-- 30 --

A central feature of special relativity is the absolute speed barrier set by light. It is important to realize that this limit applies not
only to material objects but also to signals and influences of any kind. There is simply no way to communicate information or a
disturbance from one place to another at faster than light speed. Of course, the world is full of ways for transmitting disturbances at
slower than the speed of light. Your speech and all other sounds, for example, are carried by vibrations that travel at about 700
miles per hour through air, a feeble rate compared with light's 670 million miles per hour. This speed difference becomes obvious
when you watch a baseball game, for instance, from seats that are far from home plate. When a batter hits the ball, the sound
reaches you moments after you see the ball being hit. A similar thing happens in a thunderstorm. Although lightning and thunder
are produced simultaneously, you see the lightning before hearing the thunder. Again, this reflects the substantial speed difference
between light and sound. The success of special relativity informs us that the reverse situation, in which some signal reaches us
before the light it emits, is just not possible. Nothing outruns photons.

Here's the rub. In Newton's theory of gravity, one body exerts a gravitational pull on another with a strength determined solely by
the mass of the objects involved and the magnitude of their separation. The strength has nothing to do with how long the objects
have been in each other's presence. This means that if their mass or their separation should change, the objects will, according to
Newton, immediately feel a change in their mutual gravitational attraction. For instance, Newton's theory of gravity claims that if
the sun were suddenly to explode, the earth-some 93 million miles away—would instantaneously suffer a departure from its usual
elliptical orbit. Even though it would take light from the explosion eight minutes to travel from the sun to the earth, in Newton's
theory knowledge that the sun had exploded would be instantaneously transmitted to the earth through the sudden change in the
gravitational force governing its motion.

This conclusion is in direct conflict with special relativity, since the latter ensures that no information can be transmitted faster than
the speed of light—instantaneous transmission violates this precept maximally.

In the early part of the twentieth century, therefore, Einstein realized that the tremendously successful Newtonian theory of gravity
was in conflict with his special theory of relativity. Confident in the veracity of special relativity and notwithstanding the mountain
of experimental support for Newton's theory, Einstein sought a new theory of gravity compatible with special relativity. This
ultimately led him to the discovery of general relativity, in which the character of space and time again went through a remarkable
transformation.

Einstein's Happiest Thought

Even before the discovery of special relativity, Newton's theory of gravity was lacking in one important respect. Although it can be
used to make highly accurate predictions about how objects will move under the influence of gravity, it offers no insight into what
gravity is. That is, how is it that two bodies that are physically separate from another, possibly hundreds of millions of miles apart
if not more, nonetheless influence each other's motion? By what means does gravity execute its mission? This is a problem of
which Newton himself was well aware. In his own words,

It is inconceivable, that inanimate brute matter, should, without the mediation of something else, which is not
material, operate upon and affect other matter without mutual contact. That Gravity should be innate, inherent
and essential to matter so that one body may act upon another at a distance thro' a vacuum without the mediation
of anything else, by and through which their action and force may be conveyed, from one to another, is to me so
great an absurdity that I believe no Man who has in philosophical matters a competent faculty of thinking can
ever fall into it. Gravity must be caused by an agent acting constantly according to certain laws; but whether this
agent be material or immaterial, I have left to the consideration of my readers.11

That is, Newton accepted the existence of gravity and went on to develop equations that accurately describe its effects, but he never
offered any insight into how it actually works. He gave the world an "owner's manual" for gravity which delineated how to "use"
it—instructions that physicists, astronomers, and engineers have exploited successfully to plot the course of rockets to the moon,
Mars, and other planets in the solar system; to predict solar and lunar eclipses; to predict the motion of comets, and so on. But he
left the inner workings—the contents of the "black box" of gravity—a complete mystery. When you use your CD player or your
personal computer, you may find yourself in a similar state of ignorance regarding how it works internally. So long as you know
how to operate the equipment neither you nor anyone else needs to know how it accomplishes the tasks you set for it. But if your
CD player or personal computer breaks, its repair relies crucially on knowledge of its internal workings. Similarly, Einstein

11
Isaac Newton, Sir Isaac Newton's Mathematical Principle of Natural Philosophy and His System of the World, trans. A. Motte and Florian Cajori (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1962), Vol. I, p. 634.