Happy New Year 2020

“Ring out the old, ring in the new,

Ring, happy bells, across the snow:

The year is going, let him go;

Ring out the false, ring in the true,” said Alfred Lord Tennyson. 

The biggest lesson I learnt in 2019 was that we have no idea who's coming into our life and who's going to leave. Be prepared for anything and everything, for life is just a journey and never a destination in itself. We meet so many, we bid goodbye to so many. We learn something, we unlearn something... 

Don't worry if someone calls you a mad person. People called Einstein a mad man, Leonardo da Vinci a mad man… People call you mad only when you don't live your life like others. Perhaps feel happy. It is like confirming you that you are on your own way, in fact, the right way. 

Don’t break your head to talk to such people, for they always avoid talking with you due to a fear of getting exposed. They avoid you unable to face the truth, they love to be hidden behind the ugly and a mask filled with sweet and dangerous lies. When such people - whether relatives or family members or friends - are not ready to talk with you or avoid you, don’t worry. Be happy, for such people are like clouds, when they’re gone its a beautiful day. 

Never stop questioning, never stop arguing, never stop telling the truth, never stop unmasking the lies and cheating of relatives, family members, and friends. Never stoop down to the level of others to convince or please them. You need not hide the truth, you need not say lies to cover up a mistake, you need not compromise to save someone...     

A fresh start, a new chapter in life is waiting to be written. New questions to be asked, embraced, and loved. Answers to be discovered and then lived in this transformative year of delight and self-discovery... It’s never too late to become who you want to be. I hope you live a life that you’re proud of, and if you find that you’re not, I hope you have the strength to start over. 

HAPPY NEW YEAR 2020!

The man who made Einstein world-famous

It is hard to imagine a time when Albert Einstein's name was not recognised around the world.

But even after he finished his theory of relativity in 1915, he was nearly unknown outside Germany - until British astronomer Arthur Stanley Eddington became involved.

Einstein's ideas were trapped by the blockades of the Great War, and even more by the vicious nationalism that made "enemy" science unwelcome in the UK.

But Einstein, a socialist, and Eddington, a Quaker, both believed that science should transcend the divisions of the war.

Einstein (left) and Eddington (right) only met for the first time years after the end of World War One

It was their partnership that allowed relativity to leap the trenches and make Einstein one of the most famous people on the globe.

Einstein and Eddington did not meet during the war, or even send direct messages. Instead, a mutual friend in the neutral Netherlands decided to spread the new theory of relativity to Britain.

Einstein was very, very lucky that it was Eddington, the Plumian Professor at Cambridge and officer of the Royal Astronomical Society, who received that letter.

Not only did he understand the theory's complicated mathematics, as a pacifist he was one of the few British scientists willing to even think about German science.

He dedicated himself to championing Einstein to both revolutionise the foundations of science and restore internationalism to scientists themselves.

Einstein was the perfect symbol for this - a brilliant, peaceful German who refuted every wartime stereotype while challenging the deepest truths of Newton himself.

Desperate fight to test Einstein's theory
So, as Einstein was trapped in Berlin, starving behind the blockade and living under government surveillance for his political views, Eddington tried to convince a hostile English-speaking world that an enemy scientist was worthy of their attention.

He wrote the first books on relativity, gave popular lectures on Einstein, and became one of the great science communicators of the 20th Century.

His books stayed on the bestseller lists for decades, he was a constant presence on BBC radio, and was eventually knighted for this work.

Eddington photographed the solar eclipse on 29 May 1919

It was hard to convince the UK to care about space-time and gravity as the U-boats were sinking food transports, and thousands of young lives were lost for meagre gains in Flanders, Belgium.

Just Einstein's ideas were not enough. Relativity is strange, with twins aging differently and planets trapped by warped space.

Eddington needed a definitive demonstration that relativity was true and Einstein was right, and that only his international approach could revolutionise science.

His best option was to test a bizarre prediction of Einstein's theory of general relativity.

When light passed near a massive body like the Sun, Einstein said, gravity would bend the rays ever so slightly.

This meant the image of a distant star would be shifted a small amount - the star would seem to be in the wrong place.

Einstein predicted a specific number for that shift (1.7 arc-seconds, or about 1/60 millimetre on a photograph). An astronomer would find this challenging to measure, but it could be done.

Unfortunately, it is normally impossible to see stars during daytime, so one would have to wait until a total solar eclipse to make the observation.

Total eclipses are rare, short, and often located in inconvenient places requiring extensive travel for European astronomers. Einstein had been trying for years to have this prediction tested, with no success.

Eddington, though, thought he might be able to make it happen at an upcoming eclipse in May 1919, visible in the southern hemisphere.

Even with the U-boat threat, no country was better positioned than Britain to undertake an expedition to test Einstein's prediction.

Frank W Dyson (left) secured funding for Eddington's expedition

Eddington needed a great deal of support for this.

Fortunately, he was close friends with Frank W Dyson, the Astronomer Royal. Dyson secured funding, although even with the money the war made it difficult to procure needed equipment.

Even worse, it was possible that Eddington would not be able to go on the expedition - because he might be in prison.

As a Quaker, Eddington was a conscientious objector to the war and refused to participate in conscription. Many other Quakers ended up jailed or performing hard labour.

After many failed appeals it seemed that Eddington would be arrested, but at the last moment he received an exemption (no doubt engineered by his politically savvy friend the astronomer royal).

Amazingly, it was given on the condition that he carry out the expedition to test Einstein's theory.

'Greatest moment in life'
The armistice in November 1918 meant that the expedition could go ahead.

Eddington wanted to make sure the results of the expedition, whatever they were, brought Einstein to the attention of the world.

So he and Dyson started a public relations campaign to get both the scientific community and ordinary people excited for the results.

The newspapers were primed and ready to report on what Eddington presented as an epic battle between Britain's own Newton and the upstart Einstein.

Einstein, seriously ill from wartime starvation and trying to navigate revolution-torn Berlin, knew little of this.

Instead, Eddington and his colleagues had to test Einstein's prediction almost completely on their own.

Two teams were sent to observe the eclipse: one to Brazil, and one - led by Eddington - to the island of Principe in West Africa.

Eddington's 'comparator' measured changes in the positions of stars, seen on telescope glass plates mounted below the movable microscopes

On 29 May 1919 - 100 years ago - those astronomers watched the darkened sky for six minutes to catch the smallest change in the stars to reveal the greatest change in our understanding of the universe.

Nearly ruined by weather, equipment malfunctions, and steamship strikes, the expeditions brought back photographs that hopefully showed stars displaced by the Sun's gravity.

After months of intense measurement and mathematics, Eddington had a positive result.

He called this the greatest moment of his life: "I knew that Einstein's theory had stood the test and the new outlook of scientific thought must prevail."

He presented the results to a room at the Royal Society packed with scientists and reporters eager to hear who had triumphed, Einstein or Newton (even as the portrait of Newton gazed over the proceedings).

The announcement created an enormous stir. The president of the Royal Society declared this "one of the highest achievements in human thought".

The Times headline the next day read "Revolution in Science".

Eddington had planned the event perfectly. Einstein, virtually overnight, went from an obscure academic to a sage everyone wanted to know more about.

And Eddington gave the public what they wanted. As the chief apostle of relativity in the Anglophone world, he was the one every newspaper and magazine went to.

His lectures had to turn away hundreds of people. Those who made it in not only learned about the strange physics of relativity, but also about Einstein as the symbol of international science, able to rise above the hatred and chaos of war.

Einstein himself could barely rise from his sickbed. He heard about the results from a telegram via the Netherlands.

He was delighted that his theory had been verified even as he was baffled by the media firestorm that suddenly enveloped his life.

Never again would he be able to venture through his front door without being accosted by reporters.

Without Eddington, relativity would have gone unproven, and Einstein would have never become the icon of genius.

Eddington was Einstein's most essential ally, though they did not meet until years after the war's end.

Their collaboration was crucial not only to the birth of modern physics, but to the survival of science as an international community through the darkest days of World War One.

(Source: BBC)

Albert Einstein's 'God letter' sells for $2.9m

A handwritten letter by Albert Einstein in which he grapples with the concept of religion has smashed predictions and sold for nearly $2.9m (£2.3m).

The so-called "God letter" was written in 1954 and was expected to fetch $1.5m (£1.2m) at auction in New York.

The Nobel Prize-winning scientist, then 74, wrote the one-and-a-half page note to German philosopher Eric Gutkind in response to one of his works.

The letter is regarded as a clear statement of Einstein's religious beliefs

It is seen as a key statement in the debate between science and religion.

"This remarkably candid, private letter was written a year before Einstein's death and remains the most fully articulated expression of his religious and philosophical views," a statement from Christie's says.

It fetched almost double the auction house's predicted price of between $1m-1.5m.

In the letter, written in his native German, Einstein takes issue with the belief in God.

"The word God is for me nothing but the expression and product of human weaknesses," he writes. "The Bible a collection of venerable but still rather primitive legends."

It continues: "No interpretation, no matter how subtle, can [for me] change anything about this."

Albert Einstein pictured around the time he wrote the so-called "God letter"

The physicist also muses on his own Jewish identity, writing that it is "like all other religions, an incarnation of primitive superstition".

"The Jewish people to whom I gladly belong, and in whose mentality I feel profoundly anchored, still for me does not have any different kind of dignity from all other peoples," he writes.

It is not the first time Einstein's letters have been put up for auction.

Last year, a note written to an Italian chemistry student who had refused to meet him sold for $6,100.

It was sold alongside a number of other letters from Einstein, including a 1928 note that went for $103,000, in which he set out his thoughts for his third stage of the theory of relativity.

In 2017, a note in which he gave advice on happy living sold for $1.56m in Jerusalem.

A single sentence, it reads: "A calm and humble life will bring more happiness than the pursuit of success and the constant restlessness that comes with it."

(Source: BBC)

Albert Einstein’s private diaries reveal his racist views

Newly translated into English, Albert Einstein’s private travel diaries from the 1920s reveal that he was racist in his early life, especially toward Chinese people.

The journals, published as “The Travel Diaries of Albert Einstein” by Princeton University Press, reveal that Einstein, perhaps the most famous scientist of all time and known for his theory of general relativity and the equation e=mc2, was extraordinarily biased toward certain populations. This is a stark contrast to his stance later in life when he said that racism was a “disease of white people.”

The diaries were written between October 1922 and March 1923. In one entry Einstein wrote that the “Chinese don’t sit on benches while eating but squat like Europeans do when they relieve themselves out in the leafy woods. All this occurs quietly and demurely. Even the children are spiritless and look obtuse.”

Speaking about the “abundance of offspring” and the “fecundity” of the Chinese, he continued: “It would be a pity if these Chinese supplant all other races. For the likes of us the mere thought is unspeakably dreary.”

Einstein also derided the people of Ceylon, which is now known as Sri Lanka. In Ceylon, he wrote, the locals “live in great filth and considerable stench at ground level,” before adding they “do little and need little. The simple economic cycle of life.”

Einstein also gave his thoughts on Japanese people, who he viewed in a more positive light, calling them “unostentatious, decent, altogether very appealing.” However, he also wrote the “intellectual needs of this nation seem to be weaker than their artistic ones – natural disposition?”

“Entries… contain passages that reveal Einstein’s stereotyping of members of various nations and raise questions about his attitudes on race,” a description of the book reads.

The journals were translated from the German and are described as “the first publication of Albert Einstein’s travel diary to the Far East and Middle East.”

Speaking with The Guardian, the book’s editor, Ze’ev Rosenkranz, said that Einstein’s views were not intended for public consumption and provide a shock to those who read them.

“I think a lot of comments strike us as pretty unpleasant – what he says about the Chinese in particular,” Rosenkranz told The Guardian. “They’re kind of in contrast to the public image of the great humanitarian icon. I think it’s quite a shock to read those and contrast them with his more public statements. They’re more off guard, he didn’t intend them for publication.”

Rosenkranz is also the assistant director of the Einstein Papers Project at the California Institute of Technology and has written several books about the life of Einstein.

The remarks in his journal are markedly different to the public image Einstein had in his later years.

In 1946, speaking at Lincoln University, the first degree-granting historically black university in the US, Einstein said that racism was a “disease of white people” and added “I do not intend to be quiet about it,” according to a 2007 article in the Harvard Gazette.

Einstein was a founder of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and left it his literary estate and personal papers. He declined an invitation to serve as Israel’s first president.

He died in 1955 at the age of 76.

(Source: NY Post)

Some Chinese are defending Einstein's 'racism' against their ancestors

With the widely reported news this week of Albert Einstein’s “racist” comments against the Chinese, some in the East Asian nation have actually come out in defense of the legendary physicist.

Einstein, a Jewish academic who left Nazi Germany to the U.S. prior to the start of World War II, has historically been seen as a staunch critic of racism. In a 1946 presentation at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, he referred to racism as “a disease of white people.”

However, a new standalone edition of his private diaries from a trip to Asia has revealed a different perspective. Published by Princeton University Press, The Travel Diaries of Albert Einstein: The Far East, Palestine, and Spain, 1922-1923 is the first English printing of the intellectual’s writings from his trip to Asia.

German-born American physicist Albert Einstein (1879-1955) referred to the Chinese as “industrious, filthy people.” He also said that the Chinese are a “peculiar herd-like nation… often more like automatons than people.” CENTRAL PRESS/GETTY IMAGES

Among other critical comments, Einstein referred to the Chinese as “industrious, filthy people.” He also said that the Chinese are a “peculiar herd-like nation … often more like automatons than people.” He argued that "it would be a pity if these Chinese supplant all races,” saying that such a thought “is unspeakably dreary.”

Einstein took issue with the fact that the Chinese he encountered on his trip “don’t sit on benches while eating but squat like Europeans do when they relieve themselves out in the leafy woods.” He also lamented that “even the children are spiritless and look obtuse,” and explained that he can’t understand how Chinese men find Chinese women attractive.

While many around the world expressed shock and criticism of the iconic scientist's words, some Chinese have actually jumped to defend Einstein. According to The Guardian, several users of China’s popular social media site Weibo voiced their support for the scientist and even gave credence to his views.

“Einstein went to China at the wrong time,” one user reportedly wrote. “Hunger, war, and poverty all pressed on the Chinese [during that time period]. How could Chinese people at the time gain Einstein’s respect?”

Another user wrote that when they see photos of that time period, they also perceive their ancestors as “dirty," the South China Morning Post reported. The user said: “This is called insulting China? That’s ridiculous … Einstein depicted the true state of that era.”

Some even compared Einstein’s writings to those of Lu Xun, who is considered "the father of modern Chinese literature." Xun is best known for his critical satire of Chinese society in the early 1900s. As one user wrote, Chinese “praise” Xun for pointing out China’s historic disadvantages. “Why should we blame Einstein for this?”

German-born Swiss-US physicist Albert Einstein, author of the theory of relativity, declares his opposition to the 'H' bomb and to the arms race between the USA and the USSR in a conference 14 February 1950 in Princeton during a TV broadcast which created a considerable stir in the United States and all over the Western World AFP/GETTY IMAGES

Xun was "a savage critic of traditional Chinese culture and revered many European writers who were also social critics," Professor Mary Gallagher, the director of the Lieberthal-Rogel Center for Chinese Studies at the University of Michigan, told Newsweek. Gallager added that the comparison made by Chinese is "interesting and relevant."

The Chinese "are pointing out the perceived 'defects' of their culture that both Lu Xun and Einstein noticed," she explained. "They are also ... implicitly comparing that dreadful period ... to its current era of ascendancy and success."

Gallagher said that "it’s refreshing to witness Chinese who are confident enough about their own culture and economic progress since then to take Einstein’s comments in stride."

According to Gallagher, history education in the country also portrays the period when Einstein visited "as China’s most humiliating period in the modern era." She explained that the Chinese Communist Party "is presented as saving China from this period" and that the establishment of the People's Republic of China in 1949 is "still known as the beginning of the 'new China.'"

(Source: Newsweek)

Einstein's travel diaries reveal physicist's racism

Newly published private travel diaries have revealed Albert Einstein's racist and xenophobic views.

Written between October 1922 and March 1923, the diaries track his experiences in Asia and the Middle East.

In them, he makes sweeping and negative generalisations, for example calling the Chinese "industrious, filthy, obtuse people".

Einstein would later in life advocate for civil rights in the US, calling racism "a disease of white people".

This is the first time the diaries have been published as a standalone volume in English.

Albert Einstein wrote the travel diaries on a trip to the Far East in the 1920s

Published by Princeton University Press, The Travel Diaries of Albert Einstein: The Far East, Palestine, and Spain, 1922-1923 was edited by Ze'ev Rosenkranz, assistant director of the California Institute of Technology's Einstein Papers Project.

Einstein travelled from Spain to the Middle East and via Sri Lanka, then called Ceylon, on to China and Japan.

The physicist describes arriving in Port Said in Egypt and facing "Levantines of every shade... as if spewed from hell" who come aboard their ship to sell their goods.

He also describes his time in Colombo in Ceylon, writing of the people: "They live in great filth and considerable stench down on the ground, do little, and need little."

Einstein went on the trip with his wife Elsa

But the famous physicist reserves his most cutting comments for Chinese people.

According to a piece in the Guardian about the diaries, he describes Chinese children as "spiritless and obtuse", and calls it "a pity if these Chinese supplant all other races".

In other entries he calls China "a peculiar herd-like nation," and "more like automatons than people", before claiming there is "little difference" between Chinese men and women, and questioning how the men are "incapable of defending themselves" from female "fatal attraction".

Noted for both his scientific brilliance and his humanitarianism, Albert Einstein emigrated to the US in 1933 after the rise of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party.

The Jewish scientist described racism as "a disease of white people" in a 1946 speech at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania.

Diaries reflect changing views
Analysis by Chris Buckler, BBC News, Washington

Einstein's theory of relativity changed how people thought about space and time but these diaries demonstrate how his own personal views about race seem to have altered over the years.

The writings may have been intended as private thoughts but their publication will upset some in America, where campaigners still celebrate Albert Einstein as one of the voices that helped shine a light on segregation.

When he moved to the US in 1933 he was taken aback by the separate schools and cinemas for blacks and whites and Einstein subsequently joined the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

He is said to have told people that he saw similarities in the way Jews were being hounded in Germany and how African-Americans were being treated in his new homeland.

He chose Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, a historically black college, to give one of his most damning speeches just a year after the end of World War Two.

Some who study Einstein's writings from the 1920s may argue that there is a possibility that he believed that because of his own feelings.

His diaries are full of gut reactions and private insights. In the context of the 21st Century they may tarnish the reputation of a man who is revered almost as much as a humanitarian as a scientist.

But the words were written before he saw what racism could lead to in America and Germany - a country he had effectively fled.

(Source: BBC)

Why the FBI kept a 1,400-page file on Einstein

The world-famous physicist was outspoken against racism, nationalism, and nuclear bombs, prompting deep suspicion from J. Edgar Hoover.

Albert Einstein was already a world-famous physicist when the FBI started keeping a secret dossier on him in December 1932. He and his wife Elsa had just moved to the United States from their native Germany, and Einstein had been very vocal about the social issues of his time, arguing publicly against racism and nationalism.

By the time of Einstein’s death on April 18, 1955, that FBI file would be 1,427 pages long. Agency director J. Edgar Hoover was deeply suspicious of Einstein’s activism; the man was quite possibly a communist, according to Hoover, and was certainly “an extreme radical.”

Einstein himself probably would have laughed out loud at those labels if he’d known about them; he’d heard far worse from the Nazis back home. And he was not at all intimidated by officialdom. “Unthinking respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth,” he declared in 1901.


The thousands of people expected to gather this weekend as part of the March for Science would likely agree.

Motivated by cuts to national science budgets and anti-science rhetoric from the Trump Administration, a grassroots group of scientists, teachers, and other science advocates organized a march on Washington akin to the Women’s March held in January. The movement has since grown to include hundreds of partner marches in cities around the world.

The marchers say they are rallying for everything that science represents, including reason, open-mindedness, and evidence-based decision-making at every level of society.

Although they enjoy the backing of more than 170 scientific organizations, participants have mobilized in the face of heated debate among scientists themselves. As one skeptical geologist put it in the New York Times, the march “will serve only to ... turn scientists into another group caught up in the culture wars.”

But, considering Einstein’s rebellious life, the event’s supporters will be acting in the spirit of one of the greatest scientists who ever lived.

Einstein's defiant attitude had gotten him kicked out of the German equivalent of high school at age 15, and that had led him to renounce his citizenship at age 17. He wanted nothing more to do with Germany’s authoritarian schools and rampant militarism, which he loathed.

Instead, Einstein attended the Zurich Polytechnic Institute in Switzerland, became a Swiss citizen, and, after he graduated, went to work at the Swiss patent office in Bern, where he did his revolutionary work on relativity and quantum theory in 1905. (Read about the 2016 discovery of gravitational waves, a phenomenon Einstein predicted a hundred years ago.)

Einstein speaking during a "Science And Civilization" lecture in 1933 at the Royal Albert Hall in London. 

Einstein did not return to live in Germany until April 1914, when his achievements led to a prestigious appointment at the University of Berlin. There, he continued to develop his ideas about relativity and gravity, which received spectacular confirmation in 1919 from observations of a solar eclipse and which have shaped our understanding of the universe ever since.

The rising Nazi party was soon denouncing relativity as “a Jewish perversion”—the 1920s equivalent of using “fake news” as an all-purpose put-down—and Einstein was receiving so many anonymous death threats that he tried to avoid walking alone.

But threats didn’t shut him down. Instead, he repeatedly used his newfound fame to speak out against what he saw as the wrongs of the world. Silence in the face of evil, he once said, “would have made me feel guilty of complicity.”

He denounced militant nationalism. “The measles of mankind,” he called it in 1929.

He questioned capitalism. “I regard class differences as contrary to justice and, in the last resort, based on force,” he wrote in 1931. “Let every man be respected as an individual and no man idolized.”

He protested racism. In 1937, when African-American singer Marian Anderson was denied a hotel room in Einstein’s new home town of Princeton, New Jersey, he and Elsa invited Anderson to stay in their home—the beginning of a lifelong friendship. He also befriended the African-American singer Paul Robeson, who had been ostracized for being a communist. And in a 1946 address to the historically black Liberty University in Pennsylvania, Einstein declared segregation to be “a disease of white people.”

After 1933, the rise of Hitler forced Einstein to concede that pure pacifism was no longer realistic. In August 1939, fearing that German physicists were already racing to exploit the newly discovered phenomenon of nuclear fission, Einstein signed a letter to U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt warning that “the element uranium may be turned into a new and important source of energy in the immediate future”—that is, a bomb.

Roosevelt’s response was the Manhattan Project: a crash program to develop the atomic bomb before Hitler could.

Einstein played no further role in the project. But in the spring of 1945 he did write another letter urging the President to meet with Manhattan Project scientists who were concerned about the rush to finish the bomb and use it, even though Germany was near defeat and had clearly given up on uranium.

Roosevelt died on April 12 before he could read the letter, and when Einstein learned in August that an atomic bomb had been detonated over the Japanese city of Hiroshima, he could only whisper, “Oh my God.” (Also see “This Bonsai Survived Hiroshima But Its Story Was Nearly Lost.”)

For the rest of his life, he was a tireless advocate for bringing nuclear weapons under some form of international control. In the atomic age, he argued, war had become a form of insanity.

We can only guess what Einstein would have said about today’s political atmosphere. But we do know his reaction to an earlier era of government crackdowns: the anti-communist hysteria of the 1950s.

“Every intellectual who is called before one of the committees ought to refuse to testify,” Einstein declared in 1953, referring to the congressional investigations that were intimidating and ruining the careers of many innocent people.

That statement earned him outraged editorials in newspapers across the country, including the Washington Post and New York Times. But he wore their condemnation proudly.

After his firsthand experience with the “brute force and fear” taking hold in Europe, what impressed Einstein most about America “was the country’s tolerance of free thought, free speech, and nonconformist beliefs”—the very qualities that had always animated his science, says his biographer Walter Isaacson.

Einstein was not about to stand by and watch while, in the great physicist’s words, “the German calamity of years ago repeats itself.”

(Source: National Geographic)