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!

Why do you ignore science?

Did you know that carbon dioxide levels have no effect on global warming? In fact, it is just the opposite! Global warming controls carbon dioxide levels kind of indirectly AND the levels show a lagging correlation to global temperature by about 800 years! The majority of the worlds carbon dioxide emissions is from the ocean and volcanos. Volcanos emit more carbon dioxide each year than all the factories, cars, and planes and man products put together! AND! Carbon dioxide makes up for a percent of a percentile of the greenhouse gases!

And get this! Global warming is actually directly controlled by… are you ready for this?

THE SUN!!! WOW!!! THE SUN CONTROLS HOW HOT THE EARTH IS!

My dad also posted about this subject. He doesn’t like Al Gore very much. I don’t really have a problem with him. He’s just a hypocrite, and an inobjective propoganda maker and he is NOT a scientist. And finally, I’m not defending Republicans with this. I’m very politically moderate. I think they’re all hypocritic, power hungry, selfish liars.

My dad is constantly bugging me to put all of my conversation that I have for him on my blog. It is because in person, he hates to talk about the things that I’m learning in all of the scientific writings that I read. I don’t care who gets this stuff or who doesn’t… I am going to rant and scream to the world how incredible this stuff is.

First of all, the book I am currently reading is a collection of physics lectures written by Richard Feynman. He was a big physicist in the 50s and 60s and I’m pretty sure he went to all teaching until he died in 1988.¬†His writing is magnificent. The only thing that you really need to know before you read this book is some basic calculus and some Euclidean geometry.

It starts out talking about a lot of mathematics involved in classical¬†mechanics. Classical mechanics is just Newtonian physics… the boring stuff… force, kinetic energy, momentum, acceleration, all of that classic stuff dealing with bodies in motion through space. If there are any of you out there that think those types of things are what physics I’m going to be studying in college are, you are mistaken. Although these are the basic mechanics to what I’ll be doing, and an important part in the learning process, it is only the beginning.

In Einstein’s time and just before, physics was entering a revolution, where electricity and magnetism were starting to be known as a large part of modern physics. All kinds of men made incredible contributions to science in those days… and they were all brilliant. Luckily for Einstein, he was coming up at just the right time when all of the equtions he needed to answer the things he’d been dreaming up were being born. Things such as the Lorentz Transformation and so on. A famous experiment called the Michelson and Morley Experiment had just been conducted.

It’s as if God was pushing Einstein right up to the top of modern science. He had been dreaming about principles of relativity since he was 16. He failed his last final in college, which would have led him into electrical engineering. Instead he was stuck in a patent office all day in Switzerland doing nothing, but dreaming up the ideas that would change the world of science and technology as we knew it. The basic principles of relativity were starting to form, but nobody really saw it coming until he came in and BAM! Like magic, he put all of it together.

I was excited last night and earlier this evening about the things I’d been reading. I knew Einstein’s theories of relativity about how it changed our views on space… and then I also knew about his famous equation which states that mass is proportional to energy. Tonight Feynman finally pulled it all together for me, and I understand how the two connect now. I also learned a bit of vector analysis which was a really cool form of math which was composed of a little basic calculus, basic algebra, and some Euclidean geometry, but when they were put together, it will make your head spin at first. It was really exciting as I grasped it all.