This post is part of a series dedicated to fundamental-assumption-shattering scientific breakthroughs. If you lived centuries ago and thought the Earth was flat, and would want to find out that the Earth was round (even if it meant nothing to your daily life), then this series is for you. The material is basic and the implications profound. For the first article of the series click here: For Those Who Care to Know That The Earth is Round.
- You’ve seen his face. What was so mind-blowing about this guy?
You probably have heard about E=MC^2, seen pictures of Albert Einstein with funky facial expressions, and maybe learned of the “Theory of Relativity.” But I have noticed that not a lot of people are not familiar with the implications of century-old, mind-blowing advancement. It’s probably because we often don’t consider ourselves scientific, at least not enough to understand all sorts of crazy equations. In this post, we will leave crazy mathematics for the scientists, and just take a look at the implications of the science. If you are familiar with relativity, then you might want to skip this post. If you are not familiar, then I will attempt to break it down for you very simply. Simply enough that even if you have never looked at science since schooling, you will get the bizarre implication of Einstein’s Theory of Relativity and will be able to see that it is an advancement in the same category as finding out that the Earth is round. I will keep it brief and simple, I promise–just stick with it. Then you can go learn about it more if you want.
Right in the beginning of the 1900′s, Einstein was a young patent clerk. For a long time he had wondered what a light beam would look like if you were traveling at the speed of light. He considered two points:
- According to work by Isaac Newton, if you are driving in your car at 40 mph with your hand out the window, and someone traveling in the next lane in the opposite direction, also going 40 mph, was drunk and swerved into your hand, it would be the same as your hand getting hit at 80 mph.
- According to work by James Maxwell, the speed of light is constant. That is, if you were running at 90% of the speed of light and measured the speed of a light beam going past you, it would not be just the 10% difference… it would still appear to be going the full speed of light. That is, you cannot add and subtract velocities (as in the car example above) when it comes to light.
If you are unclear about those two points, don’t worry because it doesn’t matter. It’s not even that important. The point is that Einstein, in a stroke of brilliance, concluded that space and time are purely relative to the observer. To get a more in-depth explanation of his deductive process, you could try this article at PBS by renowned theoretical physicist Michhio Kaku, or just Google it. The implications of these simple/confusing conclusions are absolutely wild. Let’s talk about it!
Einstein is essentially saying that if you are in a vehicle going at 99% of the speed of light, and you fire a bullet that goes 20% the speed of light, the bullet won’t go (99% + 20%=) 119% the speed of light. Space will shrink for that bullet and time will slow down for that bullet so that it might end up going 99.33% the speed of light.
If that doesn’t make sense to you, it still doesn’t matter. All you need to know is this–the twin paradox (Wikipedia article on the twin paradox so you can be responsible and research this on your own to make sure I’m not full of marshmallows):
Let’s say you had a twin brother at birth. Right from birth, they scooped your twin brother up and put him on a space ship that traveled away at 98% of the speed of light. Well for 20 years you didn’t see him. You are now a 20-year-old young adult, experiencing life the same way we all do. One day, your brother returns to Earth. To your surprise he would look shockingly like a 10-year-old boy–because he actually would be a 10-year-old boy!! He would say “wow, did you have a growth spurt or what?” and you would say “was your growth stunted?” What defies our common experience is that because he was traveling at that speed, time moved slower for him than it did you. It’s all relative though–he was looking at his watch go “1 Mississippi, 2 Mississippi, etc..” as were you. But if you could somehow view his watch while he was on the space ship, it would seem to you, on Earth, that his watch was running at half speed. Time itself was running, for him, half the speed which it was running for you–but to him it seemed normal. (The twin paradox is a particular case for special relativity)
Yes. That is hard to believe. We are used to time being absolute, as there is an immutable “tick, tock, tick, tock” going on through out the universe. Put as Einstein pointed out, there’s really no such thing as time out side of our heads.
Is this true or just theory?
Is this all true? Or is this mathematical trickery? A weird fact about science is that it can’t actually prove anything. It can only disprove things. Technically, the only thing that we can prove (to ourselves) is that we are conscious… to learn more about that, research solipsism. If you dare assign some level of reality to the world, then evidence that we have that points to validity in Einstein’s relativity is in the outstanding predictions his equations have made. Using his equations, scientists have been able to detect black holes and make stunningly accurate predictions about cosmic events. The more sophisticated our instruments become, the more accurate the equations seem to become. Using atomic clocks to fly around the world in different directions and then to measure the time difference all upheld what Einstein had predicted. It is now the most accurate science we have for large-scale bodies. It is just simply crazy that space and time can be warped.
E=Mc^2? Spacetime?
Einstein later went on to expand his Special Theory of Relativity, as it is called, to include gravity. The equation E=MC^2 means that energy and mass are equatable. In the expanded theory, “General Theory of Relativity,” Einstein explained how mass actually warped space and time. In fact, the warping is a major contributor to what we call “gravity.”
Space and time come together to form a fabric called “spacetime,” or “space-time,” which is represented in the picture above. The picture is missing a dimension, however, because we can’t draw 4 dimensions (3 space and 1 time)… but don’t worry about that. The mass that is Earth warps it like a trampoline and anything that comes into that warped space-time will feel the gravitational effects.
Blah blah blah–the take away points
If “science is your religion,” or you “believe in science,” or think of science as a great anvil on which to test out any theory about the world, God, or anything, then you should know that science currently has it that time and space are relative to the observer. The concepts of time and space as we commonly think about them and experience them are incomplete, as they are not immutable or unchangeable–they can be warped, stretched, and in the case of a black hole, time apparently stops altogether!
So are you going to go to work tomorrow? Probably. Maybe just one or two out of many readers, like myself, will develop an interest and begin to research more. I may not be the best at explaining science, but if I can provide a spark of interest, then perhaps just one reader will go on to research and make the next contribution to modern science–that would make this post worthwhile, would it not? And for the rest, it’s just good to know that the Earth is round, and that time and space are relative.
“Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute, and it seems like an hour. Sit with a pretty girl for an hour, and it seems like a minute. That’s relativity.” -Albert Einstein
