Official "This Day In History" thread

[Nick]

... and the crucial communication between Einstein and Eddington was passed via Willem de Sitter at the Observatory of Leiden University because Germany and Great Britain were enemies in the First World War while the Netherlands was neutral. Here is a photograph of all of them in Leiden:

[ewmayer]

Originally Posted by Nick

... and the crucial communication between Einstein and Eddington was passed via Willem de Sitter at the Observatory of Leiden University because Germany and Great Britain were enemies in the First World War while the Netherlands was neutral. Here is a photograph of all of them in Leiden:

Also recall that the reason Eddington was one of the few British scientists who went out of his way to keep the lines of communication with his German colleagues open during WW1, due to his pacifist Quaker beliefs. Good on him, I say.

I'll edit my pages 3-4 post in the next few days to also add an English translation to those. Einstein makes at least one rather curious comment late in the paper, about the import of the new work versus that of special relativity.

[Dubslow]

Surely an English translation already exists somewhere?

[Dubslow]

What does the {ml i} bracket notation mean? Apparently it is nothing more than oppositely signed Christoffel symbols?

[ewmayer]

Originally Posted by Dubslow

Surely an English translation already exists somewhere?

Quite possibly, though less certainly than for the later official journal paper. But it would take me at least as long to do a halfway-decent search as to simply bang it out myself, and would be less interesting of an exercise.

Originally Posted by Dubslow

What does the {ml i} bracket notation mean? Apparently it is nothing more than oppositely signed Christoffel symbols?

I confess that shorthand notation still has me puzzled as well - you may be right, but I need to crack open a DiffGeom text to see if I can with certainty pin down what it is shorthand for. On second thought, he fact that there are plenty of explicitly rendered Gammas and that the common shorthand for them is square brackets would seem to argues against it standing for such.

[ewmayer]

July 1, the 100th anniversary of the start of the almost-unfathomably bloody Battle of the Somme:

Silence the most fitting memorial at Somme commemorations | The Guardian

How J.R.R. Tolkien Found Mordor on the Western Front | NYT

[Dr Sardonicus]

March 6 is the anniversary of one of the most infamous rulings, if not the most infamous ruling in US history, the 1857 Dred Scott decision. It contains the phrase, "no rights which the white man was bound to respect."

Also, of the day in 1836 when the Alamo fell.

Also, of the day in 1970 when a Weathermen bomb factory in Greenwich Village blew up, sending three would-be bombers to their eternal reward.

From the end of an old "Forensic Files,"

Q: And how often are bomb makers blown up by their own bombs?

A: Not often enough.

And, most important of all, March 6 is the anniversary of the day in 1912 when Oreo cookies were introduced, in response to the success of Hydrox cookies.

[Dr Sardonicus]

March 7

In 1965, a march by civil rights demonstrators was violently broken up at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, by state troopers and a sheriff's posse in what came to be known as "Bloody Sunday."

[Dr Sardonicus]

March 8

In 1618, German astronomer Johannes Kepler devised his third law of planetary motion.

In 1948, the Supreme Court, in McCollum v. Board of Education, struck down voluntary religious education classes in Champaign, Illinois, public schools, saying the program violated separation of church and state.

In 1965, the United States landed its first combat troops in South Vietnam as 3,500 Marines arrived to defend the U.S. air base at Da Nang.

In 1979, technology firm Philips demonstrated a prototype compact disc player during a press conference in Eindhoven, the Netherlands.

In 1983, in a speech to the National Association of Evangelicals convention in Orlando, Fla., President Ronald Reagan referred to the Soviet Union as an "evil empire."

In 2014, Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370, a Boeing 777 with 239 people on board, vanished during a flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, setting off a massive search. (To date, the fate of the jetliner and its occupants is unlearned.)

[Dr Sardonicus]

March 9

In 1841, the U.S. Supreme Court, in United States v. The Amistad, ruled 7-1 in favor of a group of illegally enslaved Africans who were captured off the U.S. coast after seizing control of a Spanish schooner, La Amistad; the justices ruled that the Africans should be set free.

In 1862, during the Civil War, the ironclads USS Monitor and CSS Virginia (formerly USS Merrimac) clashed for five hours to a draw at Hampton Roads, Va.

In 1916, more than 400 Mexican raiders led by Pancho Villa attacked Columbus, N.M., killing 18 Americans. During the First World War, Germany declared war on Portugal.

In 1964, the U.S. Supreme Court, in New York Times Co. v. Sullivan^[1], raised the standard for public officials to prove they'd been libeled in their official capacity by news organizations.

[1] Held: A State cannot, under the First and Fourteenth Amendments, award damages to a public official for defamatory falsehood relating to his official conduct unless he proves "actual malice" -- that the statement was made with knowledge of its falsity or with reckless disregard of whether it was true or false.

Il Duce & Co. want the Sullivan ruling overturned.

[Dr Sardonicus]

March 10

In 1496, Christopher Columbus concluded his second visit to the Western Hemisphere as he left Hispaniola for Spain.

In 1848, the U.S. Senate ratified the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which ended the Mexican-American War.

In 1864, President Abraham Lincoln assigned Ulysses S. Grant, who had just received his commission as lieutenant-general, to the command of the Armies of the United States.

In 1876, Alexander Graham Bell's assistant, Thomas Watson, heard Bell say over his experimental telephone: "Mr. Watson — come here — I want to see you" from the next room of Bell's Boston laboratory.

In 1969, James Earl Ray pleaded guilty in Memphis, Tenn. (on his 41st birthday) to assassinating civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. (Ray later repudiated that plea, maintaining his innocence until his death.)

I know the struggle with my conscience during the Mexican War. I have never altogether forgiven myself for going into that. I had very strong opinions on the subject. I do not think there was ever a more wicked war than that waged by the United States on Mexico. I thought so at the time, when I was a youngster, only I had not moral courage enough to resign. I had taken an oath to serve eight years, unless sooner discharged, and I considered my supreme duty was to my flag. I had a horror of the Mexican War, and I have always believed that it was on our part most unjust. The wickedness was not in the way our soldiers conducted it, but in the conduct of our government in declaring war.

-- Ulysses S. Grant to journalist John Russell Young (1879).