Black Bodies and Quantum Cats by Jennifer Ouellette

Author:Jennifer Ouellette
Language: eng, eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Group USA, Inc.
Published: 2005-06-17T16:00:00+00:00

21

It’s All Relative

JUNE 1905: EINSTEIN INTRODUCES

SPECIAL RELATIVITY

Marty McFly, the teenage hero of the hugely popular film Back to the Future (1985), is a typical American high school student: he plays in a rock band, skateboards, and covets a crucial set of wheels so he and his girlfriend can ride around town in style. Alas, the “hip” gene appears to have bypassed the other members of his family. His alcoholic mother is clearly battling clinical depression, and his father is an obsequious, wet noodle of a nerd clad in polyester and horn-rimmed glasses. Marty’s brother is a high school dropout who works at a fast-food restaurant, and his pudgy, fashion-challenged sister can’t get a date to save her life.

Even Marty has his geeky side: he befriends an eccentric mad scientist, Doc, whose makeshift laboratory is crammed with bizarre inventions. After 20 years of labor, Doc has finally created a working time machine, housed in the shell of a pricey Delorean automobile. In Hollywood, the course of scientific experimentation never runs smooth, so naturally Marty finds himself accidentally transported back to the 1950s, and hilarious high jinks ensue.

The notion of time travel is one of the most prevalent themes in science-fiction novels and films, at least since H. G. Wells published The Time Machine in the late nineteenth century. The film Time after Time transports a fictionalized Wells to San Francisco in the 1970s in pursuit of Jack the Ripper, who has escaped Victorian England in a time machine of Wells’s devising. In the French film The Visitors, a medieval knight and his ill-kempt page find themselves trapped in modern-day France. Woody Allen’s Sleeper awakens to his own version of a futuristic nightmare: public phone calls cost $1 million. Inspired in their turn, scientists have theorized about how time travel might one day be possible, by means of rotating black holes, wormholes, or cosmic strings. But it was special relativity—proposed in June 1905 by Albert Einstein, 10 years after the publication of The Time Machine—that first suggested a theoretical basis for this far-fetched stuff of science fiction.

Einstein’s fascination with science began when he was four or five and first saw a magnetic compass. He was enthralled by the invisible force that caused the needle to always point north, and the instrument convinced him that there had to be “something behind things, something deeply hidden.” He spent the rest of his life trying to decipher the arcane mysteries of the universe. Today, the name Einstein is synonymous with genius, but for years his parents thought their son was a bit “slow” because he spoke hesitantly and wasn’t a stellar student. Einstein was just plain bored with the teaching methods of formal education, with its emphasis on memorization and blind obedience to an arbitrary authority. He preferred to study at home with books on math, physics, and philosophy. “It’s almost a miracle that modern teaching methods have not yet entirely strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry,” he later said. “For what this delicate little plant needs more than anything, besides stimulation, is freedom.

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