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Happy birthday to special relativity!
I was delighted, amused and appalled this morning
when I opened my email and was reminded that this
week marks 100 years since Albert Einstein published
his groundbreaking paper on what is now know as
special relativity. It was actually Einstein's
second 1905 paper, where 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's 1905 contribution was to
unify important parts of classical mechanics and
Maxwell's electrodynamics. Recalling these facts
was my delight.
Amused? I recalled a story from a biography of
Einstein: "While working with fellow physicists at
the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study one
evening, Niels Bohr, who was in the habit of
repeating words over and over whenever he was
engrossed in thought, began pacing around the
office, repeating, 'Einstein... Einstein...'
Suddenly the office door opened and Einstein himself
tiptoed into the room; Bohr, standing at a window
with his back to the door, did not see his colleague
come in. Bohr, still muttering Einstein's name,
turned around - and was astonished to find the
object of his thoughts apparently materialized
before his eyes. Einstein explained why he had come:
Smoking was against his doctor's orders and he had
promised not to buy tobacco. He had, however, never
promised not to steal tobacco - as he was presently
doing from the large pot which was resting on Bohr's
table."
Appalled: The email that reminded me of the 1905
paper on special relativity came from an
independent Washington, DC bookstore where I do most
of my book shopping. The email reported:
"This week marks the 100th anniversary of
Einstein's publication of the Special Theory of
Relativity, e=mc 2." Somehow the great
technology of the 21st century could not cope with
the superscript 2 (that's supposed to be "e
equals m c-squared"). The profound was thus
obscured by the ineptness of the technologies of
communication, the writer - or both. I would
venture to say that the technologies are to blame,
judging from the conspicuous space before the 2 that
is probably a remnant of a superscript markup code
provided by the author but automatically stripped
out for reasons of browser compatibility or some
such nonsense. This caused my mind to wander off to
perform a "gendanken experiment" (thought
experiment, ala Einstein) to speculate on what might
have happened to theoretical physics (in particular,
quantum mechanics) if the publisher of the original
paper (and referees) missed the superscript. At the
very least, we might have been spared the atomic
bomb, but I digress.
Will we ever get it right? The field of performance
support was launched, in part, because of the
enormity of critical, internal representations in
technology that are never exposed to the people who
have to do the work, and in cases where they
desperately need some explicit, external
representation that makes sense of their world.
Such issues are the stuff of distributed cognition
and user/human-centeredness - which remain largely
overlooked and trivialized by those who create and
disseminate technology.
Performance-centered design therefore remains an
important advocacy, a useful set of techniques and
an alternative to inefficiencies, frustrations and
pain of organizations and their people, who have to
do the work.
 An
aside: If you are interested in the exciting period
of history that was spawned in part by special
relativity, have a look at Kai Bird's new book, American
Prometheus. It is a biography of J. Robert
Oppenheimer that includes a cast of thousands,
like Einstein, Bohr, Born, Dirac, Heisenberg
et. al. Great reading - a reminder of how we
arrived here in 2005.
Regards,
Gary Dickelman
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