Albert Einstein and Max Planck

These days, physicists developed the words "birds" and "frogs." While most of us are frogs, Einstein and Planck are birds. Let us illustrate this difference, let us look at some photos from my Washington webpage.

• The most prominent object in this city is the Washington monument, which is the tallest obelisk in the world. It is located between the
  1. Capitol Building (east) and the Lincoln Memorial (west), and between the
  2. White House (north) and the Jefferson Memorial (south).

  Let us see how the Monument looks to frogs and to birds.

  Frogs and Birds look at the Washington Monument differently.

• Frogs look at the Washington Monument.
  1. I look like a Frog at the bottom of the Monument.
  2. Independence Day Celebration on the 4th day of July every year.
  3. Frogs can look at the Sky during the night celebration of the Independence day.
  4. Old Tree.
  5. More Frog Photos.

• Birds look at the Washington Monument.
  1. with the Capitol Building and the Reflection Pool.
  2. with the White House.
  3. with the Jefferson Memorial.
  4. with the Lincoln Center. Photo taken at the roof top of the Kennedy Center for Performing Arts.
  5. More Bird Photos.

  The frogs can see the Washington Monument and its vicinity in detail. The birds are forced to see at least one other object, in addition to the Monument. The birds are forced to figure out something that contains both of them.

• Here is another example. Women are often objects of artists. There are many paintings and sculptures of one woman in the world, such as da Vinci's Mona Lisa and Venus statues. This is the frog's view.

  There are also many pictures of a woman with her son. There is a Chinese character for woman, and a chractor for son.

  Ancient Chinese combined these two characters to generate the abstract concept of "good." I learned about this when I was twelve years old, and this has been my way of looking at the world.

  Chinese were not the only ones to generate this concept. Ancient Babylonians derived the concept of "god" from a boy with her mother. This Babylonian tradition plays an important role in Catholic and Orthodox churches. Thus, it is interesting to construct a webpage containing photos of mother and son, and get "good or god" feelings from them. Click here for the webpage.
  
  
  

Frogs and Birds in Physics

We all agree that Planck and Einstein are birds, while most of are frogs. We say this because we all like to become birds. Some people can be born as birds, and some can take a evolutionary process to transform themselves to birds. By definition, evolution takes many years under hostile environments. We are interested in the latter course. Let us see how Planck and Einstein became birds.
• Max Planck became a bird by looking at both small-frequency behavior and high-frequency behavior of radiation distribution. He then connected these two different curves into one. In so doing, he had to introduce the concept of quanta, and a new fundamental constant which is now called Planck's constant. The point is that he built a bridge between the low-energy and high-energy distributions. Like a bird, he was able to look at both.

• Albert Einstein became a bird by worrying about physics observed by a stationary observer and the same physics seen by an observer on a bicycle.
  1. He learned about Maxwell's equations are covariant under Lorentz transformations. He was interested in making Newtonian mechanics also Lorentz-covariant. This aspect is well known. Einstein was like a bird when he looked at physics.

  2. As a consequence, Einstein derived a single energy-momentum relation for slow and fast/massless particles. I became quite excited about this when I was a sophomore at Carnegie Tech, and worried about whether internal space-time symmetries can be unified in the same manner, especially the quark-parton puzzle. I was able to produce a webpage entitled Further Contents of Einstein's E = mc²

• Freeman Dyson is a very important person in quantum electrodynamics, and Steven Weinberg thanks him in his PhD thesis. In 1965, Dyson said QED could be more effective if combined with other areas of physics. What he said is true, and he talked like a bird.

  In the Lamb shift calculation, we need hydrogen wave functions. Since QED cannot produce those wave functions, QED became great because it was combined with the Schroedinger picture of quantum mechanics.

  However, instead of wave fucntions, Dyson talked about an ill-fated bootstrap calculation of the neutron-proton mass difference. You may click here for a more detailed story.

  As is the case of Dyson's QED, QCD can be more effetive in hadronic physics if it can be combined with other branches of physics. I gave a conference talk on this subject in 2009. It was publihsed in the proceedings, but it is easier to see its ArXiv version.

• Electro-Weak Interaction. We all know how QED was developed as a renormalizable field theory. For many years, the theory of weak interaction remained as Fermi's phenomenological theory borrowing the first-order perturbation formula from quantum mechanics. Thus, the weak interaction should become integrated into QED. By observing this, Weinberg and Salam became the birds. This is not unlike Einstein's case where one transformation law should be applicable to both mechanics and electromagnetic theory.

  Feynman in 1986, from AIP Emilio Segre Visual Archives

• Richard Feynman was a big bird. He felt he was becoming a bird when he said

  The adventure of our science of physics is a perpetual attempt to recognize that the different aspects of nature are really different aspects of the same thing.

  Feynman published about 150 papers. If what he said is true, he should have been able to combine all of these papers into one.

  I attempted to combine some of his papers into one, and I was able to use the same set of equations for three of his papers, namely

  1. His 1969 paper on partons.
  2. His 1971 paper on harmonic oscillators for the quark model.
  3. Feynman's rest of the universe in his book on 1972 statistical mechanics.

  These three papers are sufficiently orthogonal, and it is a challenge to combine them into one paper. Click here if you are interested in what I am saying here.