I picked up one of the physics books I bought a long time ago and started reading it yesterday. I have not read anything of that sort since January, so I figured I better get back on it.

It’s called Faster that the Speed of Light by Joao Magueijo. The basic idea of the book is very rebellious but still respectable in the world of physics. It’s a speculation against Einstein’s great theories of relativity. All books about modern physics have explanations of the special and general theories of relativity before they go into what they’re about. I’ve read about the theories of relativity in like 5 books now, so I just started on the chapter that follows general relativity.

It was the perfect place to start. With every book about physics, I’m always learning new ways of looking at relativity. It’s one of the most “open to the reader” theories ever. That’s why I love it so much. The reader can analyze what’s being said and then play around with the ideas in thought. The first thing I read about was the theory of ether.

Ether was an idea that came up around 1905 when Einstein published special relativity. In every other book I’ve read, it sounds like a really cracked out idea that doesn’t make much sense, but this book did a great job of explaining why they came up with it. Ether is just a substance that exists in the void of space that we cannot see or track down. They said that it exists everywhere that we can see. The reason why we needed to pretend there was “something” in the “nothingness” of space was because light waves were going through nothing. Every other wave has a medium that it vibrates through. Sound waves, ocean waves, etc. But light had no known medium. One might ask, “well, how would you go about proving that there is ether?” There were experiements carried out called the Michelson-Morley experiments. Basically, if there is an ether ocean everywhere, then the Earth is rotating around the sun through it. So the experiments were trying to prove that there is an ether wind, that light travels slower if you point it against the direction of Earth’s rotation around the sun. It makes sense!

Unfortunately, for the ether theory advocates, the light did not change speed. It held one universal speed regardless of where they pointed it. The negative results support Einstein’s special theory of relativity all the way. What’s crazy is Einstein was basically saying that light is a vibration that has no medium. It is the only wave that can propagate through a perfect vacuum. That meant that nothing could change its speed. At least that’s what he thought in 1905. His equation was energy is equal to mass times the speed of light squared. It was soon after that he realized… things could bend light- change its path. If light has an energy, then light can be converted into mass, which means it has gravity. Not only does it have gravity, but it is pulled by gravity, as well. Since it moves so quickly, there is a very little effect relative to light flying by Earth because Earth’s pull is relatively weak compared to the sun’s pull.

I’m starting to get off topic, though. As you can see, it’s easy to roam away from the main point when thinking about relativity. It’s pure genius. I hope you enjoyed the lesson and understood!

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