A Beginner's View of Our Electric Universe - New

I have a great deal of respect for Copernicus, Newton and Einstein as the honourable and dedicated characters
they seem to have been. There are other contributors to science who deserve a mention, but that would be
something for a different book, not this one. If you are particularly interested to know more about these and
other pioneers of science, then you should look into the ancient and modern history of astronomy, physics,
cosmology and mathematics. There you will find many in-depth historical and biographical accounts that do an
amazingly detailed and interesting job of describing the work of these and other significant people. Suffice it to
say that the foundations for what we have today as the story of our universe were laid from the work of Newton
and Einstein.
It was in 1905 that Einstein produced his first major theory that was eventually to become famously known
as his ‘Special Theory of Relativity’. This title came about in 1919 after a particularly supportive observation
was carried out by one of his colleagues, Sir Arthur Eddington, that apparently verified what Einstein’s theory
claimed. In the theory, Einstein stated that among other things, the speed of light was constant at 300,000
kilometres per second (in a vacuum) for all observers, whether they were moving or not. What he really had in
mind here was the assumed empty vacuum of space. Derived from this was the inference that the speed of light
is the fastest that anything can travel at in the universe - a universal speed limit, if you like. Although debated
at the time, Einstein’s idea that light could travel through ‘nothing’ prevailed, so that which had become his
Special Theory of Relativity stood strong among his peers and rapidly became accepted as scientific fact.
Later in 1915, Einstein came up with his second major theory, the ‘General Theory of Relativity’. This was
his crowning glory, in which he made a stab at laying out a geometric explanation of gravity. In doing this,
he also came up with the assertion that our universe existed within a framework of what he labelled ‘spacetime’.
The invention of this term was his way of describing our universe as an environment wherein time and
space are related, or to put it another way, if you were able to change space, then you would change time, and
vice-versa. These ideas seemed a bit crazy to some but made sense to others when the effects suggested were
considered possible only when travelling at or close to the speed of light. Again, nobody seemed to have cause
or motivation to object to Einstein’s latest theory, so it stood strong for a while before becoming acceptable
scientific ‘fact’. None of this could be proved but it seemed that one plausible theory could stand with another,
so the overall picture that developed took on a life of its own.
Note here that Einstein’s theories really did spring from his own imagination. They had started as ideas from his
personal ‘thought experiments’, as he called them; periods of deep thought that were also fuelled by aspects of
work done by others. No fundamental experiments could be done at the time to prove any of his theories and it
remains a fact today that in terms of what they claim on the grandest scales, they have still not been proven. This
means that anything currently promoted as solid fact regarding the assumed powerful influence of the force of
gravity on large scales can summarily be explained as only being the output of athletic, imaginative thinking.
This fact alone should be enough to set some alarm bells ringing for us!
26 | The thinking that got us here