Einstein’s Brain by Mohan Ashtakala

 

Dr. Thomas Harvey with Einstein's Brain

Albert Einstein was born on April 14, 1879, Ulm, Germany, one-hundred-and-forty-three years ago. Since the time he gained fame for his works, his genius aroused much curiosity. Some of his peculiar thought processes became well known. He found difficulty speaking as a child, concerning his parents to such an extent that they consulted a speech doctor. Later, Einstein revealed that he thought in pictures, not in language. He famously imagined riding a beam of light; the experience perhaps foreshadowing his theories on the behavior of light.

He suffered from dyslexia, and found himself unable to socialize with schoolmates. He preferred playing by himself, working on puzzles and building complex structures with blocks. In later years, music had a way of unlocking secrets. When confronted with a difficult physics problem Einstein would pick up his violin, and then suddenly stop and shout, “I’ve got it,” as the answer entered his mind.

The combination of his eccentric childhood and his later notoriety gave birth to much interest and speculation with respect to his brain. Was Einstein’s brain different from those of normal men? Did it explain his genius?

The opportunity to study this came in April 18, 1955, when Einstein passed away. He wanted to be cremated and his ashes spread over the sea, as he did not want his presumptive grave to become idolized. However, during the autopsy, Dr. Thomas Harvey, of Princeton, removed the brain and preserved it. It does not seem that this was done with permission, despite the fact that Hans Albert, Einstein’s elder son, endorsed the move only after the event occurred.

Harvey took the brain to the University of Pennsylvania, and dissected it into several pieces, some of which was supplied to leading scientists. The rest, he kept to himself, hoping to find support for research, but for many years, no such opportunity arose, and it travelled with him to the many places he subsequently lived. In 1978, journalist Steven Levy found the brain, preserved in alcohol, in two mason jars in a cider box. They had been sitting there for over twenty years.

Finally, in the 1980’s, research on portions of the brain were conducted by Berkeley professor Marian Diamond. Sadly, or fortunately, as the case may be, Einstein’s brain proved not to be anything special. The only peculiarity was a small increase in “glial” cells in the left interior cortex, but not so significant as to explain the man’s genius.

Mohan Ashtakala (www.mohanauthor.com) is the author of The Yoga Zapper, a fantasy, and Karma Nation, a literary romance. He is published by Books We Love (www.bookswelove.com)

Remebering Einstein

On March 14, 1879, a hundred-and-forty-one years ago, a son was born to Hermann Einstein, an engineer and salesman, and Pauline Koch, in the kingdom of Wurttemberg, in present-day Germany. Pauline was well-educated and showed a passion for music. It was on her insistence that Albert Einstein took up violin lessons at the age of five, which developed into a life-long passion.

The young Einstein was slow in learning to speak. In fact, his condition prompted his parents to seek medical help. But this disorder affected his learning in positive ways. His imagination was astounding: he tended to think in terms of images rather than words. When his father gifted him a compass at age five, he puzzled constantly over the nature of magnetism.

He tended to be rebellious, questioning conventional wisdom, which resulted in his being expelled from one school and for another headmaster to famously declare that the child would never amount to much.

Despite his struggles in speech, Einstein showed his genius quite early, especially in mathematics. In primary school, his gift for this subject became apparent and he obtained the highest marks in his class, performing far above the school requirements. By age twelve, he had mastered applied arithmetic and decided to learn algebra and geometry on his own, which he did over a summer vacation.

His great breakthroughs in physics came directly from his thinking in images. He conducted a series of mental experiments, which he named Gedankenexperiment, or thought experiments. At age sixteen, he imagined what it would be like to ride alongside a beam of light. But the dictates of the physics of the day didn’t correspond to his imagination. He wrestled with that mind experiment until, ten years later, he arrived at his Special Theory of Relativity, a ground breaking theory that shattered the conclusions of Newtonian physics.

In 1905, at the age of twenty-six, Einstein worked at a patent office in Switzerland, as he was neither able to get a doctoral dissertation accepted nor obtain an academic job. Despite working six days a week, he produced four papers in his spare time that changed the course of history. The first showed that light could be described as waves as well as particles, leading to the field of quantum physics. The second proved the existence of atoms and molecules. The third, the Special Theory of Relativity, said that there was no absolute time or space. And finally the fourth propounded and equivalence between light and mass, represented by the famous equation E=mc2.

Much of what we take for granted today comes from the work of this great physicist. Among these are cell-phones, satellite communications, lasers, semiconductors and atomic power. And many future discoveries still await unfolding, such as space travel and quantum computing. Rarely has one man’s work entirely changed the course of history. Einstein is one such man.

Mohan Ashtakala is the author of "The Yoga Zapper," a fantasy and "Karma Nation," a literary romance. www.mohanashtakala.com, www.bookswelove.net.

Stephen Hawking

Stephen Hawking

In the early morning of March 14, 2018, exactly 139 years after Albert Einstein’s birth, the renowned physicist Stephen Hawking passed away peacefully at his home in Cambridge, England, at the age of 76. That he lived to such an age, and that he accomplished so much in his time, is a remarkable achievement.

In 1963, Hawking, while a graduate student at Oxford, was diagnosed with a rare early-onset slow-progressing form of motor neurone disease, which eventually robbed him of all motor functions, including the ability to use his voice. The following year, he became engaged to Jane Wilde, a friend of his sister. Hawking later said that the engagement gave him "something to live for,” since the doctors’ predictions of a very short and unproductive life induced a deep depression. The two married on the 14th July 1965, determined to face all obstacles in their way.

Hawking is most famous for his work regarding black holes, celestial objects so massive that nothing, not even light, can escape their clutches. Based on Einstein’s theory of General Relativity, Hawking, along with Robert Oppenheimer, Sir Roger Penrose and others, advanced our knowledge of the behavior of the Universe.

Their work suggested that, upon the collapse of a massive star, when it runs out of its own internal nuclear fuel, it undergoes a sudden shrinkage under the pull of its own gravity.  They predicted that the outcome of this collapse, as implied by Einstein’s theory of gravity, to be a space-time singularity: an infinitely dense and extreme physical state of matter, ordinarily not encountered in any of our usual experiences of the physical world. A massive star, millions of miles across, would collapse to the size of the dot in the letter ‘i.’

Einstein himself strongly opposed such an idea and conclusion, and for a long time, not much progress occurred in this field. It took the genius of Stephen Hawking, among others, to find that Einstein was in error, and that star collapse and singularity do happen. Thus, in the later 1960s and early 1970s, the study of quantum theory and gravity was revived.

Hawking was a regular visitor to Canada. The physicist permitted The Stephen Hawking Centre in Waterloo, Ontario, to bear his name.

“Remember to look up at the stars and not down at your feet. Try to make sense of what you see and wonder about what makes the universe exist,” Hawking said of the meaning of life. “Be curious. And however difficult life may seem, there is always something you can do and succeed at.”

Mohan Ashtakala is the author of "The Yoga Zapper," (www.yogazapper.com) published by Books we Love (www.bookswelove.com)