Instant interactions: problem solved!
“Simultaneity” suspect says sage...
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...some day we are going to have to acknowledge the fact that no current theories can address the rather obvious problem that gravity effects seem to be communicated at infinite speed. from
a prophesy about science
Newton's Third Law of Motion "To every action there is
always opposed an equal reaction; or, the mutual actions of two bodies
upon each other are always equal, and directed to contrary parts."
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Relativity!
It’s a brand new science topic that is going widely misunderstood, even today as the new century—the twentieth!—is getting started. Even by many university students who learn it in Philosophy 101. Isaac Newton was deeply troubled at the end of his century of science, the seventeeth century. His "Universal Theory of Gravitation" seemed to describe, explain and predict the motions of the heavenly bodies, but at the core of his theory, his "Three Laws of Motion," Newton saw trouble. His Third Law obviously demanded that gravity effects be communicated instantaneously when applied to bodies, like the Moon interacting with Earth, that are not in contact. Trouble was still brewing near the end of the century we just left, the nineteenth. James Clerk Maxwell, the prominent English Natural Philosopher commanded the puzzling observations of Gauss, Faraday, Ampère, Oersted, Henry—and all those other Natural Philophers who delved into the mysteries of Magnetism and Electric Currents—to get into line and march in step. His four equations forced order out of chaos. But they came out of unsuspected dimensions. Vectors! Tensors! Vector Derivatives! Maxwell moved mathematics in mysterious directions that baffle even the brilliant. But the super brilliant Maxwell, by creating mental images of rolling balls, spinning rods, "curling" mathematical abstractions, and "diverging" sinks and sources, unified the behavior of charged particles (those "electrons" and "protons" of which we are all made according to those Philosophers) into four simple (but mysterious) mathematical formulae. However, Maxwell's formulae don't make sense when we try
to translate them from one observer to another observer, if those observers
happen to be in motion. |
Many Unsuspected Dimensions It was an obscure patent examiner in Switzerland who "saw the light." It was he who realized everyone was looking in the wrong direction. In fact they were looking in the wrong dimension. He has become an instant sage. Albert Einstein is now known to the educated man the world around as The Image of The Scientist. What did he do? He tells us that he solved the problem of instantaneous interactions by denying that there is a problem. He simply asserted that "simultaneity," the happenstance that two events separated by some distance occur "at the same time," has no meaning. At least not the meaning that even the most-educated man believes that it has. That was Einstein's great leap into new dimensions of thinking. His key turned the locks of the doors into the new dimensions. Space and time were united into a "four-vector," in which time could become space, and space become time. Mass mysteriously became an equivalence with energy, some single thing which reveals itself to man according the the way man chooses to query Mother Nature. The "electric field" and the "magnetic field," too, are two views of a single inseverable entity. The speed of light is the "infinite speed" in these newly discovered dimensions of mathematical thinking. Einstein is now working to bring the other great force of nature, gravity,
into the picture to unite it with the force of charge. Experiments
will be difficult because gravity is weaker than charge by a factor of
1 followed by 35 zeros! (Now, jump ahead a century: If you have a GPS instrument to locate yourself out in the woods, you are relying on Einstein's General Relativity for the accuracy of your location. You would be miles off if the GPS system did not employ General Relativity in its calculations.)
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