Einstein's Cross

Amateur astronomers know of a few sky sightings that require considerable expertise to view. One of the seven most challenging is called Einstein's Cross, requiring a relatively powerful telescope, a knowledge of exactly where to look, and considerable patience. For many scientists, it helps prove Albert Einstein's Theory of General Relativity. For me, it symbolizes one of my great passions and helped me grow personally as an individual dedicated to the beauty of math and its power to transform my life.

An enlarged, long-exposure photograph of Einstein's Cross reveals a fuzzy central globe, surrounded by four slightly sharper globes, forming a small glowing cross glowing in the darkness of the northern sky. Actually, this is just two objects. One is a galaxy, a 14th magnitude system in the constellation of Pegasus. The second is a much stronger, brighter quasar. A quasar is an intense light source powered by a black hole, but we should not be able to see this one because it is much farther away from the earth and directly behind the quasar from our line of sight.

Einstein's most famous theory predicts why we can see that distant quasar, and why it looks like four nearly identical globes clustered around the central light of the foreground galaxy. His theory postulates that massive objects have the ability to curve space and that light follows these curves. The galaxy acts as a gravitational lens, bending the light from the quasar around it into four roughly eq

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finance, from accounts receivable to working in a business development office. I have come to see that I can apply my passion for math to building my studies of business economics and, eventually, to helping my family's business grow. Currently, the business has no international development plans and has devoted no real thought to the viability of exporting our products to other countries in Asia, Europe, or even the United States. I hope to apply the skills and knowledge that my USC degree would give me to building my family's company into a successful international business, and my fascination with math gives me the foundation for designing and accomplishing this plan. Einstein's Cross is a lens that allows us to see an object that would otherwise be invisible from where we stand. It is also an example of a theory that seems to make sense but is very difficult to prove. For me, math offers the same kind of lens and a similar type of proof. Numbers help us to see and understand the way that things operate, and many of these are things that are otherwise hard to look at directly. Equations give us elegant and exact methods of analyzing processes and exchanges that are not always either elegant or exact. My passion fo

Category: Science - E