Articles on Adelman and E=mc(2)

The New York Times has an interesting article today on the life 
and career of Leonard Adelman, with remarks on RSA and public 
key cryptography.  Friendly, not technical.

For email copy send blank message with subject:  LA_lite

And, while not directly related to crypto, the magazine "The 
Sciences", published by the New York Academy of Sciences, has a 
long article, "Beyond E=mc(2)", on a controversial theory that 
mass is "only electric charge and energy".

The authors are:  Bernard Haisch, Alfonso Rueda and H. E. 
Puthoff.

For copy send blank message with subject:  EMC2_too



Here is a brief excerpt:


   Recent work by us and others now appears to offer a
   radically different insight into the relation E=mc(2), as
   well as into the very idea of mass itself. To put it
   simply, the concept of mass may be neither fundamental nor
   necessary in physics. In the view we will present,
   Einstein's formula is even more significant than physicists
   have realized. It is actually a statement about how much
   energy is required to give the appearance of a certain
   amount of mass, rather than about the conversion of one
   fundamental thing, energy, into another fundamental thing,
   mass.

   Indeed, if that view is correct, there is no such thing as
   mass -- only electric charge and energy, which together
   create the illusion of mass. The physical universe is made
   up of massless electric charges immersed in a vast,
   energetic, all-pervasive electromagnetic field. It is the
   interaction of those charges and the electromagnetic field
   that creates the appearance of mass. In other words, the
   magazine you now hold in your hands is massless; properly
   understood, it is physically nothing more than a collection
   of electric charges embedded in a universal energetic
   electromagnetic field and acted on by the field in such a
   way as to make you think the magazine has the property of
   mass. Its apparent weight and solidity arise from the
   interactions of charges and field.

   Besides recasting the prevailing view of mass, this idea
   would address one of the most profound problems of physics,
   the riddle of how gravity can be unified with the other
   three fundamental forces of nature. The electromagnetic
   force and the weak force, which is responsible for nuclear
   decay, have been shown to be two manifestations of a single
   force, appropriately called the electroweak force. There
   are tantalizing hints that the strong force, which binds
   nuclei together, will someday be unified with the
   electroweak force. But until now gravity has resisted all
   attempts at unification. If the new view is correct,
   however, gravity would not need to be separately unified.
   Just as mass would arise from the electromagnetic force, so
   would gravity.

End excerpt.

John Young says:
> The New York Times has an interesting article today on the life 
> and career of Leonard Adelman, with remarks on RSA and public 
> key cryptography.  Friendly, not technical.

The article contains a serious inaccuracy -- it credits Adleman with
having invented the term "Computer Virus", when, in fact, it was
probably John Brunner in his novel "The Shockwave Rider" over ten
years earlier. It also inaccurately credits one of his students with
developing the first one as a test, when in fact they existed for a
long time before.

.pm

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----

In article <9412131605.AA12267@snark.imsi.com>, you wrote:
> 
> The article contains a serious inaccuracy -- it credits Adleman with
> having invented the term "Computer Virus", when, in fact, it was
> probably John Brunner in his novel "The Shockwave Rider" over ten
> years earlier. It also inaccurately credits one of his students with
> developing the first one as a test, when in fact they existed for a
> long time before.
> 
> .pm
> 

The notion of a computer virus predates THE SHOCKWAVE RIDER.  Gregory
Benford used the notion in a short story published in AMAZING STORIES in
1973 or 1974.  It was an idea mentioned in passing in a story taking
place in a mining town in Antarctica.  (Sorry, but I can't provide any
more bibliographic data than that; I'm relying strictly on memory.)
Benford definitely used the word "virus" to describe how the thing
reproduces. 

In 1975 (the same year that THE SHOCKWAVE RIDER came out) Laser Books
published the notoriously bad SEEDS OF CHANGE, by Thomas F.  Monteleone. 
Monteleone has the Evial Computer That Rules The World brought down by
feeding it something called a "Benford program," i.e. a virus.

I couldn't say for sure whether the idea of computer viruses was
original to Benford or not.  He is a theoretical plasma physicist who in
his misspent youth worked at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in
the weapons program.  It is possible that he worked on numerical
modeling of plasmas in a secure computing environment, and that viruses
were part of the threat models of the Livermore computer security
people.

If he did invent the idea, then he has a lot to answer for. . . .

                          | For me, to be a feminist is to answer the
   Alan Bostick           | question "Are women human?" with a yes.
   abostick@netcom.com    | 
finger for PGP public key |      Katha Pollitt, REASONABLE CREATURES
Key fingerprint:          | 
50 22 FB 46 41 A3 17 9D F7 33 FF E1 4E 1C 89 79  +legal_kludge=off

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d'oh.

slip of the fingers, my apologies for the last message.

mg.

--
Matthew Gream
(sw/hw engineer)
<M.Gream@uts.edu.au>
(02) 821-2043

re Hal Puthoff et al.'s "unconventional" theories on the nature of
matter, tnx for pointer to article, but a caveat: they are very
probably wrong, as are virtually all such attempts to overturn big
chunks of physics.  Does the article mention that Hal is most famous
for his SRI work on remote viewing & spoonbender/magician Uri Geller
some years ago?  That doesn't disprove his current notions (and I've
tried to read some of his technical papers, which he occasionally gets
published in mainstream peer-reviewed physics journals, but I don't
have the time or talent to poke holes in them; my Ph.D. is in
astrophysics and general relativity) but perhaps raises some
questions, if you're a skeptic by nature....

To give this msg a wee bit of crypto content, any news on the "quantum
cryptography" front?  Although that subject does seem to me to be
legitimate physics, my current perception is that it's almost entirely
an intellectual exercise, and that the proposed applications
(key-distribution or the like) are contrived examples without
plausible real-world use (and with many security holes to boot).  Am I
wrong?

Best,  ^z  (Mark "no relation" Zimmermann)