“As a friend with more experience than you, I recommend that you do not take these plans forward, first because you will not succeed, and even if they have, because no one will believe you,” Max Planck to Albert Einstein.
The November 25, 1915, somewhere in Germany, printing machine carving the Meeting Reports of the Prussian Academy of Sciences . Between pages 844 and 847 of this compilation of yellowed paper an enigmatic text was under the German title Feldgleichungen der Gravitation -The field equations of gravity -.
Mathematical formulas that appeared there were the product of the strange ideas of a German physical stranger who did not wear stockings and that because of his “incompetence” had to take a discreet place in the patent office in Bern, Switzerland . Ironically, today this “incompetent” is known to all, Albert Einstein (1879-1955).
Two hundred years ago, Isaac Newton had published a gravity equation describing how the cannonballs and the planets moved. However, with their new equations Einstein not only postulated new laws of physics, but reinvented the universe, space and time.
The universe of Einstein began in 1905 ‘miraculous year’, when he published three important items, including “On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies”, better known as special relativity, which describes the behavior of bodies when they move at speeds close to light.
This theory postulates that the maximum speed can reach a body is 300,000 km / s, the speed of light (c). This is enough to give eight laps to Earth in a second. However, his famous equation E = mc ^ 2 , proposes equality between energy and mass, indicating that the more power / speed have a body, the greater its mass. Those who go jogging to lose weight can be reassured; increasing its mass is negligible at such low speeds, while burning calories is significant. However, if it ran at speeds close to c, the weight could be several million tons
This phenomenon has an important consequence for physics. Only massless bodies, such as particle-the photon light-transmitting, they can move ac, while a massive need infinite energy to do something impossible from the known laws of physics. For this reason, those who imagine how to conduct manned interstellar not think of engines that will drive a huge ship through space, but that will change in a space for “bringing” the destination to the ship, such as Warp Drive proposal by the Mexican physicist Miguel Alcubierre in 1994. Do you remember that exciting Captain Kirk phrase command of the Enterprise? Mr. Zulu, at warp speed!
Second, the special relativity postulates that space and time are not separate entities, but a unique structure of four dimensions. It is easy to see that the three dimensions of space -Width, height-length and are not independent, but interchangeable. The height of a cube can be converted to their width if it is broken, a fact that does not surprise anyone. But the employee of the patent office found that it can also exchange time in space through speed. This means that the faster a body moves by the dimensions of space, time will slow down. For someone who hypothetically ac moves, the clock stops.
Although the effects of special relativity may seem alien or science fiction, you should know that the satellites that provide the cell signal and GPS time passes a little slower because they orbit at high speeds around the Earth, so that aerospace engineers should schedule their re-synchronization to the information about your current position is true.
In 1915, after years of throwing pieces of paper into the trash, Einstein found a way to combine the phenomena of special relativity, with the mysterious gravity whose nature was left unfinished for Newton. In “The field equations of gravity” Einstein postulated: Gravity is not a force as is commonly imagined, it is an effect created by the warping of space-time in the presence of mass.
Your smartphone falls to the floor almost every week because the Earth distorts the space-time region. If you take a sheet by four corners, and places a heavy object in the center, you will see how the sheet is deformed, and all objects that are located at the ends will fall toward the object center. This image at first sight simple, is something that no enlightened mind had thought of hundreds of years of science , and is what is called the theory of general relativity.
such an amazing idea too radical needed tests. And the most important of which took place in 1919 when the British astronomer Arthur Eddington was given the task of measuring whether the starlight -Product warp space-time is curved when the sun passed in front of them . during a solar eclipse The result was overwhelming and presented by the owners of the New York Times on 6 and 7 November 1919 “Einstein’s theory succeeds” and “Revolution in science – New theory of the universe, Newtonian ideas overthrown” . Since then, general relativity is the pillar of cosmology, a science of the XXI century that deals with the origin and evolution of the universe and the properties of space-time.
Ironically, these changes were so profound that or Einstein himself believed completely in the consequences of his theory . The Russian mathematician Alexander Friedmann and the Jesuit priest Georges Lemaître discovered that the equations of general relativity led to a universe with a dynamic evolution, that is, one that expands or shrinks over time, a paradigm that was contrary to the idea of eternal static universe of Einstein.
However, between 1929 and 1931 the American astronomer Edwin Hubble observed that other galaxies that populate the universe are moving away from the Milky Way, our galaxy. In other words, the universe is expanding. Later, Einstein went to the Mount Wilson observatory for a look through the telescope that expanded the boundaries of their own universe.
From this fact, Lemaître made the following argument: if the universe is expanding, yesterday was smaller than today, and if we go back far enough, we will see how everything should be concentrated at a single point unimaginably small, hot and dense; a ‘primeval atom “that gave rise to a universe that has evolved over 13,700 million years. This is what we now know as the Big Bang theory.
General relativity has passed every scientific evidence that has been submitted, but Einstein’s legacy goes beyond practical applications such as GPS, cell phones, the or atomic bombs computers . The relativistic universe is a brush of the human mind which animates our strangest fantasies about the cosmos, and makes us think of black holes, visit other worlds, traveling at the speed of light, or go back in time.
The magnificent and strange universe that we saw in the Interstellar film (2014), was cooked for years in the mind that was once a solitary and quiet girl, whose Greek teacher said, “You’ll never amount to nothing”. Someone who thought during the day falling elevators, twins traveling through space, or people riding on a beam of light. Do we relativity holds more? It is a difficult question to answer, but 100 years later, Einstein has led us to an extraordinary adventure through space-time, an adventure of thought that seems endless.
No comments:
Post a Comment