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.