Well.. we have sought God’s help for the hardship...
People ask.. what is “Relativity”.. and some enquire.. and some understand it as a “theory on paper”.. and many people asked for it to be written about.. and so on...
But relativity is no longer merely a theory...
The atomic bomb followed from it...
It left the laboratory and the blackboard of equations and hypotheses and became a terrifying reality for the whole world.. and “Albert Einstein” believed that every person had the right to know about it and understand it..
And he hated pretentiousness and the difficult, affected talk that does not reach ordinary people and considered it stupidity.. and that it leads to the “isolation of science”.. and to people’s spiritual poverty and the narrowness of their imagination.. and he believed that whoever sits in an ivory tower and plays the role of “the genius scientist whom the public does not understand” or “the one only the educated understand”.. is an ignorant person..
He rejected restricting any science to certain people.. and used to say that genius lies in simplicity.. and that the truth is simple...
The question with which Einstein began his ideas.. is: “What is behind the closed door?”
Imagine yourself sitting on your favourite chair in your room with the door shut.. what is behind the closed door?
Can you see what is behind the door? Of course not.. because the door is solid and if it is a little thick you will not even be able to hear what is going on behind it..
But the fact is that the door is not solid.. and the cat, for example, can hear very well what is going on behind it even if you do not hear the same thing...
The door is made up of particles.. and these particles are separate from one another.. and the particle is made up of atoms.. and they too are separate and far apart.. and the atom itself is made up of protons and electrons, separate and far apart.. they are almost as far from one another, by their scales, as the Earth is from the sun...
Meaning this solid, hard door is a void...!
A scattered emptiness containing atoms...
Meaning you are unable to hear or - in some way - see through the void.. and if someone is standing directly behind the door you do not see him...
You are unable to see through the door.. and you believe this is the truth.. whereas if you put on glasses that work with “X-radiation”.. you would see through the door as if it did not exist...
We can measure with another example.. that brings the matter closer to you.. and Einstein thought about it too.. you are sitting on your favourite chair in calm and stillness.. fixed, not moving.. but science says this is not the truth..
The truth is that the chair you are sitting on has active atoms with electrons and protons in a spinning motion.. and the earth’s plates on which your house is built are moving.. and the whole Earth is moving through space faster than a fast car..
You are not fixed and still as you believed...
Imagine you are sitting in a garden looking at flowers coloured yellow and red and orange and mauve.. and the blue sky and the green grass..
All that you see means nothing to the rabbit.. the rabbit sees only blue and green...
Ordinary white light.. the kind coming to you from the lamp.. is not in truth white.. if you passed it through a “glass prism”.. it would break into seven colours.. which it is made of.. a rainbow.. which forms when the sun is out and the world is raining or damp and the water plays the role of the glass prism..
You do not see a thing that exists in front of your eyes...
All the judgements we pass on things are “relative”.. they are not the truth.. governed by our weak senses and the measuring instruments we have managed to attain...
That is the worst of it.. you might be seeing something that does not exist at all....
Imagine you are stretched out on the seashore watching the stars on a clear night.. watching a star that shines.. this star is 100 million “light-years” away from us.. the light-year is the distance light travels in space in a year.. and it is approximately.. 9 thousand billion kilometres..
Meaning this star, for a beam of light to come to you from it.. took 100 million light-years.. this beam set out 100 million years ago...
During those million years.. this star may have exploded.. vanished.. or moved through space to another place...
You would need the like of them.. 100 million light-years.. to know the fate of that same star...
Meaning you are in fact sitting watching something that shines above you in the sky.. and it does not exist at all...!
To that degree can our senses and our scientific measuring tools mislead us...?!
So does this world not exist? Is it not real???
No, it exists and is real.. but there is a gap between us and it.. and a gap between it and our instruments with which we measure.. and we try constantly to fill them.. so that they let us see the world as it truly is...
And the truth is that there is more than one world.. there is the world of humans.. with its colours, and the world of the rabbit with its colours.. and the world of the bat, which does not see at all.. and the world of the telescope and X-rays..
How do we reach the truth? Mathematicians and after them Einstein laid down the rules that let us, in some way, arrive at something shared by which we can measure..
And this was the nucleus of relativity, which we will continue talking about another time, God willing...
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References:
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1 - Ehlers, Jürgen (1973), "Survey of general relativity theory", in Israel, Werner, Relativity, Astrophysics and Cosmology, D. Reidel, pp. 1–125
2 - Kennefick, Daniel (2007), "Not Only Because of Theory: Dyson, Eddington and the Competing Myths of the 1919 Eclipse Expedition", Proceedings of the 7th Conference on the History of General Relativity, Tenerife, 2005 0709, p. 685.
3 - Schutz, Bernard F. (2003), Gravity from the ground up, Cambridge University Press.
4 - ماهي نظرية النسبية - لانداو ورومر - دار مير - موسكو..
5 - النسبية بين نيوتن وأنشتاين - تأليف د. طالب ناهي الخفاجي..
6 - آينشتين و النسبية - د. مصطفى محمود - دار المعارف...
7 - اينشتاين والنظرية النسبية - د. محمد عبد الرحمن - دارالقلم - بيروت - الطبعة الثامنة...
8 - الزمان الوجودي - عبد الرحمن بدوي...
9 - النسبية الخاصة - د. مصطفى مشرفة...
10 - ABC of relativity - Russel..