6/28 - Setting the Stage for the Genius

Today I read... Wolfgang Rindler's "Introduction to Special Relativity."

First off, let me explain in extreme brevity how special relativity works - it says the speed of light always appears to travel at the same speed, unlike everything else in the world. The geometry of that situation leads to some interesting consequences - time passes at different rates for people moving at different velocities. If you rode on a train that travelled close to the speed of light, one week for you might correspond to hundreds of years for everyone else.  The ratio of those times is called the Lorrentz factor.

It shouldn't be surprising the a guy named Hendrick Lorrentz, not Einstein, orginated the math behind the Lorrentz factor. But interestingly enough, he did so before Einstein or anyone else realized that light traveled at constant velocity!

Scientists had actually been doing experiments for a while trying to detect variations in the speed of light due to the rapid motion of the earth around the sun. They couldn't do it. Lorrentz supposed that maybe, when an object moved through ether (this then-speculative substance that permeated outer space), the ether distorted the objects spatial and temporal dimensions! This was able to account for light's apparent constancy.

The difference between he and Lorrentz was, Lorrentz tried to explain experimental data after the fact, and he supposed that it was the result of some interaction between "ether" and matter. Einstein, in 1905, made essentially philosophical assumptions about the architecture of reality, not drawn from data as much as from intuition and elegance.

Lorrentz changed how the actors spoke and moved. Einstein re-invented the very stage itself.

Also noteworthy, apparently Einstein wasn't the first person to begin thinking in these terms. One of history's greatest mathematicians, Henry Poincare (pronunciation in French) started toying with them the year beforehand, in 1904. Einstein was simply able to jump on the ball more quickly and demonstrate how revolutionary this new age of physics was.

That was what I read today. I think I'll pick up the same book tomorrow... in fact, probably for a few days.

Cheers,
Dale