THE THEORY OF RELATIVITY

Everyone knows, or has heard, that you can determine how far a lightning strike is
away from you after hearing the thunder. After you see the strike, count the minutes until
you hear the thunder. This time will determine the distance between you and the strike as
time travels at 760 miles per hour or 12.7 miles per minute. Suppose you were in a
completely silent airplane traveling at a speed of 761 miles per hour directly away from
the lightning strike. Would you still here the thunder? No, you would not. Would you still
see the lightning strike? Yes, you would, because light travels at an incredible speed of
186,000 miles per second. That is not a misprint, that is about 670 million miles per hour!
If you were traveling directly at the lightning strike, you would hear the thunder, but
sooner than if you were standing still. This shows that everything is relative to
everything else, and occurs according to the velocity and the location of the observer.

The Special Theory of Relativity

Long ago, Isaac Newton determined the laws of classical physics. His law of
universal gravitation stated that all objects were attracted to other objects with some force
depending on the mass of the object and the distance between them. He also postulated
that the laws of physics applied to all observers in all reference frames whether in motion
or not. About the beginning of the nineteenth century, scientists noted that the prediction
of the orbit of Mercury around the Sun was a little bit different than thought before. Also,
Maxwell determined at about the same time that the speed of light was a fixed constant in
air. Newton had thought that the speed of light changed depending on the motion of the
observer. Along came Albert Einstein in 1905. He postulated that: 1) No moving
observer at a constant speed could perform any type of experiment to prove whether they
were moving or not! Not only that, but also that: 2) The speed of light is a constant in air!
Consider the astronaut on the Space Station. If he did not have a reference (the Earth) to
look at, there is no way that he could tell he was moving at a speed of nearly 18,000
miles per hour.

The General Theory of Relativity

In1907, Einstein thought that his theory of relativity would not work in a
gravitational field. He thought what if there is a difference between a gravitational field
and a uniformly accelerating one which was not subjected to gravity? It turns out that
there is no difference! Acceleration and gravity create exactly the same conditions, and
an observer in a closed room cannot distinguish between the two. This was called the
principle of equivalence and it can also work in reverse. That is, if you are in an elevator
in free fall, the acceleration cancels out the effect of gravity. About this time Einstein also
realized that this effect would cause light to bend. If a light is shown from one side of the
elevator to the other, the observer in the elevator would notice that the light would hit the
opposite wall directly across from the side it entered. An observer outside of the
elevator, though, would notice that the light would not hit exactly across from where it
entered but would bend downward to form an arc. This phenomenon was confirmed in
1919 during a total solar eclipse. Astronomers confirmed that the position of stars close
to the Sun was deflected by a distance of 1.7 seconds of arc. This was the deflection that
Einstein had predicted! Also, due to these effects, time is frequency shifted in a
gravitational field. Suppose we shine the light in the falling elevator from the ceiling to
the floor. The frequency of the light to the observer inside the elevator will be the same at
both places. But the observer outside the elevator will notice that the frequency of the
light has increased at the elevator floor. This is called a “blue shift” and is characteristic
of objects coming toward the observer. If the experiment is performed backward, from
the floor to the ceiling, the frequency is decreased and the light is “red shifted”, meaning
that the object is running away from the observer. Thus, time is changing at different
altitudes and is not constant as everyone thought! This effect has been verified with the
advent of very precise atomic clocks. An atomic clock in Boulder Colorado gains about
5 microseconds a year compared to an atomic clock in England. These discoveries led to
the three main postulates of general relativity as follows: 1) Space and time are not rigid,
their form and energy are influenced by matter and energy. 2) Matter and energy
determine how space-time curves. 3) Space and its curvature determine how matter
moves.

These discoveries made the universe a weird place! Space is actually a curved
area where massive objects can actually warp the three dimensional space around them.
As a result of Einstein’s findings, many unexplained observations in space became
evident. These two theories became the most important advance in physics since the time
of Newton.