kamivasq

Albert Einstein was a really smart motherfucker. He was smart not just because he was able to conceive of the theory of relativity (both the special and general theories) - he was working on things that people before him had already worked on. What was really smart about him is that he was able to make it all explicable - if not entirely comprehensible - to your average person. I'm not going to go into the general and special theories of relativity, because I honestly only understand the theories in metaphor, and Einstein's metaphors are much more eloquent, nuanced, and specific than mine. Plus, I don't really remember exactly what it was all about. Basically, that Euclidean geometry is always going to fail in the face of a universe that is infinitely more complex than we can possibly imagine. But there are some constants and things you can do with math that help make calculations a lot closer to and reflective of actual observation. Einstein was hoping, I think, for some universal constant, but never got there (or didn't share it, fearing that it would give physicists nothing to do but make little pig statues out of pink erasers and thumbtacks). The math, a lot of it, is far beyond me, but I'm sure the mathematic illustrations and references to quantum physics documents are really helpful to people who know about that stuff. I was a good math student in high school, and a lot of it is still light-years out of my league. But like I said, the important thing about the book is that it explains things without needing the math. Anyone can relate to that feeling of being on a train (or in a car, nowadays), your focal point being the side of a moving car, and feeling as if you're moving backward even though the car beside you has moved forward, when in reality, you're both on the planet Earth, rotating on its axis and around the sun, which is moving in relation to our galaxy, which...you get the point. You can measure the speed of the car moving next to you, giving you that sick feeling in your stomach, but you're never going to get it quite right, except as it relates to wherever you happen to be. Pretty short read, too.

2023-02-13 09:10