Posted: Fri Jan 25, 2013 4:11 pm Post subject: Modern Times
What was Einstein’s insight about light and what role did the Michaelson-Morley experiment play?
Did this insight change the discipline of science? How?
Post any questions you have and any insights the reading gave you on the light project.
Einstein's special theory of relativity (so only applying to objects moving at constant velocities) ties together the Lorentz transformations with the speed of light. Essentially as something approaches the speed of light times moves more slowly for it, or as the world around it approaches the speed of light distances become smaller and smaller. Thus light itself is both simultaneously at all points along its wave, or that it is all across the Universe at once. But as proven by the Michaelson-Morley experiment, the speed of light is always c to any observer. He also took Planck's work and stated clearly that light could also be a particle, which lead to the conclusion that light is both a particle and a wave.
I think this has two major impacts. The first is the common trend of theory coming before experiment. Newton urged scientists to inquire into the nature of things with experiment and then create a hypothesis. Newton did not guess. As the field got more and more abstract, modern day scientists were forced to put theory first, backed up usually with mathematics, and then prove their ideas through experiment. The second is that the observer must be included in the results of the experiment, stated oh so perfectly in our notes on microhistory. These both seem like significant changes since the time of Newton.
Posted: Sat Jan 26, 2013 8:40 am Post subject: Be sure to post only what we asked for!
Be sure to post only what we asked for!
Post any questions you have and any insights the reading gave you on the light project. Did these scientists change the discipline of science or not? How?
Similar to Ben's point, I think the way of doing science had gone into a loop during this period: as the subject gets abstract and cannot be tested directly, scientists had to design experiments based on their proposed theory, and then refine the experiment again and again to get the more accurate result. Also, since light is as intangible as was universe to Aristotle, the way of describing abstract element in the terms of a rather solid item (wave/particle) also resembles the old ways of doing science a little.
The other change I saw was that scientists were not only looking for theories and definitions to explain the world, they looked more into how to get the accurate measurement. I think this entering of math is also a key defining feature of modern science.
The idea of absolute truth is also broken more and more as well as the imagined omnipotent elements like ether. As einstein suggested that movement and time are relative and there is no need to invoke a preferred frame of reference, then the standard framework of universe we used to believe in and rely on is sort of broken.
(But at the same time, it seems that "light" started to be the authority that is not relative: "no matter how close you get, when you measure the speed of light beam itself you will always get the answer c)
I'm having a lot of difficulties trying to picture quanta/energy or light in the form of quanta, can someone please explain....?
A discipline includes study, method, purpose and topics. Although each scientist focused on slightly different points, after all, the ultimate topic they discussed or studied was “light”. Here comes my first question: why and how did scientist start studying about light? Who started it? The first person I can think of right now is Aristotle (he argued white light is perfectly pure and is corrupted by passing through glass and other substances). So Aristotle mentioned light in order to prove his theory that heaven is perfect and earth isn’t. Then starting from Newton (probably before him in fact) people started questioning Aristotle’s point and decided to dig deeper in, that’s how they found out about light as a mixture, speed of light, relativity and photons. So does that mean the purposes of scientists later than Aristotle were just to see if the theory previous than his was correct? So that’s like a chain with the beginning of it being Aristotle trying to explain nature and saying “heaven is perfect”. The method surely changed. As we can see now things are more theoretical rather than experimentally-based (is that a word?), but this is because scientists start talking about things that are hard (if not impossible) to experiment on. So I guess even though human’s understanding of light and universe rapidly changed because of each scientist’s contribution, the discipline of science itself remained unchanged.
To respond to Mijia:
I too am a bit confused as to how light can be a particle, but I'll try giving you my understanding of it. So, if light is a wave, then its frequency should be subject to change when it's emitted and reflected off different objects- in other words: a given object should be able to reflect and emit all kinds of light. What Planck realized is that objects usually emit a specific kind of light- the sun is yellow and the hot iron poker is red, even though heated objects have particles moving at many different speeds. Planck discovered that charged particles can only emit and absorb radiation "in definite amounts"(121). It was because of these definite amounts that Planck believed in light as a particle.
Michelson and Morely proved that the speed of light is consistent no matter which way the earth is moving in relation to it. This discovery created an a priori "speed limit" (though it was proven that things could move faster) to which space and time had to conform to as opposed to light conforming to space and time. Though Einstein admitted that Michelson and Morely did not influence him directly, he was influenced by Lorentz's work which was heavily influenced by Michelson and Morely. Lorentz' and Fitzgerald's work aimed to explain the results of the Michelson-Morely experiment, so clearly, if Einstein was influenced by Lorentz, he was influenced secondhand by Michelson-Morely.
Einstein's insight about light was that time, in addition to space, as Lorentz discovered, must distort to conform to the speed of light. He theorized that the speed of light is like a barrier on one side of which everything can only move slower than the speed of light and on the other side, everything can only move faster than the speed of light. Time stands still for anything moving at the speed of light which means light is everywhere along its path at once, independent of time as normal sequence.
I think this was important for Science as a discipline because it made time and space, which we once thought were a priori pieces of knowledge, into changeable and fluid things. Also, the fact that he said all motion is relative and any object is entitled to regard itself as sitting still gives power to the observer. Now the observer is entitled to describe reality as it exists relative to him/herself.
I think the last part of the reading gave me insight into the light project. The idea of duality was essential to understanding how light works. In order to understand the behavior of light, its essential to look at it as both a particle and a wave. I think this use of duality in understanding light is important to science because it allows objects to have simultaneous contradicting properties. This would become important in Schroedinger's cat experiment. On a more abstract level, duality allows for a separation between objects and their properties which Aristotle insisted were one and the same.
If time is simply another dimension, how does that affect the idea of change? To me it seems impossible for change to occur if time doesn't have a direction anymore. Does Einstein's theory of Special Relativity fit better with Aristotle's or Plato's ideas about change (see page 5)?
Ben and Mijia bring up interesting points. It felt to me that the scientist were circling again, or returning to familiar points. They were narrowing in on the how, with numbers and measurements and most interesting of all comparisons. For instance the reference "relitiveity" started to appear and I think hold more importance. There is an odd double negative in that people were narrowing down on things, like Michaelson-Morley experiments, and so isolating the idea and questions, but then the idea of relativity entered more which involved comparing one thing to another. It seems like at the same time as narrowing down on details, the scientist also returned to Aristotle and other such people's ideas of trying to fit together the puzzle of everything. (short: smaller more detailed puzzle pieces, but still trying to assemble whole picture.) The above convoluted thoughts are how I respond to the change of discipline question.
To Patrick's question I am honestly not sure myself. Although when I read the question I think about how if time has no direction maybe it is similar to how people think change is always forward, but it may also be regression. SO perhaps the directions we think of in the dimension(s) would affect the answer to your question. Any other thoughts?
-I'm not sure how/if i'll incorporate this into my project but I think the death of ether, brought about by the study of light, changed Science.
-Einstein's theory of relativity... I suppose the the search for the answer to "what is light" led him to find the answer to other things that really did change a lot about science.
-"thinking in terms of space-time, rather than time alone" p. 112
In the reading, most of my questions are on the various experiments....
My big philosophical question is: Why did people feel the need to study light? What about it did so many scientists find so intriguing?
Did these scientists change the discipline of science or not? How?
I've been having trouble with this question, as the discipline of science is an absolutely enormous thing. Though these scientists made groundbreaking discoveries, they didn't fundamentally change the way we go about doing science. They did, however, change their respective fields. I still feel as though saying "not" in these posts in a bit of a cop-out though. I agree with Ben, that more use of math definitely changed Science, but it was by many people over a period of time.
Last edited by Isabella D on Sun Jan 27, 2013 9:27 pm; edited 1 time in total
Einstein's work on light changed the discipline of science. He made many insights, based on Maxwell's equations, about the workings of the universe. Einstein proposed that all motion was relative; there was now no standard or ultimate frame of reference. He also thought that time was relative to the observer, that there was no absolute time. Einstein found that nothing, except light, could ever be as fast as c. No matter how fast an observer was going the speed of light would always be c. Lorentz also made equations that described how electromagnetic fields will appear different for different observers. The discipline of science went from trying to find the absolute 'clockwork' of the universe to realizing that space, time, and speed are relative to each observers frame of reference.
In response to Mijia:
A quantum is a wave packet. The frequency of the waves in one quantum/photon is equivalent to the frequency of the wave of light overall, but there is some uncertainty because it is not possible to know the exact location of a particle and know and the exact momentum/frequency (Heisenberg uncertainty principal). This image may help
I don’t see how these scientists changed the discipline of science. I think they changed the way people thought about the universe, and certainly improved scientific understandings of physics, but I don’t think they changed how people ‘do science’ so in that sense, I don’t think they changed the discipline.
I tried to respond to Patrick’s question, but didn’t get very far. I couldn’t find a good quote from Plato on his views on change, but for Aristotle: “Change (in an object’s form)… is never open-ended, but confined to the narrow corridor connecting pairs of contrary qualities.)” (pg. 5) It seems to me that Aristotle didn’t consider time in the grand picture, but only in these specific examples, at least in what we have read. This quote seems like one way to visualize the hypothesis-antithesis-synthesis relationship, to me. However, Minkowski said time going either forward or backward should be regarded as a fourth dimension, but he lists six ways for space to ”move,” for lack of a better word. I don’t know if that helps you or adds to your question, but Minkowski’s idea gave me a reference of what time is in comparison to space.
This quote confused me most out of the reading: “Moving at constant velocity through three dimensions is mathematically equivalent to changing the orientation of an object in a four-dimensional spacetime, and the changing length of the shadow is equivalent to the changing amount of length contraction the object undergoes, while the amount of time dilation goes the opposite way, increasing as the shadow shrinks. The three-dimensional world around us is essentially a shadow from four-dimensional spacetime.” (pg. 118) Can anyone put it in simpler/ shorter terms?
Einstein’s effect on the theory of light established that the speed of light is the universal speed limit. (Nothing can go faster). He also said that from the point of view of one travelling closer to light speed the closer they got the slower time would seem to move. Morley proved that light moves the same speed no matter which direction it is going, Einstein then used the speed of light as a constant in his equations.
These insight changed science in that it supplanted Newtonian beliefs and made time a variable depending on speed.
Einstein's insight was in his experimenting and theories about acceleration. He looked into how different objects could move at their own speed and claim to be at rest on their own terms. What he discovered during this was that there was no possible way to reach the speed of light. Einstein had wondered what what happen if given the opportunity to travel next to a beam of light, at the speed of light, something which he discovered would never be possible. The Michaelson-Morley experiment gave Einstein the knowledge that no matter what, the speed of light would always remain the same. Without this fact, there would have been no way to prove that light speed is unreachable by anything else.
I believe that this insight did change the discipline of science. The fact that it was now known for a fact that the speed of light was always constant started off a solid base point for others to investigate what light truly is. The insight of Einstein helped shape the discipline of science by adding the fact that this does not mean that the world has a "standard of rest" Einstein was able to say that all motion is relative to its own object, which allowed for any object to be able to claim to be at rest, as opposed to the same speed for all.
Since Einstein had established the speed of light as a constant that, the dimensional conditions we exist in (namely space and time, - which as Patrick said Kant had previously established as concrete, a priori truths) must conform to. The implication being that these dimensions are capable of behaving in a manner completely separate from our typical understanding of them, grounded in familiarity. Our experience as humans is similar enough however, that Kant's view was a logical understanding of space and time. We generally don't have the ability to move quickly enough to actively observe space and time in there more flexible, relative terms. But can notice the effects on a much smaller, tangible scale, moving clocks are slower etc. Most importantly, I believe is the fact that Einstein expressed the observer is "entitled" to view there frame of reference as the one being at rest, or regular and subsequently validate their observations. All time (and I guess subsequently, space) is relative. Newton's ultimate, universally true progression of time was dead. - And perhaps universal truth's in general were dead- that every observation could only be validated as circumstantial. As other's have mentioned it's seems that science as a whole was moving away from the realm of absolutes, and was, as a discipline, moving toward a view of the universe that can only be understood in the context of the observer.
I guess what feels strange is that this tendancy towards, the relative and subjective was caused by a set of "absolute" truths ( observed nature of space/time) being contradicted and altered by a new, conflicting - but equally absolute- claim (The observed speed of light.) Is there an end to this cycle? What discoveries have the potential to override this truth and the worldview it has subsequently bred? And doesn't this sound a whole lot like the dialectic process?
What was Einstein’s insight about light and what role did the Michaelson-Morley experiment play?
Did this insight change the discipline of science? How?
Einstein determined that the speed of light was the fastest anything could go. He also determined that light was both a wave and particle. ties together the Lorentz transformations with the speed of light. The Michaelson-Morley experiment showed that the speed of light was always constant, even though it may seem like it isn't to the person experiencing it.
I feel like this reading has confused me even more about the discipline of science. I feel like (can't remember which author but...) the more you know about something the less confident you feel about knowing it...
I found it interesting that the word "insight", instead of "discovery"/"conclusion" was chosen to capture Einstein's theories. Starting from Newton, the scientists made experimentation a big part of their study, and they use experiments to support their theory. For Einstein, although he did many experiments, his theories about relativity seem to be a huge extension of what could be actually experimented. There are so many parts, such as time is still for moving light, that can only be theorized and not tested. I found it extremely hard to understand Einstein largely because there's nothing in our life that is analogous to what he was saying. So I guess the discipline of science was greatly changed.
I'm just really confused by the concept of time "shrinks". I think a better understanding of Einstein's theories would help me with further exploration.
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