"Einstein's Big Idea"...back again

In case you missed it the first time around [October 11th, 2005], PBS will offer NOVA's "Einstein's Big Idea" this Tuesday, September 16th. Frankly, I was not impressed and displeased with Einstein's treatment and opinion of Mileva Maric.

From the love letters between Albert and Mileva Maric: The rules of a relationship...humm.

A. You will see to it (1) that my clothes and linen are kept in order, (2) that I am served three regular meals a day in my room, (3) that my bedroom and study are always kept in good order and my desk is not touched by anyone other than me.

B. You will renounce all personal relations with me, except when they are required to keep up social appearances. In particular, you will not request (1) that I sit with you at home, (2) that I go out with you or travel with you.

C. You will promise explicitly to observe the following points in contact with me: (1) you will expect no affection from me and you will not reproach me for this, (2) you must answer at once when I speak to you, (3) you must leave my bedroom or study at once without protesting when I ask you to go.

D. You will promise not to denigrate me in the eyes of the children either by word or deed.

I think by the time this was written the marriage was on a slippery slope to failure. Such was the end of ten years of companionship. It is interesting to note that the parcel of the letters that was offered at auction in the winter of 1996 fell far short of Christie's estimated worth of nearly $2,000,000. The whole lot went for about $800.00 while a book dealer in California paid nearly $400,00 for 1913 and 1914 musings as Einstein developed the general theory of relativity. Go figure. I would sell my love letters for 800k in a heart beat--all three of them.

Transcript...

"Einstein's Big Idea"

NOVA's website for "Einstein's Big Idea"

And the transcript from another Einstein offering.

"Einstein Revealed"

"Making Einstein's Big Idea"

by

Gary Johnstone

September 2005

Symmetry

I worked on the film Einstein's Big Idea for about eighteen months—from early research to completion of the edit. In all that time two questions recurred: How does a filmmaker write a film about science geniuses? How do you get actors to play physicists? As we Brits like to say, "Blimey!"

My short (and more truthful) answer to both those questions is that you follow your nose and hope for the best. My considered answer (and one which conveniently rewrites history with the benefit of hindsight) would be as follows:

My dad was an electrical engineer and a part-time artist. So my brain has receptors for both flavors of human endeavor. I studied physics and chemistry at high school. I studied psychology, philosophy of science, and artificial intelligence at university. I studied the nature of creativity at grad school. But of course I hung around with the art school lot and the theater group crowd. So I'm a filmmaker, but I'm also not an alien to the world of physics and I have a vague memory of T.S. Kuhn.

What struck me most about the book E=mc2: A Biography of the World's Most Famous Equation by David Bodanis, on which the program is based, were the human stories behind the icons. I guess I wanted to be iconoclastic. In a vaguely jealous way, I wanted to see the flawed person behind the myth.

Einstein was a bit of a dude, a skirt-chaser. Faraday was driven by a fundamentalist religious faith. Lavoisier was a really uptight guy. Maxwell, a hero in my homeland of Scotland, was someone I knew nothing about (despite walking into a million buildings named after him). Émilie du Châtelet, just a wild, wonderful person, and Lise Meitner, an adventure story/opera all on her own. How can you not make a great film with such a cast?

So having established that scientists are not boring, I moved onto stage two. I read everything I could, right down to primary sources—diaries and letters. Then I visited esteemed professors across the great lands of America. Only one made me feel like a fool. He wasn't trying to, he just had that attitude: "I'll explain it once, if you don't get it, then I haven't got the time to explain it twice." Eventually, after about six months of study, I felt I just about "got it." Then I had to find a way of explaining it to the "myself" of six months previously. Luckily I had an advisory panel of professors and high-school physics teachers to guide me. To be honest, it was trial and error.

In making a 110-minute film about two hundred years of science, you have to be ever-so-slightly reductionist. I boiled the science down as much as I could. There is a fine line between too much and too little science in a program like NOVA. The viewers who understand the science want more science; those attracted to the human stories want less science. You can't win. We had a slogan on set when we were filming: "When the science gets boring, cut to the sex."

I think the thing that comes across most powerfully to me about all the geniuses in the program is that they were all hugely passionate for their subjects and totally unreconstructed workaholics. I've only given a taste of how bright, how addicted to their mission, how "other" these scientists were. We only scratched the surface of these remarkable people.

If anything, Einstein's Big Idea is more of a fairy tale than a definitive account. It's meta-reality. In fact, what I've done is the opposite of what I thought I was setting out to do: I've turned physicists into heroes. It's a very contentious thing to do in the world of history of science. Quite a lot of physicists who have seen the film seem to like it, however. Why should cops, firefighters, and soldiers get all the mythologizing?

And to finish, how do you explain physicists to actors? I repeat, "Blimey!" Well, I tried to tell them how keen you all are, how absorbed and intense. I went to great lengths to unpick your wonderfully complex, bizarre personalities. You should have seen the blank expressions. In the end, two words solved the problem. "Star Trek." Just say the gobbledegook and keep smiling! Of course, the actors got the passion, the obsession, and the drive, but the math and physics? Forget about it!

[Gary Johnstone is producer, director, and writer of Einstein's Big Idea, based on the book E=mc2: A Biography of the World's Most Famous Equation by David Bodanis.]


E=mc2...Einstein's idea?

I wrote on October 12th, 2005:

For the most part the hype was not far off the mark for NOVA's "Einstein's Big Idea " was an entertaining section of physics and history of science. I was pleased in that Einstein was not the core of presentation and that antecedent events and personalities were introduced. Actually, as advertised, the star of the docudrama was "E=mc²". It was refreshing to note individuals such as Sir Humphry Davy, Michael Faraday, Robert Clerk Maxwell, Émilie du Châletet, Isaac Newton, Lise Meitner, Otto Hahn, Marie-Anne Pierette Paulze, Antoine-Laurent de Lavoisier and interwove their contributions to the equation. [All pre-Einstein dramatizations smacked of the short lived Steve Allen PBS production "You Are There" many years ago.] Despite the showcase of Émilie du Châletet and Lise Meitner, it sidestepped the controversial issue of Maleva Maric and portrayed her as a domestic, mother, and "Do you want me to check your mathematics?" person. Her whole role was underplayed as compared to the cool performances and significance of Émilie du Châletet and Lise Meitner. For the most part, women got a "bum rap" and it says little of anything encouraging young women to pursue science and more of the social times of the eras. Einstein himself comes off as the typical personification of undergraduate males: Lazy, cafe [pub] patrons, over confident, and in Einstein's case arrogant and devoid of establishing meaningful relationships [with either his wife or most colleagues].

The production itself was elaborate and well done. There were lots of details especially in the laboratories of Sir Humphry Davy and Michael Faraday. The rotating wire around an iron core floating in a pool of mercury was spectacular. And, it was good that the special, computer generated effects were minimal. The balance between the historical production and input from contemporary scientists was informative and not overdone punctuating each element of E=mc² with relevant material or relevant comments on the personalities.

There appears to be a shift in the methodology of NOVA in the past decade or so for the hard hitting format has been replaced with dramatic representations. Maybe this is what it takes to get science to the public. The 112 minute two part production was better than expected and I am sure David Bodanis's book E=mc²: A Biography of the World's Most Famous Equation would offer detailed, quiet insight that just couldn't be covered in the film.

Einstein: Chauvinist?

Mileva and Albert

Jeeze...this is juicy stuff and certainly shows a darker side and staunch European male attitude at that time.

From the love letters between Albert and Mileva Maric: The rules of a relationship...humm.

A. You will see to it (1) that my clothes and linen are kept in order, (2) that I am served three regular meals a day in my room, (3) that my bedroom and study are always kept in good order and my desk is not touched by anyone other than me.

B. You will renounce all personal relations with me, except when they are required to keep up social appearances. In particular, you will not request (1) that I sit with you at home, (2) that I go out with you or travel with you.

C. You will promise explicitly to observe the following points in contact with me: (1) you will expect no affection from me and you will not reproach me for this, (2) you must answer at once when I speak to you, (3) you must leave my bedroom or study at once without protesting when I ask you to go.

D. You will promise not to denigrate me in the eyes of the children either by word or deed.

I think by the time this was written the marriage was on a slippery slope to failure. Such was the end of ten years of companionship. It is interesting to note that the parcel of the letters that was offered at auction in the winter of 1996 fell far short of Christie's estimated worth of nearly $2,000,000. The whole lot went for about $800.00 while a book dealer in California paid nearly $400,00 for 1913 and 1914 musings as Einstein developed the general theory of relativity. Go figure. I would sell my love letters for 800k in a heart beat--all three of them.


Einstein in Love: A Scientific Romance by, Dennis Overbye

ISBN: 0-670-89430-3

Review:

It would be a mistake to judge Dennis Overbye's book Einstein in Love: A Scientific Romance by its cover, because this book is as much a story about science at the beginning of the twentieth century as it is a story about the romantic life of one of the great scientific minds of the time.

At its heart, this book is a biography of Albert Einstein that focuses specifically on his most productive period as a scientist, a time that spans roughly the years 1900-1920. In the course of 370 pages, it discusses his accomplishments as a scientists and the episodes that were shaping his personal life during this time.

Of the two, Einstein's place as a scientist is most well-known to even the most unscientific among us. (The fact that Einstein's likeness was recently found on television dancing among the stars while selling something as mundane as a soft drink is a testament to his position as the archetypal scientist in our collective subconscious.) And it is to these unscientific masses that Overbye has pitched his book. That doesn't mean that this is not a well-researched work. In fact, quite the opposite is true. The fifteen pages of end notes and 70 bibliographical references attest to the research that has gone into producing it. Rather, it is a warning to mathematicians that they won't attain a deeper understanding of the scientific work of the time by reading this book. They will, however, learn some of the basic facts of the history of science at the end of the nineteenth century.

A typical example is Overbye's discussion of non-Euclidean geometry. Like much of the mathematics and physics in the rest of the work, non-Euclidean geometry is presented as the outgrowth of a long philosophical conversation that was reaching a climax at the turn of the century. Overbye's description begins with Plato, whose argument that anyone could attain absolute knowledge with the proper reasoning was the basis of the absolute laws that were the goal of scientific exploration. However, this perspective had been mortally wounded when the empiricist David Hume launched his critique of causality. As Einstein himself wrote (and Overbye relates), "Hume's clear message seemed crushing: the sensory raw material, the only source of our knowledge, through habit may lead us to belief and expectation but not to the knowledge and still less to the understanding of lawful relations." Enter Immanuel Kant, who argued that the mind had pre-built categories into which it could organize the output of sensation. Among these categories, he argued, "were the ideas of absolute space, time, causality, and the axioms of geometry". For Overbye, the discovery of non-Euclidean geometries was the next phase in this Hegelian process of history. Lobachevsky and others showed that there was nothing sacred about the axioms of Euclidean geometry and Bernhard Riemann ("a man seriously ahead of his time") then showed these different geometries had a reality all their own when he "demonstrated that they described the surfaces of various curved three-dimensional objects".

And... well, that's about it. As in the remainder of the book, there is no mathematics here, only broad descriptions of powerful mathematical ideas and of the scientists who were thinking them. In fact, for Overbye the people are as important as the ideas. Boltzmann, Curie, Helmholtz, Hertz, Hilbert, Hopf, Hurwitz, Klein, Lorentz, Maxwell, Minkowski, Planck, Poincaré, Riemann — the index reads like the index of a science or math text and in many lengthy passages Overbye introduces his readers to the many mathematicians and scientists who were wrestling with the problems of the day. For instance, Poincaré, who enters the stage in the midst of the debate on non-Euclidean geometry, is described vividly:

A portly man of medium height with a bushy beard, pince-nez, and a legendary air of distraction about him, Poincaré was the greatest living mathematician in France and perhaps the world, arguably the greatest living Frenchman. Poincaré was the last man who seemed to know everything. He had qualified for membership in every section of the French Academy of Sciences, from geology to mathematics. As the author of thirty books and five hundred articles, he was elected as well to the literary section of the Academie Française. On top of everything else, he was an avid dancer. Every year he lectured on a different field of physics. His trademark was inventing new fields of mathematics.

There are also many equally vivid geographical descriptions scattered throughout the book. At times, Overbye shifts into the present tense and the book is suddenly transformed into a travel guide for central Europe. Consider Overbye's description of Schaffhausen, Switzerland, where Einstein worked briefly as a private tutor:

Schaffhausen, its cobbled, walled streets arranged around an eleventh-century cathedral, a vineyard fortress whose cannons command the Rhine valley to this day, is one of Switzerland's prettier towns, famous for its rococo architecture and frescoed facades. An astronomical clock tower with gold sun, moon, and planets sweeping the zodiacal circle, capable of tracking eclipses and changing seasons as well as the time, stands over Fronwagplatz, the central marketplace.

Undoubtedly, the most important thread winding throughout the entire story is Einstein's relationship with Mileva Maric, his first wife. Much has been written about the role that Maric played in Einstein's professional development, with some even suggesting that Einstein gave her his Nobel Prize money (which was awarded after they were divorced) because he felt she was more deserving of it than he was. Overbye does not seem to be sympathetic to this perspective. He recognizes that Maric was truly ahead of her time and was able to accomplish many things that other women could not. There is also no doubt that she shared Einstein's love of physics, that early on in their relationship they spoke constantly about it, and that they both eventually succumbed to the expectations placed on each of the sexes during that time period. ("Things don't look nearly as bad at home as you think. You'll be able to clean up in short order," he once wrote to her.) But in the end, the Mileva Maric that Overbye describes suffers from the same faults and frailties that separate the rest of us from the Einsteins of the world. The most he is willing to admit is that working with Einstein "was bound to undermine her own self-confidence".

Moreover, for Overbye, the major focus is not the professional attachment, but the personal attachment between the two of them. Drawing on many sources, including numerous personal correspondences, Overbye relates much of the raw emotion of this relationship and its consequences throughout it's entire trajectory, and the scenes from this ever-evolving relationship are a major source of the drama of this work. There are happy moments when they are both students studying physics in Zurich and lamenting the "philistine" ways of their society, but it's mostly a long painful journey that seems doomed from the beginning. To start things off, it seems Einstein may have never even seen his only daughter — born before he and Mileva were married and presumably given up for adoption. In fact, the fate of this daughter is a mystery that historians are still debating, and even Einstein's own sons didn't know she existed until after their mother's death. When Einstein and Maric eventually married six years after they had met, Einstein made his vows only "out of a sense of duty". Eventually, Einstein would leave Mileva to take up with his cousin Elsa in Berlin. In the process, he would severely strain his relationships with both of his sons. For a long time his oldest son Hans Albert wouldn't speak to him, and, as Overbye relates, his youngest son Eduard began to feel abandoned, writing at one point: "The worst destiny is to have no destiny, and also to be the destiny of no one else." Moreover, even after leaving Mileva, Einstein still could not put his personal life in order. When it came time to commit to Elsa he found himself tempted by her daughter, Ilse, and seems to have settled for Elsa only when Ilse turned him down. As expected given these prenuptial problems, his time with Elsa was also marked by numerous infidelities.

The sad story of Einstein's personal life aside, I enjoyed this book. In fact, I couldn't put it down. As someone who knew only the vague outlines of Einstein's life, I was enthralled by the drama of it all. Not only was this the all-too-human story of one of the great thinkers of the twentieth century, it was also the story of a genius, laboring at the fringes of the scientific establishment, who might not have been. Overbye captures this drama on every page — from Einstein's carefree days as a student in Zurich and his post-graduate days as a patent clerk with a wife and family waiting at home, all the way to his discovery by the popular press following the astronomical observations during the eclipse of 1919 that confirmed general relativity.

This book won't make the subtleties of Einstein's work clear, but for someone trying to get a feel for the history of science at the end of the nineteenth century, there is much that can be learned from it. Avid historians may be bothered by Overbye's lofty goal of making the turn-of-the-century discoveries of physics the dramatic conclusion of a story of scientific progress centuries in the making, but mathematical generalists will enjoy both the well-told tales from the history of mathematics in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and the personal stories from the lives of scientists and mathematicians of the time.

For mathematics educators, there is also a lot to think about in this book. Einstein succeeded in spite of — and not because of — the education he received. In many ways, he was his teachers' worst nightmare — a "nondiligent" student who skipped classes and had little respect for his teachers, who in turn had little respect for him. In fact, it's likely that a professor's poor recommendation was the reason this undisputed genius began his working life as a patent clerk. On the other hand, Einstein was gifted with those basic qualities that every teacher tries to inspire in his or her students. He was extraordinarily curious and an inveterate reader who, unfortunately, indulged in his passion for philosophy and physics both on his own time and on his professors' time. Maybe Einstein was the ultimate counter-example in a long tradition of seemingly disinterested students who even today wander through the halls of colleges and universities. But maybe he points to an untapped well of talent and motivation that all educators should continually seek to discover and harness in any student that happens to cross their path.

Also:

In Albert's Shadow : The Life and Letters of Mileva Maric, Einstein's First Wife

by,

Milan Popovic

ISBN: 080187856

Percy Lavon Julian...chemist

Percy Lavon Julian
1899-1975

Gender has given science a bad reputation as previously exemplified by articles on Lise Meitner , Rosalind Franklin , Mileva Maric [Einstein's first wife] , and Mary Tsingou [Menzel] and race is not immune either. Such is the case with Percy Julian an organic chemist that provided humanity with many medicinal drugs including cortisone.

Julian was born in Montgomery, Alabama to Elizabeth (1878-?) and James Sumner Julian I (1871–?). James was a railway mail carrier for the United States Post Office, and his father was a slave. Elizabeth worked as a school teacher. He grew up in the time of Jim Crow. Among his childhood memories was finding a lynched man hung from a tree while walking in the woods near his home. While it was generally unheard of for African Americans at the time to pursue an education beyond the 8th grade, Julian's father steered all of his children towards higher education. Julian attended DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana. At the time, the college accepted very few African American students and the town was segregated. Julian was not allowed to live in the college dormitories and initially stayed in an off campus boarding home where he was refused meals. It was days after his arrival before Julian found an establishment that would allow him to eat. Ultimately, he took work firing the furnace and doing other odd jobs in a fraternity house and, in return for his service, he was allowed to sleep in the basement and eat. He graduated from DePauw in 1920 Phi Beta Kappa and valedictorian. By 1930 Julian's father had moved the entire family to Greencastle, Indiana so that all his children could attend college at DePauw, he was still working as a railroad postal clerk.

Julian wanted to obtain his doctorate in chemistry but learned it would be difficult for an African American. He was denied access to American doctorate programs because they felt that the only jobs obtainable post-graduation would be as instructors at all black colleges. After graduating from DePauw, Julian became a chemistry instructor at Fisk University. He then received an Austin Fellowship in Chemistry and went to Harvard University in 1923 for his M.S. Worried that white students would resent being taught by an African American, Harvard withdrew Julian's teaching assistantship and he was unable to complete his Ph.D. at Harvard. In 1929 Julian received a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship to continue his graduate work at the University of Vienna, and he received his Ph.D. in 1931. He studied under Ernst Späth and was considered an impressive student. In Europe, he found freedom from the racial prejudices that nearly stifled him in the States. He freely participated in intellectual social gatherings, went to the opera and found greater acceptance among his peers. Julian was the third African American to receive a Ph.D. in chemistry after St. Elmo Brady and Edward M. A. Chandler.--Wikipedia.

"Reclaiming a Black Research Scientist's Forgotten Legacy"

by

Felicia R. Lee

February 6th, 2007

The New York Times

On the day that Percy L. Julian graduated at the top of his class at DePauw University, his great-grandmother bared her shoulders and, for the first time, showed him the deep scars that remained from a beating she had received as a slave during the last days of the Civil War. She then clutched his Phi Beta Kappa key in her hand and said, "This is worth all the scars."

Every February, when the curtain lifts on Black History Month, the cast of highlighted lives is often familiar: a Martin Luther King Jr., a Katherine Dunham. But the documentary Forgotten Genius, to be broadcast tonight as part of the Nova science series on PBS, dramatizes the story of Mr. Julian, a largely neglected black chemist who was nonetheless one of the most important scientists of the 20th century. He is played by the Tony Award-winning actor Ruben Santiago-Hudson, and the moment with his great-grandmother is but one in a film full of the echoes of the country’s painful racial history.

The Nova filmmakers’ effort to revive Mr. Julian’s legacy is not only riveting, but also one of the most ambitious projects in the 34-year history of Nova. His work included discoveries in the synthesis of cortisone, an anti-inflammatory used in the treatment of rheumatoid arthritis and many other conditions. In 1999 the American Chemical Society recognized his synthesis of physostigmine, a glaucoma drug, as one of the top 25 achievements in the history of American chemistry. He was the first black chemist ever elected to the National Academy of Sciences.

"It’s been just wonderful," Paula S. Apsell, the senior executive producer for Nova, said of making the two-hour film. "It’s that delicious feeling you get when you know you’re on to something away from the crowd."

Because there was no full biography of Mr. Julian, Ms. Apsell said, about four years went into original research on his story: finding his unpublished autobiography, gathering speeches in which he talked about his life and work, conducting oral histories around the country with those who knew him. The project director was Stephen Lyons, an independent producer who was a co-writer and co-producer of the film with Llewellyn M. Smith (an associate producer for Eyes on the Prize). Mr. Smith is the director of Forgotten Genius.

Narrated by the actor Courtney B. Vance (Ron Carver on Law & Order: Criminal Intent), Forgotten Genius relies on a combination of interviews and dramatic re-enactments. Early on, viewers see the sheer odds against Mr. Julian, who was born in Montgomery, Ala., in 1899 and died in 1975.

In one scene he is 12, walking in the Alabama woods, when he discovers a young lynching victim hanging from a tree. He reaches out and touches the body. The adult Julian comments, "He didn’t look like a criminal; he just looked like a scared boy."

Mr. Smith said, "I think in the film there’s a view of him as a whole human being, and that’s unusual for scientists."

Mr. Julian’s name came up around 1998, Ms. Apsell recalled, when Nova sought to inject some diversity into a series about the lives of scientists, profiles that had included Albert Einstein, Galileo and Isaac Newton.

The dramatic spine of Forgotten Genius has Mr. Julian telling his story in flashback before an audience, documenting a life in which accomplishment and oppression took turns.

Harvard awarded him a master's degree but would not support him in getting his doctorate (he earned it at the University of Vienna); potential employers snubbed him. ("We didn’t know you were a Negro," the DuPont Company told him after inviting him for an interview.)

After doors slammed and opportunities vanished, Mr. Julian landed a job at Howard University, only to become enmeshed in a sex scandal that ended his employment there: He and his future wife were accused of having an affair while she was still married to one of his colleagues.

He spent years teaching at DePauw, in Greencastle, Ind., where a building is now named in his honor, but was denied a faculty position. After almost two decades at the Glidden company, where his research made possible a fire-retardant foam widely used in World War II and the mass production of synthetic progesterone, the company told him to concentrate on things like nonsplattering shortening.

By the time he became successful enough to move with his wife and two children into Oak Park, Ill., a mostly white Chicago suburb, their home was the target of a bomb and a fire.

"The good side was, as a kid I got to spend more time with my dad and stay up late, because we’d sit in the tree outside," recalls Percy Julian Jr., now a civil rights lawyer in Madison, Wis. "He’d sit there with a shotgun. And we’d talk about why someone would want to do this, and how wrong it was and how stupid it was."

Mr. Santiago-Hudson, who is also a playwright, said the project resonated with his desire to mirror the black American journey. He recalled eagerly reading boxes of material as the filmmakers did their research.

"I became Percy Julian," he said. "These are the stories I want to tell. They straighten us out in a society where the people who write the history books want the heroes to look like them."

Mr. Julian is certainly a hero by the end of the film, though he laments, "I feel that my own country robbed me of the chance for some of the great experiences that I would have liked to live through." By 1953 he had established Julian Laboratories (which he sold for more than $2 million in 1961), and he later formed Julian Research Institute, a nonprofit organization. He won accolades for his support of the civil rights struggle and was able to hire many black scientists and inspire many more.

One was James Shoffner, an organic chemistry researcher, who in Forgotten Genius compares Mr. Julian to Jackie Robinson as a barrier-breaker. Mr. Shoffner, 79, said he grew up reading about Mr. Julian in the so-called Negro press and met him in the late 1950s at a meeting of the American Chemical Society. He helped the society organize a symposium on Mr. Julian in 1999 and aided the Nova effort.

"Why he was not well known has to do with a series of factors, the first being the color of his skin," Mr. Shoffner said in a telephone interview. "Also, he did his science in a small liberal arts college in the middle of the country, and he did his science in industry. Those are two places not thought of as producing world-class science."

Already, because of the interest generated by the making of the film, Gerry Walanka, a Chicago lawyer and businessman, has begun a fund called In Search of Genius Foundation to help minority students interested in science. "We want to build on his story in a way that motivates young people," Mr. Walanka said. Nova is turning over more than 2,000 pages of transcripts from the film to an archive of the Julian family’s choice so that there can finally be a chance for a scholarly look at Mr. Julian.

"It certainly gives hope to young people about what you can be if you never, ever, ever give up," Mr. Julian’s son said. "That was the message our father gave us."

And from Depauw University e-history:

Percy Lavon Julian was born in Montgomery, Alabama in 1899. He was the grandson of a slave and the oldest child of James Sumner Julian, a railway mail clerk, and Elizabeth Adams Julian, a schoolteacher. After graduating from a small normal school in his home town, he entered DePauw University as a "subfreshman" in the fall of 1916. At first he lived in the attic of a fraternity house, where he worked as a janitor and waiter in return for room and board. Later his parents moved to Greencastle to establish a home for Percy and his two brothers and three sisters, all of whom eventually graduated from DePauw.

Percy quickly made up his academic deficiencies and majored in chemistry under the guidance of Professor William M. Blanchard. The southern-born Blanchard recognized his protégé's scientific potential but recommended that he find a teaching position in a black college after graduation rather than undertake advanced training, because his skin color would limit his chances for success as a chemist.

Graduating from DePauw in 1920 at the top of his class, Percy accepted an instructorship in chemistry at Fiske University. Two years later he received a fellowship to study at Harvard, where he earned an M.A. in 1923. After two more years spent at Harvard on various research grants, he went to West Virginia State College for Negroes and later to Howard University to teach chemistry. Taking leave to study at the University of Vienna, where he received a Ph.D. in 1931, Julian found his career momentarily blocked at Howard and had to look elsewhere for a suitable position.

In 1932 his old mentor Professor Blanchard, now academic dean of DePauw University, invited Julian to return to his alma mater as a research associate in organic chemistry. For four years Julian carried on research in Minshall Laboratory that led to the successful synthesis of physostigmine, a drug used in the treatment of glaucoma. But DePauw lost the opportunity to retain the services of a brilliant scientist when the board of trustees proved unwilling to grant the black chemist a regular faculty position. Instead, in 1936 Julian became director of research for the Soya Products Division of the Glidden Company in Chicago.

During 17 years with that company he developed such products as fire-fighting foam and perfected methods for the mass production of hormones. In 1953 he formed his own company, Julian Laboratories, Inc. with headquarters in Franklin Park, Ill. and branches in Mexico and Guatemala. One of his major accomplishments was a process for the commercial production of the arthritis drug cortisone. Eventually selling the company to two large pharmaceutical firms, he organized Julian Associates and the Julian Research Institute in 1964, continuing his work as a research scientist and consultant until his death in 1975.

Throughout his life Julian maintained a deep interest in DePauw University, visiting the campus frequently as a guest lecturer, becoming a trustee in 1967, and even purchasing a farm near Greencastle as a country retreat. After his death his widow, Dr. Anna Johnson Julian, and their children, Faith and Percy Jr., established a trust fund to support research programs in the university's chemistry department and an annual Percy L. Julian Memorial Lecture. Also included was a scholarship fund to enable talented students to prepare themselves for careers in chemistry or related fields. Finally, in 1980 DePauw University rededicated the recently constructed building housing the mathematics and physical science departments as the Percy L. Julian Science and Mathematics Center.

And NOVA offered a fine production... Ruben Santiago-Hudson as Percy Julian in NOVA's Percy Julian: Forgotten Genius

NOVA

Transcript

E=mc2...Einstein's idea?

Has anyone ever heard of Olinto De Pretto ? History of science scholarship by Umberto Bartocci [Professor of Mathematics at the University of Perugia, Italy] has revealed that the famous equation [E=mc2] attributed to Einstein was published two years prior to Einstein's publication in 1905 in an Italian journal ["Reale Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti" (The Veneto Institute of Science, Letters and Proceedings) on February 27th, 1904 by Olinto De Pretto entitled "Ipotesi dell’etere nella vita dell’universo" (Hypothesis of the Essence of the Universe). Is this the making of an urban myth or the truth? It is difficult to determine for even though the Italian journals are available, they haven't been translated and I certainly don't read Italian. Furthermore, the elements of this material is potential for a miniseries on the "Discover" channel: Olinto De Pretto..."In 1921, a year before Einstein received the Nobel Prize, De Pretto was shot dead, murdered by a woman over a business dispute." Einstein was fluent in Italian and could have see the publication. True or not, it is interesting to read the cadre who wish to debunk Einstein for whatever their group or personal agendas may be. Does it really make much difference whether Einstein culled previous information to condense that data into more meaningful statements? It may well be true that there is over emphasis placed on one individual to arrive at the published conclusions in 1905 and better historically to acknowledge the contributions [including his wife Mileva] of predecessor's input. Umberto Bartocci has written a book about all of this.

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