Einstein was a socialist Zionist who opposed nationalism.^[66] In 1931, The Macmillan Company published About Zionism: Speeches and Lectures by Professor Albert Einstein.^[67] Querido, an Amsterdam publishing house, collected eleven of Einstein's essays into a 1933 book entitled Mein Weltbild, translated to English as The World as I See It; Einstein's foreword dedicates the collection "to the Jews of Germany".^[68] In the face of Germany's rising militarism, Einstein wrote and spoke for peace.^[69]^[70]

Albert Einstein, seen here with his wife Elsa Einstein and Zionist leaders, including future President of Israel Chaim Weizmann, his wife Dr. Vera Weizmann, Menahem Ussishkin, and Ben-Zion Mossinson on arrival in New York City in 1921.

Einstein publicly stated reservations about the proposal to partition the British-supervised British Mandate of Palestine into independent Arab and Jewish countries. In a 1938 speech, "Our Debt to Zionism", he said: "I am afraid of the inner damage Judaism will sustain—especially from the development of a narrow nationalism within our own ranks, against which we have already had to fight strongly, even without a Jewish state. ... If external necessity should after all compel us to assume this burden, let us bear it with tact and patience."^[71] In a 1947 letter to Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, Einstein stated that the Balfour Declaration's proposal to establish a national home for Jews in Palestine "redresses the balance" of justice and history.^[72]

The United Nations did divide the mandate, demarcating the borders of several new countries including the State of Israel, and war broke out immediately. Einstein was one of the authors of a 1948 letter to the New York Times criticizing Menachem Begin's Herut (Freedom) Party for the Deir Yassin massacre (Einstein et al. 1948).

Einstein served on the Board of Governors of The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. In his Will of 1950, Einstein bequeathed literary rights to his writings to The Hebrew University, where many of his original documents are held in the Albert Einstein Archives.^[73]

When President Chaim Weizmann died in 1952, Einstein was asked to be Israel's second president, but he declined, stating that he had "neither the natural ability nor the experience to deal with human beings." ^[74] He wrote: "I am deeply moved by the offer from our State of Israel, and at once saddened and ashamed that I cannot accept it. "^[75]

Anti-Nazism

In January 1933, Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany. One of the first actions of Hitler's administration was the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service which removed Jews and politically suspect government employees (including university professors) from their jobs, unless they had demonstrated their loyalty to Germany by serving in World War I. In December 1932, in response to this growing threat, Einstein had prudently traveled to the U.S. For several years he had been wintering at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, California,^[76] and also was a guest lecturer at Abraham Flexner's newly founded Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey.^[77]

The Einsteins bought a house in Princeton (where Elsa died in 1936), and Einstein remained an integral contributor to the Institute for Advanced Study until his death in 1955. During the 1930s and into World War II, Einstein wrote affidavits recommending United States visas for a huge number of Jews from Europe trying to flee persecution, raised money for Zionist organizations and was in part responsible for the formation, in 1933, of the International Rescue Committee.^[75]^[78]

Albert Einstein receiving his certificate of American citizenship from Judge Phillip Forman in 1940.

Meanwhile in Germany, a campaign to eliminate Einstein's work from the German lexicon as unacceptable "Jewish physics" (Jüdische Physik) was led by Nobel laureates Philipp Lenard and Johannes Stark. Deutsche Physik activists published pamphlets and even textbooks denigrating Einstein, and instructors who taught his theories were blacklisted—including Nobel laureate Werner Heisenberg, who had debated quantum probability with Bohr and Einstein. Philipp Lenard claimed that the mass–energy equivalence formula needed to be credited to Friedrich Hasenöhrl to make it an Aryan creation.^[79]^[80]

Einstein became a citizen of the United States in 1940 and remained there the rest of his life, although he retained his Swiss citizenship.^[81]

Atomic bomb

Main article: Manhattan Project

Einstein-Szilárd letter

Concerned scientists, many of them refugees from European anti-Semitism in the U.S., recognized the danger of German scientists developing an atomic bomb based on the newly-discovered phenomena of nuclear fission. In 1939, the Hungarian émigré Leó Szilárd, having failed to arouse U.S. government interest on his own, worked with Einstein to write a letter to U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, which Einstein signed, urging U.S. development of such a weapon.^[82] In August 1939, Roosevelt received the Einstein-Szilárd letter and authorized secret research into the harnessing of nuclear fission for military purposes.^[83]

By 1942 this effort had become the Manhattan Project, the largest secret scientific endeavor undertaken up to that time. By late 1945, the U.S. had developed operational nuclear weapons, and used them on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Einstein himself did not play a role in the development of the atomic bomb other than signing the letter.^{[citation needed]} He did help the United States Navy with some unrelated theoretical questions it was working on during the war.^[84]

According to Linus Pauling, Einstein later expressed regret about his letter to Roosevelt.^[85] In 1947, Einstein wrote an article for The Atlantic Monthly arguing that the United States should not try to pursue an atomic monopoly, and instead should equip the United Nations with nuclear weapons for the sole purpose of maintaining deterrence.^[86]

Cold War era

When he was a visible figure working against the rise of Nazism, Einstein had sought help and developed working relationships in both the West and what was to become the Soviet bloc. After World War II, enmity between the former allies became a very serious issue for people with international résumés. To make things worse, during the first days of McCarthyism Einstein was writing about a single world government; it was at this time that he wrote, "I do not know how the third World War will be fought, but I can tell you what they will use in the Fourth—rocks!"^[87] In a 1949 Monthly Review article entitled "Why Socialism?"^[88] Albert Einstein described a chaotic capitalist society, a source of evil to be overcome, as the "predatory phase of human development" (Einstein 1949). With Albert Schweitzer and Bertrand Russell, Einstein lobbied to stop nuclear testing and future bombs. Days before his death, Einstein signed the Russell-Einstein Manifesto, which led to the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs.^[89]

Einstein was a member of several civil rights groups, including the Princeton chapter of the NAACP. When the aged W. E. B. Du Bois was accused of being a Communist spy, Einstein volunteered as a character witness, and the case was dismissed shortly afterward. Einstein's friendship with activist Paul Robeson, with whom he served as co-chair of the American Crusade to End Lynching, lasted twenty years.^[90]

In 1946, Einstein collaborated with Rabbi Israel Goldstein, Middlesex University heir C. Ruggles Smith, and activist attorney George Alpert on the Albert Einstein Foundation for Higher Learning, Inc., which was formed to create a Jewish-sponsored secular university, open to all students, on the grounds of the former Middlesex University in Waltham, Massachusetts. Middlesex was chosen in part because it was accessible from both Boston and New York City, Jewish cultural centers of the U.S. Their vision was a university "deeply conscious both of the Hebraic tradition of Torah looking upon culture as a birthright, and of the American ideal of an educated democracy."^[91] The collaboration was stormy, however. Finally, when Einstein wanted to appoint British economist Harold Laski as the university's president, Alpert wrote that Laski was "a man utterly alien to American principles of democracy, tarred with the Communist brush."^[91] Einstein withdrew his support and barred the use of his name.^[92] The university opened in 1948 as Brandeis University. In 1953, Brandeis offered Einstein an honorary degree, but he declined.^[91]

Given Einstein's links to Germany and Zionism, his socialist ideals, and his links to Communist figures, the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation kept a file on Einstein^[93] that grew to 1,427 pages. Many of the documents in the file were sent to the FBI by concerned citizens: some objecting to his immigration, while others asked the FBI to protect him.^[94]

Although Einstein had long been sympathetic to the notion of vegetarianism, it was only near the start of 1954 that he adopted a strict vegetarian diet.^[95]

Death

On 17 April 1955, Albert Einstein experienced internal bleeding caused by the rupture of an aortic aneurysm, which had previously been diagnosed and reinforced.^[96] He took a draft of a speech he was preparing for a television appearance commemorating the State of Israel's seventh anniversary with him to the hospital, but he did not live long enough to complete it.^[97] He died in Princeton Hospital early the next morning at the age of 76, having continued to work until near the end. Einstein's remains were cremated and his ashes were scattered.^[98]^[99]

Before the cremation, Princeton Hospital pathologist Thomas Stoltz Harvey removed Einstein's brain for preservation, without the permission of his family, in hope that the neuroscience of the future would be able to discover what made Einstein so intelligent.^[100]

Legacy

While travelling, Einstein had written daily to his wife Elsa and adopted stepdaughters, Margot and Ilse, and the letters were included in the papers bequeathed to The Hebrew University. Margot Einstein permitted the personal letters to be made available to the public, but requested that it not be done until twenty years after her death (she died in 1986^[101]). Barbara Wolff, of The Hebrew University's Albert Einstein Archives, told the BBC that there are about 3,500 pages of private correspondence written between 1912 and 1955.^[102]

The United States' National Academy of Sciences commissioned the Albert Einstein Memorial, a monumental bronze and marble sculpture by Robert Berks, dedicated in 1979 at its Washington, D.C. campus adjacent to the National Mall.

Einstein bequeathed the royalties from use of his image to The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Corbis, successor to The Roger Richman Agency, licenses the use of his name and associated imagery, as agent for the Hebrew University.^[103]^[104]

Honors

See also: List of things named after Albert Einstein

In 1999, Albert Einstein was named "Person of the Century" by Time magazine,^[105]^[106] a Gallup poll recorded him as the fourth most admired person of the 20th century^[107] and according to The 100: A Ranking of the Most Influential Persons in History, Einstein is "the greatest scientist of the twentieth century and one of the supreme intellects of all time."^[108]

Albert Einstein Memorial located on the public grounds of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, Washington, D.C.

A partial list of his memorials:

The International Union of Pure and Applied Physics named 2005 the "World Year of Physics" in commemoration of the 100th anniversary of the publication of the Annus Mirabilis Papers.^[109]
The Albert Einstein Institute
The Albert Einstein Memorial by Robert Berks
A unit used in photochemistry, the einstein
The chemical element 99, einsteinium
The asteroid 2001 Einstein
The Albert Einstein Award
The Albert Einstein Peace Prize

In 1990, his name was added to the Walhalla temple.^[110]

Impact on popular culture

Main article: Albert Einstein in popular culture

In the period before World War II, Albert Einstein was so well-known in America that he would be stopped on the street by people wanting him to explain "that theory". He finally figured out a way to handle the incessant inquiries. He told his inquirers "Pardon me, sorry! Always I am mistaken for Professor Einstein."^[111]

Albert Einstein has been the subject of or inspiration for many novels, films, and plays. Einstein is a favorite model for depictions of mad scientists and absent-minded professors; his expressive face and distinctive hairstyle have been widely copied and exaggerated. Time magazine's Frederic Golden wrote that Einstein was "a cartoonist's dream come true."^[106]

Einstein's association with great intelligence has made the name Einstein synonymous with genius, often used in ironic expressions such as "Nice job, Einstein!".

Einstein's "Year of Wonders," 100 Years Later

It has been a hundred years since Albert Einstein's annus mirabilis, or "year of wonders," during which the then-26-year-old government worker wrote a series of papers that revolutionized our understanding of the universe.

To mark the occasion, 2005 has been designated by the United Nations as the International Year of Physics.

There have, of course, been scores of groundbreaking scientific developments since Einstein's time. Yet at its core, science is still operating in the same framework that Einstein laid out a century ago.

"He changed not only science but also the way to go about good science," said Gerald Holton, a physics professor and Einstein scholar at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. "He was not trying to find solutions to small problems but to bring all of physics under one roof."

E=mc²

Einstein, who was born in Germany, really was working as a lowly clerk at the Swiss Patent Office in Bern when he conceived his radical theories, which came to provide the foundation of modern physics.

He submitted his series of papers to the Annalen der Physik, the leading German physics journal at the time.

In a paper written in May, 1905, Einstein showed how the existence of atoms—an idea that had been hotly debated but far from universally accepted—could be verified by measuring the jiggling of microscopic particles in a glass of water.

The process, measuring what is known as Brownian motion, gave scientists a way to count atoms by looking through an ordinary microscope.

In June of that year, Einstein introduced relativity, a theory of time, distance, mass, and energy. He set the speed of light as the universal speed limit and showed that distance and time are not absolute but instead affected by one's motion.

"Until his day, people were tied to this idea of time as being fixed," said Clifford Will, a physics professor at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. "Einstein took an operational viewpoint that time is what clocks measure and nothing more." (Will is the author of Was Einstein Right?)

In a three-page add-on to the theory, completed in September 1905, Einstein derived his famous equation E=mc². The equation shows that the energy of a body equals its mass times the speed of light squared.

Quantum Mechanics

Yet it was his first paper, written in March, that was perhaps his most revolutionary.

In it, Einstein argued that light is not a wave, as most physicists previously thought, but instead a stream of tiny packets of energy that have since come to be known as photons. This helped explain the photoelectric effect (the emission of electrons by certain substances when subjected to light or radiation).

The theory won Einstein the Nobel Prize in 1921 and helped lay the foundation for quantum theory, which states that physics cannot make definite predictions. It can only predict the probability that things will turn out one way or another.

The quantum theory, with its statistical description of nature at the subatomic scale, has turned out to be right.

However, Einstein came to reject the unpredictability of quantum mechanics, famously saying, "God does not play dice with the universe." Instead he saw it as a mere path to a deeper and more complete description of the universe.

"He couldn't accept that so deeply woven into the fabric of the cosmos was an element of uncertainty," said Brian Greene, a physics and mathematics professor at Columbia University in New York. "He hoped the probabilistic framework of quantum mechanics was merely an intermediary point physicists reached in their study. But that doesn't seem to be the case," said Greene, who wrote the best-selling The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory.

Unified Theory

Holton, the Harvard physicist, says it is a mistake to look at Einstein's papers individually.

"They all show the same motivation," Holton said. "In the very first lines [Einstein says] there is something wrong with the way we understand nature … that there are microscopic bodies big enough to see, and a submicroscopic world of atoms and molecules, which we can't see. Einstein said, 'No, there must be just one kind of physics. God would not have made two kinds of physics.'"

Einstein became convinced that one unified theory could explain the order of the universe.

"His way of approaching physics was to find connections between things which had been viewed as separate," Greene said. "His ultimate goal was to find a connection between all of nature's forces."

Einstein never succeeded in his search for a theory of everything. But many people consider string theorists such as Greene to be Einstein's natural successors.

String theory is a physical model that says that the fundamental building blocks of the universe are vibrating filaments of energy within every particle.

"We're certainly carrying on a program that Einstein initiated," Greene said. "Whether we are on the right track, I don't know. But if it is correct, then it would be the kind of theory that Einstein spent 30 years searching for but never found. That would be quite a wonderful thing."

Einstein and Darwin: A tale of two theories

Q&A with ‘Origins’ astronomer Neil deGrasse Tyson

	Albert Einstein, shown at left in a 1938 photo, revolutionized physics and became a cultural icon. Charles Darwin, shown at right in a circa-1880 painting, laid the foundation of modern evolutionary theory, and today that theory is a cultural flashpoint.
Univ. of New Hampshire via AP file, Rischgitz via Getty Images file

World Greates

Great News for the World

Velupillai Prabhakaran-LTTE

Bangaru Usharani

Prafulla Chandra

Louis Pasteur

Subhash Chandra Bose

Nelson Mandela

Nelson Rolihlahla MANDELA

Profile of Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela

Biographical Details

A Brief Biography

Bhagat Singh

Mahatma Gandhi

Biography of Mahatma Gandhi

Che Guevara

NIKOLA TESLA

Nikola Tesla

CARL SAGAN

Carl Sagan: A life in the cosmos

WILHELM CONRAD RONTGEN

Wilhelm Conrad Rontgen

MAX PLANCK

Max Planck

ISAAC NEWTON

Isaac Newton

Influence of the Hermetic Tradition

GALILEI GALILEO

Galileo Galilei

BEN FRANKLIN

Benjamin Franklin

ALBERT EINSTEIN

Albert Einstein

Albert Einstein

Contents

Youth and schooling

Patent office

Marriage and family life

Annus Mirabilis

Light and general relativity

Nobel Prize

Unified field theory

Collaboration and conflict

Bose–Einstein statistics

Schrödinger gas model

Einstein refrigerator

Bohr versus Einstein

Religious views

Politics

Zionism

Anti-Nazism

Atomic bomb

Cold War era

Death

Legacy

Honors

Impact on popular culture

Einstein's "Year of Wonders," 100 Years Later

Einstein and Darwin: A tale of two theories

Q&A with ‘Origins’ astronomer Neil deGrasse Tyson