Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- 1 A revolution in time
- 2 The nature of light
- 3 Light and time
- 4 The ultimate speed
- 5 E = mc2
- 6 Matter and anti-matter
- 7 Little Boy and Fat Man: relativity in action
- 8 Down to earth
- 9 Warped space
- 10 The Big Bang, black holes unified fields
- 11 Afterword: Relativity and science fiction
- Appendix: Some mathematical details and derivations
- Chronology
- Glossay
- Quotations and sources
- Suggestions further reading
- Name index
- Subject index
- Plate section
2 - The nature of light
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 March 2013
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- 1 A revolution in time
- 2 The nature of light
- 3 Light and time
- 4 The ultimate speed
- 5 E = mc2
- 6 Matter and anti-matter
- 7 Little Boy and Fat Man: relativity in action
- 8 Down to earth
- 9 Warped space
- 10 The Big Bang, black holes unified fields
- 11 Afterword: Relativity and science fiction
- Appendix: Some mathematical details and derivations
- Chronology
- Glossay
- Quotations and sources
- Suggestions further reading
- Name index
- Subject index
- Plate section
Summary
The factor which finally succeeded, after long hesitation, to bring the physicists slowly around to give up the faith in the possibility that all physics could be founded upon Newton's mechanics, was the electrodynamics of Faraday and Maxwell.
Albert Einstein. Autobiographical notes, 1949Fields of force
That gravity should be inate, inherent, and essential to matter so that one body may act upon another at a distance through a vacuum and without the mediation of anything else…is to me so great an absurdity that I believe that no man who has in philosophical matters a competent faculty of thinking can ever fall into it.
Isaac Newton, letter to Richard BentleyThree pictures hung on the wall of Einstein's study – portraits of Isaac Newton, Michael Faraday and James Clerk Maxwell. These three physicists provided the inspiration for Einstein's great works. With the tools provided by Faraday and Maxwell, Einstein eventually overturned Newton's conception of the universe and the very fabric of space and time which had proved itself so successful for over 200 years.
Newton pictured atoms of matter as having various powers of attraction and repulsion, gravity being the most famous such property. In Newton's scheme of things, the Earth attracts the Moon and all other bodies – such as the famous apple -by virtue of its mass. Newton discovered how this attractive force diminished with distance and, by applying his force law to the Sun and the planets of the solar system, he was able to explain the orbits of the planets.
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- Chapter
- Information
- Einstein's Mirror , pp. 23 - 45Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1997