Gizmorama - December 10, 2014

Good Morning,

Albert Einstein left behind 80,000 pages of documents and they are now available online thanks to the Digital Einstein Project. The genius that's within those 80,000 pages. Amazing!

Learn about this and more interesting stories from the scientific community in today's issue.

Until Next Time,
Erin

P.S. PulseTV customers, remember that Monday, December 15th (by 10 a.m. Central Time) is the last day to get your order in time for Christmas with standard shipping!

***
* World's largest telescope to be built in Chile *
LA SILLA, Chile (UPI) - The European Southern Observatory's Council announced Thursday the construction of the world's largest telescope has been approved.

The European Extremely Large Telescope (E-ELT), as it's currently called, will be built in the Atacama Desert in Chile, on top of a mountain named Cerro Armazones.

The desert is known for having one of the clearest views of the night sky, due to lack of clouds, dry air and no light pollution.

"The decision taken by Council means that the telescope can now be built, and that major industrial construction work for the E-ELT is now funded and can proceed according to plan," said Tim de Zeeuw, ESO's Director General. "There is already a lot of progress in Chile on the summit of Armazones and the next few years will be very exciting."

It is the "most powerful of all the extremely large telescope projects currently planned," he said.

The approval only applies to the first phase of construction, and talks regarding the second phase will begin at the end of 2015.

Construction is expected to reach completion in 2024, and the telescope will feature a light-collecting surface 128 feet wide.


*Einstein documents digitization project complete*
PRINCETON, N.J. (UPI) - Anyone with a computer and an Internet connection can now explore more than 80,000 pages of documents left behind by the world's most famous physics genius, Albert Einstein.

The now-complete Digital Einstein project -- the online phase of the Einstein Papers project and a collaboration between Princeton University Press and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (to whom the scientist bequeathed his intellectual legacy) -- is nearly two decades in the making. Researchers began sorting through the physicist's letters, papers, postcards, notebooks and diaries in 1986.

The online documents correspond with a series of physical books, The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein, previously released by Princeton University Press. The more than 5,000 searchable online documents, available in German and English, cover Einstein's life through his 1921 Nobel prize in physics.

"We want to make everything accessible to a much wider audience than just the scholars, historians, physicists and philosophers," Diana Kormos-Buchwald, director of the Einstein Papers project, told The Guardian. "It's been a challenge to get all the material online, but I'm extremely thrilled that we have succeeded."

Additional documents will be uploaded over time as additional volumes are printed by Princeton.

"We've been working on it for a while, and we've been thinking about it for a long time," Kormos-Buchwald told Inside Higher Education. "Only now do we have a fantastic colleague like [Princeton University Press's] Kenneth Reed who could make it so that it could be standardized and authorized and correct."

Missed an Issue? Visit the Gizmorama Archives