Special Relativity
Physics at the end of the nineteenth century found itself in crisis: there were perfectly good theories of mechanics (Newton) and electromagnetism (Maxwell), but they did not seem to agree. Light was known to be an electromagnetic phenomenon, but it did not obey the same laws of mechanics as matter. Experiments by Albert A. Michelson (1852-1931) and others in the 1880s showed that it always traveled with the same velocity, regardless of the speed of its source. Older physicists struggled with this contradiction in various ways. In 1892 George F. FitzGerald (1851-1901) and Hendrik A. Lorentz (1853-1928) independently found that they could reconcile theory and experiment if they postulated that the detector apparatus was changing its size and shape in a characteristic way that depended on its state of motion. In 1898, J. Henri Poincaré (1854-1912) suggested that intervals of time, as well as length, might be observer-dependent, and he even speculated (in 1904) that the speed of light might be an "unsurpassable limit".Michelson | FitzGerald | Lorentz | Poincaré |
Einstein in 1905
The Fourth Dimension
Minkowski
Einstein did not quite finish the job, however. Contrary to popular
belief, he did not draw the conclusion that space and time could be
seen as components of a single four-dimensional spacetime fabric. That
insight came from Hermann Minkowski (1864-1909), who announced it in a
1908 colloquium with the dramatic words: "Henceforth space by itself, and
time by itself, are doomed to fade away into mere shadows, and only a kind
of union of the two will preserve an independent reality".
Four-dimensional Minkowski spacetime is often pictured in the form of a
two-dimensional lightcone diagram, with the horizontal axes representing
"space" (x) and the vertical axis "time" (ct).
The walls of the cone are defined by the evolution of a flash of light passing
from the past (lower cone) to the future (upper cone) through the present
(origin). All of physical reality is contained within this cone; the region
outside ("elsewhere") is inaccessible because one would have to travel faster
than light to reach it. The trajectories of all real objects lie along
"worldlines" inside the cone (like the one shown here in red). The apparently
static nature of this picture, in which history does not seem to "happen" but
is rather "already there", has given writers and philosophers a new way to
think about old issues involving determinism and free will.
Einstein initially dismissed Minkowski's four-dimensional interpretation
of his theory as "superfluous learnedness" (Abraham Pais, Subtle is the
Lord..., 1982). To his credit, however, he changed his mind quickly.
The language of spacetime (known technically as tensor mathematics) proved
to be essential in deriving his theory of general relativity.The Equivalence Principle
Einstein's happiest thought (1907): "For an observer falling freely from
the roof of a house, the gravitational field does not exist" (left).
the roof of a house, the gravitational field does not exist" (left).
Conversely (right), an observer in a closed box—such as an elevator or
spaceship—cannot tell whether his weight is due to gravity or acceleration.
Soon after completing his special theory, Einstein had the
"happiest thought of his life" (1907). It came while he was sitting in his
chair at the patent office in Bern and wondering what it would be like to try
to drop a ball while falling off the side of a building. Einstein realized
that a person who accelerates downward along with the ball will not be able
to detect the effects of gravity on it. An observer can "transform away"
gravity (at least in the immediate neighborhood) simply by moving to this
accelerated frame of reference — no matter what kind of object is dropped.
Gravitation is (locally) equivalent to acceleration. This is the principle
of equivalence.
To understand how remarkable the equivalence principle really is, imagine
how it would be if gravity worked like other forces. If gravity were like
electricity, for example, then balls with more charge would be attracted to
the earth more strongly, and hence fall down more quickly than balls with
less charge. (Balls whose charge was of the same sign as the earth's would
even "fall" upwards.) There would be no way to transform away such effects
by moving to the same accelerated frame of reference for all objects.
But gravity is "matter-blind" — it affects all objects the same way.
From this fact Einstein leapt to the spectacular inference that gravity
does not depend on the properties of matter (as electricity, for example,
depends on electric charge). Rather the phenomenon of gravity must
spring from some property of spacetime.
Gravity as Curved Spacetime
Einstein eventually identified the property of spacetime which is responsible for gravity as its curvature. Space and time in Einstein's universe are no longer flat (as implicitly assumed by Newton) but can pushed and pulled, stretched and warped by matter. Gravity feels strongest where spacetime is most curved, and it vanishes where spacetime is flat. This is the core of Einstein's theory of general relativity, which is often summed up in words as follows: "matter tells spacetime how to curve, and curved spacetime tells matter how to move". A standard way to illustrate this idea is to place a bowling ball (representing a massive object such as the sun) onto a stretched rubber sheet (representing spacetime). If a marble is placed onto the rubber sheet, it will roll toward the bowling ball, and may even be put into "orbit" around the bowling ball. This occurs, not because the smaller mass is "attracted" by a force emanating from the larger one, but because it is traveling along a surface which has been deformed by the presence of the larger mass. In the same way gravitation in Einstein's theory arises not as a force propagating through spacetime, but rather as a feature of spacetime itself. According to Einstein, your weight on earth is due to the fact that your body is traveling through warped spacetime!General Relativity
General relativity is based physically on the equivalence principle, but the theory also has a second, more mathematical foundation. Known as the principle of general covariance, it is the requirement that the law of gravitation be the same for all observers — even accelerating ones — regardless of the coordinates in which it is described. (It is for this reason that Einstein named his new theory "general", as opposed to "special" relativity — he dropped the earlier restriction to uniformly moving observers.) This proved to be the most difficult challenge that Einstein ever faced. As he later said, to express physical laws without coordinates is like "describing thoughts without words". Einstein was obliged to master the abstract mathematics of surfaces and their description in terms of tensors, a field pioneered by Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777-1855) and generalized to higher dimensions and more abstract spaces by Georg Friedrich Bernard Riemann (1826-1866). In this labor he was aided above all by his friend the mathematician Marcel Grossmann (1878-1936). Another mathematician named David Hilbert (1862-1943) nearly beat him to his final equations.Gauss | Riemann | Grossmann | Hilbert |
Einstein in 1916
Relational or Absolute?
In 1918, Einstein described Mach's principle as a philosophical pillar of general relativity, along with the physical principle of equivalence and the mathematical pillar of general covariance. This characterization is now widely regarded as wishful thinking. Einstein was undoubtedly inspired by Mach's relational views, and he hoped that his new theory of gravitation would "secure the relativization of inertia" by binding spacetime so tightly to matter that one could not exist without the other. In fact, however, the equations of general relativity are perfectly consistent with spacetimes that contain no matter at all. Flat (Minkowski) spacetime is a trivial example, but empty spacetime can also be curved, as demonstrated by Willem de Sitter in 1916. There are even spacetimes whose distant reaches rotate endlessly around the sky relative to an observer's local inertial frame (as discovered by Kurt Gödel in 1949). The bare existence of such solutions in Einstein's theory shows that it cannot be Machian in the strict sense; matter and spacetime remain logically independent. The term "general relativity" is thus something of a misnomer, as pointed out by Hermann Minkowski and others. The theory does not make spacetime more relative than it was in special relativity. Just the opposite is true: the absolute space and time of Newton are retained. They are merely amalgamated and endowed with a more flexible mathematical skeleton (the metric tensor).Nevertheless, Einstein's theory of gravity represents a major swing back toward the relational view of space and time, in that it answers the objection of the ancient Stoics. Space and time do act on matter, by guiding the way it moves. And matter does act back on spacetime, by producing the curvature that we feel as gravity. Beyond that, matter can act on spacetime in a manner that is very much in the spirit of Mach's principle. Calculations by Hans Thirring (1888-1979), Josef Lense (1890-1985) and others have shown that a large rotating mass will "drag" an observer's inertial reference frame around with it. This is the phenomenon of frame-dragging, whose existence Gravity Probe B is designed to detect. The same calculations suggest that, if the entire contents of the universe were to rotate, our local inertial frame would undergo "perfect dragging" — that is, we would not notice it, because we would be rotating too! In that sense, general relativity is indeed nearly as relational as Mach might have wished. Some physicists (such as Julian Barbour) have gone further and asserted that general relativity is in fact perfectly Machian. If one goes beyond classical physics and into modern quantum field theory, then questions of absolute versus relational spacetime are rendered anachronistic by the fact that even "empty space" is populated by matter in the form of virtual particles, zero-point fields and more. Within the context of Einstein's universe, however, the majority view is perhaps best summed up as follows: Spacetime behaves relationally but exists absolutely.
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