Links for 2012-03-21

A 68-year-old UNC-Chapel Hill physics professor with three degrees from Oxford University is being held in an Argentine prison on charges of trying to smuggle two kilograms of cocaine. Paul H. Frampton, who holds the title Louis D. Rubin Jr. Distinguished Professor of Physics and Astronomy, said in a telephone interview that he was arrested Jan. 23 at the airport in Buenos Aires after the drugs were found in his checked luggage en route to Raleigh-Durham International Airport. Frampton said he was confident that he would be exonerated and seemed less upset by the drug charges than of his treatment by the university, which he said had stopped his pay for reasons of petty academic jealousy.

The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, which owns the German Jewish physicist’s papers, is pulling never-before seen items from its climate-controlled safe, photographing them in high resolution and posting them online – offering the public a nuanced and fuller portrait of the man behind the scientific genius. Only 900 manuscript images, and an incomplete catalogue listing just half of the archive’s contents, had been available online since 2003. Now, with a grant from the Polonsky Foundation UK, which previously helped digitise Isaac Newton’s papers, all 80,000 items from the Einstein collection have been catalogued and enhanced with cross referencing technology. The updated web portal, unveiled on Monday, features the full inventory of the Einstein archives, publicising for the first time the entirety of what’s inside the collection and giving scholars a chance to request access to items they previously never knew existed.