Relativity of Mankind - Einstein and his Time

(contenuti)

0. Starter Module – Einstein’s life

I never think of the future -- it will come soon enough.

 
Albert Einstein
Born: 14 March 1879 in Ulm, Württemberg, Germany - Died: 18 April 1955 in Princeton, New Jersey, USA
 
Around 1886 Albert Einstein began his school career in Munich. As well as his violin lessons, which he had from age six to age thirteen, he also had religious education at home where he was taught Judaism. Two years later he entered the Luitpold Gymnasium and after this his religious education was given at school. He studied mathematics, in particular the calculus, beginning around 1891.
In 1894 Einstein’s family moved to Milan but Einstein remained in Munich. In 1895 Einstein failed an examination that would have allowed him to study for a diploma as an electrical engineer at the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule in Zurich. Einstein renounced German citizenship in 1896 and was to be stateless for a number of years. He did not even apply for Swiss citizenship until 1899, citizenship being granted in 1901.
Following the failing of the entrance exam to the ETH, Einstein attended secondary school at Aarau planning to use this route to enter the ETH in Zurich. While at Aarau he wrote an essay (for which was only given a little above half marks!) in which he wrote of his plans for the future:-

If I were to have the good fortune to pass my examinations, I would go to Zurich. I would stay there for four years in order to study mathematics and physics. I imagine myself becoming a teacher in those branches of the natural sciences, choosing the theoretical part of them. Here are the reasons which lead me to this plan. Above all, it is my disposition for abstract and mathematical thought, and my lack of imagination and practical ability.

Indeed Einstein succeeded with his plan graduating in 1900 as a teacher of mathematics and physics. One of his friends at ETH was Marcel  Grossmann who was in the same class as Einstein. Einstein tried to obtain a post, writing to Hurwitz who held out some hope of a position but nothing came of it. Three of Einstein’s fellow students, including Grossmann, were appointed assistants at ETH in Zurich but clearly Einstein had not impressed enough and still in 1901 he was writing round universities in the hope of obtaining a job, but without success.
He did manage to avoid Swiss military service on the grounds that he had flat feet and varicose veins. By mid 1901 he had a temporary job as a teacher, teaching mathematics at the Technical High School in Winterthur. Around this time he wrote:-

I have given up the ambition to get to a university ...

Another temporary position teaching in a private school in Schaffhausen followed. Then  Grossmann’s father tried to help Einstein get a job by recommending him to the director of the patent office in Bern. Einstein was appointed as a technical expert third class.
Einstein worked in this patent office from 1902 to 1909, holding a temporary post when he was first appointed, but by 1904 the position was made permanent and in 1906 he was promoted to technical expert second class. While in the Bern patent office he completed an astonishing range of theoretical physics publications, written in his spare time without the benefit of close contact with scientific literature or colleagues.
Einstein earned a doctorate from the University of Zurich in 1905 for a thesis On a new determination of molecular dimensions. He dedicated the thesis to Grossmann.
In the first of three papers, all written in 1905, Einstein examined the phenomenon discovered by Max Planck, according to which electromagnetic energy seemed to be emitted from radiating objects in discrete quantities. The energy of these quanta was directly proportional to the frequency of the radiation. This seemed to contradict classical electromagnetic theory, based on Maxwell’s equations and the laws of thermodynamics which assumed that electromagnetic energy consisted of waves which could contain any small amount of energy. Einstein used Planck’s quantum hypothesis to describe the electromagnetic radiation of light.
Einstein’s second 1905 paper proposed what is today called the special theory of relativity. He based his new theory on a reinterpretation of the classical principle of relativity, namely that the laws of physics had to have the same form in any frame of reference. As a second fundamental hypothesis, Einstein assumed that the speed of light remained constant in all frames of reference, as required by Maxwell’s theory.
Later in 1905 Einstein showed how mass and energy were equivalent. Einstein was not the first to propose all the components of special theory of relativity. His contribution is unifying important parts of classical mechanics and Maxwell’s electrodynamics.
The third of Einstein’s papers of 1905 concerned statistical mechanics, a field of that had been studied by Ludwig Boltzmann and Josiah Gibbs.
After 1905 Einstein continued working in the areas described above. He made important contributions to quantum theory, but he sought to extend the special theory of relativity to phenomena involving acceleration. The key appeared in 1907 with the principle of equivalence, in which gravitational acceleration was held to be indistinguishable from acceleration caused by mechanical forces. Gravitational mass was therefore identical with inertial mass.

In 1908 Einstein became a lecturer at the University of Bern after submitting his Habilitation thesis Consequences for the constitution of radiation following from the energy distribution law of black bodies. The following year he become professor of physics at the University of Zurich, having resigned his lectureship at Bern and his job in the patent office in Bern.
By 1909 Einstein was recognised as a leading scientific thinker and in that year he resigned from the patent office. He was appointed a full professor at the Karl-Ferdinand University in Prague in 1911. In fact 1911 was a very significant year for Einstein since he was able to make preliminary predictions about how a ray of light from a distant star, passing near the Sun, would appear to be bent slightly, in the direction of the Sun. This would be highly significant as it would lead to the first experimental evidence in favour of Einstein’s theory.
About 1912, Einstein began a new phase of his gravitational research, with the help of his mathematician friend Marcel Grossmann, by expressing his work in terms of the tensor calculus of Tullio Levi-Civita and Gregorio Ricci-Curbastro. Einstein called his new work the general theory of relativity. He moved from Prague to Zurich in 1912 to take up a chair at the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule in Zurich.
Einstein returned to Germany in 1914 but did not reapply for German citizenship. What he accepted was an impressive offer. It was a research position in the Prussian Academy of Sciences together with a chair (but no teaching duties) at the University of Berlin. He was also offered the directorship of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Physics in Berlin which was about to be established.
After a number of false starts Einstein published, late in 1915, the definitive version of general theory. Just before publishing this work he lectured on general relativity at Göttingen and he wrote:-

To my great joy, I completely succeeded in convincing Hilbert and Klein.

In fact Hilbert submitted for publication, a week before Einstein completed his work, a paper which contains the correct field equations of general relativity.
When British eclipse expeditions in 1919 confirmed his predictions, Einstein was idolised by the popular press. The London Times ran the headline on 7 November 1919:-

Revolution in science - New theory of the Universe - Newtonian ideas overthrown.

In 1920 Einstein’s lectures in Berlin were disrupted by demonstrations which, although officially denied, were almost certainly anti-Jewish. Certainly there were strong feelings expressed against his works during this period which Einstein replied to in the press quoting Lorentz, Planck and Eddington as supporting his theories and stating that certain Germans would have attacked them if he had been:-

... a German national with or without swastika instead of a Jew with liberal international convictions...

During 1921 Einstein made his first visit to the United States. His main reason was to raise funds for the planned Hebrew University of Jerusalem. However he received the Barnard Medal during his visit and lectured several times on relativity. He is reported to have commented to the chairman at the lecture he gave in a large hall at Princeton which was overflowing with people:-

I never realised that so many Americans were interested in tensor analysis.

Einstein received the Nobel Prize in 1921 but not for relativity rather for his 1905 work on the photoelectric effect. In fact he was not present in December 1922 to receive the prize being on a voyage to Japan. Around this time he made many international visits. He had visited Paris earlier in 1922 and during 1923 he visited Palestine. After making his last major scientific discovery on the association of waves with matter in 1924 he made further visits in 1925, this time to South America.
Among further honours which Einstein received were the Copley Medal of the Royal Society in 1925 and the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society in 1926.
Niels Bohr and Einstein were to carry on a debate on quantum theory which began at the Solvay Conference in 1927. Planck, Niels Bohr, de Broglie, Heisenberg, Schrödinger and Dirac were at this conference, in addition to Einstein. Einstein had declined to give a paper at the conference and:-

... said hardly anything beyond presenting a very simple objection to the probability interpretation .... Then he fell back into silence ...

Indeed Einstein’s life had been hectic and he was to pay the price in 1928 with a physical collapse brought on through overwork. However he made a full recovery despite having to take things easy throughout 1928.
By 1930 he was making international visits again, back to the United States. A third visit to the United States in 1932 was followed by the offer of a post at Princeton. The idea was that Einstein would spend seven months a year in Berlin, five months at Princeton. Einstein accepted and left Germany in December 1932 for the United States. The following month the Nazis came to power in Germany and Einstein was never to return there.
During 1933 Einstein travelled in Europe visiting Oxford, Glasgow, Brussels and Zurich. Offers of academic posts which he had found it so hard to get in 1901, were plentiful. He received offers from Jerusalem, Leiden, Oxford, Madrid and Paris.
What was intended only as a visit became a permanent arrangement by 1935 when he applied and was granted permanent residency in the United States. At Princeton his work attempted to unify the laws of physics. However he was attempting problems of great depth and he wrote:-

I have locked myself into quite hopeless scientific problems - the more so since, as an elderly man, I have remained estranged from the society here...

In 1940 Einstein became a citizen of the United States, but chose to retain his Swiss citizenship. He made many contributions to peace during his life. In 1944 he made a contribution to the war effort by hand writing his 1905 paper on special relativity and putting it up for auction. It raised six million dollars, the manuscript today being in the Library of Congress.
By 1949 Einstein was unwell. A spell in hospital helped him recover but he began to prepare for death by drawing up his will in 1950. He left his scientific papers to the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, a university which he had raised funds for on his first visit to the USA, served as a governor of the university from 1925 to 1928 but he had turned down the offer of a post in 1933 as he was very critical of its administration.
One more major event was to take place in his life. After the death of the first president of Israel in 1952, the Israeli government decided to offer the post of second president to Einstein. He refused but found the offer an embarrassment since it was hard for him to refuse without causing offence.
One week before his death Einstein signed his last letter. It was a letter to Bertrand Russell in which he agreed that his name should go on a manifesto urging all nations to give up nuclear weapons. It is fitting that one of his last acts was to argue, as he had done all his life, for international peace.
Einstein was cremated at Trenton, New Jersey at 4 pm on 18 April 1955 (the day of his death). His ashes were scattered at an undisclosed place.

Valutation

• Divide this biography into paragraphes and give them proper titles.
• Summarize in few lines the Einstein’s life.
• Was he only interested in Physics and science?

1. Mathematics: Lorentz’s transformations

teacher: Mr. Nicola Chiriano

As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain,
and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.

We have already seen that Newtonian mechanics is invariant under the Galilean transformations relating two inertial frames moving with relative speed v in the x-direction,

However, these transformations presuppose that time is a well-defined universal concept, that is to say, it’s the same time everywhere, and all observers can agree on what time it is. Once we accept the basic postulate of special relativity, however, that the laws of physics, including Maxwell’s equations, are the same in all inertial frames of reference, and consequently the speed of light has the same value in all inertial frames, then as we have seen, observers in different frames do not agree on whether clocks some distance apart are synchronized. Furthermore, as we have discussed, measurements of moving objects are compressed in the direction of motion by the Lorentz-Fitzgerald contraction effect. Obviously, the above equations are too naïve! We must think more carefully about time and distance measurement, and construct new transformation equations consistent with special relativity.

Our aim here, then, is to find a set of equations analogous to those above giving the coordinates of an event (x,y,z,t) in frame S, for example, a small bomb explosion, as functions of the coordinates (x,y,z,t) of the same event measured in the parallel frame S’ which is moving at speed v along the x-axis of frame S. Observers O at the origin in frame S and O’ at the origin in frame S synchronize their clocks at t = t’ =0, at the instant they pass each other, that is, when the two frames coincide.
Finally, we have found the Lorentz transformations expressing the coordinates (x,y,z,t) of an event in frame S in terms of the coordinates (x’,y’,z’,t’) of the same event in frame S’:

Notice that nothing in the above derivation depends on the x-velocity v of S’ relative to S being positive. Therefore, the inverse transformation (from (x,y,z,t) to (x’, y’, z’,t’)) has exactly the same form as that given above with v replaced by -v.

Valutation

• Explain in few lines the meaning of the eight highlighted words. (8/10 points)
• Read Lorentz’s formulas. (2/10 points)

2. Physics – Special Relativity postulates and their consequences

teacher: Mr. Nicola Chiriano

Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute, and it seems like an hour.
Sit with a pretty girl for an hour, and it seems like a minute. That’s relativity.

Special Relativity: Postulates

• Principle of Relativity
All the laws of physics are the same in all inertial reference frames, i.e. frames moving at constant velocities respect to each other. 

• Constant Speed of Light
The speed of light, c = 3×10⁸ m/s, is equal in all inertial frames, regardless of the velocity of the observer or the light source.

• Consequences of Special relativity
– “Slowing” down of clocks (time dilation) and length contraction in moving reference frames as measured by an observer in another reference frame.

http://www.courses.vcu.edu/PHYS320/lectures.htm

3. Science - The Atomic Bomb / Black Holes

teacher: Mrs. Maria Giuffrida

“Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.”

FISSION/CHAIN REACTION

The atomic bomb gets it's energy from the fission (splitting) of the nuclei (core) of uranium or plutonium atoms. Albert Einstein explained how the fission of heavy atoms can produce energy released as dangerously high levels of heat and radiation. He published his theory in 1905 which is the well-known equation E = m c².
This states that a given mass (m), is associated with an amount of energy (E), equal to this mass multiplied by the square of the speed of light (c).
A very small amount of matter is equivalent to a vast amount of energy. For example, 1 kg of matter converted completely into energy would be equivalent to the energy released by exploding 22 megatons of TNT.
The neutron is the most effective particle to cause uranium fission. Only one neutron is needed to split an atom. When the atom fissions (splits), it splits into two smaller atoms which are most always radioactive and releases an enormous amount of energy and two or three neutrons. The neutrons released could then possibly hit other nuclei of uranium which causes them to split in the same fashion. This is a chain reaction (a series of fissions).

CRITICAL MASS

If you had a small sphere of pure fissile material, such as uranium-235, about the size of a golf ball, it would not sustain a chain reaction. Too many neutrons escape through the surface area, and in turn are lost to the chain reaction. This is called a subcritical amount.
In a mass of uranium-235 about the size of a baseball, there are more neutrons hitting the atoms of the fissile material than are escaping through the surface area, thus sustaining the chain reaction. The minimum amount of fissile material required to maintain the chain reaction is known as the critical mass.
Increasing the size of the sphere produces a supercritical assembly, in which the successive generations of fissions increase very rapidly, leading to a possible explosion as a result of the extremely rapid release of a large amount of energy. A heavy material, called a tamper, surrounds the fissile mass and prevents its premature disruption. The tamper also reduces the number of neutrons that escape.

PRODUCING AN EXPLOSION

When the scientist assemble the bomb, they cannot just create a supercritical mass of fissile material because it would explode.
We get around this problem by creating two subcritical amounts of fissile material then assembling them in the bomb apart from each other.They do not become critical until an explosion is set off to fire one of the subcritical masses at the other one. The force of the impact welds the two pieces together. Together, these create a critical mass.
It takes about 1 millionth of a second for the nuclear explosion to occur.

THE MANHATTAN PROJECT

Research on atomic bombs was begun around the same time in several countries, including Germany, but in the United States, the actual building of an atomic bomb was already underway by 1942 under the code name "Manhattan Project."
The project was carried out in extreme secrecy using a large amount of the national budget. Many prominent American scientists including the physicists Enrico Fermi and J. Robert Oppenheimer, and the chemist Harold Urey, were associated with the project, which was headed by a U.S. Army engineer, Major General Leslie Groves.
In September 1944 it was determined that an A-bomb would be used against Japan.
On July 16, 1945 in the desert near Alamogordo, New Mexico, the United States successfully conducted the world 's first nuclear test, the "Fat Man" test, codename Trinity. The bomb used in the Trinity test was called the "Fat Man".
When the bomb exploded and the fireball continued to consume the desert, General Thomas F. Farrell, Groves' assistant cried out, "the longhaors have let it get away from them!"

Black Holes

A black hole is a region of space that has so much mass concentrated in it that there is no way for a nearby object to escape its gravitational pull. Since our best theory of gravity at the moment is Einstein's general theory of relativity, we have to delve into some results of this theory to understand black holes in detail, but let's start of slow, by thinking about gravity under fairly simple circumstances.
The idea of a mass concentration so dense that even light would be trapped goes all the way back to Laplace in the 18th century. Almost immediately after Einstein developed general relativity, Karl Schwarzschild discovered a mathematical solution to the equations of the theory that described such an object. It was only much later, with the work of such people as Oppenheimer, Volkoff, and Snyder in the 1930's, that people thought seriously about the possibility that such objects might actually exist in the Universe. (Yes, this is the same Oppenheimer who ran the Manhattan Project.) These researchers showed that when a sufficiently massive star runs out of fuel, it is unable to support itself against its own gravitational pull, and it should collapse into a black hole.
In general relativity, gravity is a manifestation of the curvature of spacetime. Massive objects distort space and time, so that the usual rules of geometry don't apply anymore. Near a black hole, this distortion of space is extremely severe and causes black holes to have some very strange properties. In particular, a black hole has something called an 'event horizon.' This is a spherical surface that marks the boundary of the black hole. You can pass in through the horizon, but you can't get back out. In fact, once you've crossed the horizon, you're doomed to move inexorably closer and closer to the 'singularity' at the center of the black hole. You can think of the horizon as the place where the escape velocity equals the velocity of light. Outside of the horizon, the escape velocity is less than the speed of light.

The horizon has some very strange geometrical properties. To an observer who is sitting still somewhere far away from the black hole, the horizon seems to be a nice, static, unmoving spherical surface. But once you get close to the horizon, you realize that it has a very large velocity. In fact, it is moving outward at the speed of light! That explains why it is easy to cross the horizon in the inward direction, but impossible to get back out. Since the horizon is moving out at the speed of light, in order to escape back across it, you would have to travel faster than light. You can't go faster than light, and so you can't escape from the black hole.
Incidentally, the name 'black hole' was invented by John Archibald Wheeler, and seems to have stuck because it was much catchier than previous names. Before Wheeler came along, these objects were often referred to as 'frozen stars.' I'll explain why below.
A typical mass for such a stellar black hole would be about 10 times the mass of the Sun, or about 1031 kilograms.Astronomers also suspect that many galaxies harbor extremely massive black holes at their centers. These are thought to weigh about a million times as much as the Sun, or 1036 kilograms.

The more massive a black hole is, the more space it takes up. In fact, the Schwarzschild radius (which means the radius of the horizon) and the mass are directly proportional to one another: if one black hole weighs ten times as much as another, its radius is ten times as large. A black hole with a mass equal to that of the Sun would have a radius of 3 kilometers. So a typical 10-solar-mass black hole would have a radius of 30 kilometers, and a million-solar-mass black hole at the center of a galaxy would have a radius of 3 million kilometers. Three million kilometers may sound like a lot, but it's actually not so big by astronomical standards. The Sun, for example, has a radius of about 700,000 kilometers, and so that supermassive black hole has a radius only about four times bigger than the Sun.
A black hole has a "horizon," which means a region from which you can't escape. If you cross the horizon, you're doomed to eventually hit the singularity. But as long as you stay outside of the horizon, you can avoid getting sucked in. In fact, to someone well outside of the horizon, the gravitational field surrounding a black hole is no different from the field surrounding any other object of the same mass. Only stars that weigh considerably more than the Sun end their lives as black holes. The Sun is going to stay roughly the way it is for another five billion years or so. Then it will go through a brief phase as a red giant star, during which time it will expand to engulf the planets Mercury and Venus, and make life quite uncomfortable on Earth (oceans boiling, atmosphere escaping, that sort of thing). After that, the Sun will end its life by becoming a boring white dwarf star.
What if the Sun did become a black hole for some reason? The main effect is that it would get very dark and very cold around here. The Earth and the other planets would not get sucked into the black hole; they would keep on orbiting in exactly the same paths they follow right now. Why? Because the horizon of this black hole would be very small -- only about 3 kilometers -- and as we observed above, as long as you stay well outside the horizon, a black hole's gravity is no stronger than that of any other object of the same mass.
You can't see a black hole directly, of course, since light can't get past the horizon. That means that we have to rely on indirect evidence that black holes exist.
Suppose you have found a region of space where you think there might be a black hole. How can you check whether there is one or not? The first thing you'd like to do is measure how much mass there is in that region. If you've found a large mass concentrated in a small volume, and if the mass is dark, then it's a good guess that there's a black hole there. There are two kinds of systems in which astronomers have found such compact, massive, dark objects: the centers of galaxies (including perhaps our own Milky Way Galaxy), and X-ray-emitting binary systems in our own Galaxy.
These massive dark objects in galactic centers are thought to be black holes for at least two reasons. First, it is hard to think of anything else they could be: they are too dense and dark to be stars or clusters of stars. Second, the only promising theory to explain the enigmatic objects known as quasars and active galaxies postulates that such galaxies have supermassive black holes at their cores. If this theory is correct, then a large fraction of galaxies -- all the ones that are now or used to be active galaxies -- must have supermassive black holes at the center. Taken together, these arguments strongly suggest that the cores of these galaxies contain black holes, but they do not constitute absolute proof.
Two very recent discovery has been made that strongly support the hypothesis that these systems do indeed contain black holes. First, a nearby active galaxy was found to have a "water maser" system (a very powerful source of microwave radiation) near its nucleus. Using the technique of very-long-baseline interferometry, a group of researchers was able to map the velocity distribution of the gas with very fine resolution. In fact, they were able to measure the velocity within less than half a light-year of the center of the galaxy. From this measurement they can conclude that the massive object at the center of this galaxy is less than half a light-year in radius. It is hard to imagine anything other than a black hole that could have so much mass concentrated in such a small volume.
A second discovery provides even more compelling evidence. X-ray astronomers have detected a spectral line from one galactic nucleus that indicates the presence of atoms near the nucleus that are moving extremely fast (about 1/3 the speed of light). Furthermore, the radiation from these atoms has been redshifted in just the manner one would expect for radiation coming from near the horizon of a black hole. These observations would be very difficult to explain in any other way besides a black hole, and if they are verified, then the hypothesis that some galaxies contain supermassive black holes at their centers would be fairly secure.

QUESTIONNAIRE

1. How can you produce energy in the atomic bomb?
2. What's the critical mass?
3. How can an explosion be produced ?
4. Could you speak about the Manhattan Project?
5. Who were the famous American scientists involved in the project?
6. What is a black hole?
7. How big is a black hole?
8. If a black hole existed, would it suck up all the matter in the Universe?
9. Is there any proof of the existence of the black holes?
10. What happened if the Sun became a black hole?

4. History: The Second World War - the position of scientists

teacher: Mrs. Antonella Aletta

I don’t know with what weapons World War III will be fought,
but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.

"Concern for man himself must always constitute the chief objective of all technological effort -- concern for the big, unsolved problems of how to organize human work and the distribution of commodities in such a manner as to assure that the results of our scientific thinking may be a blessing to mankind, and not a curse."

Scientists in the 1930s, using machines that could break apart the nuclear cores of atoms, confirmed Einstein’s formula E=mc² . The release of energy in a nuclear transformation was so great that it could cause a detectable change in the mass of the nucleus. But the study of nuclei - in those years the fastest growing area of physics - had scant effect on Einstein. Nuclear physicists were gathering into ever-larger teams of scientists and technicians, heavily funded by governments and foundations, engaged in experiments using massive devices. Such work was alien to Einstein’s habit of abstract thought, done alone or with a mathematical assistant. In return, experimental nuclear physicists in the 1930s had little need for Einstein’s theories.

In August 1939 nuclear physicists came to Einstein, not for scientific but for political help. The fission of the uranium nucleus had recently been discovered. A long-time friend, Leo Szilard, and other physicists realized that uranium might be used for enormously devastating bombs. They had reason to fear that Nazi Germany might construct such weapons. Einstein, reacting to the danger from Hitler’s aggression, had already abandoned his strict pacifism. He now signed a letter that was delivered to the American president, Franklin D. Roosevelt, warning him to take action. This letter, and a second Einstein-Szilard letter of March 1940, joined efforts by other scientists to prod the United States government into preparing for nuclear warfare. Einstein played no other role in the nuclear bomb project. As a German who had supported left-wing causes, he was denied security clearance for such sensitive work. But during the war he did perform useful service as a consultant for the United States Navy’s Bureau of Ordnance.  

The photograph shows a postwar reconstruction of the signing.

  
"Because of the danger that Hitler might be the first to have the bomb, I signed a letter to the President which had been drafted by Szilard. Had I known that the fear was not justified, I would not have participated in opening this Pandora’s box, nor would Szilard. For my distrust of governments was not limited to Germany."

http://www.aip.org/history/einstein/ae44.htm

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5. Philosophy: “The World as I see it”

teacher: Mrs. Antonella Aletta

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6. English Literature: The stream of consciousness

teacher: Mrs. Maria Simone

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7. Arts: Munch and Dalì

The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious.
It is the source of all true art and science.

8. Religion: Einstein’s God

My religion consists of a humble admiration of the illimitable superior spirit
who reveals himself in the slight details we are able to perceive with our frail and feeble mind.

"The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science. Whoever does not know it and can no longer wonder, no longer marvel, is as good as dead, and his eyes are dimmed. It was the experience of mystery -- even if mixed with fear -- that engendered religion. A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, our perceptions of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty, which only in their most primitive forms are accessible to our minds: it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute true religiosity. In this sense, and only this sense, I am a deeply religious man... I am satisfied with the mystery of life’s eternity and with a knowledge, a sense, of the marvelous structure of existence -- as well as the humble attempt to understand even a tiny portion of the Reason that manifests itself in nature."