Posted: Thu Apr 17, 2014 5:42 pm Post subject: Einstein, Michaelson, Morley and More
One of the key revelations for science in the quest to understand what light is, was Einstein's creation of "Special Relativity". I found particularly interesting the idea that Newton was operating under and assumption that there was an "ultimate reference frame against which all motion could be measured-- a universal standard of rest" and an "absolute standard of time, a kind of clock of God, which ticked away inexorably at the same rate for everybody". These ideas would hugely hinder the progression of science and the understanding of the universe and Einstein's "Special Relativity" was the key to moving past these roadblocks.
Michaelson and Morley's experiments in accurately clocking the speed of light was also essential because it helped solidify the understanding of whether or not "the speed of light relative to the Earth was 'really' dependent on the Earth's motion through the ether".
Okay... actually how did they measure the speed of light with these mirror mechanisms if it was so fast? I actually have no clue, and I'd love if someone pointed out something that I'm completely missing. With what method, it's so not clear to me.
I'll edit this post later when I actually finish the reading, I just want to get this out there now in hopes that someone might be able to answer this...
EDIT: Alright, still haven't finished, but I've been thinking of this in the meantime. Sort of related to my question earlier. I'm on page 78 (or 118 left), and I'm just thinking about the nature of discovery. Reading about "muons", particles that last for microseconds when cosmic rays interact with atoms.
How do we know this?!??! I'm not actually asking how, but it's just freaking incredible that someone somehow figured this thing out, these "muons" that no one can see or feel, and this guy can write it down in this book, and my uninformed self can read about it and suddenly know all about muons.
What?! That's awesome! Science is awesome! Books are awesome! Knowledge is ridiculous! What's going on! I mean, no shit, that's sort of the point of education, and this is atrociously obvious, this whole notion of just reading and comprehending as fact, but damn!
What right do I have, as a simple, passive reader, to be allowed to know this knowledge, about muons or relativity or the Peloponessian War or anything else?! I didn't do those experiments, I didn't see the data or work with these scientists, and yet I know it just because of pad of paper happens to be in my lap and I can scan my eyes over it. How can I honestly say that I "know" anything I read in a book?
Okay, sorry, that was completely unrelated and totally sophomoric. I'm done with my drivel, for now.
EDIT2: Actually answering the question. The quest to learn about light led to the annihilation of "common sense ideas", which is a pretty freaking big deal in the scientific discipline. Relativity! Nothing is real and everything is real! Thanks, Einstein!
Last edited by Mark Gartsbeyn on Thu Apr 17, 2014 8:40 pm; edited 5 times in total
Mark- yeah, I have no clue. I don't think you're missing anything, I think it's just not mentioned.
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's insight about light was his theory of special relativity- namely, that all movement can only be measured as relative to yourself, and unlike scientists and physicists before him, there's no basic lack of motion, no frame of reference. The Michaelson-Morely experiment proved that there is no 'ether' that light travels though. This gave rise to the Lorenz-Fitzgerald contraction, where an object shrinks in the direction that it is moving, which came up again in Einstein's work about the motion of two objects. Honestly, I don't understand it much more than that.
For me, this section was a lot about thinking outside the box. There is no frame of reference. Light isn't a particle or a wave. I'm not sure how much this actually changed the discipline of science though.
Before I write anything, I just wanted to warn that I'm pretty sure that I didn't grasp much of the reading. Anyway...
Einstein's insight about light was that he proposed that all motion was relative to other things (?) around it (??) namely, yourself (???)
The Michaelson-Morely experiment found that light was super fast, and the speed of light would always be c.
I think that the ideas that Einstein brought up changed the way that the science world thought, but I agree with Aly that I don't really know how this changed the entire discipline of science.
I think that there are a few ways in witch the reading helps answer the project question. The work Michelson and Morey did in improving past experiments effected the discipline of science because it makes the idea of experimenting even more fundamental to science. Earlier scientists did not even do experiments much less question others experiments. I think the fact that Michelson and Morely went as far as to question an experiment and then improve on it shows a significant change in the discipline of science.
I'm a little bit confused about Einsteins ideas about light but I do think they changed the discipline of science as well. By saying that the speed of light was the same for everyone no matter where they were or how fast they were moving that brings about the idea of a constant to science. Something that everything can be measured by. I think that because this constant was proven through experiments it maybe brought about the idea that there were other constants that other things could be measured by. I think the idea of light as a constant also gave scientists a sense of direction in their work, something to base things off, a set idea of reality to go by.
One trend that I've been seeing in these readings that might help with the project is that while the study of light is the main goal driving a lot of these scientists, along the way creativity and new inventions are becoming the products. For me it seems that while scientists are focused on working on the next great solution, they are just stumbling over invention after invention (The fast moving mirrors, The Gyroscope, Foucault's Pendulum). The scale of the scientific endeavours also seemed to be changing. Experiments weren't just conducted in labs, they had been expanded to mountain ranges! The goal of finding light wasn't just a priority for physicists, it involved members from all over the scientific field including astronomers. It seems that the quest for solving the mysteries of light encouraged scientists to not only think in radically different ways, but to try to incorporate every tool that they knew of , leading to even more discoveries.
My brain feels like a sponge drenched in chocolate milk right now. Anyway, I wasn't really able to comprehend much of this reading, but I found the bit near the end about time travel to be pretty neat: "As I spelled out in my book In Search of the Edge of Time, there is actually nothing in the laws of physics (including those of the general theory of relativity, not just special theory) that forbids time travel"(120). So something called a tachyon might exist and we could then travel back in time? I guess that's a pretty cool answer to the question of how the exploration of light affected the discipline of science -- it basically created a potential reality in which time travel exists.
I don't know -- the idea of four-dimensional length really intrigued me. In a way, Einstein's ideas about special relativity seemed to mirror the ideas of Hegel, in that reality is something entirely dependent on the positioning of the knower. Maybe? I don't know what I'm saying, really. But I think there's a connection -- maybe a tenuous one -- between Einstein's theory of relativity and what Kant and Hegel did with Hume's discovery that what previously was understood as reason was in fact custom.
So I also did not understand the reading pretty much at all.... so basically I just have questions and not a lot of answers
1) What does this mean? I don't speak science and I found this very confusing.
2) I agree with Marks question/point about mirrors
3) What exactly are they using to make their calculations?
4) how exactly do the four dimensions work?
5) how much of this are we supposed to be understanding?
Einstein talked a lot about relativity which reminded me of the little I remember from 20th century physics... the idea of if you were moving at the same speed as the wave the wave would not be waving is sort of the same principle of how when you are driving cars that are going your speed dont really look like they are moving.
We also learned about motion and speed "shrinking" objects but this was always hard for me to wrap my head around...
I dont really know but it seems like things are shifting away from observation/experimentation and more toward theoretical science? but im not convinced any of that is right.
I agree with Max and others that through the exploration of light scientists have invented awesome stuff and gone to larger scales to produce more accurate results for their experiments.
Here is a link to a "demonstration" of Foucault's famous spinning mirror trick for anyone that found the explanation in the reading less than meaningful, like me.
One thing that these made clear, is that the new discoveries of how light worked also changed the very foundation and principles on which scientists though about the world. This may seem obvious, but it's an important aspect to recognize. Kind of like what Mark was getting at, the fact that we could even calculate the rotation of the Earth with a few rotating mirrors is pretty amazing. What's interesting is that we think we know it all. We think we know why the sky is blue, why the sun shines, the speed that light travels, and the whole works. But then again, they thought the same thing hundreds of years ago, and where wrong -- well, from our perspective anyways. What if we are wrong about things we have taken for granted? What if out description of the universe is but a poor polynomial approximation to a trigonometric or natural function (I'm in BC calc right now, and the fact that we can create polynomials that approximate ugly functions with stunning accuracy is mind blowing - and also got me thinking of how close to reality not only the graphs on paper I draw are, but also reality as we know it). What's special about light, is that it was a domino run of explosions, with discoveries and experiments leading in every direction and back again in a million different paths - sometimes towards inventions such as the telescope, sometimes all the way finding a place in electricity and magnetism. Our curiosity about light has driven us all around the world of physics on what seems to be a never-ending journey, with one of the most intriguing road stops being the link between space and time.
I'll say this: if the light project reflects anything from these readings, it's going to be a good mixture of mind blowing and head scratching.
My general response to the reading is really just a blank stare of confusion. I don't really know what's going on. But I'll try to answer the questions as best I can:
Einstein's main insight into the study of light was the Theory of Relativity, theory that all motion is only measurable with a frame of reference. The Michaelson-Morely experiment only proved that light doesn't travel through an ether.
That's all I got. I'm hoping I can get a better understanding of the reading when we discuss it.
I got really confused on the reading, I tried to use the reading to solve the question of what is light, but I actually got more questions form the reading. I don't really understand the "particle", I know it is not solid, liquid or gas, the concept of particle is very difficult for me understand. Also, it talks about the red light was in the white light, so how do we define a red light which is originally white light but pass through a red film and became red? Form the reading, besides those posts, I did't really get the ether part and how it affected light. Also, it is hard for me to picture how the Earth moving affects light. Also the 4th dimension part, I kind of get that if you add time in, that is 4th dimension, but I am not sure if that's all of it. I think what Einstein gave was more like a concept to understand light. The Michaelson-Morely experiment did find out more about light, like the speed. But at the same time, it connected a lot with the reading from yesterday and I got tons of questions... I wasn't expecting light to be that complex before, but now to me light is like the second complicated thing in the world. The first one is human's mind, because we raise questions!
I feel like this reading has really just proven my suspicion that this class is what all of my CSW classes have been leading up to: I took 20th Century Physics last mod, and the ideas of special relativity and blackbody radiation were already kind of familiar to me, so I guess I had a little bit of a cheat there. In any case, I was quite confused about the specifics of tachyons - they make sense as a concept, but the whole hill-analogy (or maybe not even an analogy, maybe a description?) was where I lost my understanding.
Otherwise, I really liked this reading; going into the passages with the leading question of "what is light?" really helped generate some interpretations and really abstract concepts that I'm quite pleased with. While the author was at times a bit dry, his comment on the origin of tardons was quite inspiring.
Quote:
...slighly tongue in cheek, a few physicists say that ordinary slower-than-light particles also deserve a name, and call them tardons, because they are 'tardy' compared with tachyons [the Greek word for "swift"].
I was thinking about how nerdy this is to be honest - and how much it's a joke I would totally make - and it made me visualize a discipline as a realm in which your individual way of connecting to truth is collectively built upon: it's a community in which you all discover truth in slight variations of the same manner, and build off of one another's methods. It's a nice little niche image, and I think that the concept of light is what connects disciplines to one another (not interdisciplinarily, but literally like a junction between disciplines). Going into why I think this would be quite lengthy, but I think it's sufficient to say that I'm currently treating light as an autonomous being - which can be a sum of its parts (like particles) and an active thing (like wave behavior) - and thinking about whether or not it is inherently attached to our physical world or if what we see of it is simply the result of other processes/other elements beyond the dimensions we can perceive? This obviously inspires more questions about how we can definitively assert truth/fact without even knowing the full extent of our universe, which makes me think that Science is much more about the study of objects based on how we relate to them - much in the way that History is about sequences of events and our interpretations of them. In short, I'm seeing quite a few connections between the two disciplines. (For instance, Science is the absence of personal belief being valued above group belief, thus making it about creation of knowledge through common agreement to eliminate certain ideas. In much the same way that History is a people's creation, an author's interpretation offers that final step of elimination). However, that's probably another post for another time, but it does make me wonder whether light is a universal understanding - meaning, it exists without individual interpretation, what you see is what it is - and if so, why we still attempt to define it; why do we attempt to limit light through defining it?
Joined: 01 Apr 2014 Posts: 8 Location: United States
Posted: Thu Apr 17, 2014 9:48 pm Post subject:
I agree with Eve that the Michelson and Morey continued to solidify the importance and trueness of experimentation, and that in order to advance science it is essential to question others' experiments.
Like Mark and some other people, I didn't fully understand the logistics of the mirror experiments and I hope we talk about how that works in class tomorrow because that is definitely the biggest hole in my understanding right now.
Einstein's special theory of relativity obviously has had a huge impact on the science world and led to lots of discoveries, which is more science than Science. I think he sort of reinvented physics, and that is how he had an impact on Science. He didn't change the scientific method, but he did change how physicists approach problems. Connecting space and time was revolutionary. In chemistry we talked a lot about how before Einstein and his crowd, light, space, time, and energy were all thought of very separately, and now we know that the lines between those things are not very defined at all.
Einstein seemed very much to be a visual learner, or at least good at imagining visuals to learn from. His theories on what it would be like to move at the speed of light along side a wave of light influenced scientists in their experiments. The reason this idea came to Einstein in the first place was because of the failure of the Michaelson-Morley experiment. Realizing that our Earthly techniques of measuring movement were dependent on the Earth itself. Einstein used this and took the Earth out of the equation.
I don't know if the discipline of Science changed, but I think the way we go about interpreting it and working with it changed. Like others have said, after Einstein's insight, experiments became larger and grander. These days we can look back in time to the point of the big bang... that's insane. Einstein's insight helped to inspire scientists to think bigger and in a way, yes the discipline of Science was changed.
Tino, what you mentioned about our current views on the world potentially being incorrect has always been an interesting idea to me. Cool to see someone else had that idea too.
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