einstein
einstein
einstein
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elative to the medium (the water or air) propagating them.<br />
In other words, the speed at which an ocean wave reaches you will depend on how fast you are moving through the water toward or away from<br />
the source of the wave. The speed of a sound wave relative to you will likewise depend on your motion relative to the air that’s propagating the<br />
sound wave.<br />
Those relative speeds add up. Imagine that you are standing in the ocean as the waves come toward you at 10 miles per hour. If you jump on a<br />
Jet Ski and head directly into the waves at 40 miles per hour, you will see them moving toward you and zipping past you at a speed (relative to you)<br />
of 50 miles per hour. Likewise, imagine that sound waves are coming at you from a distant boat horn, rippling through still air at 770 miles per hour<br />
toward the shore. If you jump on your Jet Ski and head toward the horn at 40 miles per hour, the sound waves will be moving toward you and zipping<br />
past you at a speed (relative to you) of 810 miles per hour.<br />
All of this led to a question that Einstein had been pondering since age 16, when he imagined riding alongside a light beam: Does light behave<br />
the same way?<br />
Newton had conceived of light as primarily a stream of emitted particles. But by Einstein’s day, most scientists accepted the rival theory,<br />
propounded by Newton’s contemporary Christiaan Huygens, that light should be considered a wave.<br />
A wide variety of experiments had confirmed the wave theory by the late nineteenth century. For example, Thomas Young did a famous<br />
experiment, now replicated by high school students, showing how light passing through two slits produces an interference pattern that resembles<br />
that of water waves going through two slits. In each case, the crests and troughs of the waves emanating from each slit reinforce each other in some<br />
places and cancel each other out in some places.<br />
James Clerk Maxwell helped to enshrine this wave theory when he successfully conjectured a connection between light, electricity, and<br />
magnetism. He came up with equations that described the behavior of electric and magnetic fields, and when they were combined they predicted<br />
electromagnetic waves. Maxwell found that these electromagnetic waves had to travel at a certain speed: approximately 186,000 miles per<br />
second.* That was the speed that scientists had already measured for light, and it was obviously not a mere coincidence. 4<br />
It became clear that light was the visible manifestation of a whole spectrum of electromagnetic waves. This includes what we now call AM radio<br />
signals (with a wavelength of 300 yards), FM radio signals (3 yards), and microwaves (3 inches). As the wavelengths get shorter (and the frequency<br />
of the wave cycles thus increases), they produce the spectrum of visible light, ranging from red (25 millionths of an inch) to violet (14 millionths of an<br />
inch). Even shorter wavelengths produce ultraviolet rays, X-rays, and gamma rays. When we speak of “light” and the “speed of light,” we mean all<br />
electromagnetic waves, not just the ones that are visible to our eyes.<br />
That raised some big questions: What was the medium that was propagating these waves? And their speed of 186,000 miles per second was a<br />
speed relative to what?<br />
The answer, it seemed, was that light waves are a disturbance of an unseen medium, which was called the ether, and that their speed is relative<br />
to this ether. In other words, the ether was for light waves something akin to what air was for sound waves. “It appeared beyond question that light<br />
must be interpreted as a vibratory process in an elastic, inert medium filling up universal space,” Einstein later noted. 5<br />
This ether, unfortunately, needed to have many puzzling properties. Because light from distant stars is able to reach the earth, the ether had to<br />
pervade the entire known universe. It had to be so gossamer and, shall we say, so ethereal that it had no effect on planets and feathers floating<br />
through it. Yet it had to be stiff enough to allow a wave to vibrate through it at an enormous speed.<br />
All of this led to the great ether hunt of the late nineteenth century. If light was indeed a wave rippling through the ether, then you should see the<br />
waves going by you at a faster speed if you were moving through the ether toward the light source. Scientists devised all sorts of ingenious devices<br />
and experiments to detect such differences.<br />
They used a variety of suppositions of how the ether might behave. They looked for it as if it were motionless and the earth passed freely through<br />
it. They looked for it as if the earth dragged parts of it along in a blob, the way it does its own atmosphere. They even considered the unlikely<br />
possibility that the earth was the only thing at rest with respect to the ether, and that everything else in the cosmos was spinning around, including<br />
the other planets, the sun, the stars, and presumably poor Copernicus in his grave.<br />
One experiment, which Einstein later called “of fundamental importance in the special theory of relativity,” 6 was by the French physicist Hippolyte<br />
Fizeau, who sought to measure the speed of light in a moving medium. He split a light beam with a half-silvered angled mirror that sent one part of<br />
the beam through water in the direction of the water’s flow and the other part against the flow. The two parts of the beam were then reunited. If one<br />
route took longer, then the crests and troughs of its waves would be out of sync with the waves of the other beam. The experimenters could tell if this<br />
happened by looking at the interference pattern that resulted when the waves were rejoined.<br />
A different and far more famous experiment was done in Cleveland in 1887 by Albert Michelson and Edward Morley. They built a contraption that<br />
similarly split a light beam and sent one part back and forth to a mirror at the end of an arm facing in the direction of the earth’s movement and the<br />
other part back and forth along an arm at a 90-degree angle to it. Once again, the two parts of the beam were then rejoined and the interference<br />
pattern analyzed to see if the path that was going up against the supposed ether wind would take longer.<br />
No matter who looked, or how they looked, or what suppositions they made about the behavior of the ether, no one was able to detect the elusive<br />
substance. No matter which way anything was moving, the speed of light was observed to be exactly the same.<br />
So scientists, somewhat awkwardly, turned their attention to coming up with explanations about why the ether existed but was undetectable in any<br />
experiment. Most notably, in the early 1890s Hendrik Lorentz—the cosmopolitan and congenial Dutch father figure of theoretical physics—and,<br />
independently, the Irish physicist George Fitzgerald came up with the hypothesis that solid objects contracted slightly when they moved through the<br />
ether. The Lorentz-Fitzgerald contraction would shorten everything, including the measuring arms used by Michelson and Morley, and it would do so<br />
by just the exact amount to make the effect of the ether on light undetectable.<br />
Einstein felt that the situation “was very depressing.” Scientists found themselves unable to explain electromagnetism using the Newtonian<br />
“mechanical view of nature,” he said, and this “led to a fundamental dualism which in the long run was insupportable.” 7<br />
Einstein’s Road to Relativity<br />
“A new idea comes suddenly and in a rather intuitive way,” Einstein once said. “But,” he hastened to add, “intuition is nothing but the outcome of<br />
earlier intellectual experience.” 8<br />
Einstein’s discovery of special relativity involved an intuition based on a decade of intellectual as well as personal experiences. 9 The most<br />
important and obvious, I think, was his deep understanding and knowledge of theoretical physics. He was also helped by his ability to visualize<br />
thought experiments, which had been encouraged by his education in Aarau. Also, there was his grounding in philosophy: from Hume and Mach he