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Gravity
Einstein's special theory of relativity applies only to steady, unchanging motion through space-time, not accelerating motion like an object falling toward Earth.
- It troubled Einstein that his theory didn't include gravity, and his battle to incorporate it made symmetry central to his thinking.
- Einstein later understood that gravity is the curvature of space-time itself. Falling objects follow the space-time path carved out for them.
- After general relativity was published, it appeared that energy might not be conserved in strongly curved space-time. But mathematician Emmy Noether proved that the amount of energy (including mass), the amount of electric charge, the amount of momentum, are all associated with a particular symmetry, a change that doesn't change anything.
- Noether showed that the symmetries of general relativity ensure that energy is always conserved.
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Dualities
Duality is a closely related idea to symmetry. Wave-particle duality has been around since the beginning of quantum mechanics. But newfound dualities have shown interesting relationships. For example, a three-dimensional world without gravity can be mathematically equivalent to a fou...
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415 reads
Insights of Albert Einstein
Many insights of Albert Einstein are now part of popular imagination: black holes, time warps, and wormholes show up in movies and books.
Less famous, but probably the most revolutionary part of Einstein's phenomena, is a simple idea that shows how pieces fit together and illuminate the ro...
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Matter
After Einstein, the pull of symmetry became more powerful.
- Paul Dirac, trying to make quantum mechanics compatible with the symmetry requirements of special relativity, found a minus sign in an equation, suggesting the existence of "antimatter."
- Wolfgang Pauli, trying to acc...
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Not giving up on symmetry
The idea of symmetry proved very powerful. Giving it up would mean giving up on naturalness - the idea that the universe has to be exactly the way it is for a reason.
But inside black holes, the speed of light (which grounded Einstein's work) will not play a vital role in the future....
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Symmetry
The relationship that mattered most to Einstein's ideas was symmetry. Scientists describe symmetry as changes that don't really change anything. More complicated symmetries have led to the discoveries from neutrinos to quarks.
Symmetry is at the root of our descrip...
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747 reads
Einstein and Light
Albert Einstein did not think about symmetry when he wrote his first relativity papers in 1905. He was considering several seemingly unrelated puzzles and connecting the dots.
- Einstein realized that the speed of light - a speed that stayed constant - was a measurable manifestation of...
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Gauge symmetry
From the 1950s, invariances took on a life of their own. New symmetries, known as "gauge" invariances, became productive by requiring the existence of everything from W and Z bosons to gluons.
Gauge symmetry dictates what other ingredients you have to introduce. Gauge symmetries d...
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Relationships over things
We often think of things as the heart of reality. But most often the relationship is more important, not the stuff.
We may think "stuff" like space and time are unchangeable aspects of nature. In reality, the relationship between space and time stays the same.
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Some changes don't change anything
The most fundamental aspects of nature stay the same.
For example, Einstein's papers on relativity show that the relationship between energy and mass is invariant, even though energy and mass can take on many different forms.
Even though matter produces ene...
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Unified space-time
Unified space-time starts to make sense if we think that the speed of light is a relationship between the distance traveled over time.
Because the speed of light can't change, your laser beam won't go any faster. The measurement of distance and time must be changed instead, depending on th...
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580 reads
Broken Symmetries
Symmetry, as it is understood, seems not to answer the biggest questions in physics. In some cases, symmetries show the underlying laws of nature that do not show up in reality.
For example, when energy congeals into matter (E = mc2), the result is an equal amount of matter and antimat...
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421 reads
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Space-Time
Einstein's theory of general relativity says that Time can be bent, stretched and squeezed, and the four-dimensional fabric with a huge mass creates a dimple, or bending of Space-Time, causing gravity.
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Absolute time does not exist
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