{"id":1023,"date":"2008-04-04T10:00:36","date_gmt":"2008-04-04T10:00:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/funkboxing.com\/wordpress\/?p=1023"},"modified":"2011-08-22T03:47:56","modified_gmt":"2011-08-22T03:47:56","slug":"blinded-with-science-relativity-part-1-special","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/funkboxing.com\/wordpress\/?p=1023","title":{"rendered":"Blinded with Science – Relativity – Part 1: Special"},"content":{"rendered":"

*originally printed in Red Shtick Magazine – April, 2008<\/a> (pdf<\/a>)<\/p>\n

The year is 1905. You are a zany German, working in a Swiss patent office. You are young,\u00a0trying to impress women, and without warning, you grow a head of hair that challenges\u00a0classical physics. All you want are fast women and fast, horseless carriages. Your hair wants\u00a0to change the world.<\/p>\n

This was Albert Einstein\u2019s life at the age of 26. He was faced with a choice: cut the wild hair\u00a0and get back to his life, or let it grow and allow each strand to wander into new dimensions of\u00a0truth. Einstein made the choice to let his profound hairstyle define his life and, thereby,\u00a0define a new understanding of nature.<\/p>\n

Einstein\u2019s exotic hair weaved knowledge into his mind, which he used to create a series of\u00a0papers now called the Annus Mirabilisor \u201cMiracle Year.\u201d In these documents are\u00a0revolutionary ideas on basic physics that are still pretty much incomprehensible to most\u00a0people 103 years later.<\/p>\n

The first of these ideas is the photoelectric effect. Einstein found that the luminous glow\u00a0created by his hair was emitted in discrete packets of energy called quanta. Before this\u00a0discovery, the infinite divisibility of energy was considered the basis of electromagnetism as\u00a0understood by Maxwell, who apparently didn\u2019t understand jack. Ironically, the idea that\u00a0energy is discrete became one of the pillars of quantum mechanics, which Einstein often\u00a0rebuked as \u201ccrazier than a straitjacketed Nazi in a French gay bar.\u201d<\/p>\n

In these papers, Einstein also discussed Brownian motion, for which he created a means of\u00a0measurement on a relatively large scale. Brownian motion is a concept relating to molecular\u00a0movements. That last sentence is so laden with potential for scatological abuse that I feel it\u2019s\u00a0best left alone.<\/p>\n

The concepts in the Annus Mirabilis that had the most immediate and far-reaching\u00a0consequences for physics are special relativity and the equivalence of matter and energy. One\u00a0of the most frequently referenced formulas in science is E=mc2. This formula is only slightly\u00a0less popular than the punch line to the classic Boudreaux and Thibodaux joke \u2013 pi(r) round.\u00a0Both of these formulas describe the fundamental nature of the universe: one of them finds the\u00a0circumference of a circle; the other finds the circumference of wasteland we can create when\u00a0politicians and generals dictate the utility of scientific discoveries.<\/p>\n

Contrary to popular belief, Einstein most certainly did not create the nuclear bomb. His\u00a0contribution to nuclear warfare was much the same as the prehistoric inventor of the wheel\u2019s\u00a0contribution to rush-hour traffic. Einstein\u2019s formula gave matter a rest energy, which was\u00a0distinct from classical potential and kinetic energies.<\/p>\n

The rest state of matter turned out to possess a metric ass-load of energy. Under the right\u00a0circumstances, it was believed that certain elements could be induced to split or combine in\u00a0ways that might release this energy. In a controlled reaction, the release would be steady and\u00a0contained.<\/p>\n

Of course, most people immediately began considering how immensely wicked it would be if\u00a0we could start an uncontrolled reaction and drop it on people who mess with us. So, a bunch\u00a0of people who weren\u2019t Einstein set about using Einstein\u2019s brilliant ideas to kill lots of people.\u00a0Seems like, if Einstein was so smart, he would have seen that coming and just kept his mouth\u00a0shut. All is vanity, but with hair like that, who can blame him?<\/p>\n

When the move towards nuclear weapons began, Einstein made his feelings on the subject\u00a0very clear with his famous quote: \u201cThose who believe in the necessity of nuclear weapons\u00a0have no penis.\u201d Einstein was known to have several penises; each of them was over 10 inches\u00a0long, and they boasted a collective IQ of 235.<\/p>\n

Among Einstein\u2019s many ideas and penises, he conjured perhaps his most famous and\u00a0profound discovery of nature: Special Relativity. His discourse into this subject was titled\u00a0\u201cOn the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies,\u201d which is also the name of a new Cirque du\u00a0Soleil performance in which several acrobats perform Lorenz transformations in mid-air\u00a0using gravitational harmonics. If you know what a Lorenz transformation is, you\u2019re cool. If\u00a0you can actually calculate one, I love you. Really.<\/p>\n

Classical relativity assumes that all inertial reference frames are subject to identical laws of\u00a0physics. This means that, if you\u2019re standing at the back of a short bus moving at 30mph, and\u00a0you throw a tub of Boudreaux\u2019s Butt Paste\u00a0towards the front at 30 mph, the relative speed of\u00a0the Butt Paste to a stationary observer is 60mph. That all sounds quite reasonable.<\/p>\n

Einstein decided that it was entirely too reasonable and there had to be something wrong with\u00a0it. Special relativity postulates that, while classical relativity holds true at all reasonable\u00a0speeds, once you start moving at unreasonable speeds, unreasonable things start to happen.\u00a0The speed at which the universe becomes completely unreasonable is c, the speed of light. If\u00a0you want to know just how fast light is, look it up; let\u2019s just say it\u2019s freaking way fast. It is so\u00a0freaking way fast that it isn\u2019t really a speed at all; it is a speed limit. Nothing can travel that\u00a0fast, except light, because it\u2019s special. The specialness of light is not just due to the fact that it\u00a0can go way fast. Light is special because it is always traveling at the same speed, to any\u00a0observer, in any inertial frame of reference. I wish I could do that.<\/p>\n

This time, the short bus is cruising at half the speed of light. You shine a Boudreaux\u2019s Butt\u00a0Paste flashlight towards the front of the bus. One might expect a stationary observer to judge\u00a0the light from the bulb to be traveling at 1.5 times the speed of light. Special relativity states\u00a0that the light from the bulb is traveling at exactly the speed of light to all observers. From\u00a0what science can effectively measure, it has been proved time and again that Einstein was\u00a0right on the money.<\/p>\n

Big, unconventional ideas often spring from big, unconventional hair. In one year, Einstein\u00a0and his hair documented logical and intuitive leaps that dwarf the lifelong efforts of some of\u00a0the cleanest-cut minds in science. After this astonishing year of revelation, Einstein\u2019s hair\u00a0took about ten years off. He grew dreadlocks, got into Rasta for a while, and then decided\u00a0that he and his hair had more riddles to solve. Gravity had always been a thorn in Albert\u00a0Einstein\u2019s side. His hair defied it, so he had no choice but to stand with his hair and face the\u00a0challenge. Together, they battled Newton\u2019s Law of Universal Gravitation. Find out who won\u00a0next time on\u2026something about science\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

*originally printed in Red Shtick Magazine – April, 2008 (pdf) The year is 1905. You are a zany German, working in a Swiss patent office. You are young,\u00a0trying to impress women, and without warning, you grow a head of hair that challenges\u00a0classical physics. All you want are fast women and fast, horseless carriages. Your hair […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[10],"tags":[39],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/funkboxing.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1023"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/funkboxing.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/funkboxing.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/funkboxing.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/funkboxing.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1023"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/funkboxing.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1023\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1035,"href":"http:\/\/funkboxing.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1023\/revisions\/1035"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/funkboxing.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1023"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/funkboxing.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1023"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/funkboxing.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1023"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}