I wish Albert was still alive. I just know we would have been best friends. We'd be hanging out, eating nachos, drinking a little Diet Coke (to keep our wits about us), and discussing some of uncle Al's (I'm sure I would be allowed to call him that) formulas.
The thing about uncle Al and his formulas is that they were a lot simpler than some of those other guys' formulas. You go back about a hundred years, and you see blackboards all over the US and Europe covered in completely indecipherable formulas. Scientists would look at them, stroke their beards (since most of the scientists back then didn't shave -- too many formulas to write) and vigorously shake their heads while mumbling something in German, Hungarian, or even Russian. Sometimes shouting would erupt and many times chalk and erasers would fly through the air pelting any nearby observers with little chalk dust clouds.
There were a lot of arguments back then. Mostly about the speed of light. Some of those formulas indicated that the speed of light was a constant. It never changed. Here's one that illustrates it:
Even if you don't understand the difference between permittivity and permeability, I think you would agree that the formula clearly shows the speed of light as a constant in our universe. I can't speak for other universes because I haven't yet figured out a way to visit them, although some ardent followers of the now defunct Grateful Dead band assure me with vigorous head shakes that they have indeed visited more than one other universe. However, when visiting those other universes, they didn't take time to perform even the basic experiments to determine if the speed of light is a constant. Or not.
So, along comes my BFF, Al. He says to all the other scientists that, yes, the speed of light is constant, and that we can begin using it in all our formulas. It seems that scientists love nothing better than shoving these constants into formulas. Because they never change. They're constant. And there are a lot of them, too.
Outside of the speed of light, pi is one of the favorites. It's a weird one, though, because you can never get it to stop giving you digits. Most people just resolve it out to 3.14159265359 and just give up. That means that no formula using pi will ever be completely
accurate. Well, who cares. That's close enough, right?
Al would just shrug his shoulders and say, "Ja, ja. Es ist glose enoughs." Then he'd light his pipe,
blow out a cloud of smoke and stare at his chalk board. While stroking his hairless chin. Al didn't go in
for beards.
Al liked to simplify complex formulas. Take the one he is showing me in the photo above. "R = 0."
He looks pretty excited about, too. I didn't know that R equals 0. Did you? Did anybody? No.
Nobody did until uncle Al drew it up there on his chalk board.
So right about that time I would ask Al about c, the constant speed of light. Al would shake
his head, erase the R = 0 and scribble out e=mc2. He would turn to me and say, "zo, zat ees der
speed limits vor ze whole universes. You can't go any vaster zan dat." Zee, der vormulas clearly
shows dat time vould slowing down, und your mass would grow to take up ze whole universes."
That Al. He had some trippy ideas. Sometimes I wonder what he was smoking.
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