The Rigor of Angels by William Egginton

Author:William Egginton [Egginton, William]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2023-08-29T00:00:00+00:00

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On November 4, 1915, Einstein arrived at the grand hall of the Prussian State Library to give the first of four previously scheduled lectures to the Prussian Academy of Science. Few knew that he had been racing down to the wire to finish his calculations, and indeed would continue to work on them throughout the month leading to his climactic delivery of the field equations of gravity on November 25. The results were nothing short of revolutionary. As his biographer Walter Isaacson has written, “The general theory of relativity was not merely the interpretation of some experimental data or the discovery of a more accurate set of laws. It was a whole new way of regarding reality.”[20] Max Born would later dub it “the greatest feat of human thinking about nature” and “the most amazing combination of philosophical penetration, physical intuition, and mathematical skill.”[21] Unsurprisingly, such a usurpation of the laws of physics would have profound ramifications for the study of the cosmos as a whole. In 1916, after briefly basking in the success of his grueling efforts, Einstein turned his attention to this most fundamental of all questions.

Newton had believed that the universe must be akin to a finite island of matter floating in an infinite void of space. That the island in question must be finite he deduced from the nature of gravity, for an infinite amount of matter in the universe would generate an infinite gravitational force at the surface of every sphere located in it, which is impossible. Einstein quickly saw that his theories of gravitation and light led to radically different conclusions.

To begin with, one of the outcomes of his theory of special relativity had been the equivalence of mass and energy (canonized in the most famous equation in history, E = mc2). According to this understanding, any finite island of mass in an infinite sea of empty space would radiate energy, and hence lose mass over time, leaving it “to become gradually but systematically impoverished.”[22] Moreover, it conflicted with general relativity as well. Newton had interpreted his bucket experiment as showing that objects must know where they are in absolute space. As we saw before, in Einstein’s theory the inertial mass of objects in space depended on the diffusion throughout the universe of a gravitational field that could be expressed mathematically in the form of a curved space-time continuum. But a finite amount of stuff spread out in an infinite expanse of space would effectively produce no such field, and hence we’d be back to Newton’s bucket not knowing if it was spinning.[23]

But solving this problem by making space itself finite raised the age-old problem of what it could possibly mean for an all-encompassing cosmos to have boundaries. If there are boundaries, what lies outside them? Moreover, the mere idea of a boundary to space completely violated the theory of relativity, since the assumption of specific boundaries to space itself imposes an absolute “where” from which any measurements or observations would have

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