Einstein Relatively Simple

The following sections are included:

• Dedication
• About the Author
• Prologue
• Contents

The year is 1905. Working alone at a Government Issue desk at the Swiss patent office on the corner of Grain Storage and Geneva Lane in Berne, a brash young man with a driving passion for physics is stuck. He has been wrestling with the problem off-and-on for nearly a decade…

Have you ever been in a boat moving steadily down a stream or river? Perhaps you have felt the sensation that you are standing still and the scene along the shore, the water below, and sky above are all moving by you in the opposite direction. Or perhaps you have been in a train sitting idle at the station as the train on the track next to you pulls out. Looking at the other train through the window, you suddenly feel you are moving backwards. At the moment you cannot tell whether your train or the other train is moving…

After yet another business failure, in 1894 Einstein's father moved his family to Pavia, Italy — where a wealthy uncle had agreed to finance an electrochemical factory. Albert was left behind at the home of a distant relative to complete his studies at the Gymnasium. He had three years to go, a very long time for a 15-year-old (Fig. 3.1)…

Einstein had a genius for seeing what others could not. Experiments could not find the ether supposedly required for the transmission of electromagnetic waves. Maxwell's equations did not obey Galileo's dictum. Lorentz (and others) proposed a new transform. This new recipe made Maxwell's equations mathematically independent of uniform motion — but no one understood its physical significance…

When we say that time is relative, we mean that all aspects of time are relative. Imagine again a spaceship speeding away from the Earth at 87% the speed of light. According to the Lorentz Factor, clocks on the spaceship run at just about half the rate of clocks on the Earth…

In his 1905 paper on special relativity, Albert Einstein made a prediction that has been called “one of the deepest insights into the nature of reality ever discovered.” He stated that events happening at the same time for you may not happen at the same time for me…

The summer of 1905 was a particularly memorable one for Albert Einstein. He had submitted his three seminal papers to the highly regarded German physics journal Annalen der Physik by June. Still working at the Bern patent office and isolated from the physics community, he found himself pondering how special relativity might relate to energy. In September of 1905, he published the results of his contemplations in the same journal. This remarkable three-page supplement has been called “perhaps the most profound afterthought in the history of science”…

Time paradox? The unraveling of the spacetime continuum? Does “Doc” Brown's warning have any validity? Well, not really — it's only a movie. But there is a grain of truth to these far-fetched statements. According to relativity, the spacetime continuum does exist. And it is helpful to think of spacetime as a kind of fabric (especially in general relativity). Plus time travel into the future is real. As you will see, we do it all the time. This wild notion, as well as other curious predictions, begins with the concept of spacetime…

If you found the tenets of special relativity mind-boggling, wait till you read about general relativity. Special relativity told us how uniform motion squeezes space and slows time, how matter is “frozen” energy, and how the space interval (distance) and time interval are united under a single construct unaffected by uniform motion called the spacetime interval…

In his search for a relativistic theory of gravity, Einstein first attempted to treat gravity purely in terms of special relativity. He tried to replace Newton's instantaneous gravity with gravity traveling from place to place at the speed of light. His initial calculations showed something was wrong — under this construct, falling objects appeared to fall at different rates depending on their horizontal speed…

It is the year 2525 and man is still alive. Somehow our clever and contradictory species has survived the threat of nuclear war, climate change, ocean acidification, stratospheric ozone depletion, nitrogen and phosphorus cycle imbalance, biodiversity loss, aerosol loading, global viruses, global pollution, global starvation, depleted water supplies, asteroid collisions, super-tsunamis, volcanic mega-eruptions, physical atrophy, overpopulation, telephone texting, and mindless tweets…

By the summer of 1912, Albert Einstein had established the warping of space and time per the Equivalence Principle. Now he needed a formula which modeled this so-called warping. Years earlier he had denigrated the spacetime construct of Poincaré and Minkowski, calling it a mathematical curiosity with no physical relevance — perhaps in part because he did not think of it himself…

As the summer of 1912 turned to fall, Albert Einstein was working exclusively on the “gravitation problem”. The now Professor of Theoretical Physics at Zurich Poly soon hit upon his first major stumbling block.

Einstein's famous collaboration with Marcel Grossman began in earnest in the summer of 1912. Together they tried to come up with mathematics which connected spacetime curvature (the gravitational field) with the source of gravity (an object's mass-energy). At its core was a trio of ambitious goals for his new theory.

On March 20, 1916, Albert Einstein published his now famous exposition on general relativity. The manuscript was presented in Annalen der Physik, the same prestigious German physics journal in which he had published his theory of special relativity a decade earlier…

Peering into the night sky on a clear night, the stars shimmering like jewels against the blackness of space, we find ourselves asking: How did we get here? Was the universe always as it appears today? What is its future? In this chapter we discuss these profound questions based on the first scientifically substantiated theory on the origin, structure, and evolution of the universe — the big bang theory…

The following sections are included:

• Epilogue
• Appendix A
• Appendix B
• Appendix C
• Appendix D
• Appendix E
• Acknowledgements
• Notes with Sources
• Figure Credits
• Also by Ira Mark Egdall
• Further Reading
• Index