Many of us especially those who major in physics must have come in contact with this theories,what amaze me is as elegant as it, many know little about it.so Ill like to throw more light as little and insufficient as it may be on the deceptively simple but equally very powerful theories,

I will like to start by looking at the figure behind this profound theories and how he journeyed towards this breathtaking theories

Albert Einstein and his journey towards relativity
Many of us who are grown ups may have encountered scenarios whereby others made fun of us for asking childish questions or we making fun of others to this effect. But Einstein was a man who could ask immensely simple questions. As a child, Einstein asked himself the simple question: What would a light beam look like if you could catch up with one? Would you see a stationary wave, frozen in time? This question set him on a 50year journey through the mysteries of space and time

Imagine trying to overtake a train in a speeding car. If we hit the gas pedal, our car races neck-and-neck with the train. We can peer inside the train, which now appears to be at rest. We can see the seats and the people, who are acting as though the train weren't moving. Similarly, Einstein as a child imagined travelling alongside a light beam. He thought that the light beam should resemble a series of stationary waves, frozen in time; that is, the light beam should appear motionless

When Einstein was 16 years old, he spotted the flaw in this argument and letter on he showed that a light beam travels at the same velocity c, no matter how hard you try to catch up with it.

this seemed absurd . This meant that we could never overtake the train (light beam). Worse, no matter how fast we drove our car, the train would always seem to be traveling ahead of us at the same velocity

special relativity

In 1905, with plenty of time on his hands at the patent office, Einstein carefully analyzed the field equations of Maxwell and was led to postulate the principle of special relativity: The speed of light is the same in all constantly moving frames. This innocent-sounding principle is one of the greatest achievements of the human spirit. Some have said that it ranks with Newton's law of gravitation as one of the greatest scientific creations of the human mind in the 2 million years our species has been evolving on this planet. From it, we can logically unlock the secret of the vast energies released by the stars and galaxies

To see how this simple statement can lead to such profound conclusions, let us return to the analogy of the car trying to overtake the train. Let us say that a pedestrian on the sidewalk clocks our car traveling at 99 miles per hour, and the train traveling at 100 miles per hour. Naturally, from our point of view in the car, we see the train moving ahead of us at 1 mile per hour. This is because velocities can be added and subtracted, just like ordinary numbers

Now let us replace the train by a light beam, but keep the velocity of light at just 100 miles per hour. The pedestrian still clocks our car traveling at 99 miles per hour in hot pursuit of the light beam traveling at 100 miles per hour. According to the pedestrian, we should be closing in on the light beam. However, according to relativity, we in the car actually see the light beam not traveling ahead of us at 1 mile per hour, as expected, but speeding ahead of us at 100 miles per hour. Remarkably, we see the light beam racing ahead of us as though we were at rest. Not believing our own eyes, we slam on the gas pedal until the pedestrianclocks our car racing ahead at 99.99999 miles per hour. Surely, we think, we must be about to overtake the light beam. However, when we look out the window, we see the light beam still speeding ahead of us at 100 miles per hour

Uneasily, we reach several bizarre, disturbing conclusions.
First, no matter how much we gun the engines of our car, the pedestrian tells us that we can approach but never exceed 100 miles per hour. This seems to be the top velocity of the car.
Second, no matter how close we come to 100 miles per hour, we still see the light beam speeding ahead of us at 100 miles per hour, as though we weren't moving at all

This raise the fundamental question- How can both people in the speeding car and the stationary person measure the velocity of the light beam to be the same? Ordinarily, this is impossible. It appears to be nature's colossal joke

The only possible way outta this paradox Einstein noted is that--time slows down for us in the car. If the pedestrian takes a telescope and peers into our car, he sees everyone in the car moving exceptionally slowly. However, we in the car never notice that time is slowing down because our brains, too, have slowed down, and everything seems normal to us. Furthermore, he sees that the car has become flattened in the direction of motion. The car has shrunk like an accordion

This also raise another question-if the car has shrinks like an accordion why don't we feel the effect?

Einstein was also ready- he noted that we never feel this effect because our bodies too have shrunk

Then Einstein went further to express himself with amazingly simple mathematics- This one equation, in turn, governs the properties of dynamos, radar, radio, television, lasers, household appliances, and the cornucopia of consumer electronics that appear in everyone's living room
More important, Einstein found that the mass of the car also increases as it speeds up. But where did this excess mass come from? Einstein concluded that it came from the energy

This had disturbing consequences. Two of the great discoveries of nineteenth-century physics were the conservation of mass and the conservation of energy; that is, the total mass and total energy of a closed system, taken separately, do not change. For example, if the speeding car hits the brick wall, the energy of the car does not vanish, but is converted into the sound energy of the crash, the kinetic energy of the flying brick fragments, heat energy, and so on. The total energy (and total mass) before and after the crash is the same

Einstein said that the energy of the car could be converted into mass—a new conservation principle that said that the sum total of the mass added to energy must always remain the same. Matter does not suddenly disappear, nor does energy spring out of nothing

When Einstein was 26 years old, he calculated precisely how energy must change if the relativity principle was correct, and he discovered the relation E = mc2. Since the speed of light squared (c2) is an astronomically large number, a small amount of matter can release a vast amount of energy. Locked within the smallest particles of matter is a storehouse of energy, more than 1 million times the energy released in a chemical explosion. Matter, in some sense, can be seen as an almost inexhaustible storehouse of energy; that is, matter is condensed energy.The direct impact of Einstein's work on the fourth dimension was, of course, the hydrogen bomb, which has proved to be the most powerful creation of twentieth-century science

# to be continued #

nice one OP, i'm looking forward to the continuation/conclusion of your article.

geez18:
nice one OP, i'm looking forward to the continuation/conclusion of your article.

thanks bro...working on the continuation..will inform you when it's ready

butterfly88:
thanks bro...working on the continuation..will inform you when it's ready

ok

fantastic!.....carry on op

In continuation

Einstein special theory of relativity alone would have guaranteed him a place among the giants of physics. But Einstein wasn't satisfied

His key insight was to use the fourth dimension to unite the laws of nature by introducing two new concepts: space-time and matterenergy. Although he had unlocked some of the deepest secrets of nature, he realized there were several gaping holes in his theory. What was the relationship between these two new concepts? More specifically, what about accelerations, which are ignored in special relativity? And what about gravitation

His friend Max Planck, the founder of the quantum theory, advised the young Einstein that the problem of gravitation was too difficult. Planck told him that he was too ambitious: "As an older friend I must advise you against it for in the first place you will not succeed; and even if you succeed, no one will believe you."5 Einstein, however, plunged ahead to unravel the mystery of gravitation. Once again, the key to his momentous discovery was to ask questions that only children ask.

When children ride in an elevator, they sometimes nervously ask, "What happens if the rope breaks?" The answer is that you become weightless and float inside the elevator, as though in outer space, because both you and the elevator are falling at the same rate.even though both you and the elevator are accelerating in the earth's gravitational field, the acceleration is the same for both, and hence it appears that you are weightless in the elevator (at least until you reach the bottom of the shaft).
General theory of relativity
1907, Einstein realized that a person floating in the elevator might think that someone had mysteriously turned off gravity. Einstein once recalled, "I was sitting in a chair in the patent office at Bern when all of a sudden a thought occurred to me: 'If a person falls freely he will not feel his own weight.' I was startled. This simple thought made a deep impression on me. It impelled me toward a theory of gravitation." Einstein would call it "the happiest thought of my life

Reversing the situation, he knew that someone in an accelerating rocket will feel a force pushing him into his seat, as though there were a gravitational pull on him. (In fact, the force of acceleration felt by our astronauts is routinely measured in g's—that is, multiples of the force of the earth's gravitation.) The conclusion he reached was that someone accelerating in a speeding rocket may think that these forces were caused by gravity.

With this children's question, Einstein grasped the fundamental nature of gravitation: The laws of nature in an accelerating frame are equivalent to the laws in a gravitational field . This simple statement, called the equivalence principle, may not mean much to the average person, but once again, in the hands of Einstein, it became the foundation of a theory of the cosmos

This equivalence principle also gives simple answers to complex physics questions. For example, if we are holding a helium balloon while riding in a car, and the car suddenly swerves to the left, our bodies will be jolted to the right, but which way will the balloon move? Common sense tells us that the balloon, like our bodies, will move to the right. However, the correct resolution of this subtle question has stumped even experienced physicists. The answer is to use the equivalence principle. Imagine a gravitational field pulling on the car from the right. Gravity will make us lurch us to the right, so the helium balloon, which is lighter than air and always floats "up," opposite the pull of gravity, must float to the left, into the direction of the swerve, defying common sense

Einstein exploited the equivalence principle to solve the long-standing problem of whether a light beam is affected by gravity. Ordinarily, this is a highly nontrivial question. Through the equivalence principle, however, the answer becomes obvious. If we shine a flashlight inside an accelerating rocket, the light beam will bend downward toward the floor (because the rocket has accelerated beneath the light beam during the time it takes for the light beam to move across the room). Therefore, argued Einstein, a gravitational field will also bend the path of light

Einstein knew that a fundamental principle of physics is that a light beam will take the path requiring the least amount of time between two points. (This is called Fermat's least-time principle.) Ordinarily, the path with the smallest time between two points is a straight line, so light beams are straight. (Even when light bends upon entering glass, it still obeys the least-time principle. This is because light slows down in glass, and the path with the least time through a combination of air and glass is now a bent line. This is called refraction, which is the principle behind microscopes and telescopes)

However, if light takes the path with the least time between two points, and light beams bend under the influence of gravity, then the shortest distance between two points is a curved line. Einstein was shocked by this conclusion: If light could be observed traveling in a curved line, it would mean that space itself is curved

to further simplify- Imagine a rock placed on a stretched bedsheet. Obviously the rock will sink into the sheet, creating a smooth depression. A small marble shot onto the bedsheet will then follow a circular or an elliptical path around the rock. Someone looking from a distance at the marble orbiting around the rock may say that there is an "instantaneous force" emanating from the rock that alters the path of the marble. However, on close inspection it is easy to see what is really happening: The rock has warped the bedsheet, and hence the path of the marble

By this analogy, if the planets orbit around the sun, it is because they are moving in space that has been curved by the presence of the sun. Thus the reason we are standing on the earth, rather than being hurled into the vacuum of outer space, is that the earth is constantly warping the space around us

Since warping of the bedsheet was determined by the presence of the rock. Einstein summarized this analogy by stating: The presence of matter-energy determines the curvature of the space-time surround
This, in turn, can be summarized by Einstein's famous equation, which essentially states: Matter-energy —» curvature of space-time(where the arrow means determines)

This deceptively short equation is one of the greatest triumphs of the human mind. From it emerge the principles behind the motions of stars and galaxies, black holes, the Big Bang, and perhaps the fate of the universe itself and with the help of riemann matric tensor Einstein was able to express his views mathematilly

Below are some images to illustrate this space warp

very beautiful o thanks

phensbassey:
very beautiful o thanks

thanks bruh..more interesting topics to come soon

butterfly88:
thanks bruh..more interesting topics to come soon

can't wait

I.

Very informative.
Now know the drive behind the E=mc^2.


#IsaacNewton is genius

Very informative.
Now know the drive behind the E=mc^2.


#IsaacNewton is a genius

still at sea about wormholes though

nice,very nice! OP,hope i'm correct to assume you're a physicist? you did a very good job.i look forward to reading other articles from your stable.

geez18:
nice,very nice! OP,hope i'm correct to assume you're a physicist? you did a very good job.i look forward to reading other articles from your stable.

yeah broh..you're correct I'm a physicist.

Thanks....just dropped another one today...#basic concepts of quantum physics#...I hope you enjoy it too

This is a beautiful piece. Short and simple. Easy to read also..
Kudos; OP.


Cc johnnydon22 Teempakguy mrphysics donaldffd



Lalasticlala; FP abeg.

Password: Mark Zuckerbeg's sweatshirt

This is a beautiful piece. Short and simple. Easy to read also..
Kudos; OP.


Cc johnnydon22 Teempakguy mrphysics donaldffd



Lalasticlala; FP abeg.

Password: Mark Zuckerbeg's sweatshirt

Pdizzle:
i feel like a physicist. Good job.

thanks

SirWere:
This is a beautiful piece. Short and simple. Easy to read also..

Kudos; OP.



Cc
johnnydon22
Teempakguy
mrphysics
donaldffd




Lalasticlala; FP abeg.


Password: Mark Zuckerbeg's sweatshirt

( ...thanks aplenty bro

Nice one OP, all correct. Newton Special theory of relativity is great, prof. did great. i want you to write on time dilation, length contraction, time synchronization, twin paradox etc in a very simple way so that the general public can appreciate it's usefulness. i remembered when we were taught Relativity, we were trying to prove the Lorentz transformation, most physics textbooks did it through some hard ways and only a Relativity video from Standford university was able to prove it in a very authoritative manner such that anyone who an undergraduate can understand it. it was interesting and i still appreciate Prof.Enstein, this days i want to devote myself to quantum mechanics, everyday i start it from the beginning till i will convince myself that i have understand it.

These things are very interesting and the application if it abounds everywhere. Nice work sir and God's grace

butterfly88:
yeah broh..you're correct I'm a physicist.

Thanks....just dropped another one today...#basic concepts of quantum physics#...I hope you enjoy it too

why didnt u continue?

.