By George Templeton
Gazette Blog Columnist
Believing Einstein
"A human being is a part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts, and his feelings as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty. “ Albert Einstein
As Paul Tillich put it, man’s belonging yet separation makes it possible for him to ask questions and find answers. This he called the moral imperative. But questions challenge us.
The Cosmos Changed
It started with James Clerk Maxwell (1873), the “father” of electromagnetism. Maxwell is often credited with establishing the speed of light waves, and hence the age of the universe. Then came Einstein’s Special Relativity in 1905.
Special Relativity holds that (1) the laws of physics are the same in all inertial (constant velocity) frames of reference and (2) the speed of light in a vacuum is a constant. It's not just an obscure theory. It's in your smartphone, GPS, and the atomic bomb. If you think deeply, you will find it in the mystery of many things we take for granted.
Situational Relativity
It is not ethical but it is situational. It isn’t just the way you look at things. It’s the way our everyday world is, but we didn’t realize it.
You can start with situations and try to find a governing principle that explains them. If you can’t explain it with words or pictures, you don’t understand it. Or you can start with mathematics. It is more comprehensive but then you have to find the situations which apply to it. Nature reveals her secrets to us in the shape of equations.
Irrelevant Relativity
Students experience relativity every time they look out the car window and wonder whether they are moving or the car next to them in the adjacent lane is. Newton’s laws hold for both inside a parked car and one moving at constant velocity. Within the cars, it is impossible to distinguish between the one that is at rest and the moving one.
All motion is relative. There is no rest frame. Consequently, we do not care which “car” we refer a motion to. However, motion looks and calculates differently depending on viewpoint. How you look to me and how you see yourself is different.
You can see the beginning and the end of your ruler simultaneously because it is there with you. Nothing is more “real” than a measured quantity.
Can you measure everything that exists in nature? At what point, if any, do we count proxies in measurement?
The length of an object differs for observers in relative motion. The moving ruler’s back is catching up with its front! Thus apparent length is not absolute. This is called the Lorentz Contraction.
If we could drive along with a light beam, the image of a clock behind us would never catch up. Time would stop. Like length, time is also not absolute. Time slows down for the moving man. Time, in the Lorentz Transformation is not a constant.
For Newton, length, time, and mass seemed absolute, but they are not. It is not possible to describe space or time separately. We cannot acquire information instantly. Nothing can move faster than light. Consequently, there is no absolute simultaneity.
Gaussian Geometry
Gauss was a 19th-century mathematician who gave us a small, local geometry like the one we learned in high school but at the same time, it could become cosmic and curved. Riemann, a student of Gauss, generalized the vector (size and direction) into a tensor (all directions simultaneously) quantifying distance on twisted surfaces like Klein’s bottle. We can’t press a string along all curved surfaces, straighten it out, and then measure it.
This math relied on the infinitesimals denied by the 17th-century Catholic Church. Newton used them to create Calculus. Einstein adapted them to create his gravitational field theory.
Minkowski Space-Time
We think in 3 dimensions: X, Y, and Z. We need 4: X, Y, Z, and T to describe Einstein’s cosmos. It is not x,y,z and then add time afterwards! We are inside 4-dimensional space. We cannot view it from the outside. The interval between two “events” is a squared relationship (curved) and it includes the speed of light.
Minkowski, Einstein’s school professor, developed the “light-cone” coordinate system. The future was inside a top cone and the past was in a cone below it.
Every event is “now” for someone. For disconnected observers they are equally valid. Consequently, the past is eternally present but hard to get to. The initial conditions are different and there are disturbances along any journey.
Intelligence
The people in the Iowa Caucus explained that President Obama was too “professorial”. They wanted a candidate who had no need or desire to contemplate any further. But this was not the case for Einstein. He was interested in physics and philosophy. He knew that the truth was incomplete. He thought deeply about things that science took for granted. He could not accept orthodoxy concerning the unseen. He wrestled with the connection of ideas among themselves, unifying the work of scientists in disparate fields.
Einstein’s Character
We cannot explain Einstein with IQ tests. He never did well with rote learning, embraced nonconformity, and rebelled against authority. Einstein failed to complete his Ph.D. degree and could not get a job teaching physics, so he accepted a position as a patent examiner. He did his revolutionary work in theoretical physics, alone, with no laboratory, and in his spare time after work.
Aristotle’s Physics
Given only the gift of life, how would you see things? Aristotle was the author of hundreds of scrolls treating nearly every subject. Physics was philosophy in his day. He lacked our viewpoint influenced by 2500 years of progress. His “science” unified what I call our subjective and objective properties. It was more human than ours is.
A Geocentric Earth
Is the earth immobile and fixed at the center of the universe? It is argued that the Bible says so. Is it the heavens that rotate around the earth, or your viewpoint that moves the stars in the sky? Which is the simpler explanation?
Waves
A wave is a disturbance in a medium. For electromagnetic waves, scientists thought that they traveled through the ether, but Michelson and Morley could not find it.
Electromagnetic radiation carries its own medium. Electromagnetism is one of the fundamental forces of nature. It is in the ionic bonding of materials, your TV, and kitchen appliances. It is in nearly everything we take to be real.
Lorentz showed that the speed of light could not be different (the anisotropic synchrony convention) for light coming towards you and light moving away from you. It was constant as Michelson-Morley had found. It had to be different from Galileo’s physics where time was a constant flow. Otherwise, Maxwell’s electromagnetic equations would be wrong.
Newton’s Gravity
They say that Newton discovered the law of gravity while sitting under an apple tree. A falling apple hit him on the head. People trivialize Newton so they will feel more intelligent.
Einstein found that matter makes space-time curved and curved space-time tells matter how to move. He realized that there is no difference between gravity and acceleration. We are still learning about gravity.
Newton’s gravity was instantaneous and everywhere. He used God to fill in its gaps. Einstein’s relativity corresponds with Newton. He did not replace Newton or God.
My Fear
When a mass (inertia) moves it increases. For a particle to travel at the speed of light, its mass must be infinite. Nothing can travel faster than light. All masses have energy and energy has mass. From this comes Einstein’s famous equation (E=mc^2) and the atomic bomb.
Einstein never accepted the bomb that he laid the foundation for. He would not have liked Trump’s contention that we are all sovereign nations, justified by narcissistic self-interest.
Humanity reveals its psychology with the recent war in Israel. Eventually there is no choice but to fight it out. Now we have Russia’s 100,000,000-ton nuclear torpedo, and the Satan MIRV.
More than 100 years ago, James Allen saw the solution.
“Mind is the Master-power that moulds and makes,
And Man is Mind, and evermore he takes
The tool of Thought, and, shaping what he wills, Brings forth a thousand joys, a thousand ills:-
He thinks in secret, and it comes to pass:
Environment is but his looking-glass.”
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