Einstein's Big Idea: Important Scenes

Einstein's Big Idea

The story behind the world's most famous equation, E = mc^2 Aired October 11, 2005 on PBS

The Relationship Between Electricity and Magnetism?

HUMPHRY DAVY: Again, Newman.

CHATER: So, the electrical force goes this way, the compass points that way. How can one affect the other?

MICHAEL FARADAY: Perhaps the electricity is throwing out some invisible force as it moves along?

HUMPHRY DAVY: What?

MICHAEL FARADAY: Perhaps some sort of electrical force is emanating outwards from the wire.

WILLIAM THOMAS BRANDE: Oh, my dear boy, let me tell you that at the University of Cambridge, electricity flows through a wire, not sideways to it.

MICHAEL FARADAY: Well, that may be what they teach at Cambridge, but it doesn't explain what's happening before our eyes.

Faraday's Passion and Great Discoveries

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.

JOHN NEWMAN: I've never seen you like this, Faraday. You look like a happy child.

MICHAEL FARADAY: I'm shaking, Newman. Underneath I'm shaking. You see, John, you see?

JOHN NEWMAN: 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.

S. JAMES GATES, JR.

Compass and Mysteries of The Universe

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.

ALBERT EINSTEIN

Days of Happiness

Lavoisier, I think, found his job as a tax collector really rather tedious, and the times he looked forward to were the evenings and the weekends when he could indulge his passion for chemical experimentation. And he called those times his "jours de bonheur," his "days of happiness."

PATRICIA FARA

What Lavoisier did was absolutely central to science and especially to E = mc2, 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 rubble and dust, and burned the buildings into ashes and smoke, it 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 weight of the original city and the air around it before. Nothing disappears.

DAVID BODANIS

Faraday ve Maxwell

MICHAEL FARADAY: James, James, forgive me. A word of advice: don't get old.

JAMES CLARK MAXWELL (Dramatization): Michael, how are you?

MICHAEL FARADAY: Oh, I'm fine. Memory isn't too good though.

JAMES CLARK MAXWELL: Well, I thought you might like to see what I've just published.

MICHAEL FARADAY: Oh, yes, yes, splendid.

JAMES CLARK MAXWELL: So your results show that when electricity flows along a wire what it actually does is create a little bit of magnetism. As that magnetic charge moves it creates a little piece of electricity.

MICHAEL FARADAY: Electricity?

JAMES CLARK MAXWELL: Electricity and magnetism are interwoven, like a never-ending braid, so it is always pulsing forward.

MICHAEL FARADAY: That's wonderful.

JAMES CLARK MAXWELL: Michael, Michael. There's something very crucial in the math. This electricity producing magnetism and magnetism producing electricity, it 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.

MICHAEL FARADAY: I'm not sure I...

JAMES CLARK MAXWELL: It's the speed of light. That is the speed of light. You were right all along, light is an electromagnetic wave.

Emilie du Chí¢telet's Way

All her life Du Chí¢telet 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.

Emilie du Chí¢telet'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.

And Einstein...

ALBERT EINSTEIN: 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 mass, and mass can become energy, and not just energy equaling mass. Energy equals mass times the square of the speed of light.

MILEVA MARIC EINSTEIN: 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=mc2. 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.

Against all Odds, Lise Meitner

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.

RUTH LEWIN SIME

LISE MEITNER: If the nucleus is so big that it has trouble staying together, then couldn't just a little tiny jog from a neutron and...

OTTO ROBERT FRISCH: 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?

LISE MEITNER: How much energy?

OTTO ROBERT FRISCH: 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.

LISE MEITNER: Wait, let me do a packing fraction calculation. The two nuclei are lighter than the original uranium nucleus by about one-fifth of a proton in mass.

OTTO ROBERT FRISCH: What? So some mass has been lost? Einstein's E = mc2?

LISE MEITNER: If we multiply the lost mass by the speed of light squared we get...200 million electron volts. He's split the atom.

OTTO ROBERT FRISCH: No, no, no. You've split the atom.