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Relativity
and Quantum Mechanics
are the two major pillars of 20th century physics. These theories,
launched within five years of one another, revolutionized our
understanding of nature. They utterly dismantled the conceptual basis
of Newtonian physics that had been the gold standard of science for
over 200 years, and introduced radically new concepts that defy human
intuition. These theories may represent the greatest upheaval in the
history of science. Both Relativity and Quantum Mechanics were launched
over 100 years ago, yet we are still digesting their broad and stunning
implications. Both theories have been exhaustively tested and confirmed
to extraordinary precision; as bizarre as they may seem at first, there
is no denying that they describe our world as it really is.
Einstein’s Theory of
Special Relativity, published in 1905, applies only to special
situations in which everything moves with constant velocity — when
there are no forces and no accelerations. In particular, Special
Relativity assumes that the effects of gravity are negligible. While
this theory revolutionized our understanding of many important natural
phenomena, there was clearly a need to extend the theory to include
forces and, most importantly, to incorporate gravity.
This book is the first of
several in the Everyone’s Guide Series
devoted to General Relativity. Here, we will compare the theories of
gravity of history’s two greatest physicists: Newton and Einstein. We
will discuss Einstein’s “Happiest Moment”, when he discovered the
Equivalence Principle, and examine its important consequences. We will
also discuss some several unexpectedly complex effects of gravity:
tidal
forces and time dilation .
Earth moves through
spacetime curved by the Sun
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Next in Series
General Relativity 2:
Spacetime Curvature
See all the books
in the
Everyone's Guide
Series
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