According to the documentary record, what was arguably the hottest hot streak in the history of the human mind was beginning just about 100 years ago. A nobody in a Swiss patent office, awaiting his doctorate and working essentially in isolation, was preparing to submit nearly two dozen reviews of technical papers for a scientific journal. That was Albert Einstein’s batting practice, just two weeks shy of his 26th birthday.
What followed was an “annus mirabilis“--roughly a miracle year, the coming together of more than one seminal, ground-shattering event. Usually the term applies to the output of more than one person--as in the annus mirabilis of 1922, when both T.S. Eliot’s “Waste Land“ and James Joyce’s “Ulysses“ were published and modern 20th-century literature arrived with a bang.
But 1905 belonged to one man. Between March and late September, Einstein churned out five papers setting the elemental science of physics as it had existed until then on its ear. He submitted a sixth paper expanding on one of his earlier breakthroughs in December.
The giant forward strides taken inside his head set the stage for a revolution in human understanding of light, the atom, time, space, motion and matter. His output that year included a certain equation about energy and matter that is known around the world by people who have no idea what it means. Taken together, these strides have had impacts far beyond physics into philosophy, politics, religion, even art and music.
This year the United Nations is recognizing the centennial with an International Year of Physics. Symposiums at universities all over the world are being held as well.
The Bush administration, however, has chosen to dishonor the triumph of America’s best-known immigrant. Instead, it is starving the research activities of people working on potential breakthroughs across the board, especially those attempting pure research and thought of the kind that Einstein devoted his life to.
In lieu of a science-friendly government to celebrate Einstein, we non-experts at least have a marvelous book to turn to, hot off the Harvard University Press. In “Einstein 1905: The Standard of Greatness,“ John Rigden not only summarizes accessibly the great man’s accomplishments of that year; he analyzes the nature of scientific research.
A physics professor at Washington University in St. Louis, Rigden says scientists and their research breakthroughs differ from great accomplishments by artists and composers. If Claude Monet had never lived or if Mozart had not written his mold-breaking opera “The Magic Flute,“ their works would not exist. To that extent, the activity inside their heads is central.
Scientists, according to Rigden, are much more driven by events outside their creative heads. It is certain, he says, that particle theory, quantum physics, even relativity would have emerged out of the then-existing state of knowledge and inquiry. Where the scientist is unique is in his expression of what he discovers. Einstein famously said that “a storm broke loose in my mind“ that unprecedented year, and for all his genius he just as famously said that in pure research, “imagination is more important than knowledge.“
The only burst of work on this scale in science was Isaac Newton’s work in 1665 to 1666 when he produced findings on the makeup of light, the nature of gravity, and a method of mathematic calculation called calculus.
That is ironic because Einstein’s breakthroughs challenged Newtonian concepts of fixed relationships and immutable laws.
BOSTON.COM

Lebanese opposition protesters wave national flags as demonstrations continue in downtown Beirut, March 3. (AFP Photo)

People power has come to Lebanon. The resignation of the prime minister, Omar Karami, and his government would not have happened without thousands of Lebanese people laying peaceful siege to Parliament. The events on the streets of Beirut are comparable to the recent “orange“ revolution in Ukraine and earlier “velvet“ revolutions in Georgia and in Eastern Europe. They are not over yet, but are going to go down in the country’s history as a turning point as seminal as the civil war.
Either they will spell the end of the old order of confessional-based politics or they may be the prelude to a new era of violence and chaos. At the moment it is impossible to tell. What can be asserted with confidence, however, is that the assassination of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri has created a revolutionary mood in the country that transcends the traditional confessional divides. The killing has galvanized Lebanese, particularly young Lebanese--Sunni, Shiite, Christian, Druze--into action. They want change. On the other hand, there are those who may decide to resort to extreme violence to prevent change.
Events are not going to stop with Karami’s resignation. The protesters also want the resignations of President Emile Lahoud and the heads of the country’s intelligence services. Most of all, they want the complete withdrawal of Syrian troops from the country. Invigorated by their success in bringing down the government--possibly even astonished at their achievement--the protesters will carry on, confident that they can win, and because of that, thousands more are now likely to join their ranks.
Syria had already decided to redeploy its troops back toward its border, but this is unlikely to satisfy the protesters. Damascus, on the other hand, already under intense international pressure orchestrated largely from Washington, will resist a complete pullout, at least at the moment. To withdraw now would be seen as a humiliating cave-in to that pressure, in particular to the high-profile interference by Washington and Paris.
What is necessary now is that the rest of the world give the Lebanese the space to make up their own minds about what they want. What happens next must be their decision. The only role the outside world has is in preventing a recurrence of violence, and the best way to do that is by keeping out. That means that that the US, France and everyone else saying what ought to happen must adopt a hands-off policy. The lesson of Lebanon’s civil war is that when outsiders begin interfering, Lebanon suffers.
Winds of change are blowing though the region: Elections in Iraq, a successful rebellion against the old establishment in the Palestinian Parliament, constitutional changes on the cards in Egypt and now people power in Lebanon. Until a few weeks ago, change was seen as driven from outside, by the Americans. Those who still think that are clearly wrong. The Americans may have done some of the initial driving but it is now being driven from within. The Middle East is ready for change and wants a change but not only between Palestinian and Israeli.
ARABNEWS.COM

No country likes to come to terms with embarrassing parts of its past. Japanese schoolbooks still whitewash the atrocities of World War II, and the Turkish government continues to deny the Armenian genocide. Until about 1970, the millions of visitors to Colonial Williamsburg saw no indication that roughly half the inhabitants of the original town were slaves.
Until recently, one of the world’s more blatant denials of history had been taking place at the Royal Museum of Central Africa, an immense, chateau-like building on the outskirts of Brussels.
It was founded a century ago by Belgium’s King Leopold II, who, from 1885 to 1908, literally owned the Congo as the world’s only privately controlled colony. Right through the 1990s, the museum’s magnificent collection of African art, tools, masks and weapons--among the largest and best anywhere, much of it gathered during the 23 years of Leopold’s rule--reflected nothing of what had happened in the territory during that period.
The holocaust visited upon the Congo under Leopold was not an attempt at deliberate extermination, like the one the Nazis carried out on Europe’s Jews, but its overall toll was probably higher.
Soon after the king got his hands on the colony, there was a worldwide rubber boom, and Leopold turned much of the Congo’s adult male population into forced labor for gathering wild rubber.
His private army marched into village after village and held the women hostage to force the men to go into the rain forest, often for weeks out of each month, to tap rubber vines. This went on for nearly two decades.
Though Leopold made a fortune estimated at well over $1 billion in today’s dollars, the results were catastrophic for Congolese.
Laborers were often worked to death, and many female hostages starved. With few people to hunt, fish or cultivate crops, food grew scarce. Hundreds of thousands of people fled the forced-labor regime, but deep in the forest they found little to eat and no shelter, and travelers came upon their bones for years afterward.
Tens of thousands more rose up in rebellion and were shot down. The birthrate plummeted. Disease--principally sleeping sickness--took a toll in the millions among half-starved and traumatized people who otherwise might have survived.
In 1998, I finished a book on the subject, “King Leopold’s Ghost,“ which was published in Belgium and drew furious denunciations from royalists and conservatives.
The foreign minister sent a special message to Belgian diplomats abroad, counseling them on how to answer awkward questions from readers. Asked if the museum planned changes, a senior official of the Royal Museum of Central Africa replied that some were under study, “but absolutely not because of the recent disreputable book by an American.“
The museum’s current director, Guido Gryseels, caught between pressure from human rights activists on the one hand and rumored strong pressure from the government and the royal family on the other, several years ago appointed a commission of historians to study the Leopold period and determine just what did happen.
Under Gryseels, the museum has also gradually begun rewording signs on its exhibits, and several weeks ago opened a new exhibit, “Memory of Congo: the Colonial Era,“ accompanied by a catalog, a thick, lavishly illustrated coffee-table book of several dozen scholarly articles.
Belgium is not alone in failing to face up to its own history. All countries mythologize their pasts and confront the worst of it only slowly. But once they do, there are positive discoveries as well as painful ones.
Adam Hochschild
LATIMES.COM

Cervantes called for “blessings on him who invented sleep, the mantle that covers all human thoughts“. That is all very nice, but the author of Don Quixote did not, it appears, pay enough attention to how sleep has been divvied out. Not to put too fine a point on it, there is a danger of a slumber divide emerging to add to all the other divides--from digital to wealth--that we have to contend with. A survey carried out by the Sleep Council has found big differences in the amount of sleep people get in Britain, depending on their profession. At the top are solicitors with an average of 7.8 hours sleep--and 20% of them actually get as much as ten hours a night. Enough said.
At the bottom end of the scale, the worst sleepers (apart from hospital doctors on call who get only 4.5 hours a night) are MPs. They manage a miserable average of 5.2 hours a night. Although this excludes cat naps taken during dull debates in the Commons in the afternoons, it is worrying that the nation’s legislators may be taking decisions when they are unfit to do so. According to research done at the University of British Columbia, each hour of lost sleep at night is associated with a temporary loss of one IQ point. Dr Stanley Coren, author of the research, also claims that sleep deprivation has been a major factor in causing disasters, including the Columbia space shuttle tragedy in February 2003 and the Exxon Valdez oil spill in March 1989.
Although the Sleep Council (funded by the National Bed Federation) has a vested interest in promoting a good night’s sleep--presumably we will wear out beds out more quickly if we spend more time in them--it also makes some important points. There is increasing evidence that fatigue, often associated with lack of sleep, is a cause of accidents and diminished performance among car drivers, train drivers, airline pilots and others. But how such findings can be translated into laws that would improve behaviour, and reduce accidents, is quite another matter. Legislating about what we do at night as well as during the day might be considered an extension of the nanny state that is just too intrusive.
GUARDIAN.CO.UK

The London conference to support the new Palestinian leadership and build momentum for renewed Middle East peace negotiations had limited goals.
The meeting, attended by representatives of 23 states and the United Nations, can be seen in one sense as an attempt to reintroduce the Palestinians to polite international society after four years of Israeli-Palestinian conflict for which the blame fell disproportionately on the late Yassir Arafat.
Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) has been democratically elected as his successor, and his new administration has been purged of most of the old guard after a gruelling struggle with the Palestinian parliament. Equally important elections, to parliament and within Fatah, the dominant party, are scheduled soon. Political and financial reforms are in train, Arafat’s myriad security services are being consolidated and renewed, institutions--many of them destroyed by Israel in the intifada--are reviving.
If the chief purpose of the conference was to legitimise these efforts and solicit international support for them it succeeded. But these necessary first steps could come to naught unless the next ones are taken with care.
The recent ceasefire--broken by apparently rogue bombers at a Tel Aviv night club last week--is fragile. Mr Abbas will have to strain to keep a grip on Palestinian militants while Ariel Sharon, Israel’s prime minister, will have to exercise unusual restraint.
The brittle current situation will be subject to more stress when Israel starts its unilateral withdrawal from the Gaza Strip. But the struggle for the land could reignite ferociously if Mr Sharon uses the Gaza gambit to consolidate Israel’s control over the West Bank, in pursuit of his goal of an indefinite interim solution to the conflict. Mr Abbas, moreover, will survive only if he can show his people that the peaceful way forward he proposes produces results--that an end to Israel’s occupation of their land is in sight.
Eventually, therefore, both sides will have to define the destination they are heading for. There appears little chance as things stand that they could even approach agreement on the so-called final status issues: borders, settlements, refugees and Beit-ul-Moqaddas.
The best way to nudge forward may therefore prove to be an international conference. There is no mystery about what a settlement would have to look like: a Palestinian state on virtually all the West Bank, Gaza and occupied Arab east Beit-ul-Moqaddas; Arab recognition of Israel’s right to live in peace behind its 1967 borders, with only minor boundary changes. Nor is there any ambiguity in international law that the Israeli occupation and expansion of Jewish settlements is illegal.
It is, of course, the Israelis and Palestinians who will eventually have to reach agreement. But it is the international community’s job both to facilitate it and make clear to both sides that the world is no longer prepared to be held hostage by their struggle.
FT.COM