Theory of special relativity

The theory of special relativity was published by Einstein in 1905, in a paper called "On the
Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies". It says that both distance measurements and time
measurements change near the speed of light. This means that as you get closer to the speed of
light (nearly 300,000 kilometres per second), lengths appear to get shorter, and clocks tick more
slowly. Einstein said that Special Relativity is based on two ideas. The first is that the laws of
physics are the same for all observers that are not moving in relation to each other. All the people
on a jet airplane would not be moving much in relation to each other, but the people in two
different jet airplanes that come toward each other would be moving toward each other very fast.
The people who are all going in the same direction at the same speed are said to be in an "inertial
frame." The second idea is that any observer, no matter how fast that observer moves in relation
to us, is always the same. A vacuum is a volume without any matter in it.

Light from both stars is measured as having the same speed

People who are in the same "frame" (think of them as being in a big box so that they all go
places together and at the same speed) will measure how long something takes to happen in the
same way. Their clocks will keep the same time. But people moving in another "frame" will look
over at them and see that their clocks were moving at a different rate. The reason that this
happens is actually quite simple. It is the consequence of two ideas. One idea we have seen
already. No matter what you are doing, even if you are moving toward a distant star at half the
speed of light, or if you are moving away from it at half the speed of light (or any other speed, it
does not matter), if you measure the speed of the light coming from that star it will always be the
same number. The other idea goes against our ordinary ideas. The other idea says that who is
standing still and who is moving is whoever you say is standing still or moving. How can that
be?

Imagine you were all alone in a different universe. That universe has no suns, planets, or
anything else. It just has you and your spaceship. Are you moving? Are you standing still? Those
questions do not mean anything. Why? Because when we say we are moving we mean that we
can measure our distance from something else at one time and measure the distance at another
time and the numbers will not be the same. If the numbers get bigger we are moving away. If the
numbers get smaller we are moving closer. Suppose a sailor is standing on the edge of a very
long boat with a flat top. Her boyfriend is standing on the dock. They are still very close
together, so they shout to each other. The boat starts to leave. The sailor runs toward the back of
the boat at the same speed that the boat moves forward so she and her boyfriend can keep
talking. As far as her boyfriend is concerned, she is not moving. So to have movement you must
have at least two things. We do not think about it because when we sit on the earth in a park,
which is moving very fast around the sun, we think we are not moving because we do not get any
closer or farther away from the trees in the park.

Now imagine that another spaceship appears in this other universe. On your spaceship you say
that their spaceship is coming closer to yours. After all, you do not feel yourself moving. On
their spaceship they say that your spaceship is coming closer to theirs. They do not feel
themselves to be moving either. Somebody on an airplane can be moving at several hundred
kilometers per hour, but they say, "I am just sitting here."

Distance traveled is relative to different standards of reference

Let us try to stretch our minds a bit. Imagine that a basketball player is on a glass airplane on the
ground. People outside can see him very easily. He begins to walk from the back of the airplane
toward the front of the airplane, bouncing his basketball as he goes. Maybe the distance between
the places where his basketball hits the floor of the airplane is about one meter or one yard. If
some people are under the airplane they can mark the place directly under the airplane where the
ball hits the floor. Those marks are a meter or maybe a yard apart. So everybody agrees that the
bounces are about a meter or a yard apart. Later the plane takes off. People still watch it from on
the ground. But this time bounce number 5 is over a place in Gibraltar and bounce number 6 is
over a place in Spain. The distance between bounces is measured in kilometers or miles on the
ground, but the people on the plane get the same answers they did while the plane was on the
ground.

Now suppose some people are on a big spaceship and they want to make a very accurate clock.
So they make a long tunnel between decks from what would be like the top of an airplane to
what would be the bottom of an airplane. At one end they put a mirror, and at the other end they
put a simple machine. It shoots one short burst of light toward the mirror and then waits. The
light hits the mirror and bounces back. When it hits a light detector on the machine, the machine
says, "Count = 1," it simultaneously shoots another short burst of light toward the mirror, and
when that light comes back the machine says, "Count = 2." Of course since light is very fast the
count changes very fast. They decide that a certain number of bounces will be defined as a
second, and they make the machine change the seconds counter every time it has detected that
number of bounces. Every time it changes the seconds counter it also flashes a light out through
a porthole under the machine. So somebody out taking a space walk will see the light flashing
every second.

Light clock faster at rest and slower in motion

Every grade school child learns the formula d=rt (distance equals rate multiplied by time). We
know the speed of light, and we can easily measure the distance between the machine and the
mirror and multiple that to give the distance the light travels. So we have both d and r, and we
can easily calculate t. The people on the spaceship compare their new "light clock" with their
various wrist watches and other clocks, and they are satisfied that they can measure time well
using their new light clock.

Now this spaceship happens to be going very fast. It is not coming to Earth to visit, but it does
happen to fly over the North Pole. There is a science station with a telescope at the North Pole.
They see a flash from the clock on the space ship, and then they see another flash. Only the
flashes do not come a second apart. They come at a slower rate. The reason is that the situation is
like the basketball player on the airplane. The ball is pushed downward by the player's hand.
That is the light in the spaceship's machine firing off a burst toward the mirror. The ball hits the
floor and bounces. That is like the light hitting the mirror and being reflected. The ball returns to
the player's hand. That is like the light hitting the machine and triggering a new burst of light.
Note that the distance between the place on the ground where the basketball is seen to hit the
floor and the distance on the ground where the basketball is seen to return to the basketball
player's hand is some great distance. Depending on how fast the plane is going, it might be a
kilometer or even a mile away.
So the man on the North Pole sees the light flash on the side of the spaceship when it is
thousands of miles away, and then sees the next flash when the spaceship has gotten thousands
of miles closer. The way the North Pole man sees it, the light started out, let's say, 100,000 miles
away and hit its return point when it was perhaps 90,000 miles away. So instead of just traveling
twice the diameter of the space ship (perhaps several hundred meters or yards) the light has
traveled 10,000 miles. Light always goes at the same speed, d = rt, and so the time this trip took
is going to be much greater as seen by the man on the North Pole. That is why the clock on the
spaceship is not flashing once a second for the Earth observer.

Special relativity also relates energy with mass, in Albert Einstein's E=mc2 formula.

Mass-energy equivalence
E=mc2, also called the mass-energy equivalence, is one of the things that Einstein is most famous
for. It is a famous equation in physics and math that shows what happens when mass changes to
energy or energy changes to mass. The "E" in the equation stands for energy. Energy is a number
which you give to objects depending on how much they can change other things. For instance, a
brick hanging over an egg can put enough energy onto the egg to break it. A feather hanging
over an egg does not have enough energy to hurt the egg.

There are three basic forms of energy: potential energy, kinetic energy, and rest energy. Two of
these forms of energy can be seen in the examples given above, and in the example of a
pendulum.

A cannonball hangs on a rope from an iron ring. A horse pulls the cannonball to the right side.
When the cannonball is released it will move back and forth as diagrammed. It would do that
forever except that the movement of the rope in the ring and rubbing in other places causes
friction, and the friction takes away a little energy all the time. If we ignore the losses due to
friction, then the energy provided by the horse is given to the cannonball as potential energy. (It
has energy because it is up high and can fall down.) As the cannonball swings down it gains
more and more speed, so the nearer the bottom it gets the faster it is going and the harder it
would hit you if you stood in front of it. Then it slows down as its kinetic energy is changed back
into potential energy. "Kinetic energy" just means the energy something has because it is
moving. "Potential energy" just means the energy something has because it is in some higher
position than something else.

When energy moves from one form to another, the amount of energy always remains the same. It
cannot be made or destroyed. This rule is called the "conservation law of energy". For example,
when you throw a ball, the energy is transferred from your hand to the ball as you release it. But
the energy that was in your hand, and now the energy that is in the ball, is the same number. For
a long time, people thought that the conservation of energy was all there was to talk about.

When energy transforms into mass, the amount of energy does not remain the same. When mass
transforms into energy, the amount of energy also does not remain the same. However, the
amount of matter and energy remains the same. Energy turns into mass and mass turns into
energy in a way that is defined by Einstein's equation, E = mc2.

A picture of Einstein after winning his Nobel Prize, 1921

The "m" in Einstein's equation stands for mass. Mass is the amount of matter there is in some
body. If you knew the number of protons and neutrons in a piece of matter such as a brick, then
you could calculate its total mass as the sum of the masses of all the protons and of all the
neutrons. (Electrons are so small that they are almost negligible.) Masses pull on each other, and
a very large mass such as that of the Earth pulls very hard on things nearby. You would weigh
much more on Jupiter than on Earth because Jupiter is so huge. You would weigh much less on
the Moon because it is only about one-sixth the mass of Earth. Weight is related to the mass of
the brick (or the person) and the mass of whatever is pulling it down on a spring scale which
may be smaller than the smallest moon in the solar system or larger than the Sun.

Mass, not weight, can be transformed into energy. Another way of expressing this idea is to say
that matter can be transformed into energy. Units of mass are used to measure the amount of
matter in something. The mass or the amount of matter in something determines how much
energy that thing could be changed into.
Albert Einstein, 1921

Energy can also be transformed into mass. If you were pushing a baby buggy at a slow walk and
found it easy to push, but pushed it at a fast walk and found it harder to move, then you would
wonder what was wrong with the baby buggy. Then if you tried to run and found that moving the
buggy at any faster speed was like pushing against a brick wall, you would be very surprised.
The truth is that when something is moved then its mass is increased. Human beings ordinarily
do not notice this increase in mass because at the speed humans ordinarily move the increase in
mass in almost nothing.

As speeds get closer to the speed of light, then the changes in mass become impossible not to
notice. The basic experience we all share in daily life is that the harder we push something like a
car the faster we can get it going. But when something we are pushing is already going at some
large part of the speed of light we find that it keeps gaining mass, so it gets harder and harder to
get it going faster. It is impossible to make any mass go at the speed of light because to do so
would take infinite energy.

Sometimes a mass will change to energy. Common examples of elements that make these
changes we call radioactivity are radium and uranium. An atom of uranium can lose an alpha
particle (the atomic nucleus of helium) and become a new element with a lighter nucleus. Then
that atom will emit two electrons, but it will not be stable yet. It will emit a series of alpha
particles and electrons until it finally becomes the element Pb or what we call lead. By throwing
out all these particles that have mass it has made its own mass smaller. It has also produced
energy.[12]

In most radioactivity, the entire mass of something does not get changed to energy. In an atomic
bomb, uranium is transformed into krypton and barium. There is a slight difference in the mass
of the resulting krypton and barium, and the mass of the original uranium, but the energy that is
released by the change is huge. One way to express this idea is to write Einstein's equation as:

E = (muranium mkrypton and barium) c2

The c2 in the equation stands for the speed of light squared. To square something means to
multiply it by itself, so if you were to square the speed of light, it would be 299,792,458 meters
per second, times 299,792,458 meters per second, which is approximately
(3108)2 = (91016 meters2)/seconds2=
90,000,000,000,000,000 meters2/seconds2
So the energy produced by one kilogram would be:
E = 1 kg 90,000,000,000,000,000 meters2/seconds2
E = 90,000,000,000,000,000 kg meters2/seconds2
or
E = 90,000,000,000,000,000 joules
or
E = 90,000 terajoule

About 60 terajoules were released by the atomic bomb that exploded over Hiroshima.[13] So
about two-thirds of a gram of the radioactive mass in that atomic bomb must have been lost
(changed into energy), when the uranium changed into krypton and barium.

BEC
The idea of a Bose-Einstein condensate came out of a collaboration between S. N. Bose and
Prof. Einstein. Einstein himself did not invent it but, instead, refined the idea and helped it
become popular.

Zero-point energy
The concept of zero-point energy was developed in Germany by Albert Einstein and Otto Stern
in 1913.

Momentum, mass, and energy

Statue of Albert Einstein in the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities.

In classical physics, momentum is explained by the equation:

p = mv

where
 p represents momentum
m represents mass
v represents velocity (speed)

When Einstein generalized classical physics to include the increase of mass due to the velocity of
the moving matter, he arrived at an equation that predicted energy to be made of two
components. One component involves "rest mass" and the other component involves momentum,
but momentum is not defined in the classical way. The equation typically has values greater than
zero for both components:

E2 = (m0c2)2 + (pc)2

where

E represents the energy of a particle

m0 represents the mass of the particle when it is not moving
p represents the momentum of the particle when it is moving
c represents the speed of light.

There are two special cases of this equation.

Einstein in his later years, c. 1950s

A photon has no rest mass, but it has momentum. (Light reflecting from a mirror pushes the
mirror with a force that can be measured.) In the case of a photon, because its m0 = 0, then:

E2 = 0 + (pc)2
E = pc
p = E/c

The energy of a photon can be computed from its frequency or wavelength . These are related
to each other by Planck's relation, E = h = hc/, where h is the Planck constant (6.6261034
joule-seconds). Knowing either frequency or wavelength, you can compute the photon's
momentum.
In the case of motionless particles with mass, since p = 0, then:

E02 = (m0c2)2 + 0

which is just

E0 = m0c2

Therefore, the quantity "m0" used in Einstein's equation is sometimes called the "rest mass." (The
"0" reminds us that we are talking about the energy and mass when the speed is 0.) This famous
"mass-energy relation" formula (usually written without the "0"s) suggests that mass has a large
amount of energy, so maybe we could convert some mass to a more useful form of energy. The
nuclear power industry is based on that idea.

Einstein said that it was not a good idea to use the classical formula relating momentum to
velocity, p = mv, but that if someone wanted to do that, he would have to use a particle mass m
that changes with speed:

mv2 = m02 / (1 v2/c2)

In this case, we can say that E = mc2 is also true for moving particles.

The General Theory of Relativity

General relativity

Einstein field equations

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The General Theory of Relativity was published in 1915, ten years after the special theory of
relativity was created. Einstein's general theory of relativity uses the idea of spacetime.
Spacetime is the fact that we have a four-dimensional universe, having three spatial (space)
dimensions and one temporal (time) dimension. Any physical event happens at some place inside
these three space dimensions, and at some moment in time. According to the general theory of
relativity, any mass causes spacetime to curve, and any other mass follows these curves. Bigger
mass causes more curving. This was a new way to explain gravitation (gravity).

General relativity explains gravitational lensing, which is light bending when it comes near a
massive object. This explanation was proven correct during a solar eclipse, when the sun's
bending of starlight from distant stars could be measured because of the darkness of the eclipse.

General relativity also set the stage for cosmology (theories of the structure of our universe at
large distances and over long times). Einstein thought that the universe may curve a little bit in
both space and time, so that the universe always had existed and always will exist, and so that if
an object moved through the universe without bumping into anything, it would return to its
starting place, from the other direction, after a very long time. He even changed his equations to
include a "cosmological constant," in order to allow a mathematical model of an unchanging
universe. The general theory of relativity also allows the universe to spread out (grow larger and
less dense) forever, and most scientists think that astronomy has proved that this is what
happens. When Einstein realized that good models of the universe were possible even without
the cosmological constant, he called his use of the cosmological constant his "biggest blunder,"
and that constant is often left out of the theory. However, many scientists now believe that the
cosmological constant is needed to fit in all that we now know about the universe.

A popular theory of cosmology is called the Big Bang. According to the Big Bang theory, the
universe was formed 15 billion years ago, in what is called a "gravitational singularity". This
singularity was small, dense, and very hot. According to this theory, all of the matter that we
know today came out of this point.

Einstein himself did not have the idea of a "black hole", but later scientists used this name for an
object in the universe that bends spacetime so much that not even light can escape it. They think
that these ultra-dense objects are formed when giant stars, at least three times the size of our sun,
die. This event can follow what is called a supernova. The formation of black holes may be a
major source of gravitational waves, so the search for proof of gravitational waves has become
an important scientific pursuit.

Beliefs
Many scientists only care about their work, but Einstein also spoke and wrote often about politics
and world peace. He liked the ideas of socialism and of having only one government for the
whole world. He also worked for Zionism, the effort to try to create the new country of Israel.

Einstein's family was Jewish, but Einstein never practiced this religion seriously. He liked the
ideas of the Jewish philosopher Baruch Spinoza and also thought that Buddhism was a good
religion.[source?]

Even though Einstein thought of many ideas that helped scientists understand the world much
better, he disagreed with some scientific theories that other scientists liked. The theory of
quantum mechanics discusses things that can happen only with certain probabilities, which
cannot be predicted with better precision no matter how much information we might have. This
theoretical pursuit is different from statistical mechanics, in which Einstein did important work.
Einstein did not like the part of quantum theory that denied anything more than the probability
that something would be found to be true of something when it was actually measured; he
thought that it should be possible to predict anything, if we had the correct theory and enough
information. He once said, "I do not believe that God plays dice with the Universe."

Because Einstein helped science so much, his name is now used for several different things. A
unit used in photochemistry was named for him. It is equal to Avogadro's number multiplied by
the energy of one photon of light. The chemical element Einsteinium is named after the scientist
as well.[14] In slang, we sometimes call a very smart person an "Einstein."

Criticism
Most scientists think that Einstein's theories of special and general relativity work very well, and
they use those ideas and formulas in their own work. Einstein could not agree that phenomena in
quantum mechanics can happen out of pure chance. He believed that all natural phonomena have
explanations that do not include pure chance. He spent much of his later life trying to find a
"unified field theory" that would include his general relativity theory, Maxwell's theory of
electromagnetism, and perhaps a better quantum theory. Most scientists do not think that he
succeeded in that attempt.