Relativity

Finished Einstein's Relativity: The Special and the General Theory over the weekend. My copy was subtitled “A simple explanation that anyone can understand.” Basically, it omitted the vast majority of the mathematics behind the theory and just presented the concepts and the justifications for its various claims in simplified form. The only math was the statement of the Lorentz transformation with a demonstration of why it holds for the special case of Newtonian mechanics, and a couple of equations involving Gaussian coordinate systems (systems whose coordinate axes are not straight lines) with a demonstration of the fact that a Euclidean coordinate system is just a special case of a Gaussian one.

I must admit that despite the abysmal translation guilty of the most overstuffed, pompous British academic style, the book did live up to the promise of being understandable by anyone, or at least by me. I can's say, however, that I enjoyed it. I realize in retrospect that I expected the book to change my view of the physical world, my outlook on life even, in some fundamental, earth-shattering way. I expected it to offer insight into the nature of our universe heretofore unavailable to me. That it failed to do. The oft-cited result of the theory of relativity is the fact that clocks slow down when they move at speeds close to the speed of light. This sounds vaguely subversive, but how does it really alter our daily experience? It does not. The only example of his theory's significance that Einstein himself gives is that it explains some of the astronomical observations having to do with distant stars, as well as, in one particular case, the orbit of the planet Mercury. Important for astronomers and cosmologists, no question about it. But for me? Not so much. One could argue that something like this is intrinsically interesting and significant. Fair enough. Years ago, I might have counted myself among those for whom this holds true. For better or for worse, however, I've long since come down to earth, as it were.