Einstein's Relativity, Literature and Perception

Einstein's Relativity, Literature and Perception

The effect relativity had on literature was that it gave a new way of viewing objects moving at speeds near light. What a person sees depends on their viewpoint. Relativity states that as an object moves faster from a relatively stationary point the object becomes warped, or a plane that flies 'straight" over a merry-go-round would appear curved to the rider. These are two examples of the way relativity causes someone to think. The biggest direct effect on literature was that relativity made time travel possible. Before Einstein was thought to be a fantastic yet impossible feat. Relativity only solved half the problem, time travel into the future. This occurs through time dilation. The science fiction pulps picked up on this idea and went wild.

In 1905 Albert Einstein introduced a theory called special relativity. Special Relativity deals with objects at a speed near the speed of light, c, with constant velocity. Ten years later he came out with his Nobel Prize winning theory of General Relativity which involves two objects moving a different accelerations. Einstein explained his theory by using a train car a light bulb and two observers. This train is going down the track with one observer inside the train car and one outside the train car. The observer inside the car standing exactly in the middle turns on the light switch then views the light hitting both walls at the same time. The outside observer standing so he is exactly in the middle of the car, but outside, when the light is turned on sees something different. This observer sees the light hit the back wall of the car, then hit the front wall. Why does this happen? This happens because there are two different obser...

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...s. He refined equations and ideas by Michelson and Morley who came up with a generic relativity theory using swimmers in water and rough numbers for the speed of light using a setup with mirrors. Then after Einstein's publication of relativity the credit for the contraction of length goes to Lorentz and Fitzgerald, and H.E. Ives for the experiment using decaying hydrogen to prove the time dilation theory. The key to all of this is that one man took data collected by others and made sense of it.

Works Cited

Beiser, Arthur. The World of Physics. McGraw-Hill Publishing New York, New York, 1960.

Beiser, Arthur. Concepts of Modern Phvsics. McGraw-Hill Publishing; New York, New York, 1967.

Nahin, Paul J. TimeTravel. Writer's Digest Books; Cincinnati, Ohio, 1997.

Wehr, M. Russel. Phvsics of the Atom. Addison-Wesly Publishing; Reading, Massachusetts, 19a).