Quantum Theory Cannot Hurt You_ A Guide to the Universe - Marcus Chown [54]
The question Einstein therefore set out to answer after he published his special theory of relativity in 1905 was: What does one person see when looking at another person accelerating relative to them? The answer, which took him more than a decade to obtain, was contained in the “general” theory of relativity, arguably the greatest contribution to science by a single human mind.
When Einstein embarked on his quest, one problem in particular worried him: what to do about Newton’s law of gravity. Although it had stood unchallenged for almost 250 years, it was clear to Einstein that it was fundamentally incompatible with the special theory of relativity. According to Newton, every massive body tugs on every other massive body with an attractive force called gravity. For instance, there is a gravitational pull between Earth and each and every one of us; it keeps our feet glued firmly to the ground. There is a gravitational pull between the Sun and Earth, which keeps Earth trapped in orbit around the Sun. Einstein did not object to this idea. His difficulty was with the speed of gravity.
Newton assumed that the force of gravity acts instantaneously—that is, the Sun’s gravity reaches out across space to Earth and Earth feels the tug of that gravity without any delay. Consequently, if the Sun were to vanish at this very moment—an unlikely scenario!—Earth would notice the absence of the Sun’s gravity instantly and promptly fly off into interstellar space.
An influence that can cross the gulf between the Sun and Earth in no time at all must travel infinitely fast—instantaneous travel and infinite speed are completely equivalent. However, as Einstein discovered, nothing—and that necessarily includes gravity—can travel faster than light. Since light takes just over eight minutes to travel between the Sun and Earth, it follows that, if the Sun were to vanish suddenly, Earth would continue merrily in its orbit for at least eight and a bit minutes before spinning off to the stars.
Newton’s tacit assumption that gravity reaches out across space at infinite speed is not the only serious flaw in his theory of gravity. He also assumed that the force of gravity is generated by mass. Einstein, however, discovered that all forms of energy have an effective mass, or weigh something. Consequently, all forms of energy—not just mass-energy—must be sources of gravity.
The challenge facing Einstein was, therefore, to incorporate the ideas of the special theory of relativity into a new theory of gravity and, at the same time, to generalise the special theory of relativity to describe what the world looked like to an accelerated person. It was as he contemplated these gargantuan challenges that a lightbulb lit up in Einstein’s head. He realised, to his surprise and delight, that the two tasks were one and the same.
THE ODD THING ABOUT GRAVITY
To understand the connection it is necessary to appreciate a peculiar property of gravity. All bodies, irrespective of their mass, fall at the same rate. A peanut, for instance, picks up speed just as quickly as a person. This behaviour was first noticed by the 17th-century Italian scientist Galileo. In fact, Galileo is reputed to have demonstrated the effect by taking a light object and a heavy object and dropping them together from the top of the Leaning Tower of Pisa. Reportedly, they hit the ground at the same time.
On Earth the effect is obscured because objects with a large surface area are preferentially slowed by their passage through the air. Nevertheless, Galileo’s experiment can be carried out in a place where there is no air resistance to mess things up—the Moon. In 1972, Apollo 15 commander Dave Scott dropped a hammer and a feather together. Sure enough, they hit the lunar soil at exactly the same time.
What is peculiar about this phenomenon is that, usually, the way in which a body moves in response