The Layman'sGuide ToQuantum Reality

2 THEORY OF RELATIVITY

In the beginning years of the 1900's, Albert Einstein was busy working math problems for physics theory, and unconsciously imitating Grumpy Cat. He fiddled around a while with the newborn Quantum Theory, before uttering the immortal words, "God does not play dice," and going on to play god dice with other universal constants as he constructed the Theory of Relativity.

At the end of the 1800s, classical physics was failing to predict certain anomalies that the universe was guilty of committing. Light, composed of photons, was acknowledged to be massless, and so should not be affected by big massive bodies, such as planets, but scientists noticed that light exhibited a slight bending in its path, when it passed near big masses. At the time, the Eggheads assumed that a semi-physical aether existed, and was the medium through which light moved.

There was an experiment called the Michelson-Morley experiment, which was designed to measure the effects of the (assumed) flow of the aether on the speed of light. The scientific community was perplexed when the experiment showed no effect on photon speed in any direction of measurement of the experiment. These pointed to the idea that the aether wind had no effect on photon speed. The experiment used a device called an Interferometer to measure the speed of light, but it did not find a change. The Interferometer measurements also suggested that the aether might not exist at all.

Along came Grumpy Cat, who we know as Albert Einstein. After he had turned out to be a horrible Patent Office Clerk, he decided to try his hand at the less arduous field of Theoretical Physics. He would kick his shoes off and drink beer while he loafed around at home, pretending that he could make sense of some of the newer discoveries in the field.

Ever few days, his wife would correct the math on his whiteboard. This would irritate Albert so much, that he would have to buy a box of wine at the local convenience store, and travel down to the train tracks, where he would watch the trains go by him.

He noticed that the pitch of the train's horn coming toward him would be higher than when they were stationary, and the pitch of the train horns moving away from him would be lower than when stationary. He also knew that the pitch did not change for you if you were a passenger on the train.

This revelation excited him more than a trip to the neighborhood topless joint, and he frantically started jotting down his observations, assumptions, and conclusions. He even backed it up with some math. I will not bore you with a lot of math, but let me explain the basic ideas.

He noted that the laws of physics and the characteristics of a Frame is the same for any observers that are in uniform motion in relation to each other. Let me explain this a little better.

We all know that you change your mass and time slows down as you travel at speeds close to the speed of light. Imagine that you have two spaceships traveling near the speed of light together toward another star, and a man is standing on earth watching them.

If you are a passenger in ship #1, you do not notice anything odd about distances, masses or time passage aboard your ship. When you look over at ship #2, which is traveling at the same speed and direction as ship #1, it looks normal as well.

When the man on Earth looks at the two spaceships, he sees that they are getting heavier, the people on them are moving much slower than usually, and there seems to be an odd distortion of the shape of the ships. As long as the two ships fly together, they are in the 'same Frame of Reference, ' and neither crew notices a change. This is called the Principle of Relativity.

Let us say that the man on Earth gets mad at the two spaceships, tries to shoot them with his laser gun. It takes a long time for the light to catch up with the ships because it only can overtake the ships by the difference between the velocity of the ships and the speed of light. The man on Earth sees a normal laser beam overtaking two very fast moving ships, so everything is as expected.