Albert Einstein

A Thought Experimentalist

Physics 1010
Philip Denton Millerberg
Professor Demars
Monday, November 19th 2018

ALBERT EINSTEIN : A THOUGHT EXPERIMENTALIST !1

 Albert Einstein: A Thought Experimentalist

Albert Einstein was a fascinating man. He changed the way we view the physical
world. He questioned things that I hardly have the capacity to understand, let alone,
challenge. His ability to think deeply and experiment within his own mind was
remarkable.

Einstein grew up in a small house in Munich, Germany. He came from humble

beginnings. His speech developed rather slowly. His parents sought help for him
because they thought that he may be impaired. He would later say that perhaps this
was the reason he thought in visual thought experiments (History Channel 2010)

When he was young, Einstein‘s father gave him a Compass. Einstein wanted to
figure out how that needle moved, he was fascinated by the fact that this seemed to
happen by magic. This thought would send him into a lifelong exploration of how
things work without being touched. In other words “the underlying world of
nature” (BBC 2015)

One of his first thought experiments was the idea of catching up with a light
wave, what would he see? What would it look like? He was around 16 when he thought
about this. I was thinking about skateboarding and girls. Imagine if I would have been
daydreaming about physics, I wonder where I would be...Einstein and I are alike In the
way that we both had discipline problems and both skipped classes to do things that
we enjoyed rather than doing what we were told.

Albert applied to a prestigious college and got rejected...just goes to show that
perhaps it’s who you know not what you know? “I’d like to meet the man in the
admissions office who rejected Albert Einstein” (BBC 2015). Eventually he got in to that
school and eventually he graduated. However, he didn’t do well enough to get a
teaching fellowship so he begin to work at a patent office. Fortunately for Albert
Einstein, he got to look at clock and switch patents all day which, in a way, was right
up his alley.

In the age of Einstein, Theoretical Physics was new and there weren’t a bunch of
scientific journals published. Newton was one of two kinds of physics that existed back
then. Newton believed that the whole universe was governed by the same force,

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gravity. Newtons equations are so effective, that they are still used today to send
probes to distant places in space. (History Channel 2010)

Another part of Einstein’s work consisted of electricity and magnetism. Maxwell

was the leader in this study back then. He stated that the speed of light is always the
same. This baffled Einstein. He performed a thought experiment, where he imagined a
man standing at a train station where a light turns on, he imagines the man watching as
the light wave passes his eyes. Einstein also Imagines a woman on a train, and the
train is passing precisely at the time the light is turned on and precisely at the speed of
light. He imagines that the woman would view the speed of light relatively at zero, due
to the fact that the train is traveling at the same speed as the light. The man and the
woman would see the light at different speeds, therefore Newton and Maxwell had
contradictory theories. This was a problem that needed fixing according to Einstein.
This idea that time was experienced differently depending on the person, really got
Einstein thinking. This provokes another thought experiment...

Einstein imagines the same train station with the same man standing there. He
imagines that on either side of the man, two strikes of lightning hit the ground. He
imagines that the man will experience seeing these strikes simultaneously. He then
Imagines the woman on the train passing at the moment that the two strikes happen.
Traveling at the speed of light, she would experience a lapse in the two strikes due to
her moving at the speed of light. This had Einstein thinking that if two observers could
not agree on what is simultaneous, they can’t agree on the flow of time itself (BBC
2015). Einstein concluded that The lady on the fast moving train does measure the
speed of light to be the same as the man because relative to him her time runs slower.
This concept of time and space being flexible depending on how you are moving
became known as special relativity. He would later add acceleration as a variable in
this special relativity (BBC 2015).

Albert then had to look at Newtonian gravity. According to Newton, gravity is a

force that acts instantaneously, which contradicts the theory of special relativity, so
Einstein had to figure out how to fit gravity into special relativity. He began to think
about how objects fall. According to Galilean thought, all things fall at the same rate if

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air resistance is negligible. Einstein would later discover that there must be an
important link between gravity and acceleration.

“The Faster you are moving the slower time is going” (Nova 2014)

 There was a jet and atomic clock experiment that was done back in the 70s, where
they put an atomic clock in a jet and sent it around the world at the same time they
observed a clock at rest, not in a jet. They compared the two clocks. The one in the jet
was a few billionths of a second slower. This experiment showed that time and space
could no longer be considered separate they had to be considered together, space-
time.

The NOVA narrator explores his understanding of now. He is sitting in his office now, at
the same time a cat is jumping off the windowsill, there is a meteor hitting the moon,
there’s a star exploding. He says that Einstein says that now is relative. He says that
since there are people in different motion, they will experience different “now slices”
from different angles if you were to look at space-time as a loaf of bread. This concept
baffles me. He goes on to describe an alien, not in motion, far, far away from earth. At
the same point in time there’s a man sitting on a park bench. Because they are not
both experiencing the same space time, however, if that alien were peddling a bike
away from earth his “now” would be the man on the benches “past”.

I digress…After work one day Einstein takes a trolley car, while on the car, he
notices the clock tower behind him, as he’s traveling away from the tower, he imagines
that if he were traveling at the speed of light the second hand would essentially stop
moving from his perspective. He then imagines that if you were just watching the clock,
while standing still, the second hand would click normally. The faster one moves the
slower they experience time. This is still blowing my mind...This video goes on to
explain that the closer you get to the earths core, the faster you move, hence the
slower time moves, furthermore, if time moves slower the closer to the ground you are,
then your head is slightly older than your feet (Science ABC 2018). What a trip!

Einstein had some very interesting things happen to him during his time on
earth. Einstein once had a $5000 bounty on his head, “Above anything else in the
world, they fear the influence of men of intellectual independence,” he went on to say
about the Nazis who happen to put said bounty on his head.

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 He considered himself an agnostic not an atheist, He had Pantheistic beliefs
which basically said that nature and the universe are equal to divinity...this is similar to
how I see things. (Thoughty2 2015)

He didn’t wear socks, he found them unnecessary and that every time he wore
them, he would get holes in them. I tend to agree, however if I don’t wear socks, my
feet stink. (Thoughty2 2015) I wonder if his feet stopped producing stink after so many
years of conditioning his feet to be cooped up without socks...

He loves to smoke pipes, he once said, “I believe that pipe smoking contributes
to a somewhat calm and objective judgment in all human affairs”(Thoughty2 2015)

It was said that His memory was so bad that he couldn’t remember his own
phone number.(Thoughty2 2015) Mine is bad too, but not that bad...

He was offered Israel’s Presidency because he was thought to be the greatest Jew
alive! (Thoughty2 2015)

Albert Einstein was a very driven individual with some outstanding quirks. I had
a great time researching this pillar of a human being. I am still in awe of his fantastic
thought experiments and am in wonder as to what it must have been like to be him. I
don’t claim to fully understand his theories, in fact, I have a hard time scratching his
surface. I chose him because his allure has always fascinated me.

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 References

History Channel (2010) Extraordinary Genius of Albert Einstein

https://www.youtube.com/results?
search_query=Extraordinary+Genius+of+Albert+Einstein

BBC (2015) Einstein’s Mind, The Enigma of Space and Time

https://www.youtube.com/results?
search_query=Einstein%E2%80%99s+Mind%2C+The+Enigma+of+Space+and+Ti
me

Art of Spirit - Awaken! Exert from Nova (2014) Time is an Illusion said Einstein - (the
space-time continuum)
https://www.youtube.com/results?
search_query=Time+is+an+Ilusion+said+Einstein+-+%28the+space-
time+continuum%29+ 

Science ABC (2018) Dilation - Einsteins Theory of Relativity Explained

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=Dilation+-
+Einsteins+Theory+of+Relativity+Explained

Thoughty2 (2015) Surprising Facts About: Albert Einstein

https://www.youtube.com/results?
search_query=Surprising+Facts+About%3A+Albert+Einstein

Image Credit: Goodreads.com

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