Today was a day. just the day I needed - total solitude in the big city. After a week of teaching (and what a wonderful bunch of students I enjoyed), I needed an unwind, a day of disorganised wandering, a day of answering to no one, no questions or decisions ... and I got it!
My adventure started with a walk, a short bus ride, a longer skytrain trip and Vancouver!
Hopped off at Main Street station, then picked up a MobiBike from the Olympic Village station, and pedaled to Opus on Granville Island for some art supplies. Instead of battling the parking, all I had to do was battle the crowds. There's a bikeshare station at Granville Island, so I didn't need to find a spot for the bike.
After lunch, I picked up another Mobibike and cycled the seawall to Oppenheimer Park for an Urban Sketcher meetup at the Japanese Festival. I managed to find a spot and a view then got down to sketching, filling in the colour with my new Winsor and Newton watercolour markers. OK, so it's a first attempt with the pens and I need lots more time to get used to them ... but what fun!
Cycled my Mobibike back to Olympic Village, walked to Beta 5 chocolates for a sundae then finished it off with an iced tea back on False Creek.
I spoke to only a few people all day, including a sweet little girl who wanted to watch me sketch and a slightly dodgy older guy who I think might have been trying to get lucky(????).
Did I feel lonely? No.
Do I feel rejuvenated? Yes, most certainly - art, solitude, no decision-making for a multitude, no responsibilities apart from to myself for a change. The summer and its lead-in have been busy, trying to fill weekends with activities for the boy, making sure we did indeed have a holiday planned and that the summer didn't just slip away, getting through the work with this last week being the most intense, dealing with summer camp organisation, making the most of local summer living as much as possible ... it's been exhausting.
But now I'm now looking forward to August with a reduced workload, a couple of holiday weeks with the boys, and the house to myself for a few days if mr ebb gets organised.
Roll on summer!
June 30 marks the anniversary of publication for physicist Albert Einstein’s first paper on special relativity. On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies (1905) sets out Einstein’s theory on the relationship between space and time, establishing relativity for time and distance, and the absolute nature of the speed of light. As one of his four annus mirabilis [Latin: “miraculous year”] papers published in Annalen der Physik science journal the year that he obtained his doctoral degree, Einstein’s paper turned the concepts of space and time inside out—or upside down. It also set him on track to incorporate gravity into a general theory of relativity 11 years later, which observations from LIGO (the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory) have only recently proved correct.
Einstein’s name is now synonymous with “genius”: he wrote his four papers while working as a technical assistant in the Swiss patent office, his mass-energy equivalence formula E=mc2 is the world’s most famous equation, he received the 1921 Nobel Prize in physics, he is the most widely recognized scientist of all time, and he is perhaps responsible for the stereotypical wild-haired image of a scientist in many people’s minds.
The paper is a mass of equations around Einstein’s explanation of process—not the most reader-friendly piece of text. By the time I got to the second equation, I was lost; though I felt extremely pleased at spotting the equation for determining velocity, (distance divided by the time taken to travel). I’m not a physicist or a mathematician.
But that’s okay. Scientists don’t need to understand every branch of science any more than a non-scientist should. What is important is knowing where to go for explanation, or if you’re the reporting scientist, knowing when and how to put something into plain language (…coughcoughTalk Science to Me ).
Easy reader?
When I wrote “Ripples, no doubt” about the amazing news from LIGO, I knew that it was a Big Event in Science but wasn’t too sure of the specifics, even after reading and referencing the original primary research paper. For translation, I relied on information in the initial press release, commentary from trusted experts, and plain language explanations, including a cool animation from PHD Comics.
My first call is usually Wikipedia—not for an absolute factual explanation, but to familiarize myself with the jargon involved and maybe collect a few sources. For special relativity, however, the Wikipedia entry is quite dense, though it does carry a useful graphic explaining the relativity of simultaneous actions…
Einstein online
The Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics (a.k.a. the Albert Einstein Institute, no less!) in Germany maintains a much more straightforward walk-through on its Einstein Online website. Curated by the Albert Einstein Institute itself, the website publishes content created by a number of experts in the subject. Aimed at “somewhat below that of Scientific American,” the texts present accessible Einstein, and a review process makes sure that the science is both accurate and understandable.
From the spotlight on special relativity, I first learned the difference between relative and absolute statements with a simple coffee cup analogy: its position is relative and dependent on the position of the observer, but being full or empty is an absolute. From there, the explanation moves on through special relativity and inertial observers to explain that neither time nor distance is absolute. Introducing the reader to time dilation shows that a moving clock runs slower than a stationary one; a moving object is shorter than one that is still. Only the speed of light is a constant and does not vary with the position of the observer. It cannot go faster or slower…
more crickets?
Einstein Online is text based with animated gifs, so it loads well for all online users. I sort-of understood the main concept; however, for a more visual unraveling of special relativity, I turned to the animations.
Animated relativity
Minute Physics both shows and tells the background behind the theory, using a series of nifty hand-drawn infographics to explain what Einstein was trying to figure out…in just over a minute. There’s even a series on special relativity that takes the discovery further.
Meanwhile, Kaylee Yuhas on Explorium explains a little more about light not getting faster and time dilating, using some real-life illustrations.
Or check out Kadi Runnels’s entry as a finalist for the Breakthrough Junior Challenge 2015:
But what’s it all about?
So now you know about special relativity, but what’s it useful for? Sometimes the best way to learn the what? is understand the why?
Physics Girl explains some of the mind games that special relativity conjures up, like the twin paradox, where one twin ages on earth while the other flits around deep space for 30 years and ages only 26 years. It’s all to do with acceleration, keeping in mind that clocks traveling faster run slower.
The clock-and-time puzzle also features in why special (and general) relativity matters for GPS to work properly. Mostly, here on Earth, relativity doesn’t factor much into day-to-day life, but with satellites orbiting in space, there is enough distance for the effects to be noticed. The Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics explains this visually, and there’s a plain language version from the American Physical Society’s Physics Central.
By now you should be capable of getting to grips with some more general relativity. You’ve already met the concept of mass and energy making gravitational waves and bending space from my post on LIGO, “Ripples, No Doubt.” Here’s your chance to learn how mass affects light too by making it follow a curved path in space. This was first proved in 1919, when stars were spotted during a solar eclipse.
The verdict?
Okay, so I’m not a fluent physicist and definitely still a little hazy about the whole concept, but at least now I understand the general terms of what Einstein published, thanks to translation of the original paper into accessible text and engaging animations.
Science communication magic aside, what impresses me more is that Einstein made all these calculations in theory, as predictions. He had no way of testing his equations in the physical world with the instruments and technology of the time. Though Dyson, Eddington and Davidson proved his theory of general relativity within a few years of its publication, it took 100 years for LIGO to detect gravitational waves.
Though briefly a patent clerk(!), was Einstein a patient scientist? Was he okay with his predictions staying theoretical for the most part?
Apparently, when asked if Eddington’s observations had proved his theory of general relativity wrong, Einstein replied, “Then I would feel sorry for the good Lord. The theory is correct!” Which suggests that “theoretical” is not how he would describe his work.
