Posted on 06/01/2015 12:19:56 AM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
John Forbes Nash Jr. was a mathematical genius who had his life chronicled in the movie A Beautiful Mind. One of Nash’s colleagues says that just days before he died in a New York taxi cab accident, he had discussed his latest and possibly most brilliant discovery to date. Mathematician Cédric Villan says that Nash told him that he had replaced Einstein’s Theory of Relativity and that the new equation would further explain quantum gravity.
The Daily Mail reports that on May 20, 2015, just three days before the tax cab accident that would take his life, Nash spoke to his friend and fellow mathematician Cédric Villan in Norway. Villan says that Nash was excited about a new discovery which he said would replace Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. Though specific details on the equation were not given, Villan says that Nash’s equation would further explain quantum gravity in a way that Einstein’s did not.
Sadly, Nash would pass away on his journey back home from Norway after speaking to Villan. It was noted that Nash had just left the airport and was taking the taxi back to his home when the fatal taxi cab accident occurred. Both John Nash and his wife would pass away in the accident. Now Villan says he will be “looking into” Nash’s claims that he had found a replacement to the Theory of Relativity.
“I will certainly look into it. He explained it to me. He thought he had discovered a replacement for the equation.”
In addition to promising to look into the works left behind by Nash, Villan also took a moment to praise Nash for his contributions to the mathematics community and that he was honored to be the chairman at a lecture given by Nash.
“He qualifies as a genius. I had the honor of being the chairman at a lecture he was giving. He told about the equation he had tried to devise in his study of general relativity. He was summarizing the problem with difficult equations. It was amazing.”
The world may be mourning the loss of “a beautiful mind,” but the contributions to the scientific community may not be over for Nash. If Cédric Villan has his way, we may also be able to uncover the last gift Nash left by piecing together his final work. Do you think that Nash’s equation could replace Einstein’s Theory of Relativity?
Hmmm...
-PJ
I only got as far as E=C2M.
-PJ
high school *teacher*
Now THAT is a great conspiracy theory!
Reptilian Aliens, Black Holes, Inadvertent Time Travel; that one has everything!
A simplified explanation of Planck’s constant:
Imagine that you are pouring water into a pan, and you discover that, rather than flowing as a continuous stream, the water was actually composed of droplets so small that they looked like a stream. No matter how fast or slowly you poured, the water always came out in droplets.
So you tried to pour out as little water as you could, to see if you could get a half of a droplet, or a quarter-droplet, etc. What you find is that tipping out the water, either none comes out, or a single droplet, or multiples of that single droplet. So it turns out that water has a minimum sized droplet that can be poured out. So we’d like to measure the size of that droplet, so that I can now describe the amount of water poured out in terms of the number of droplets.
Now, this is not true for water (unless we are talking water molecules themselves). But it IS true for energy. Energy can only be released or absorbed in “droplets” (known as “quanta”). And Planck’s constant helps describe the minimum size those “droplets” of energy can be.
Make sense?
Also, since gravitational force and motion-based acceleration are equivalent (can’t really tell one from the other), one would experience the same time-dilation, length-contraction and mass increase effects as one would while accelerating. In fact, GPS technology takes BOTH effects into account for its positioning calculations. ie, the effects of the high speed of the satellite PLUS the Earth’s gravitational effects on the GPS device on the ground. Since gravity is strongest nearer to the ground, the Earth-bound GPS device experiences stronger gravity-based effects (its clock would tick more slowly than the satellite’s), while the speedy satellite of course would experience greater motion-based effects (its clock would tick more slowly than the GPS device on the surface). Surprisingly, the net result is that the gravitational effect wins out over the effect due to the speedy motion of the satellite.
Are you confusing Planck’s Constant with The Plank Length?
Time may not exist on a chalkboard equation, but there’s a conspiracy against the calculation in my leg joints.
bttt
(from The Big Bang Theory)
No. The amount of energy contained in a photon (one of those “droplets” of energy) is always a multiple of Planck’s Constant.
This is why electrons have the orbitals they do in atoms. An electron can only absorb or emit energy in quanta (determined in part by Planck’s Constant), meaning that they can only jump from one orbital to another. This is what Einstein got his Nobel Prize for... his description of black-body radiation via quanta.
Thanks for the explanation. Are you in the field?
I have been a Physics teacher in the past... ;)
Yes, if Sheldon hasn’t come up with the answer...no one will.
Except maybe Leonard, who actually has a better grasp on those things.
right... Physics III was many moons ago.
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