Are you inspired?

Any discussion about the great works of Einstein can be taken on many levels. The subject can be metaphysical, philosophical, mathematical, and even religious. Even more, the manner in which the subject is reviewed, and even the person who is presenting the ideas can have a profound impact on how it is received. I hope you will feel energized by my thoughts and explanations of the important works of Einstein.

The very thought of being energized is very much in the spirit of Einstein. For with him as with other great masters of art and science, they did their most important work without even lifting a pen. For examples, it is well documented that Mozart and Einstein thought in pictures. Once they were able to visualize what they were aiming at, it was only then that they used the tools of their craft to put the ideas to paper. For example, Einstein thought about light for nearly 10 years before he was hit with a wave of inspiration on a single day in 1905.

This seeming triviality is not to be taken lightly. These masters were driven to incredible levels by energy and passion for their subject. They have given more to us than music, equations, and a new way of being moved by revolutionary thinking. They inspired us to think and be inspired by thought.

Why are we doing this?

The very best question I have ever heard was asked by my 14 year old son. The question was so deep and so hard to answer, that I did not answer him for several months. It is perhaps a question that has been argued through the ages and is still argued to this very day. He said “Dad, how can people spend time and money on arts and science when there is so much suffering, disease, and war in the world?” This was the mother of all questions. It required a lot of thinking. Eventually I came to this revelation. There has been and always will be despair. However, we are the only creatures on this planet capable of creative thought. We have a special gift to wonder, ask questions, create and invent. So it is a matter of balance. We have to pay homage to our duties to improve the human condition, but at the same time, we have to find time to smell the roses.

On one hand, we could spend all our days worrying and thinking about problems, but that would make for a sad existence. We need some time to use our blessing to explore, expand our thinking, and to rejoice in the majesty of our being. Great civilizations from the Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, and the Renaissance were remembered more for their arts and sciences than for their wars and disease. The greatest contribution of these cultures came from free thinkers. In times when free thinking was suppressed, it also served to suppress the history. (I mean wasn’t there a thousand years of the middle ages marked by crusades and suppression and what exactly have we heard about that time?).

So if I have one message I want you to take home with you is that you should never be afraid to take some time to think. I mean really think. What if…..

The Roots of Einstein with Faraday and Maxwell

The story of Einstein and his magical year of 1905 had roots that went back 70 years to Faraday and Maxwell who discovered and described electromagnetism. In the interim, numerous physicists and mathematicians added to this great discovery and laid the groundwork for Einstein. Both Faraday and Einstein had rather improbable rises to greatness that illustrate the power of will. Neither was particularly successful or even heard of in their early years. As a young man, Faraday was laboring as a merchant and taking the time to tinker with science in his spare time. He was probably the last person you might pick to make the most important scientific discovery in history. But Faraday was driven by his curiosity and mostly unconcerned with the goings on in the world around him. Einstein shared this lack of concern for things other than his work, and was not bound or contaminated by conventional thinking.

There are a couple of really important points to make here that cannot be missed.

1. They had incredible drive
2. They did not subscribe to common knowledge and asked hard questions
3. They thought in pictures and images and were able to focus their work in their minds.

Faraday took to tinkering with magnets and wires and found that he could get a magnet to react to the flow of charge in a wire. He also could get an electrical charge in a wire from the motion of a magnet. He did hundreds of experiments and found these two forces were related. He found an “invisible field” that was generated for each case and noticed it has special orientation. Despite the initial rejection by the scientific community due to his inexperience, he was eventually recognized by Charles Maxwell who was one of the greatest physicists and mathematicians that ever lived. Out of this duo came a comprehensive mathematical description of electric and magnetic fields and their relations. These equations stand today as the very basis for electromagnetism. Our power plants today use the basic principle of inducing an electric charge by rotating magnets powered by a steam turbine.

Electromagnetism

Leading up to Einstein, the nature of the electromagnetic spectrum was developed. It was known that electricity and magnetism worked at the speed of light. Visible light was only one form of emitted electromagnetic energy. All energies of were emitted as waves, traveled at the speed of light. The Wavelength was related to the energy of the wave by the famous equation developed by Max Plank E= HV. High frequencies were low wavelength and high energies like Gamma and X rays. Low frequencies were long wavelengths and low energies like Radio and TV signals. The electromagnetic energy emitted by any body was a result of excitation of photons as electrons moved to a different orbital and gave off energy. As heat was added, it emitted light or blackbody radiation. Objects also absorbed or reflected electromagnetic radiation and thus each has a characteristic “spectrum”.

Einstein wondered about electromagnetism and visible light for years. His thoughts about visible light helped him visualize the problem, but his discoveries applied to all types of Electromagnetic Energy. (Isn’t it interesting that the human eye evolved to detect starlight versus other types of electromagnetic waves?) The title of his first paper was “On the Electrodynamics of moving bodies”. His paper was so original it had no references, and read like a stream of conscience.

The magical year of 1905

Einstein’s 1905 inspiration came several historic ideas. Years later he would add another that would be so grand, it would baffle physicists of the time and would raise questions that are still are sought after today. The earthshaking revelations of his papers in 1905 can be summarized by several completely novel concepts.

1. The speed of light is constant for any observer no matter how fast they are traveling. To make this true, time must slow down as speed increases. Light was defined as the only true constant and time, mass and energy can vary.
2. No object can ever reach the speed of light because as this speed is approached the energy required to further increase the speed grows to infinity.
3. Near the speed of light, additional energy adds to the mass of the object and causes it to slow down thus requiring more energy to increase the speed.
4. Mass can be changed into energy under when the nucleus is unstable and perturbed by the right energy.
5. Mass and energy are therefore the same thing and are related by the famous relationship E= MC2

The derivation of his famous equation was based on work of others including Lorenz transformations. Einstein’s work depended greatly on the work of Lorentz, and therefore any understanding of Special Relativity and the math associated with it must start with Lorentz.

Lorentz and Relative coordinates

Lorentz derived the famous transformation which is the predecessor and basis of the special theory of relativity, and was named after him. With this transformation are given the new formulas for the coordinates and time, which are valid for two systems, which mutually move translatory at velocity and without acceleration. He published these formulas for the first time in 1904 in his work "Electromagnetic phenomena in a system moving with any velocity smaller than that of light".

   At the relative position of the coordinate system below, the -axes constantly overlap in both systems. In this case we can divide the problem in such a way, that first of all we will look at events which are located on the -axis. Such events relative to the coordinate system are given by abscissa and time , but relatively to the system is given by abscissa and time . To find out and if and are given.

Fig. 10.1

   The light signal which moves along the -axis propagated according to the equation

   But since the same light signal has to be propagated at velocity relatively to also, then the propagation toward can be expressed by a similar formula

   The Lorentz transformations follow after much math.

Derivation of E=MC2

(dE/dt = F V)=dP/dt V, so dE=PdV, integrate E:

where: P momentum.

and Note use of Lorentz transformation for mass.

Bending of Space and Time

Einstein’s later work defined the nature of gravity and flew in the face of Newton’s famous laws. In fact he was thought to have spoken the words “Forgive me Newton”. Unlike Special relativity, the concept of gravity as defined in his work on General relativity was so strange and the math was so complex, that his contemporaries we baffled for years. For those interested, there are numerous publications (including Einstein’s original papers that go through the horribly complex Tensor math.). The final result is:

The left side of the equation contains all the information about how space is curved, and the right side contains all the information about the location and motion of the matter. General relativity is beautiful and simple (to a physicist), but mathematically it's very complicated and subtle.

He defined gravitation to be a bending of space time rather than a force. Objects which appeared to be drawn together by a force are actually only traveling through depressions in space time like a small ball circling a bowling ball which was sitting in the middle of a trampoline.

After General Relativity, Einstein devoted the rest of his life to developing a grand theory of everything to somehow include the physics of the very large (as his work applied) and the very small (as the science of quantum mechanics was developed to explain the rule of probability in small systems). Einstein did not subscribe to the use of probabilities in physics and on many occasions expressed his desire to “know the mind of God”. In other words, he felt it was possible to develop a theory which given all the physical aspects of a system predict the behavior going forward. Here is where the discussion enters the religious. This tempts the concept of free will. For example, if we could know all aspects of a person, could we in fact predict every work and action for the rest of their life? If we knew that, would free will cease to exist?

At odds with Einstein were the quantum theorists. They recognized that Einstein’s equations worked for large objects, but could not predict the movements and positions of the very small such as sub atomic particles. At the very heart of the matter was the famous discovery of the “Uncertainty Principle” by Heisenburg which stated that you could never know the exact position and velocity of a particle without disturbing it. The very act of measuring something very small was a disturbance and you the best you could do was to know a range of probabilities of such a particle as ascribe the probability that it would be in a certain place at a given time with a given velocity. In systems with trillions of particles, this would take the shape of a probability distribution. Thus the science of quantum mechanics was born and was shown to describe small systems very well.

Einstein was not buying this and uttered the words “God does not play dice”. He felt that all things were ordained and nothing was left to chance as the quantum boys would have you believe. His feud with them left him isolated and although he remained famous with the public for his earlier works, he was not taken seriously by the rest of the physics community in his later years. He spent the last 30 years of his life trying to prove his theory of everything, but his mission was doomed due to its false premise. A development of a theory of everything would have to wait (and still continues today with string theory and others).

Some associate Einstein with the development of the first nuclear weapons as an application of E=MC2. Although was did encourage Roosevelt to pursue this weapon with his famous letter in 1939, he later regretted it, and was not involved in the actual development of the weapon. He was in fact an active opponent of nuclear arms for much of his life. Politically, Leo Szlard was the person who pressured Einstein to write the letter since it was known that the Germans had in fact figured out how to split the Uranium atom with neutron bombardment. It was felt that it was only a matter of time before they could build a bomb.

But there was of course another side of Einstein’s great works that are the story of creation. The interchangeability of mass to energy was the basis of star birth and the reactions going on at the center of stars that gives light, heat and life. The law of relativity and the constant nature of the speed of light forms the basis of all laws of physics today, and the revolutionary concept of General relativity and the bending of space time opens the doors to new developments in space and the revolution in work on black holes and deep space.