Everyone knows Albert Einstein’s famous equation, but do you know why he was awarded the Nobel Prize? It was not for Relativity, but for giving birth to the Quantum Universe, which is in direct conflict with the Relative Universe!
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Thanks to QED we know that all known physical phenomena in the universe from the Big Bang to present can be described by the interaction of photons and electrons. Or, put another way, light transforming back and forth between its two known forms of matter and energy.
This view of material phenomena helps with the explanation of why rods shorten in the direction of motion. It was not Einstein who discovered this. Neither was it Einstein who discovered that the speed of light was constant. Maxwell discovered the speed of light. Michelson and Morley did an experiment that showed the speed of light was constant to all frames of reference. Fitzgerald tried to explain this with the idea that rods in motion shorten. But no one accepted this. It was Lorentz, the undisputed master of Maxwell’s equations of electromagnetism who explained how rods shorten. And unlike Fitzgerald, he did so CONVINCINGLY.
It was Lorentz, who understood the properties of the electron better than anyone, who explained the mechanics of how electrons would contract in the direction of motion, and that since electrons were the emitters of photons, or light, this contraction affected the observed speed of light such that the contraction exactly compensates for the motion. Although Fitzgerald posited that rods would shorten, it was Lorentz that showed HOW this happens.
Poincare, one of the world’s greatest mathematicians understood the logical implication of this: namely, that time itself had to stretch and contract. He even stated as much (the term, “relativity” in Einstein’s theory is understood as “Poincare’s relativity”) and commented that the laws of physics needed to change. It was inevitable. Logic dictated that it be so. But so far, there were only hints of what this change would look like. But a visionary patent clerk was piecing the images together.
Einstein was the first one who really took all of this in and put it together in a cohesive formulation, expanding these ideas to the level of fundamental principles from which all descriptions of the universe must be derived from. It was in THIS where his genius on this issued lay. He had the vision to literally re-write physics.
In his attempts to draw it all out, he got help from another great mathematician of the ages. Minkowski, who had formulated a mathematics of higher dimensions showed Einstein how to draw his picture, this new concept of space-time. With this tool, the new picture could be completed, and it was Einstein that finished it. He took Maxwell, Michelson, Lorentz, Poincare, and Minkowski and added them all up. The unification of space and time and the removal of the concept of absolute rest in the universe was the result.
Einstein’s genius was not merely in discovering, but his ability to synthesize, visualize and draw logical conclusions. Much of his “work” was pure thought.
Here is a very, very good video of some of this.
And yet, for this “Theory of Relativity,” he did not win any prizes. It was for something much larger that he won the Nobel. And it is this thing, which is currently at war with the “Theory of Relativity”
Quantum phyics
more to come on this…
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