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Theory of Relativity

Started by Contemporary Protestant, April 09, 2014, 06:23:12 PM

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Contemporary Protestant

Can someone help me understand the theory of relativity? I think time being relative is an amazing concept, but I don't understand the physics behind it or Einsteins theory about it.

I don't want to talk about religion right now (as my name would indicate), I ask out of a love for knowledge


Gawdzilla Sama

We 'new atheists' have a reputation for being militant, but make no mistake  we didn't start this war. If you want to place blame put it on the the religious zealots who have been poisoning the minds of the  young for a long long time."
PZ Myers

Contemporary Protestant

#3
I would appreciate both, but which ever you can explain best, a bit of a tip (specific to how I think)

My thought process is like drawing a land scape

first the main idea
and then details

you can explain it any way you like but main ideas first would be appreciated

I shared that because I think when reason is refined by psychology, it allows more people to see reason and fact

Contemporary Protestant

Reading the blog now,

Where did Einstein come up with this stuff? Was he looking for it or did he just "hey I wonder if gravity affects light?"

josephpalazzo

Quote from: Contemporary Protestant on April 09, 2014, 07:50:09 PM
Reading the blog now,

Where did Einstein come up with this stuff? Was he looking for it or did he just "hey I wonder if gravity affects light?"

Besides the three thought experiments shown in the blog, Einstein knew that Newton's theory could no longer hold if SR was true, that is, if time is no longer absolute as SR clearly indicated, then say if Jupiter would disappear, there would be a time lapse before the earth would feel it. There is nothing in Newton's theory that allows such a time delay, hence, Einstein was convinced that Newton's could not be a complete theory of gravity.

SGOS

You can make relativity as hard or easy as you want, but I don't think it needs to be hard just to understand the concept.  I've read very understandable explanations of it on the net.  If you start bogging down with things like equations or difficult wordy paragraphs, find another source.

Early on, the theory gained a reputation of being beyond the intellectual capacity of the normal mind.  But it's not.  That myth started with a couple of hyped media comments by journalists trying to be sensational.  While it was different and new, and perhaps at times has a non-intuitive feel to it, it actually makes sense.

Einstein figured it out mostly by just thinking about it.  He didn't do a lot of math.  In fact, from what I understand, he kind of sucked at math.  But the math geeks entered the process and figured a lot of those details out as the thing progressed.  And further experiments and discoveries of things like the cause of the red and blue shifts of light waves fit his theory and helped support it.

I may have got some of my observations ahead of my actual knowledge, but someone will make appropriate corrections if they are necessary.

AllPurposeAtheist

My theory is that most of our relitives are dumber than boxes of rocks.
All hail my new signature!

Admit it. You're secretly green with envy.

josephpalazzo

#8
Quote from: SGOS on April 11, 2014, 01:38:43 PM

He didn't do a lot of math.  In fact, from what I understand, he kind of sucked at math. 

Not really. That is a myth that refuses to die. Though Einstein did consult extensively with Levi-Civita, that was because tensor calculus was in the pioneering stage, and very few had been exposed to it. Levi-Civita was the eminent expert in that field, and Einstein understood he couldn't develop a new theory of gravity without it. During his 10-year work, from 1905 to 1915 - which btw next year will mark 100 years for the publication of Einstein's GR - there is a considerable volume of letters between these two, showing that Levi-Civita was coaching Einstein. But no one would say that he sucked at math. Au contraire, you can't do GR without high-brow differential calculus.  And Einstein was up to the task.  My blog is a watered-down version of his derivation.

SGOS

I figured I'd take a hit on the sucked at math comment.