When asked how best to celebrate Einstein’s centenary, Calder replied: ‘Let’s make relativity clear.’ The celebrated author immediately responded by writing this entertaining book, which required direct consultation with some seventy physicists and astronomers at thirty institutions on both sides of the Atlantic.
Calder credits Albert Einstein as someone who revolutionized the concepts of space, time, and motion, and who rewrote the theory of gravity: Calder also notes that the landmarks of Einstein’s work are Special Relativity (1905), which deals with motion high speed, and General Relativity. (1915), which deals with gravity. Subsequent research has shown that we actually live in a universe much like the one Einstein described, and researchers have confirmed and developed many of the ideas latent in Einstein’s equations. Thus, Calder begins a journey through the mind, theory, and written evidence of someone who could imagine the relationship between mass, energy, and light.
In 1932, two scientists split a lithium atom by firing a hydrogen proton at nearly the speed of light; They proved Einstein’s theory of special relativity. In the Cambridge atom-splitting experiment, fragments of helium flying together had, at least for a moment, exactly the same mass as the combined mass of the particles that produced them. But while an infinitesimal mass was lost in the translation of measurable mass, it was transformed into an energetic essence. Thus, Calder honors the genius in Einstein’s musings. Intuitively, Einstein’s intelligence visualized that mass possessed energy and, therefore, energy must have an equivalence in mass. His all-encompassing formula E = mc2 allowed for no loss of matter. He proposed ‘nature to keep strict energy accounts and the total energy in the universe never changes; can only be shuffled.
In a coup, Einstein deduced that light has mass; he estimated that solar precipitation on Earth was about 160 tons of sunlight each day. Although this tonnage constitutes only a minute loss of the Sun’s mass compared to the total, these light particles are absorbed by the Earth’s mass. With this understanding, we can understand that the fundamental energy sources are those associated with cosmic forces: electromagnetism manifested in light, chemical reactions, living processes, subatomic forces responsible for nuclear reactions, and gravity.
From the above, we can deduce 3,504 x 1014 tons or 350.4 trillion tons added to the mass of the Earth since the last estimate of the presence of primitive man in 6,000,000 BC.
General relativity deals with the concepts of gravity. According to Calder’s definition of Einstein’s theory, humanity is gravitationally pulled in a more complex way than is generally perceived, like water rising up the sides of its container in a centrifuge: thus, the pressure experienced in the soles of man’s feet due to the momentum of the Earth. For example, whether free falling from a tall building or accelerating in a spaceship, we achieve weightlessness; in it, one cannot feel gravity, but only its effect when in contact with the movement of the mass. Also, the big one predicted ‘gravity slows down time’. Clocks on the surface of the Sun or Earth run on less energy than clocks farther out in space, in successive shells of influence like the electron shells around the nucleus of an atom. Therefore, he envisioned the speed of light to provide a fundamental connection between time and space: ‘as a massive body distorts time and space around it, those distortions guide the motion of other objects in their vicinity’ . He perceived gravity as a peculiarity of space, not of individual elements in it.
Surely, the gravity of the mass is evidenced in the propensity of the electrons that revolve around the nucleus of the atom, of the Moon that revolves around the Earth, of the Earth and the component that revolves around the Sun, and the solar system that it travels on an invisible track, hurtling at 175 miles per second (630,000 mph). ) — thus is captured by a galaxy whose entire body also travels on an invisible track through the Universe — all subject to the law of particle behavior. Gravity is said to rule the universe; Subject to this observation, solar bodies are well defined on convenient trajectories through space and time.
Inherent in Einstein’s law of gravity is the existence of the ‘black hole’, now popular in the astrophysics discussion. We can only touch briefly on the far-reaching influence of Einstein’s musings and his impact on physical science: his comparison of the ‘g’ forces in a speeding spacecraft with objects responsive to a speeding Earth; the relationship between time and speed; bending of space and light; presence of mass in the lumen.
Calder sums up Einstein’s genius with: “For him it was a matter of intuition; for modern physics and astronomy, it is the basis.”