Varney Clarke, you asked between Newton and Einstein who is my favourite. I hope that I dont have to choose between the two but if I have to then I will choose Newton for the Science and choose Einstein for his great personality. Einstein is unrivalled in his humanness. Here is a brief summary of some of the works of these two unravelled giants of humanity. It was a watershed in our understanding of the universe when, according to De Moivre, In 1684 Dr Halley came to visit him at Cambridge. After they had been some time together, the Dr asked him what he thought the curve would be that would be described by the planets supposing the force of attraction towards the sun to be reciprocal to the square of their distance from it. Sir Isaac replied immediately that it would be an ellipse. The Doctor, struck with joy and amazement, asked him how he knew it. Why, saith he, I have calculated it. Whereupon Dr Halley asked him for his calculation without any farther delay. Sir Isaac looked among his papers but could not find it, but he promised him to renew it and then to send it him. Fulfilment of Halleys simple request led to Newton writing what is regarded as the greatest literal work of all times Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica which is Latin for The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy. In this great book, which sets the foundation for Physics as we know it today, Newton attributed the motion of heavenly bodies to a force of gravitation that exists between the bodies, say between the Sun and the Earth. Almost two centuries later, James Clerk Maxwell demonstrated by his famous Maxwells equations that light was an electromagnetic wave which seems to have an absolute speed. This is in strong contradiction with the Newtonian notion that all motion are relative. While great minds were arguing and exerting all efforts to resolve this difficulty then comes an obscure PhD holder in Physics (who was not deemed intellectually fitted enough to teach even high school physics and his father has to beg a friend to consider him for third degree clerical works at a Swede patent office) stating that the speed of light was not only absolute but sets the barrier for any information carrying thing. The constancy of the speed of light and the claim that nothing (i.e actually, information carrying entities) travels faster than light bring out sharp contradiction between Maxwells equations (theories of electromagnetism) and Newtons theories (i.e., Newtons law of gravity). Newtons law of gravitation and Maxwell equations (or the law of electromagnetism) are perfectly good theories in their own reigns of validity but they seem to disagree in reigns were both should be valid. For instance, if the Sun was to disappear right now, according Newton, we will know instantly but according to Maxwell it will take about 8 minutes before we realise that the Sun is no more. In technical jargon, Newtons law of gravitation is not Lorentz invariant. Einstein spent the next 11 years of his life doing nothing else but working on resolving this great crisis (i.e., make Newtons law of gravitation Lorentz invariant). After many failures, a thought finally ran on Einsteins mind, a thought he considers the happiest thought of his life: For an observer falling freely from the roof of a house, the gravitational field does not exist. In other words, one can make the force of gravity to disappear just by a proper choice of reference frame. With just that seemingly unimpressive thought Einstein shows, in what is reputed to be the greatest intellectual achievement of all times (theory of general relativity), that gravity was really not a force but an interplay between the effect of geometry and energy.
Posted on: Thu, 25 Sep 2014 09:56:18 +0000
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