RELATIVELY SPEAKING, THE TIME FOR RELATIVITY IS 01:00hrs UTC THURSDAY!

Nobel Prize winner Albert Einstein displaying his relativistic tongue later in life!

E=mc². It's the name of the world’s most famous equation.

Everyone’s heard of it, and yet virtually no one has the faintest clue what it's about, or of its paramount importance to our civilisation, and come to think of it our existence at all.

I’m either very foolish or brave, but at 01:00hrs UTC/GMT on Thursday March 20 (tomorrow)/ 8.00pm Eastern, I’m going to endeavour to give a 101 crash course on Einstein’s (1905) scientific paper entitled On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies, more popularly known as his Theory of Special Relativity. It was derived from the equations of electromagnetism developed by James Clerk Maxwell in the nineteenth century.

On a positive note, Special Relativity is magnitudes easier than Einstein’s theory of gravity, or General Relativity!

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In the forthcoming programme I try to condense the essence of relativistic speeds as required for interstellar space travel down to just five minutes! And all in plain English lay person’s terms too, without the need for time dilation or Lorentz length contractions!

To learn how it may be possible to travel to the stars in no time at all using mass converted to pure energy with perhaps warp drives thrown in too listen to the next Podcast-UFO to be broadcast on ArtBell’s Dark Matter Radio Network at 01:00hrs UTC/GMT on Thursday March 20. Click the links or logo to listen! Wish me luck!

FEEL THE PB&J (PASSION, BEAUTY, AND JOY) OF THE COSMOS? SHARE IT!

THOSE MAGNIFICENT MEN IN THEIR MOON MACHINES

ByANDY FLEMING

A review of a superb documentary series that reveals the astonishing and gargantuan engineering task that faced NASA and its contractors in meeting President Kennedy's challenge of putting a man on the Moon by the end of the 1960s.

The Moon landings are often regarded as mankind's finest achievement, and this 2008 Discovery Science Channel miniseries certainly gives an in-depth account of why.  At its peak in the 1960s, NASA's Project Apollo employed nearly 400,000 people, and this series is a tribute to the scientists, engineers and astronauts who made Kennedy's audacious dream come true.

Moon Machines is a series of six forty-five minute programmes, each focussing on a particular piece of essential hardware developed specifically to place an American on the Moon by the end of 1969.  It includes episodes concentrating on the Saturn V rocket, the Command Module, the Lunar Module, the Lunar Module's Guidance Computer, the Apollo Spacesuits and the Lunar Rover.

Using hours of original historic footage from NASA and its contractors, and interviews of the surviving engineers and scientists Moon Machines records those brief years in the sixties when (regarding spaceflight at least), anything seemed possible and when if materials orcomponents didn't pre-exist, they were almost magically developed and created by NASA and its engineers.