Chapter 5
Special Theory of Relativity
The Theory of Relativity is something I have
been very fascinated with since taking physics. The idea that nothing is
absolute is hard for one to understand. Let’s lay the foundational understanding of
relativity. For example, if you ask someone standing next to a highway if the
cars are moving, they will say “of course” then you ask them how they know that
the cars are moving, they will describe to you some fixed position they believe
to be unmoving, such as the light pole next to the highway, or maybe the over
pass as cars go underneath it. In other words, we describe motion based on our
perception of motion. To the observer “standing still” it is obvious to say the
cars are moving past, because it is relative to His or her fixed location. In
reality it is just as accurate to say we are moving and the cars are standing
still. Take another example; what if we were traveling on a train from
Sacramento California to Stockton California, it would be just as accurate to
say that Stockton was coming to us, as it would be to say that we were
traveling to Stockton.
Think of another situation; what if we were
traveling through space on a space ship at thousands of miles per hour. How
would we be able to tell we were in fact moving if we had no external reference
point for our motion? The fact is that there is no way to tell if the observer
or the surroundings of the observer are moving. All motion in the universe is
relative. The planet is spinning but only in relation to other things in the
universe around it. Asteroids fly by the earth only from our point of view, to
the asteroid it appears as if it is standing still and a giant, blue planet
just flew by at thousands of miles an hour. In fact, our solar system is
thought to be traveling around the universe at a speed close to half a million
miles an hour, yet to us, it appears as though everything is standing still, we
cannot tell that our solar system is in fact moving. Our earth orbits the sun
at a speed of about 100,000 K/hr, yet to us we cannot sense this speed besides
tracking the position of the sun. Our earth rotates at around 1,000 mph, yet we
stand here on the surface oblivious to the fact that we are in fact traveling
faster than sound. This is the base on which relativity rests that movement is
relative.
The only
apparent universal standard by which we can compare our speed in the universe
is the Universal speed limit of light, 299,800 km a second or 186,000 Miles a
second. This brought up a problem however, because no matter what reference
frame an observer is in, he or she will always measure the exact same number
for the speed of light. No matter how fast you are traveling or in what
direction, the speed of light is always measured as 299,800 km/s if in a
vacuum, which space happens to be for practical purposes.
For instance, in classical mechanics, if you are
driving in a car at 20 mph and you throw a ball forward at 10 mph the total
speed of the ball will be 30 mph. The speed at which you threw the ball will
add vectorely to the speed at which you are traveling. This is not the case,
however, when you are dealing with light. Nothing in the universe can travel
faster than the speed of light, thus when you are traveling in a space ship,
and you shoot a beam of light forward, you will measure the speed of light
relative to you, as 2.998 x105 km/s. An observer on planet X, will
measure this beam of light you just shot forward as the exact same speed.
The speed of light never changes, it does not
add to your current speed and is always measured as the exact same value. So
what changes in order to make this true? The answer is that time changes.
Einstein theorized that each unit of space time, had its own coordinate system.
Space and time were bent in comparison to each other. In the reference frame of
the person traveling in the space ship, they are traveling in a straight line,
but to those outside of this reference frame, the space ship travels at an angle,
relative to space time, thus it appears to those outside as if the beam of
light is traveling a greater distance than it actually does.
Picture it this way, if you are traveling in a
car and you throw up a ball, it comes straight back down to your hand, as it
normally would. What does it look like to someone outside however? It appears
to those outside that the ball travels in a parabolic fashion, traveling
upwards in an arch and coming back down to your hands, because as the ball goes
up, you are also moving forward. Thus in your coordinate system, moving forward
at 60 mph, the ball goes up and comes straight back down, because you are
moving at the same speed as the ball, but to those outside the car who are in
their own coordinate system “standing still” it appears that the ball travels
in an arch, moving forward at 60 mph.
When you approach the speed of light, the same
thing happens with light and objects. If you are traveling very fast, and you
shoot a beam of light straight up toward the ceiling, it would appear to you
that it traveled a straight path, but to those outside the space ship, it would
appear that the light actually traveled in an arch, that took longer to get to
its destination than it actually did. Likewise, objects become contracted at
extremely high speeds approaching the speed of light, so that a1 foot long
ruler measured on a space ship traveling near the speed of light would be 1
foot. Yet, outside the ruler would be contracted by the amount of the Lorentz
Transformation Principle. Where v is the speed at which the object is traveling
and c is the speed of light.
Is Time
Travel Possible?
This equation can be applied to mass, length,
and even time. Relativity forever changed the way we view the universe. Space,
time, and indeed all of reality, is relative to the observer. For instance,
take the well-known twin paradox. My girl friend is an Identical twins, lets
say that at one point in their lives say when they are 10 years old, one takes
a trip to a world 10 light years away. Traveling at close to the speed of
light, say 0.8 times (x) the speed of light (c), our twin on the space ship
will see that it takes her a certain amount of time to get to her destination.
Her clock will show that she is traveling at a normal speed and that she is years
older than when she left. However, to the twin left on earth, it would appear
that on the space ship, the twin was moving in slow motion. Viewed from
outside, time would be traveling slower than in reality. By the time the twin
got back to the earth, 20 years would have gone by for both twins, however,
only one will have aged 20 years. Here is why, the twin on the space ship
experienced time at a rate of 20yrs/2.24 less than actuality. She will be only
18.9 years old, while her sister will be 30.
How does this work though? If time is relative,
shouldn’t it be the same for both twins? Because it is just as easy to say that
the twin in the space ship stayed still and the earth receded away from her at
a speed of 0.8c. The reason why the twin paradox works is because the twin in
the space ship experienced inertia, while the twin in earth does not. So all
though the time and speeds are relative to each other, one experiences inertia,
while the other does not. This is because, relative to the universe, the twin
on earth does not move, while the twin in the space ship does.
In this way, the twin actually traveled in time.
Time has also been shown to be affected by the gravitational pull of large
masses. For instance, atomic clocks on earth and atomic clocks on satellites
orbiting earth do not run at the same speed. The clock on the satellite runs
slightly faster than the one on earth, so that time in space is moving faster
than time on earth. This has to be accounted for because the clock on the GPS satellite
speeds up at a factor of 5 x 10-10 seconds a day. This discrepancy
could cause huge calculation errors for GPS devices on earth and would make it
impossible to pinpoint exact locations. Scientists actually have to program the
clock to run slower each day to account for the time dilation difference. Why
is time effected by gravity? That is explained further in the general theory of
relativity, which will be our next chapter.
The whole reason for explaining the Special
Theory of Relativity to you is for this consideration. The theory explains that
nothing can go faster than the speed of light, because as you approach the
speed of light the energy needed to propel any mass grows to infinity since
energy and momentum are directly related to the speed of light and thus follow
the Lorentz equation, growing to infinity as the velocity of the mass
approaches the speed of light. Traveling at the speed of light, time would
equal zero, no time would pass inside the ship at all, and space would
disappear, meaning the mass of the ship would contain zero volume. One book I
read stated this, “There is no way to transmit any sort of message through
space faster than the speed of light.”[1]
This brings me to an important question, how
does God communicate with us? We pray expecting that God hears our prayers
instantly, but if nothing travels faster than the speed of light, it would take
eternity for our prayers to reach heaven. God cannot be simply a deistic super
human living in a place called heaven. The physics does not work. There is no
exception for prayer when it comes to the universal speed limit of light. The
speed of thought is the speed of light, nothing can break that law. For some,
this fact is damaging to faith, they will either reject God, or choose to believe
in irrational answer, that prayer is somehow magical. As we study the sciences
we must gain a deeper appreciation for how great God is. Rather than trying to
stuff God into a box why not broaden our imaginations and believe in a God that
is universal, infinite, and nonexistent.
The universe is the mind of God, we exist
because God thought. That dawn of time at the big bang was the birth of our 3
dimensional world, God “thought” of a beautiful idea and reality sprang to
life. Prayer may indeed connect us to the infinite, but to think of prayer as
ascending to heaven is meaningless. God is not so small that He can be
contained to a place. Look out across the vast reaches of our universe and you
will begin to see a God so much bigger than we can understand.
What about Angels though? If you believe the
Bible than you believe that Angels are real, and if they are real then they are
just another creation like us. How do they go back and forth from our world to
their own world that we like to call heaven? Even if angels could reach the
speed of light time would only slow down for them. They would reach heaven in
what seemed to be no time at all to them, but for us on earth it would take
eternity. The only way that angels can travel back and forth through space,
according to the theory of relativity, is if they actually went backwards in
time. How this would actually works is well beyond my ability to comprehend,
but if we believe that angels exists and that angels really do travel to and
from heaven, than we must conclude that God breaks the universal speed limit of
the universe.
I believe that God operates under his own laws.
I do not believe God makes laws of physics and then goes and breaks them, (what
would be the point of making the law in the first place then?) but remember
when we talked about the Big Bang Theory? What created the universe was an
infinite amount of energy, with an infinite amount of mass, all contained
within zero volume. Does that sound like something we just discussed? To even
reach the speed limit, you would need an infinite amount of energy to propel a mass
that would contain zero volume. In other words, you would need God. If God is
infinitely big, and in Him is contained infinite energy, this problem would be
no problem at all.
So what would happen if we breached the speed of
light? The theory is a mathematical absurdity. Our math has no way of
calculating such a thing since it would mean the use of imaginary numbers. We
could calculate something, but since the number we calculate is imaginary,
there is no way of evaluating the number we calculate. However, in theory, if
you traveled faster than the speed of light, time would began to flow
backwards, so that you would reach your destination before you left. An angel
wanting to reach earth would leave several days after the actual event and
reach earth on the day he intended, in the past.
Think of another situation. Imagine we are in
heaven. Have you ever wondered what it will be like to fly from galaxy to
galaxy, visiting distant planets and exploring the far reaches of our universe,
and maybe even beyond it? All these are wonderful thoughts, but have you ever
considered how long it will take you? Many of those galaxies are billions of
light years away, so how would you get there? Well, first off, if we really are
going to live for all eternity, than relative to eternity, how long is a
billion years? It is pointless to state it takes any time at all, but if we can
travel at close to the speed of light relative to us, it takes very little time
to get there. In fact, as the theory goes, if we actually reach the speed of
light, time stops all together and we would get there at the same time we
started. Only those we left behind would know any difference, and for them
again we run into the same problem. Since we have eternity, the billions years
we were gone means absolutely nothing. Think of it this way though, what if we
can move faster than the speed of light? Then we arrive at the galaxy we wish
to visit before we even leave.
The Bible says,
“…be not ignorant of this
one thing, that one day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand
years as one day.”[2]
Could
it be that this is verse is true because Heaven is in another part of the
universe and the apparent time runs differently because of the speed at which
it moves? Could it be that time is nothing to God because He has, rather He is,
what is needed to travel in time itself? I believe again, that God is greater
than his creation, God lives outside of His creation, but the Bible seems to
indicate that Jesus, the representation of God to His creation, is forever
confined to his human body, thus Jesus, and the angels, who exist in a material
universe, must travel in time to traverse the universe.
Angels could also beable to travers
the 4th dimension of time. If angels are 4th dimensional creatures,
then time to them would simply be another direction of travel, they could reach
distant places without it taking anytime at all because it would be as simple
as traveling in space time. There are many, many theories out there and we do
not have time to deeply discuss them all but are you beginning to see a God who
is much greater than our tiny understanding of reality? We can’t even
understand time! We exist in a world that is ruled by perception, and based off
our relative position in the universe. Time is relative to our position and
speed, gravity, as we will learn in the next chapter, is relative to our
position and time, and even what appears to be a straight line to us, is really
just an elongated curve, bending back on itself in accordance with the laws of relativity.
As we view all these things we realize how small and created we really are. We
live in a mechanical universe that in my opinion was created by the mechanic of
the mechanics. We can no longer hold God captive by confining him to our world,
and our understanding of space and time. God is infinite, and his reality truly
is beyond our ability to find out.
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