Blue Mass Group

This op-ed in today’s NY Times is much longer than most NYT op-eds.  Yet its focus has little to do with the "pressing issues of the day," the stuff of NYT most op-eds.  Rather, it is about Albert Einstein’s four groundbreaking papers from 1905, and the lingering effects of one of them.  Einstein is probably best known among non-scientists for discovering special relativity (the fact that distance and time behave differently depending on how fast you are moving), and the world’s most famous equation, E=mc2, both of which are from his 1905 papers.  But, as the op-ed points out, his most important 1905 paper was probably the one on the photoelectric effect, which led inexorably to the discovery of quantum mechanics with all of its attendant, and deeply unsettling, notions of uncertainty.  (The op-ed concludes by describing quantum mechanics as "humankind’s most supreme assault on the idea that reality is what we think it is.") Why is this op-ed in today’s paper?  In part, I suppose, because 1905 was 100 years ago.  But there is also, I think, an important lesson in Einstein’s story for issues that are indeed raging around us at this very moment.  As everyone knows, religiously-based [...]