Robert Coontz, Ian Osborne and Phil Szuromia- Passion for Physics

8/3/2019 Robert Coontz, Ian Osborne and Phil Szuromia- Passion for Physics

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/robert-coontz-ian-osborne-and-phil-szuromia-passion-for-physics 1/1www.sciencemag.org SCIENCE VOL 307 11 FEBRUARY 2005

E I N S T E I N ’ S L E G A C Y

The World Year of Physics in 2005 celebrates the publication of Einstein’s papers in Annalen der  Physik that, 100 years ago, heralded the era of modern physics. Part of Einstein’s legacy is thatquantum mechanics and relativity forced us to accept notions of space and time, and of matter and energy, that do not square with our everyday experience. Given Einstein’s passion for thedeepest questions in physics, we highlight some of those challenges in this special issue.

Of Einstein’s many contributions, the work that has most gripped the public imagination boils down to a single word: relativity. Today physicists are still wrestling with the implications of thismathematically straightforward but surreal-sounding theory. Some hope to find subtle flaws in a keycomponent of the special theory of relativity—flaws that, as Cho explains in his News story (p. 866), could lead physics into realms even stranger than the ones that Einstein pioneered. In another News feature (p. 869),Seife and Lawler describe how NASA’s new emphasis on exploration is affecting satellites designed to testwhether the later general theory of relativity accurately describes spacetime.

Despite being one of the fathers of quantum mechanics, Einstein wasdismayed by its probabilistic nature. Leggett (p. 871) explores the current statusof the theory and discusses the controversy that still remains. Dunningham et al .(p. 872) look at two different categories: the fragile but useful and the robust

 but essentially useless. These twotypes of entanglement can perhapsexplain the transition from the quantumto the classical worlds. Aharonov and Zubairy (p. 875) discuss some of thestranger aspects of time in quantummechanics, especially the “delayed choice quantum eraser” of Scullyand Drühl, in which the erasing of “which path” information in two-slitexperiments can restore interference patterns, even if that informationcomes “after the fact.”

After the development of generalrelativity, Einstein spent many years

attempting to unify the fundamental forces of the day: gravity and electro-magnetism. Bennett (p. 879) discusses some of the current tests of Einstein’stheories of relativity, including gravitational redshifts, gravitational waves,and the Lense-Thirring effect. He also discusses the role of dark energy and dark matter and the questions of the origin and ultimate fate of the universe.Guth and Kaiser (p. 884) overview inflationary cosmology, which helps bridge particle physics and gravitation, and they outline the experimental testsof inflation’s mark on the present universe. They also discuss the theoreticalefforts to use superstring theory to understand inflation and to determine thevacuum energy of the universe. In Books et al ., Wilczek (p. 852) reviews Penrose’scomprehensive perspective on our understanding of the physical behavior of the universe and the mathematical theory that underlies it.

Einstein’s legacy includes the physicists who continue to take up his mantle.Science’s Next Wave (www.nextwave.org) profiles some European physicists aswell as Canada’s Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics.

–ROBERT COONTZ, IAN OSBORNE, AND PHIL SZUROMI

A Passion for Physics

P A G E 8 7 9

T I T L E O F S P E C I A L S E C T I O N

I N T R O D U C T I O N

C O N T E N T S

N E W S

866 Special Relativity ReconsidereDoubly Special,Twice asControversial

869 We’re So Sorry, Uncle Albert

V I E W P O I N T S & R E V I E W

871 The Quantum MeasurementProblem

A. J. Leggett

872 From Pedigree Cats to

Fluffy-Bunnies J. Dunningham et al.

875 Time and the Quantum:Erasinthe Past and Impacting the Fut

Y.Aharonov and M. S. Zubairy

879 Astrophysical Observations:Lensing and Eclipsing EinsteinTheories

C. L. Bennett

884 Inflationary Cosmology:Explorthe Universe from the Smallestthe Largest Scales

A. H. Guth and D. I. Kaiser 

 See also related Next Wave material on p.809 and Book Review on p.852.

   C   R   E   D   I   T  :   B   E   N   N   E   T   T    E    T    A    L .

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