Week 1 - Post 2

What is most interesting about the theories of General and Special relativity is how they identify with the space time continuum. Albert Einstein was able to make some wild conclusions: When thrown, objects create a parabola shape due to the acceleration of gravity. He presumed that matter bends space and that acceleration and gravity are very similar. This works in the sense that acceleration can mimic gravity (these properties just behave exactly opposite of each other). When object are accelerating, their masses grow heavier, versus an object in free fall where the mass will become virtually negligible. These concepts make logical sense considering mass growing infinite when approaching the speed of light and that  acceleration due to gravity is always constant no matter the weight of an object. Additionally, Einstein  concluded (with the help of his 1st wife, Mileva Maric) that objects moving at higher speeds experience time slower. This also becomes clear when minding that photons (the massless electromagnetic particle that constitutes light energy) don't experience time, and are the only thing that can travel at that divine pace of 300,000,000 meters/second. Lastly, bodies going at higher speeds also become shorter in length, which again aligns with the fact that photons do not take up space. In knowing this space and time are not absolute and an objects length is dependent on how the observer is experiencing time and space. The peculiarity of Einstein's theories don't stop there. Einstein was brilliant no doubt but of course he didn't know everything. General relativity is just a theory, it cannot be "proven" per-se and has it's faults. While general relativity is just a generalization of special relativity, it is able to put a rational explanation to many previously-mysterious cosmological happenings. An example of these flaws is the double slit experiment. In this experiment a fermion (an elementary particle with mass) is shot at 2 slits. When this happens it is observed that the particle in 2 places at once. Theories of quantum mechanics agrees with this phenomena as existing in 2 distinct places at once is a quantum property of particles. When this is presented to general relativity, consequential questions arise. If matter bends space, to what place would the gravitational pull go? Gravity, unlike subatomic particles, cannot exist in two places at once. Physics needs a theory that can explain the quantum properties of space, or in other words, a quantum gravity theory. One quantum gravity theory you may have heard of is string theory- a theoretical framework that predicts the basis for all of existence is tiny one dimensional strings.

As Marcelo Glacier, author of The Island Of Knowledge, so gracefully said: "We do not experience relativistic events because we are so much slower than the speed of light." or in layman's terms, we will never achieve the capability to understand nature in all of its superiority. The universe works in mysterious  ways that humans are constantly trying to fathom. This is surely a sign of our insignificance and subordination to the nature of reality. Science is just a juvenile human understanding of the language of space, plants, the mind and so on. Is it really so crazy to think something greater might be happening beyond the depths of the fabric of the universe?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ov98y_DCvRY