It all started when, at the young age of 16, Einstein conjured up a vivid thought: What would it be like to race alongside a beam of light?
Sign up for our email newsletter for the latest science newsWho could have believed that the world was flat? Or that it sits fixed in space, while the cosmos revolves around it? Anyone with two eyes, that’s who. It takes a leap of imagination to contemplate the alternative — that we are standing atop a rapidly spinning sphere, hurtling through space.
It was Einstein’s imagination that allowed him to take leaps and make connections that his contemporaries could not. He explained his insights by analogy: “When a blind beetle crawls over the surface of a curved branch, it doesn’t notice that the track it has covered is indeed curved. I was lucky enough to notice what the beetle didn’t notice.”Einstein’s thought experiments are part of a greater tradition in physics.
So Einstein decided to add the speed of light to Galileo’s thought experiment. “Even if you didn’t just do experiments on balls and fish, and you also did experiments with light, then you wouldn’t be able to tell that the ship was moving,” says Schumacher of Einstein’s thought process. Questioning these basic assumptions is where Einstein’s imagination really kicked in. He realized that in order for a fast-moving observer to measure the same speed for light as a stationary observer, notions of universally agreed-upon space and time go out the window. “There is no audible tick-tock everywhere in the world that could be considered as time,” said Einstein. Two people in relative motion will experience time differently.
The weirdness doesn’t end there. Leo will also see that the train, and everything moving along with it, contracts. To him, it becomes shorter. Don’t worry, Gail’s fine. It’s just that space isn’t the immutable, rigid structure that we assume. Unfortunately, there’s no simple way to wrap your mind around this one, but time slowing and length contraction are two sides of the same coin.
It’s not that gravity has “turned off.” Since all objects fall at the same rate, and there were no other cues in Einstein’s mental construct, the workman would feel like he was floating in empty space. Einstein would later describe this thought experiment of the falling workman as “the happiest thought of my life,” because it provided the necessary jump-start for his general theory of relativity.
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