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From the point of view of the sailor who dropped the rock, the rock falls straight down. But for you on the dock, the rock would appear to fall at an angle. Both you and the sailor would have equal claim to being right—the motion of the rock is relative to whoever is observing it.

Einstein, however, had a question. It had bothered him for ten years, from the time he was a year-old student in Aarau, Switzerland, until one fateful evening in May Walking home from work, Einstein fell into conversation with Michele Besso, a fellow physicist and his best friend at the patent office in Bern, Switzerland, where they were both clerks. Forty years earlier, the Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell had demonstrated that the speed of light is constant. If the person at the top of the mast sends a light signal straight down while the ship is moving, where will it land?

For Einstein as well as Galileo, it lands at the base of the mast. From your point of view on the dock, the base of the mast will have moved out from under the top of the mast during the descent, as it did when the rock was falling. This means that the distance the light has traveled, from your point of view, has lengthened. The speed of light is always , miles per second. In the case of a beam of light, the speed is always , miles per second, so if you change the distance that the beam of light travels, you also have to change the time.


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That means the time on board the ship appeared to be passing more slowly than on the dock. The reverse, Einstein knew, would also have to be true.

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To the sailor, the time onshore would appear to be passing more slowly. And there we have it: a new principle of relativity. The difference between the two is in the math, and the math is the world. This was pretty heady stuff for a year-old clerk who only a couple of weeks earlier had submitted his doctoral thesis to the University of Zurich.

Einstein would keep his day job at the patent office until , but his obscurity was over, at least among physicists. Within a year of completing his relativity paper, his ideas were being debated by some of the most prominent scientists in Germany. He knew that his special relativity theory applied only to the relationship between a body at rest and a body moving at a constant velocity.

What about bodies moving at changing velocities? Unlike the beam of light, which moves at a constant velocity, the falling man would be accelerating. But in another sense, he would also be at rest. Throughout the universe, every scrap of matter would be exerting its exquisitely predictable influence on the man, through gravity.

And there we have it: another principle of relativity, called general relativity. After his vision, however, another eight years would pass before Einstein worked out the equations to support it. Einstein told friends that when he finally figured out the math to demonstrate general relativity in , something burst inside him. Einstein carried his writings on general relativity to the Netherlands, and from there a physicist friend forwarded them across the North Sea to England, where they eventually reached Arthur Eddington, perhaps the only astronomer in the world with the political clout and scientific prominence sufficient to mobilize wartime resources and to put general relativity to the test.

In late September, Einstein got a telegram saying that the eclipse results matched his predictions. In October, he accepted the congratulations of the most prominent physicists on the Continent at a meeting in Amsterdam. Then he went home to Berlin. Newtonian Ideas Overthrown. The Royal Society president and the discoverer of the electron, J.

Because the public learned about special relativity and general relativity at the same time, says Weart, the cult of Einstein coalesced quickly. And all this celebrity, British astronomer W. To many, Einstein became a symbol of postwar rapprochement and a return to reason. That must count as one of the most moral acts of that time. But some critics of relativity argued that Einstein was merely one more anarchist fueling the funeral pyres of civilization.

Avisceral, lifelong anti-authoritarian, he had renounced his German citizenship at age 16 rather than subject himself to mandatory military service. Now, in the nascent WeimarRepublic, Einstein, a Jew, found himself portrayed as a villain by swastika-sporting German nationalists and as a hero by internationalists. After Hitler rose to power in , Einstein abandoned Germany for good. He accepted an appointment to the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, where he lived in a modest house on Mercer Street until his death from a ruptured abdominal aneurysm at age 76 in April Throughout his public years, Einstein embodied contradictions.

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A pacifist, he would advocate the construction of the atomic bomb. He argued for a world without borders, and campaigned for the establishment of the state of Israel—so much so that in he was invited to be its president. He was a genius, puttering absent-mindedly around his house in Princeton, and he was a joker, sticking out his tongue for a photographer. It was their scale.

They were all larger than life, and so therefore, the thinking went, must he be, too. His first marriage had ended in divorce, a second, to a cousin, in her death, nearly two decades before his. He fathered one illegitimate daughter, who is thought to have been given up for adoption and is lost to history, and two sons, Hans Albert and Eduard.

Are Space and Time An Illusion? - Space Time - PBS Digital Studios

One of them, Eduard, suffered from schizophrenia. Hans Albert taught engineering at UC Berkeley. It was a fate Einstein hated. And maybe there was. Once the Nazis were defeated, Einstein would become not all things to all people but one thing to all people: a saint.

The halo of white hair helped. But in time his hair flew, like a mind untethered, while the bags under his eyes deepened, as if from the burden of looking too hard and seeing too much. Long before the public beatified Einstein, his fellow physicists had begun to question his infallibility. Ayear later Einstein acknowledged that the error had in fact been his, yet he remained unrepentant.

Einstein frequently and famously objected to the central tenet of quantum theory—that the subatomic world operates according to statistical probabilities rather than cause-and-effect certainties. Turner, a cosmologist at the University of Chicago and a director for mathematical and physical sciences at the National Science Foundation. But he was also single-minded about finding a unified field theory, and from on, his career was that of a mere mortal. And God plays dice. And there have been other startling ramifications of relativity theory, such as black holes, which can be created by collapsed stars with masses so great that their gravitational force swallows everything in their vicinity, including light.

Scientists are still asking questions that Einstein made possible: What powered the big bang? What happens to space, time and matter at the edge of a black hole? Will, a physicist at WashingtonUniversity in St. For his part, Einstein never quite knew what hit him. I never yet heard a truly convincing answer to this question.

What This Drawing Taught Me About Four-Dimensional Spacetime

Social scientist Bernard H. The halo has helped maintain the myth, keeping Einstein a presence on magazine covers and newspaper front pages, on posters and postcards, coffee mugs, baseball caps, T-shirts, refrigerator magnets and, based on a Google search, 23, Internet sites. In reinventing relativity, Einstein also reinvented nothing less than the way we see the universe. For thousands of years, astronomers and mathematicians had studied the motions of bodies in the night sky, then searched for equations to match them.

Einstein did the reverse. And that brings us to what may really be going on with space. Just as the outer surface of the black hole could explain what is happening in its interior, the "holographic universe" theory suggests that the interior of our universe may be described by understanding the physics of the universe's edge, which, unfortunately, we cannot access.

As an analogy, imagine if we could understand absolutely everything going inside the Earth by understanding the behavior of its surface. The Earth is three dimensions, but its surface is described by two dimensions — latitude and longitude. Similarly, the boundaries of the observable universe would have one fewer dimension than the universe's interior, but could perhaps completely explain its workings, according to the holographic principle. Along similar lines, in Musser's book, philosopher Jenann Ismael wonders if the universe is like a kaleidoscope, in which light hits individual objects and bounces off mirrors to create multiple identical images.

Maybe the entanglement that occurs between two particles at great distances is really, at a more fundamental level, the projection of a single thing onto what we perceive as two points in space. So could space indeed be an illusion? We have assumed that space is a fundamental ingredient of reality, like a canvas for a painting. The recently proposed, but still rudimentary, theory of " quantum graphity " a punny mashup of quantum gravity and graph theory attempts to combine quantum mechanics and gravity by ignoring space, and simply exploring the relationships between basic objects known as "grains," which are stand-ins for fundamental constituents such as matter.

Grains can form a network of connections with other grains; one grain can interact with another if they have enough energy. What we perceive as physical distance would actually be the amount of energy needed for two objects to interact.