![]() ![]() ![]() The cornerstone of the special theory is the notion that the speed of light in space really is always the same wherever it is measured from, and however fast and in whatever direction the person doing the measuring is moving. Einstein had the chutzpah to discard common sense and Newton’s long-established theory and take at face value the upstart equations of electromagnetism. Even if you ran in the direction of a beam of light at half the speed of light, you would still measure the light’s speed as c.Ĭlearly, either Newton’s laws or Maxwell’s equations were wrong. The snag was that this constant was the same for every observer, no matter what speed they were moving at. Maxwell’s equations, on the other hand, included a constant, c, which could only be interpreted as the speed of light. Newton’s laws describe, among other things, how to add up velocities. Like every other physicist in the early 1900s, Einstein knew there was a discrepancy between Newton’s 200-year-old theory of motion and Maxwell’s more recent equations of electromagnetism. The key feature of this theory is the notion of bent space-time, but it took Einstein 10 years longer than necessary to arrive at this. On the other hand, Einstein’s great leap from the special theory to the general theory – a new, non-Newtonian theory of gravity – is generally regarded as a unique stroke of genius that sprang from Einstein alone. Convention has it that if he had not come up with the special theory in 1905, someone else would have done so within a year or two. Albery Einstein first presented his general theory of relativity to the Prussian Academy of Sciences in Berlin in November 1915, 10 years after the special theory of relativity. ![]()
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