Articles on Adelman and E=mc(2)

[John Young <jya@pipeline.com>]

The New York Times has an interesting article today on the life 
and career of Leonard Adelman, with remarks on RSA and public 
key cryptography.  Friendly, not technical.

For email copy send blank message with subject:  LA_lite

And, while not directly related to crypto, the magazine "The 
Sciences", published by the New York Academy of Sciences, has a 
long article, "Beyond E=mc(2)", on a controversial theory that 
mass is "only electric charge and energy".

The authors are:  Bernard Haisch, Alfonso Rueda and H. E. 
Puthoff.

For copy send blank message with subject:  EMC2_too



Here is a brief excerpt:


   Recent work by us and others now appears to offer a
   radically different insight into the relation E=mc(2), as
   well as into the very idea of mass itself. To put it
   simply, the concept of mass may be neither fundamental nor
   necessary in physics. In the view we will present,
   Einstein's formula is even more significant than physicists
   have realized. It is actually a statement about how much
   energy is required to give the appearance of a certain
   amount of mass, rather than about the conversion of one
   fundamental thing, energy, into another fundamental thing,
   mass.

   Indeed, if that view is correct, there is no such thing as
   mass -- only electric charge and energy, which together
   create the illusion of mass. The physical universe is made
   up of massless electric charges immersed in a vast,
   energetic, all-pervasive electromagnetic field. It is the
   interaction of those charges and the electromagnetic field
   that creates the appearance of mass. In other words, the
   magazine you now hold in your hands is massless; properly
   understood, it is physically nothing more than a collection
   of electric charges embedded in a universal energetic
   electromagnetic field and acted on by the field in such a
   way as to make you think the magazine has the property of
   mass. Its apparent weight and solidity arise from the
   interactions of charges and field.

   Besides recasting the prevailing view of mass, this idea
   would address one of the most profound problems of physics,
   the riddle of how gravity can be unified with the other
   three fundamental forces of nature. The electromagnetic
   force and the weak force, which is responsible for nuclear
   decay, have been shown to be two manifestations of a single
   force, appropriately called the electroweak force. There
   are tantalizing hints that the strong force, which binds
   nuclei together, will someday be unified with the
   electroweak force. But until now gravity has resisted all
   attempts at unification. If the new view is correct,
   however, gravity would not need to be separately unified.
   Just as mass would arise from the electromagnetic force, so
   would gravity.

End excerpt.