Physics Stories from

Y.S.Kim's Facebook

On what grounds?

Toyotomi Hideyosi is a very important person in the history of Japan. He brutally eliminated his rival warlords and unified Japan into one country.
Since he had a humble family background, there are jokes about him. He is known as O-Saru-San (Mr. Monkey) in Japan. He appears like a monkey to human eyes, but he is a human when monkeys look at him. How did he appear to himself? Click here.
Yes, he looks differently when you look at him from different angles.

If your name is Albert Einstein, he should look differently when you are on a car with different speeds.
If this question is too complicated, let us reduce him to a hydrogen atom, the simplest object in this world. The question then becomes how the hydrogen atom appears to moving observers. The same question is how this atom appears to a stationary observer when it flies.
Einstein did not address this question and left it as a homework problem for younger generations. -- My research starts here. Click here for my Einstein page.

In 1954, I became a freshman at the Carnegie Institute of Technology after finishing my high-school years in Korea. In 1958, I became one of the 15 boys selected for physics graduate program at Princeton University. At that time, Princeton did not admit girls.

Wherever I go, I brag about my Princeton background. People thus ask me
1. whether I was the first Korean to receive a PhD degree from Princeton,
2. whether I met Einstein, when I tell them I studied physics there.
For the first question, I was not the first Korean PhD from Princeton. Syngman Rhee got his degree in 1910. He is regarded as Woodrow Wilson's most accomplished student, and the main lecture hall at Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School for Public Affairs is called "Syngman Rhee Lecture Hall."
For the second question, you may continue browsing this webpage. When I went to Princeton in 1958, Einstein was already in Heaven. How could I talk to him? Go to this page.

This table tells how much I added to Einstein's E = mc^2.

These additions are contained in this book.

Click here for detailed explanations. Let us see what we say in this book.
How can we construct the mathematics of this process?

I am not the first one to attempt to construct Einstein's mathematics for the moving localized entity. It was Paul A. M. Dirac who published three important papers to construct a theory of Lorentz-boosted localized entities.
1. Click here for Dirac's contribution to this task.
2. Click here, for the integration of Dirac's efforts.
Next, there are no hydrogen atoms moving fast enough to show this relativistic effect. What purpose does this matmematic serve in physics?

Before 1950, the particles moving with relativistic speeds were only from cosmic rays. After 1950, high-energy accelerators started producing protons moving with speeds very close to that of light.
Those protons are not hydrogen atoms. What does the proton tell about the hydrogen atom?
In 1964, Murray Gell-Mann found out the proton is a quantum bound state of more fundamental particles called "quarks," as the hydrogen atom is a bound-state of one proton and one electron.
However, in 1969, Richard Feynman observed that the same proton, when moving with the velocity close to that of light, appears as a collection of infinite number of free particles with a wide-spread momentum distribution. These particles are called "partons."
The question is whether the quarks and partons are the same entity viewed by different observers. The following figure answers this question.
All observed in high-energy labs in the real world.
Click here for further explanation.

This conclusion tells us quantum mechanics and Einstein's relativity can exist in harmony.

Yet, we can be more ambitious. The question is whether these two scientific disciplines can be synthesized into one. Crazy? See the following figure.

For a detailed explanation, go to my publication list.

Physics is Art of Synthesis!