Friday, February 20, 2015

At Pine Bluff''s Graceland cemetery


There are 67 graves of young children in Babyland, dating from 1956 thru 1985.  Most of the children were only a few days old when they died. Some were as old as two years. 


Inez was born at the time Albert Einstein finished his first relativity paper, which, coincidentally, since we are looking at markers where bodies are buried, has the word "bodies" in its title: "On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies."   June 28 was possibly even the very day Einstein finished the paper and mailed it to the Annalen der Physik.  It was received there on June 30.  The title of Einstein's second relativity paper, published in the fall of 1905, in which the relation E equals m times c squared was first derived, also has "bodies" in the title:  "Does the Inertia of a Body Depend on Its Energy Content?" In the case of the bodies in the cemetery, the inertia reaches a maximum (it would take a lot of energy to move the interred body), while the energy (mass) continues to decline, for instance through radioactive decay of Carbon-14 atoms.