(Press-News.org) The 1949 letter by the physicist and Nobel laureate discusses bees, birds and whether new physics principles could come from studying animal senses.
It's a position still being realised within physics to this day, with a growing body of research and understanding of how animals such as birds and bees find their way around.
Now a study led by RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia, discusses how recent discoveries in migratory birds back up Einstein's thinking 72 years ago.
The previously unpublished letter was shared with researchers by Judith Davys - Einstein had addressed it to her late husband, radar researcher Glyn Davys.
RMIT's Associate Professor Adrian Dyer has published significant studies into bees and is the lead author of the new paper on Einstein's letter, published in the Journal of Comparative Physiology A.
Dyer said the letter shows how Einstein envisaged new discoveries could come from studying animals.
"Seven decades after Einstein proposed new physics might come from animal sensory perception, we're seeing discoveries that push our understanding about navigation and the fundamental principles of physics," he said.
The letter also proves Einstein met with Nobel laurate Karl von Frisch, who was a leading bee and animal sensory researcher.
In April 1949, von Frisch presented his research on how honeybees navigate more effectively using the polarisation patterns of light scattered from the sky.
The day after Einstein attended von Frisch's lecture, the two researchers shared a private meeting.
Although this meeting wasn't formally documented, the recently discovered letter from Einstein provides insight into what they might have talked about.
"It is thinkable that the investigation of the behaviour of migratory birds and carrier pigeons may someday lead to the understanding of some physical process which is not yet known," Einstein wrote.
Professor Andrew Greentree, a theoretical physicist at RMIT, said Einstein also suggested that for bees to extend our knowledge of physics, new types of behaviour would need to be observed.
"Remarkably, it is clear through his writing that Einstein envisaged new discoveries could come from studying animals' behaviours," Greentree said.
More than 70 years since Einstein sent his letter, research is revealing the secrets of how migratory birds navigate while flying thousands of kilometres to arrive at a precise destination.
In 2008, research on thrushes fitted with radio transmitters showed, for the first time, that these birds use a form of magnetic compass as their primary orientation guide during flight.
One theory for the origin of magnetic sense in birds is the use of quantum randomness and entanglement. Both of these physics concepts were first proposed by Einstein.
INFORMATION:
The letter to Glyn Davys shows the openness of Einstein's mind to novel possibilities observed in nature and the evidence that he took an interest in von Frish and his bee research.
'Einstein, von Frisch and the honeybee: a historical letter comes to light', with Adrian Dyer, Andrew Greentree, Jair Garcia, Elinya Dyer, Scarlett Howard and Fredrich Barth, is published in the Journal of Comparative Physiology A (DOI: 10.1007/s00359-021-01490-6).
If you did not catch the flu this year -- and there is an overwhelming chance that you did not -- you have COVID-19 to thank.
It's a small consolation, given the enormously disruptive scope of the pandemic. But it's the focus of a new paper published in the journal Frontiers in Public Health by two Concordia researchers and their colleagues that studies the 2020 influenza figures from Canada, the United States, Australia and Brazil. The authors show there is a clear relationship between the implementation of COVID-mitigation measures such as hand-washing, masking and social distancing and the spread of the annual flu.
They write that these preventive measures all but eliminated ...
The quest to create safer, more successful pregnancies is one of the top goals of modern science. While pregnancy is better understood today than ever before, with improvements in technology helping to lower the risk of negative outcomes, there is much researchers still don't know about a vital part of the pregnancy process: uterine fluid.
Secreted by glands in the uterus during pregnancy, uterine fluid is believed to play an important role in supporting a developing embryo by sending information from the uterus to the embryo, along with a host ...
In 2020, stores sold out of garden seed, coops and rabbit cages. Now, we have an idea how much protein people can grow in their backyards.
The 2020 meat shortages led many to wonder what to eat for protein when supply chains are disrupted. Some people turned to gathering eggs, raising animals and growing their own food. A team from Michigan Technological University and the University of Alaska Fairbanks found that the work is well worth it. In a new study published in Sustainability, the researchers looked at how a typical household with a typical backyard can raise chickens, rabbits or soybeans to meet its protein needs.
People eat a lot of protein in the U.S. and the average person needs 51 grams of ...
MINNEAPOLIS/ST.PAUL (05/12/2021) -- In a study recently published in END ...
DURHAM, N.H.-- A national report from the University of New Hampshire shows close to one and a half million children each year visit a doctor, emergency room or medical facility as a result of an assault, abuse, crime or other form of violence. This is four times higher than previous estimates based only on data from U.S. emergency rooms for violence-related treatment.
In their END ...
A portable, rapid testing platform can detect gonorrhea infections in patient samples in under 15 minutes, far faster than standard-of-care tests that can take hours or days. The platform accurately detected infections and determined resistance to a common antibiotic in 217 patient samples from sexual health clinics in Baltimore and Uganda. The technology's speed and low cost could empower quicker and more affordable gonorrhea testing in low-resource regions, as well as help combat the spread of drug-resistant strains. Rates of gonorrhea and other sexually transmitted ...
A new, noninvasive method for measuring brain blood flow with light has been developed by biomedical engineers and neurologists at the University of California, Davis, and used to detect brain activation. The new method, functional interferometric diffusing wave spectroscopy, or fiDWS, promises to be cheaper than existing technology and could be used for assessing brain injuries, or in neuroscience research. The work is published May 12 in Science Advances.
"Now we can assess how well the brain regulates blood flow, and even detect brain activation noninvasively in adult humans, using principles similar to functional ...
MISSOULA - Only an anthropologist would treasure millennia-old human feces found in dry caves.
Just ask Dr. Meradeth Snow, a University of Montana researcher and co-chair of UM's Department of Anthropology. She is part of an international team, led by the Harvard Medical School-affiliated Joslin Diabetes Center, that used human "paleofeces" to discover that ancient people had far different microorganisms living in their guts than we do in modern times.
Snow said studying the gut microbes found in the ancient fecal material may offer clues to combat diseases like diabetes that afflict people living in today's industrialized societies.
"We ...
Researchers used genetic engineering tools to create a virus that can enter specific neurons and insert into the prefrontal cortex a new genetic code that induces the production of modified proteins. In tests with mice, the alteration of these proteins was sufficient to modify brain activity, indicating a potential biomarker for the diagnosis of psychiatric disorders such as schizophrenia and autism.
Sometimes referred to as the "executive brain", the prefrontal cortex is the region that governs higher-level cognitive functions and decision making. Studies of tissue from this brain region in patients with schizophrenia have detected alterations in two proteins: BDNF (brain-derived neurotrophic factor) and trkB (tyrosine receptor kinase B).
The relationship ...
A new study by the University of Georgia revealed that more college students change majors within the STEM pipeline than leave the career path of science, technology, engineering and mathematics altogether.
Funded by a National Institutes of Health grant and a National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship and done in collaboration with the University of Wisconsin, the study examined interviews, surveys and institutional data from 1,193 students at a U.S. midwestern university for more than six years to observe a single area of the STEM pipeline: biomedical fields of study.
Out of 921 students ...
