Einstein's Big Idea

a hundred years ago a deceptively simple formula revealed a hidden unity buried deep in the fabric of the universe it tells of a fantastic connection between energy matter and light its author was a youthful albert einstein it's the most famous equation in the world e equals m c squared but while we've all heard of einstein's big idea very few of us know what it means in fact e equals m c squared is so remarkable that even einstein wasn't sure if it was really true you're later than i expected we've only got sausage and cheese tonight what is it we need to talk has something happened oh no nothing sorry no i spent most of the day staring out the window at work looking at trains and i started to think about an object and how much energy it had can i explain it to you of course you can but first dinner food and talk i think the gods are laughing at me the gods were not laughing at einstein he'd united in one stunning insight the work of many who had come before him scientists who'd fought and even died to create each part of the equation the story of e equals m c squared starts long before einstein with the discovery of e for energy in the early 19th century scientists didn't think in terms of energy they thought in terms of individual powers or forces these were all disconnected unrelated things the power of the wind the force of a door closing the crack of lightning the idea that there might be some sort of overarching unifying energy which lay behind all these forces had yet to be revealed one lowly man's drive to understand the hidden mysteries of nature would begin to change all that young michael faraday hated his job he was uneducated the son of a blacksmith he'd been lucky to become a bookbinder's apprentice but faraday craved one thing he craved knowledge he read every book that passed through his hands he developed a passion for science all of his free time and his meager wages were poured into self-education he was on the threshold of an incredible journey into the invisible world of energy faraday had impressed one of his masters customers and was rewarded with a ticket that would change his life excuse me please can i pass please can i pass some of us are trying to improve ourselves if people will let us of course of course pass this way to a better life in the early 1800s science was a pursuit of gentleman something faraday was clearly not he had a rudimentary education he'd read widely he'd gone to public lectures but in 1812 he was given tickets to hear sir humphrey davey the most prominent chemist of the age 19th century scientists were the pop stars of their day their lectures were hugely popular tickets were hard to come by and davey reveled in his status they're waiting i knew he was also a keen follower of the latest fashion nitrous oxide or laughing gas he said it had all the benefits of alcohol without the hangover electricity ladies and gentlemen a mysterious force that can unravel the confusing mixture of intermingle substances that surround us and produce pure pure elements davey was an absolutely first-rate scientist however many will come to say that his greatest discovery is michael faraday's unknown that is until i isolated potassium from molten potash and sodium as i showed you last time from common salt that same magical electrode faraday may not have been born a gentleman but he wasn't going to let class barriers stop him from pursuing a career in science he worked for nights on end to bind his lecture notes into a book for his new hero lord help me to think only of others to be of use to mankind help me be part of the great circle that is your work and love lord i am your servant well this is excellent work faraday so what is it you aim to do with your life my desire sir is to escape from trade which i find vicious and selfish and to become a servant of science which i imagine makes its pursuers amiable and liberal really well i shall leave it to the experience of a few years to set you right on that score look i haven't done anything at the moment i'll send a note if anything comes up despite this humiliating setback faraday was determined to break free from his daily toil his patience was rewarded you man meet mr michael faraday he's going to be my helper while i recover he assures me he is a christian fellow perhaps with god and faraday in charge of the chemicals you and i will be safe in our place of work thank you professor davey welcome faraday oh no thank you and thank you sir humphrey just stick to your job and do as you're told and you'll be fine faraday became the laboratory assistant eagerly absorbing every scrap of knowledge that davey deigned to impart but in time the pupil would surpass the master the big excitement of the day was electricity another charge dude the battery had just been invented and all manner of experiments were being done but no one really understood what this strange force of electricity was the academic establishment at the time thought that electricity was you know like a fluid flowing through a pipe pushing its way along but in 1821 a danish researcher showed that when you pass an electrical current through a wire and place a compass near it it deflected the needle at right angles this was the first time researchers had seen electricity affect a magnet the first glimpse of two forces which had previously been seen as entirely separate now unified in some inexplicable way faraday come look at this another bright spark around here perhaps you can work it out us did's reported an amazing finding we're just replicating it here let's try the compass on the other side now that is remarkable but if the electrical force is flowing through the wire why does the needle not move in the same direction parallel to the wire quite let's try turning the whole apparatus around again newman so the electrical force goes this way the compass points that way how can one affect the other perhaps the electricity is throwing out some invisible force as it moves along what perhaps some sort of electrical force is emanating outwards from the wire oh my dear boy let me tell you that at the university of cambridge electricity flows through a wire not sideways to it well that may be what they teach at cambridge but it doesn't explain what's happening before our eyes no no let's just get on let's swap the compass to below the wire why the compass was deflected at right angles why the electricity was affecting the compass at all dumbfounded davy and many others as we celebrate the marriage of michael and sarah for faraday however the problem became an obsession it was a fascination inspired by his religion for him the problem was a way to understand god's hidden mysteries there is a small almost persecuted group in london called the sandomanians they were religious not really a sect they were just a small subset sort of like quakers faraday was a member of that group it was a very gentle decent group they believed that underneath the whole service of reality everything was created by god in a unified way that if you opened up one little part of it you could see how everything was connected michael faraday was someone who like einstein thought in terms of pictures faraday was different from anybody else he had a flare for understanding his experiments for understanding what was really going on inside them by methodically placing a compass all around an electrified wire faraday started to notice a pattern what everyone else at the time had been taught was that forces travel in straight lines faraday was different faraday imagined that invisible lines of force flowed around an electric wire and then he imagined that a magnet had similar lines emerging from it and that those lines get caught up in this flow it was a bit like a flag in the wind but faraday's great leap of imagination was to turn this experiment on its head instead of an electrified wire moving a compass needle he wondered if he could get a static magnet to move a wire i've never seen you like this faraday you look like a happy child i'm shaking human underneath i'm shaking you see john you see yes this is the experiment of the century it's the invention of the electric motor scale up the magnets and the wires make them really big attach heavy weights to them and they'll be dragged along but almost more importantly he's inventing a new kind of physics here although he didn't realize it at the time faraday had also just demonstrated an overarching principle the chemicals in the battery had been transformed into electricity in the wire which had combined with the magnet to produce motion behind all these various forces there was a common energy a couple of months earlier davey had been elected president of the royal society which was the elite body of english science but then he saw this great discovery published in the quarterly journal of science i don't know if he was envious but he certainly saw this young man who had been his assistant this mere blacksmith son had come up with one of the greatest discoveries of the victorian era davey accuses faraday of plagiarizing similar work from another imminent british scientist william wollaston so faraday what does walliston make of all this it's written to me and assures me that he's taken no offense and he acknowledges that what i published was entirely my own work right right davey is just being an ass but will davey now retract his allegation sadly no in fact he's still vehemently opposed to you being elected a member of the society really and what do you think faraday my dear boy you have my vote and mine and i believe you even have wall street's what a mess well no matter no matter it's the science that counts so tell me how does this wire of yours spin around its magnet what mysterious forces are at play there seems to be an electromagnetic interaction in my mind i see a swirling array of lines of force spinning out of the electrified wire like a spiraling web but invisible lines of force it's all a bit vague isn't it parody might have a word in private certainly listen fashion let's stop this nonsense i want you to take down your ballot paper from the lotus board so humphrey i see no reason to take it down my friends have proposed me it is they who put the paper up i will not take it down good day faraday was elected to the royal society davey died five years later a victim of his many gaseous inhalations in time faraday's world of invisible forces would lead to a whole new understanding of energy he'd started what einstein would call the great revolution it was in the very heart of this exciting new world of energy that einstein grew up my father and uncle wanted to make their fortune by bringing electric light to the streets of germany from an early age i loved to look at machines understand how things work he's going to kill himself albert stay there i experienced a miracle when my father showed me a compass i trembled and grew cold there had to be something behind objects that lay deeply hidden at high school they had their ideas about what i should learn i had my own i was merely interested in physics maths philosophy and playing the violin everything else was a ball einstein on your feet as you obviously know everything about geology tell me how does the rock start run here it's pretty much the same to me whichever way they run her professor einstein's teachers tried to drum into him as faraday had shown that energy could be converted from one form into another they also believed that all forms of energy had already been discovered einstein was going to prove them wrong he would discover a new vast reservoir of energy hidden where no other scientist had ever thought of looking deep in the heart of matter a hundred years before einstein's birth king louis xv was on the throne of france but the ancient absolute power of the monarchy over the people was starting to be challenged shark leave the windows forget the rain we need air the french revolution was just around the corner this was the era of enlightenment when intellectuals believe very firmly that the way forward lay in science and they felt that one of the first tasks that lay ahead of them was to rationalize and to classify every single kind of matter so they could see how it all interacted together antoine lavoisier a wealthy aristocratic young man decided to take up this task to see if there was some basic connection between all the stuff of everyday life all the different substances in the world but what worked for lavoisier as a scientist his meticulous even obsessive attention to detail was also to be his downfall monsieur you are if my eyes do not deceive me consuming only milk this evening first you had a glass of milk now you are eating a bowl of milk will you next move on to a plate of milk your precise observations commend you as a lady of scientific curiosity mamosa most unusual as you seek knowledge so i shall dispense it for the last five weeks i have taken nothing but milk good god man i would rather die than fast on milk for five weeks are you in the grip of some horrendous ailment on the contrary i am investigating the effects of diet on health i'm sure with the greatest of respect to a member of the royal academy of sciences your gut must sink your throat has been slit where is your gut count is no doubt petitioning the academy for a widening of your throat marianne how dare you insult the count don't forget what the count offers not just marriage but think of how you will be introduced to all this alone you will be the toast of paris would you not be ashamed madam to burden you with the duties of matrimony before you have had a chance to experience your curiosity for nature shall we all go through it's getting rather hot in here do you really plan to marry the hammer there is a plant but it is not mine then i must contrive to save you lavoisier wasn't a scientist by profession he was the head of tax enforcement in paris his great idea was to build a huge wall around the city and to tax everything that came and went but his taxes on the simple things in life bread wine and cheese did not endear him to the average parisian this scrupulous fastidious young man did still allow himself the occasional act of passion in 1771 lavoisier married marianne pauls the daughter of his colleague in the tax office thus he saved her as he had promised from an arranged marriage to account 40 years her elder allow me to show you something lavoisier i think found his job as a tax collector really rather tedious and the times he looked forward to the evenings and the weekends when he could indulge his passion for chemical experimentation and he called those times his jour de bonner his days of happiness madam what will happen if i take a bar of copper or iron and leave it outside in the rain for months on end madame what will become of them is this a verbal examination prior to an examination profile so he really seeks the truth then you join with me monsieur for you know the truth the copper will become covered in a green verdigris and the iron will last i believe the term is uh calcium most impressive my charming one but let me press you further when the metal rusts does it get heavier or lighter why sir i think you mean to trap me and perhaps this little butterfly should land and allow me to take a closer look every last citizen in france a sensible age knows that when a metal rusts it wastes away it gets lighter and eventually disappears but ah stop i have not finished contain yourself sir there's more in a recently published pamphlet by a brilliant young chemist antoine voisier demonstrates that the iron combines with the air it in fact becomes heavy most impressive i intend now whatever you intend monsieur i intend to be by your side i will learn all i can about your science and become your worthy colleague then let me show you how the iron combines with the air to form such a delicate union tomorrow tomorrow marianne learned chemistry at her husband's side but soon sought other ways to contribute to his work she learned english so that she could translate contemporary scientific works she took drawing lessons so that she could record in forensic detail the minutiae of their work together she ran their laboratory and was the public face of lavoisier inc she was central to the whole research effort that is a terrible thing to say you are a cheeky man this way please gentlemen miss you it is my great ambition to demonstrate but nature is a closed system that in any transformation no amount of matter no mass is ever lost and none is gained over here please this precise amount of water is heated to steam this steam is brought into contact with a red-hot iron barrel embedded in the coals from this end we cool this thing but interestingly we collect less water than we started with so clearly we lose a certain amount of water however we also collect a gas and the weight of the iron barrel increases now when we combine these two increases the new weight of the iron barrel and the gas we have collected they are exactly equal to the weight of the lost water ah but is it atmospheric error no no because i am measuring it to the very last grain i can see that it is lighter than the air around us and moreover it is flammable voila water is made out of hydrogen and oxygen so what he had done is get the oxygen to stick to the inside of a red hot iron rifle barrel he was basically just making rust which is oxygen iron but he was making the rust really quickly now that left the hydrogen what he called combustible air and that was just floating around as a gas no mass had been lost it had merely been transformed and now he wanted to transform it all back into water this is only the beginning in the next few months i hope to demonstrate that i can recombine this combustible air with vital air and transform them both back into water i will recreate exactly the same amount of water that was lost here in this process it is my hope to complete the cycle water into gas into water and not a drop lost for a long time lavoisier had suspected that the exact amount of matter the mass involved in any transformation was always conserved but to prove this he had to perform thousands of experiments and he had to do the measurements with incredible accuracy that's where his great wealth from being a tax collector came in he could afford to commission the most sensitive instruments ever built he became obsessed with accuracy but lavoisier's exacting methods were also starting to anger the growing mob of hungry disenchanted parisians sorry what time is it this is almost time to receive monsieur mother the academy ask you to assess his designs he claims to have made a great discovery antoine have you forgotten oh god there's another charlatan with an idea to peddle god give me patience i have invented a device which projects an image of the substance of fire onto a screen you see when a lantern is shown through a flame we see a shimmering pattern above the flame my device renders the substance of fire visible have you collected it the substance of fire have you have you trapped it and measured it no but but one can see it i'm sorry in the absence of exact measurements of of precise observations without rigorous reasoning one can only be engaging in conjecture so this is not science i am not given to conjecture monsieur really no if you will excuse me i am extremely busy today but thank you thank you so that is all then good day mr let me guess mara king's scientific despot has decreed that your invention does not conform to the version of the truth as laid down by the academy he talks about facts he worships the truth listen to me my friend they are all the same the royal academies they insult the liberty of the mind they think they are the sole arbiters of genius they are rotten to the core just like every other tentacle of the king the people it is they who will determine right and wrong don't worry in my next pamphlet i will expose this persecutor of yours for years the lavoisiers burned chopped melted and boiled every conceivable substance they'd shown that as long as one is scrupulous about collecting all the vapors liquids and powders created in a transformation then mass is not decreased liquids might become gases metals may rust wood may become ash and smoke but matter the tiny atoms that make up all substances none of it is ever lost the crowning glory of this opus was their remarkable use of static electricity to cause oxygen and hydrogen to recombine back into water what is happening as the french revolution exploded the royal family and whole swaths of aristocrats lost their heads on the guillotine to the french revolutionaries of 1790 lavoisier meant one thing and one thing only he was the despised tax collector who'd built that wall around paris lavoisier's job as a tax collector brought him under suspicion he was denounced by a failed scientist turned radical journalist jean paul maher that was it that was you what lavoisier did is absolutely central to science and especially to equals mc squared because what he said is if you take a bunch of matter you can break it apart you can recombine it you can do anything to it and the stuff of the matter won't go away if the mob burned paris to the ground utterly raised it shattered the bricks into the rubble and dust and burned the buildings into ashes and smoke turns out if you put a huge dome over paris and weighed all the smoke and all the ashes and all the rubble it would add up to the exact same way as the original city and the air around it before nothing disappears a century later all of nature had been classified into two great domains there was energy the forces that animated objects and there was mass the physical stuff that made up those objects the whole of 19th century science rested on these two mighty pillars the laws that governed one did not apply to the other but young newly enrolled physics student albert einstein didn't like laws einstein what happened to you it is more than a little ironic having been reprimanded yesterday by that idiot professor perney for poor attendance that i should in fact attend a practical lesson which was as long as it was boring and utterly pointless by the way only to be the victim of an explosion of my own apparatus and so it was your own fault then thank you and how are you today from marriage extremely well einstein oh the better for seeing you have escaped the physics laboratory with your life well in order not to alarm you any further i pledge to forever continue my studies here at the cafe bahnhof reading only the great masters of theoretical physics and restoring the babbling nonsense of the polytechnicians it's about all you ever do it's getting a little stuffy in here for ally marriage would you care to take a walk with me if there's something i'd like to discuss with you why ed einstein of course perhaps you'd like me to tell you what you have missed in lectures this week einstein wasn't exactly a model student he excelled in certain subjects especially physics and math but he wasn't very diligent in a lot of his other classes he was undoubtedly very questioning which seems to have annoyed most of his professors throughout his life he would pursue his fascinations with just incredible determination we know from his letters that einstein even from the age of 16 was literally obsessed with the nature of light everyone he could speak to his friends his colleagues even his then girlfriends malevo merrick who had become his wife everyone he badgered with the question what is light what would i see if i rode on a beam of light what a beam of light by what method do you propose to ride on this beam of light as a method is not important let us just imagine we to our young radical bohemian experimenters hand in hand on a journey to the outer reaches of the universe and we are riding on the front of a wave of light i really don't know what you are suggesting here einstein do you wish to hold my hand or ridicule me where to cure you no never i merely want you to help me to understand what would we seize you think if we were together and we sped up and up until we caught up to the front of a beam of light it was einstein's relentless pursuit of light which would bring about a revolution in science with light he would reinvent the universe and find a hidden pathway that would unite energy and mass light moves incredibly fast 670 million miles per hour that's why scientists use the term c it stands for celeritas latin for swiftness long before the 19th century scientists had computed the speed of light but no one knew what light actually was back in england a man we've already met was willing to make an educated guess after sir humphrey davies death michael faraday became professor faraday one of the most important experimenters in the world the scientific establishment still found it hard to accept that electricity and magnetism were just two aspects of the same phenomenon which faraday called electromagnetism but now he has an even more outrageous proposal for his audience invisible lines that can emanate from electricity in a while from a magnet or even from the sun for it is my contention that light itself is just one form of these vibrating lines of electromagnetism for 15 years faraday struggled to convince the skeptics that light was an electromagnetic wave but he lacked the advanced mathematics to back up his idea eventually someone came to his rescue professor james clark maxwell believed in faraday's farsighted vision and he had the mathematical skill to prove it maxwell and the aging faraday became close friends james forgive me a word of advice don't get over michael how are you i'm fine memory isn't too good but well i thought you might like to see what i've just published oh yes yes splendid so your results show that that when electricity flows along a wire what it actually does is create a little bit of magnetism and as that magnetic charge moves it creates a little piece of electricity electricity electricity and magnetism are interwoven like a never-ending braid so it is always pulsing forward it's wonderful one michael michael there's something very crucial in maths this electricity producing magnetism and magnetism producing electricity can only ever happen at a very particular speed the equations are very clear about it they come up with just one number 670 million miles per hour i'm not sure it was the speed of light that is the speed of light and you were right all along light is an electromagnetic wave maxwell had proven faraday right electricity and magnetism are just two aspects of a deeper unity a force now called electromagnetism which travels at 670 million miles per hour in its visible form it is nothing other than light itself and nothing fascinated the young einstein more than light we have lectures in half an hour oh let me think professor weber and his life training monologue or you mozart and james clark maxwell we can't we'll get a warning our project is too precious to waste time listening to those dollars come with me we'll read maxwell and think about the electromagnetic theory of light oh why my dear little johnny how you enchant a lady she's very pretty yes but can she soar and dance like our dark souls do maxwell's equations contained an incredible prediction they said you could never catch up to a beam of light even if you were traveling at 670 million miles an hour you would still see lights squiggle away from you at 670 million miles an hour do you see how she stairs that way yes you see how for her it is static yes she and the wave are traveling at the same speed we see the wave moving through the water but relative to her it just sits there so is light like that common sense would say that if you cut up to a light beam there would be a wave of light just sitting there maybe it would be shimmering a bit of electricity and a bit of magnetism so if she was traveling alongside the light wave it wouldn't be moving it would be static but maxwell says you can't have static light maybe maxwell is wrong maybe if you catch up to light it is static albert like a wave next to a boat imagine if i was sitting still and holding a mirror to my face and the light travels from my face to the mirror and i see my face yes however if i end the mirror we're traveling at the speed of light you're going at the same speed as the light leaving your face exactly light never reaches the mirror so would i be invisible that doesn't make sense young einstein was starting to realize that light was unlike any other kind of wave einstein was about to enter a surreal universe where energy mass and the speed of light intermingled in a way no one had ever suspected but there was one last mathematical ingredient that einstein would need the everyday process of squaring long before the french revolution scientists were not sure how to quantify motion equations that explained how objects moved and collided were in their infancy a crucial contribution to this subject would come from an unusual source meet the aristocratic sixteen-year-old daughter of one of king louis xiv's courtiers emily de chatelet quickly father's coming emily de chatelet would have a huge effect on physics in her tragically short lifetime unheard of for a woman of her time she would publish many scientific works including a translation of sir isaac newton's principia the greatest treatise on motion ever written du chatelaine's translation is still the standard text in france today use my memory code the causes and the crimes relay what goddess was provoked and when i hate for what offense the queen of heaven began to persecute so brave so just a man do not be cross with your sister because she persecutes many adjustments only the other night emily silenced the dr louie when she divided a ridiculously long number in her head in a matter of seconds you should have seen the incredibility on their faces when they realized emily was correct it was it uh my sister's astounding intelligence or her boundless beauty that made them escape i wonder oh well yes you you have a point with you missy i thank you for your kindness i feel however that my wit is on your curiosity to others if only my mind were permitted opportunity my dearest emily you are blessed with intellect and courage use them both and the world will fall at your feet now in one sense she is a woman utterly out of her true time and place she's a philosopher a scientist a mathematician a linguist she demands a freedom that women didn't begin to enjoy until over 150 years later a freedom to study science to write about it and to be published du chatelaine married a general in the french army at age 19 and had three children she ran a busy household all the while pursuing her passion for science she was 23 when she discovered advanced mathematics she enthusiastically took lessons from one of the greatest mathematicians of the day pierre de mopertui he was an expert on newton and she was his eager young student it seems they had a brief affair but then he set off on a polar expedition de chatelet then fell passionately in love with voltaire france's greatest poet a fierce critic of the king in the catholic church voltaire had been imprisoned twice and exiled to england where he became enthralled by the ideas of newton back in france it wasn't long before he again insulted the king de chatelet hid him in her country home poor little creature is devoted to him isolated far from paris to chatelet and voltaire turned her chateau into a palace of learning and culture complete with its own tiny theater and all with the apparent blessing of her husband there's a great deal of myths surrounding de chatelain and her love life and most of it is very exaggerated but her husband did accept voltaire into his household and he often went to paris on behalf of voltaire he went to his publisher to plead voltaire's case to keep voltaire out of jail and it is also true that emily de chatelet did have several affairs of a fleeting nature she created an institution to rival that of france's royal academy of sciences many of the great philosophers poets and scientists of the day visited you are young i hope that soon you will judge me for my own merits or lack of them do not look upon me as an appendage to this great general or that renowned scholar i am in my own right a whole person responsible to myself alone for all that i am all that i say all that i do du chatelaine learned from the brilliant men around her but she quickly developed ideas of her own much to the horror of her mentors she even dared to suspect that there was a flaw in the great sir isaac newton's thinking newton stated that the energy of an object the force with which it collided with another object could very simply be accounted for by its mass times its velocity in correspondence with scientists in germany de chatelet learned of another view that of gottfried leibniz he proposed that moving objects had a kind of inner spirit he called it vis viva latin for living force many discounted his ideas but leibniz was convinced that the energy of an object was made up of its mass times its velocity squared taking the square of something is an ancient procedure if you say a garden is four square you mean that it might be built up by four slabs along one edge and four along the other so the total number of paving slabs is four times four or sixteen if the garden is eight square eight by eight well eight squared is 64 it'll have 64 slabs in it this huge multiplication this building up by squares is something you find in nature all the time emily emily you are being absurd why ascribe to an object a vague and immeasurable force like this viva it is a return to the old ways it is the occult when movement commences you said it is true that a force is produced which did not exist until now think about bodies to have free will we must be free to initiate motion so all like this is asking is where does all this force come from in your case my dear the force i am sure is primeval oh you're infuriating you hide behind wit and sarcasm you only think you understand newton you're incapable of understanding leibniz your provocateur everything you do is about something else and makes trouble for you criticize this denounce that are you capable of discovering something of your own i discovered you despite the overwhelming support for newton de chatelet did not waver in her belief eventually she came across an experiment performed by a dutch scientist willem sagravison that would prove her point scratch sound in leiden has been dropping lead bulbs into a pan of clay dropping lead balls into clay are very imaginative using newton's formulas monsieur voltaire he then drops a second ball from a higher height calculated to exactly double the speed of the first ball on impact so monsieur care for a little wager newton tells us that by doubling the speed of the ball we will double the distance it travels into the clay leibnitz asks us to square that speed if he is correct the ball will travel not two but four times as far so who is correct messiah i feel mr newton's reputation dwindling ever so slightly oh my part we do not succumb to her there is no earthly reason to ascribe hidden forces to this dutchman's lead board well the ball travels four times further turns out leibniz is the one who is right it's the best way to express the energy of a moving object if you drive a car at 20 miles an hour it takes a certain distance to stop if you slam on the brakes if you're going three times as fast you're going 60 miles an hour it won't take you three times as long to stop it'll take you nine times as long to stop oh well it does seem worth consideration perhaps we might look over his calculations i have already checked his figures i'm sure leibniz is correct on this point i intend to include a section on this matter in my book really do be careful madame do you think the academy is ready for such an opinion quite quite we really should be careful we i see no reason to delay there is no right time for the truth emily de chatelet published her institutions of physics in 1740 and it provoked great controversy voltaire wrote that she was a great man whose only fault was being a woman in her day that was a great compliment i am with child undoubtedly two to three months i'm afraid that you are afraid you should well this child is obviously not mine nor is it your husband's knew that in the 18th century for a woman to become pregnant at the age of 43 was really very dangerous and all the while she was pregnant she had terrible premonitions about what was going to happen all her life to chatelle had tried to rise above the limitations placed on her gender in the end it was an affair with a young soldier that led to her demise six days after giving birth to her fourth child she suffered an embolism and died emily de chatelet's conviction that the energy of an object is a function of the square of its speed sparked a fierce debate after her death it took a hundred years for the idea to be accepted just in time for einstein to use this brilliant insight to finally bring energy and mass together with light einstein pursued light right through university and beyond unfortunately he'd upset so many professors that no one would write him a reference he accepted a low-paying job in the swiss patent office he and maleva married and had a child the young family struggled but none of it seems to bother albert einstein i see you are busy as usual look einstein you have shown some quite good achievements but uh listen about your promotion i really think it would be better to wait until you have become fully familiar with mechanical engineering i'm sorry perhaps next time but i wanted to hire a mate so i can get back and finish my degree now i will never pass my dislocation oh come come my pretty little duck all will be fine how will he find albert do i have to just wait another year until you are promoted oh we'll be fine oh we'll be fine we'll see there really is a very charming but but kind of a self-centered street einstein he focuses only on his particular obsessions if the rest of the world fits in around him that's fine if they can't doesn't bother him so he's going to come and tell us albert albert albert a pretty neck and your head spins okay so we must behold and comprehend the mysterious well that's kind of mysterious is going to get you into trouble i'll tell you what is truly mysterious the secret of a long and happy marriage the mathematics are fine if a little unconventional but this only works for big systems it'll fall down when you apply it to small systems i disagree oh no here we go another grand theory by albert einstein patent clark that class what would happen if one applied those formulae to electromagnetic radiation albert you can't just take one bit of physics and apply it without proper regard to a completely different area why not a but i know you like the grand linkages the big theories but wouldn't things be better all round if you just got going in some small area got a university post get a decent wage for god's sake at least mileva could study again then she'd be happy and you'd be happy ah the vulgar struggle for survival food and sex spoken like a true bourgeois pessim i want to know how god created this world i'm not interested in this or that phenomenon in the spectrum of this or that element i want to know his thoughts ceres the details yes but you can't feed your children on his thoughts betty so it turns out einstein was going for a walk with his very close friend michelle besso they'd studied physics together and talked about physics and philosophy for years and years they were very close they had cornered the question of light from every possible angle you see these clocks are over here as einstein and besso were ruminating on how much time it would take light to reach them from clocks at different distances einstein had a monumental insight thank you thank you i have completely solved the problem albert what einstein did was completely turn the problem on its head other scientists had found it impossible to accept maxwell's idea the light would always move away from you at 670 million miles an hour even if you two were traveling really fast but einstein just accepted that as a fact lights speed never ever changes then what he did was bend everything we know about the universe to fit life's fixed speed what he discovered was that to do that you have to slow down time his extraordinary insight is that time as you approach the speed of light time itself will slow down it's a monumental shift in how we see the world the instant the very instant when einstein had this brilliant insight that time could slow down well the floodgates began to open you see before then people had assumed that time was like a wristwatch on god's hand that it beat at a steady rate throughout the universe no matter where you were einstein said no that the tick tick tick of this wristwatch was actually the click click click of electricity turning into magnetism turning into electricity in other words the steady pace of light itself 1905 was a miraculous year for einsteiner for physics he had an unbelievable outpouring of creativity it starts with this publication of a paper on how to work out the true size of atoms two months later is the publication of his paper on the nature of light that's what we'll learn of the nobel prize the third paper only a month later is on how molecules move when heated and that finally ends the debate on whether atoms really exist the fourth paper is published at the end of this half year period in it einstein sets out his theory of light time and space it was this theory of special relativity that changed the way we see the world in einstein's new world the one true constant was not time or even space but light but einstein's miracle year was not over in one last great 1905 paper he would propose an even deeper unity as he computed all the implications of his new theory he noticed another strange connection this one between energy mass and light einstein realizes that the speed of light is kind of like a cosmic speed limit nothing can go faster so imagine we have a train charging along and let's say it's getting up to the speed of light and we're stuffing more and more energy in trying to get it to go faster and faster but it's still bumping up against the speed of light so all this energy where does it go it has to go somewhere amazingly it goes into the object's mass from our point of view the train actually gets heavier the energy becomes mass it's an incredible idea even einstein is amazed by it look i think i have found a connection between energy and mass if i am right then energy and mass are not absolute they are not distinct they can be converted into one another energy can become mess and mass can become energy and not just energy equally mass energy equals mass times the square of the speed of light would you like me to check your mathematics einstein sent his fifth great 1905 paper for publication in three pages he simply stated that energy and mass were connected by the square of the speed of light e equals m c squared with four familiar notes in the scale of nature this patent officer had composed a totally fresh melody the culmination of his 10-year journey into light here we are for thousands of years thinking that over here is a world of objects of matter and over there is an entirely separate world of movement of forces of energy and einstein says no they're not separate energy can become mass and crucially mass can also become energy there's a deep unity between energy matter and light e equals mc squared that equation shows that every piece of matter in our universe has stored within it a fantastic amount of energy the speed of light for example is about 300 million meters per second you multiply that by itself and you get 90 quadrillion so in other words what is matter in some sense matter is nothing but the condensation of vast amounts of energy so in other words if you could unlock somehow unlock all the energy stored within my pen that would erupt with a force comparable to an atomic bomb after einstein's fifth great 1905 paper physicists no longer spoke of mass or energy they're now the same thing to us probably the most miraculous year in science ends in silence the articles are published to resounding nothing i think the gods are laughing at me then slowly it starts a letter here a letter there for four years einstein answered each inquiry dutifully trying to explain his difficult complex ideas to a confused physics community i love the idea that life just went on as normal here are these universe changing papers circling around and the world is struggling to come to terms with them einstein had a fan club of just one luckily it happened to be the most important living physicist einstein einstein max plague has sent someone to see you plank yes he has sent his assistant he's here to see you max planck encourages the world's most eminent physicists to take einstein seriously after four years of waiting he has appointed professor of physics at zurich university from there his career is meteoric he is made professor of physics in berlin achieves world renown and becomes a household name he is the undisputed father of modern physics but einstein's success was the downfall of his marriage in 1919 he divorced mileva and married his cousin his fame led to numerous affairs e equals m c squared became the holy grail of science it held out the promise of vast reserves of energy locked deep inside the atom einstein suspected that it would take a hundred years of research to unlock it but he hadn't banked on the second world war and the genius of a jewish woman in hitler's germany 28 year old austrian lisa meitner was painfully shy despite her anxiety the young doctor of physics arrived in berlin determined to pursue a career in the exciting new field of radioactivity unfortunately in 1907 german universities did not employ female graduates luckily one man came to her aid colin i'm a researcher in the chemistry institute professor prank suggested i hey hon i have read your papers on thorium and on miso thorium and dr suggested this yes he suggested that i speak with you i need someone to collaborate i think i could really help with the physical analysis and the mathematics yes and the mathematics starting radioactive atoms has become so much a collaboration between chemistry and physics these days i'll ask fisher for a laboratory there excellent i'll speak to you soon lisa meidner had just taken the first step on a journey that would irrevocably change world history for her it would be a road marked with success and renown but also with terror and betrayal at this time not a lot was known about the atom at first people thought it was uh like a miniature solar system there was a solid nucleus of the center and electrons would spin around it sort of like um like planets around our sun a little later some researchers proposed that the nucleus itself wasn't a solid chunk but is made up of separate particles of protons and neutrons but then in what are called radioactive metals things like radium and uranium the nucleus itself seemed to be unstable leaking out energy and particles perhaps this was an example of equals m c squared the mass of a nucleus turning into energy collaboration to unlock the secrets of the atom started out on an extremely unequal footing he was given a laboratory she was forced to work in a wood shop i see you haven't set your hair on fire the boss he thinks that if he lets women into the chemistry institute they'll set their hair on fire oh so his beard must be fireproof good day yeah good day you see am non-existent to this place at least physicists recognize me for my abilities yes where would we chemists be without the studying hand of the physicist it took years but lisa lost her shyness eventually in 1912 she and han moved to the brand new kaiser wilhelm institute for chemistry where the status was really that of equals lisa became the first woman in germany ever to have the title of professor lisa i'm news oh remember the art student i told you of yes edith yes i have um esther to marry me and she has accepted dr han congratulations yes well i wanted you to be the first to know i'm very pleased for you very pleased lisa meitner was warm-hearted by nature she had many friends and she may have wanted to have a closer relationship with otto but it really does seem that physics was lisa's first love maybe even her passion the 1920s and 30s were the golden age of nuclear research the largest known nucleus at the time was that of the uranium atom containing 238 protons and neutrons mightner and han were leading the race to see if even bigger nuclei could be created by adding more neutrons so the atom pretty familiar nucleus in the center electrons orbiting around the nucleus is our focus the nucleus made up of protons and neutrons now the largest nucleus that we know is that of the uranium atom its nucleus is a tightly packed structure of 238 protons and neutrons the thrust of our work is to try to fire neutrons into this huge structure and if we can get a neutron to stick in here it will be a breakthrough knightner may have been on the brink of a major discovery but germany in the 1930s was a dangerous place to be even for a world-class scientist the u.s endangers our institute when the nazis came to power one of the first things they did was to drive out jewish academics from the universities einstein was very prominent and for that reason he was one of the first to go he was hounded out of germany in 1933. lisa was not dismissed at that time she was able to stay because she was austrian but in march 1938 austria was annexed into germany and at that point her situation became untenable what is it frightening news what's happened curtis is going around saying that i should be got rid of i am i actually knew i heard today i was going to speak to the treasurer of the institute before i told you we'll speak to you tomorrow come on let's get you home late we'll finish up the pressure on mightner was unbearable han who was known for his anti-nazi views did his best to protect her at least initially i need to talk to you about this not no i'm too busy we have to protect it how what can we do the situation is the way it is who knows what will happen next she can't stay it's just not terrible but she hasn't got a visa or even a valid passport and she may soon be forbidden to leave germany we can't harbor a jew if she stays the regime will shut us all down lisa poor line demands that you leave you can't throw her out online says you should not come into the institute anymore well i have to write up there throw him a radiation tomorrow so i have to commit you've given up when it became clear that mightner would be dismissed and probably arrested physicists all around europe wrote letters inviting her to conferences giving her an excuse to leave germany the nazis refused to let her go in july of 1938 a dutch colleague traveled to berlin and illegally took lisa back with him on a train to holland the trip was so frightening that at one point she begged to go back despite the great danger she got through she had lost everything her home her position her books her salary her pension even her native language she had been cut off from her work just at the time when she was leading the field and was on the brink of a major scientific discovery no matter what privations she suffered lisa was still thinking of physics amazingly she and han were able to collaborate by letter i hope my dear otto that after 30 years of work together and friendship in the institute that at least the possibility remains that you tell me as much as you can about what is happening back there lisa was invited by an old student friend to spend christmas on the west coast of sweden her nephew otto robert frisch who was also a physicist came to join her there aunt aunt lisa how are you my dear merry christmas aunt i need your help come on let's go out but i was hoping you'd help me back in berlin han was getting strange results he found no evidence to suggest that bombarding the uranium nucleus with neutrons had caused it to increase in size in fact his experiments seemed to be contaminated with radium a smaller atom he desperately needed meitner's expert analysis from afar she was starting to suspect that something very different was happening in their experiment han and strasman are getting some strange results with the uranium work really a couple of months ago han told me that they were finding radium amongst the uranium products we are looking for a much bigger element and here we're finding something much smaller i urged han to check again it couldn't be radium and now he writes to me and tells me that it's not radium it's barium that's even smaller exactly han is sure that it's another error but i don't know anymore it is at least possible that barium is being produced so han still needs you to interpret the data it is my work too you know exactly well i can't be there can i come on let's walk surely he's made a mistake hasn't he he hasn't done what you told him to oh my darling robert he may not be a brilliant theorist but he's too good a chemist to get this wrong if you imagine a drop of water a big drop it's unstable on the verge of breaking apart it turns out that a big nucleus like uranium is just like that now for four years meitner and han and all other physicists had thought that if you pump more neutrons into this nucleus it'll just get bigger and heavier but suddenly mightner and fresh out in the midday snow realized this nucleus might just get so big that it would split in two if the nucleus is so big that it has trouble staying together then couldn't just a little tiny joke from a neutron yes but if the nucleus did split the two halves would fly apart with a huge amount of energy where's that energy going to come from how much energy well we worked out that the mutual repulsion between two nuclei would generate about 200 million electron volts but something has to supply that energy wait let me do a packing friction calculation so two nuclei are lighter than the original nucleus of the uranium by about one fifth of a proton in mass what so some mass has been lost einstein z equals m c squared if we multiply the loss mass by the speed of light squared we get 200 million electron volts he split the atom no no you've split the atom it was an amazing discovery of course in the laboratory we're talking about tiny amounts of uranium and correspondingly tiny amounts of energy but the point is that the amount of energy released was relatively large and it came from the mass of the uranium itself the energy released was entirely consistent with einstein's equation e equals m c squared mightner and frisch published the discovery of what they called nuclear fission to great acclaim but betrayal awaited them otto han was under pressure from the nazi regime to write his jewish colleague out of the story he alone was awarded the 1944 nobel prize for the discovery in his speech he barely mentioned the leading role of mightner bizarrely even after the war han maintained it was he and not mightner who had discovered nuclear fission now i want to write something personal which disturbs me and which i ask you to read with more than 40-year friendship in mind and with the desire to understand me i am now referred to as hans long-time co-worker how would you feel if you were only characterized as the long-time co-worker of me after the last 15 years which i wouldn't wish on any good friend shall my scientific past also be taken from me is that fair and why is it happening lisa meitner had been working on this for 30 years she'd only broken apart a handful of atoms but that was enough once she had broken even one the genie was out of the bottle what miner had started after that physicists around the world began to realize they could take it a lot further in 1942 an intense effort to build an atom bomb was begun all over america's secret installations sprang up under the code name the manhattan project miami was asked to join the manhattan project and she refused she refused to have anything to do with the atomic bomb but robert frisch was different he was an important member of the team because he was convinced of the need to beat the nazis in a nuclear arms race a nuclear bomb was never used on germany but the atomic bombs dropped on hiroshima and nagasaki demonstrated the terrible destructive power of e equals m c squared vast amounts of energy in the form of electromagnetic radiation were released from a few pounds of uranium and plutonium while the pure inquisitiveness of the world's most gifted scientists ironically had brought humanity a weapon of mass destruction the equation's life has a parallel story of creation and beauty today young physicists carry on einstein's quest ever since its birth e equals m c squared has been used to delve into the depths of time to answer the biggest question of all where did we come from at particle accelerators researchers propel atomic particles to the speed of light and smash them together creating conditions like those in the big bang e equals mc squared actually tells us how the big bang itself happened in the first moments of creation the universe was this immensely dense immensely concentrated eruption of energy as it rushed apart and expanded huge amounts of energy or e were converted into mass or m pure energy became matter it became the particles and atoms and it eventually formed the first stars our sun is a huge furnace floating in space and it's powered by equals m c squared now it turns out every second four million tons of solid mass of the sun disappears comes out as energy not just a little bit of energy it's enough to light up our entire solar system make the solar system glow with heat and light and not only do stars emit energy in accordance with e equals m c squared the whole process actually creates life itself eventually a massive star dies the debris floats around clusters together gets pulled into the orbits of another star and becomes a planet we humans and the earth we stand on are made of stardust we are a direct product of e equals m c squared building on the work of scientists through the ages new generations are searching for answers using bold new tools that reach almost to the speed of light they can now ask questions that their predecessors could never have even imagined as einstein himself knew the journey of discovery is sometimes painful sometimes joyful it is as old as human curiosity itself and never ever ends we gave top physicists two short minutes to explain einstein's big idea on nova's website you can hear how they did it tell us what you think about this program and much more find it on pbs.org to order this program on dvd or vhs or the book e equals mc squared a biography of the world's most famous equation please call wgbh boston video at 1-800-255 nova is a production of wgbh boston corporate funding for nova is provided by google major funding for nova is provided by the howard hughes medical institute serving society through biomedical research and science education hhmi funding for einstein's big idea is provided by the national science foundation america's investment in the future and by the alfred p sloan foundation to enhance public understanding of science and technology and the us department of energy fostering science and security major funding for nova is also provided by the corporation for public broadcasting and by pbs viewers like you thank you

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Length: 107min 14sec (6434 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 15 2013