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plutherusThe world ended 100 years ago today.
That was when some smart-ass patent clerk daydreamed about surfing. Specifically, about surfing on a beam of light. This, of course, led to his Special Theory of Relativity, in which he took away all our notions of a nice stable universe of universal time and space and cast us into the dark shadows of curved space and even time itself bending and stretching about us as we moved. This work eventually led to quantum mechanics, which messed everything up even more, but he rejected it until his death, leaving his famous quote that "God does not play dice with the universe." (Stephen Hawking has pointed out that, indeed, it is the dice who play God with the universe.)
Without Einstein's early work, we would not have modern computers, the nuclear bomb, black holes, or the Iridium satellites. OK, maybe we'd still have black holes, but we wouldn't know about them. As for the Iridium satellites, I was rather interested to learn that they actually have to take into account the time differences. not just different time zones, but the fact that time advances more swiftly up in orbit where they are and that this difference is significant enough that it has to be taken into account in the nanosecond timing they use to communicate with ground stations...
That was when some smart-ass patent clerk daydreamed about surfing. Specifically, about surfing on a beam of light. This, of course, led to his Special Theory of Relativity, in which he took away all our notions of a nice stable universe of universal time and space and cast us into the dark shadows of curved space and even time itself bending and stretching about us as we moved. This work eventually led to quantum mechanics, which messed everything up even more, but he rejected it until his death, leaving his famous quote that "God does not play dice with the universe." (Stephen Hawking has pointed out that, indeed, it is the dice who play God with the universe.)
Without Einstein's early work, we would not have modern computers, the nuclear bomb, black holes, or the Iridium satellites. OK, maybe we'd still have black holes, but we wouldn't know about them. As for the Iridium satellites, I was rather interested to learn that they actually have to take into account the time differences. not just different time zones, but the fact that time advances more swiftly up in orbit where they are and that this difference is significant enough that it has to be taken into account in the nanosecond timing they use to communicate with ground stations...
