Quantum Theory Cannot Hurt You: A Guide to the Universe by Marcus Chown

Author:Marcus Chown
Language: eng
Format: mobi, azw3
Tags: Quantum Theory, Science, Relativity, Physics
ISBN: 9780571235469
Publisher: Faber and Faber
Published: 2008-12-01T10:00:00+00:00

SHADOWS OF SPACE-TIME

The slowing of time and the shrinking of space is the price that must be paid so that everyone in the Universe, no matter what their state of motion, measures the same speed of light. But this is only the beginning.

Say there are two stars and a space-suited figure is floating in the blackness midway between them. Imagine that the two stars explode and the floating figure sees them detonate simultaneously—two blinding flashes of light on either side of him. Now picture a spaceship travelling at enormous speed along the line joining the two stars. The spaceship passes by the space-suited figure just as he sees the two stars explode. What does the pilot of the spaceship see?

Well, since the ship is moving towards one star and away from the other, the light from the star it is approaching will arrive before the light from the star it is receding from. The two explosions will therefore not appear simultaneously. Consequently, even the concept of simultaneity is a casualty of the constancy of the speed of light. Events that one observer sees as simultaneous are not simultaneous to another observer moving with respect to the first.

The key thing here is that the exploding stars are separated by an interval of space. Events that one person sees separated by only space, another person sees separated by space and time—and vice versa. Events one person sees separated only by time, another person sees separated by time and space.

The price of everyone measuring the same speed of light is therefore not only that the time of someone moving past you at high speed slows down while their space shrinks but that some of their space appears to you as time and some of their time appears to you as space. One person’s interval of space is another person’s interval of space and time. And one person’s interval of time is another person’s interval of time and space. The fact that space and time are interchangeable in this way tells us something remarkable and unexpected about space and time. Fundamentally, they are same thing—or at least different sides of the same coin.

The person who first saw this—more clearly even than Einstein himself—was Einstein’s former mathematics professor Hermann Minkowski, a man famous for calling his student a “lazy dog” who would never amount to anything. (To his eternal credit, he later ate his words.) “From now on,” said Minkowski, “space of itself and time of itself will sink into mere shadows and only a kind of union between them will survive.”

Minkowski christened this peculiar union of space and time “space-time.” Its existence would be blatantly obvious to us if we lived our lives travelling at close to the speed of light. Living as we do in nature’s ultraslow lane, however, we never experience the seamless entity. All we glimpse instead are its space and time facets.

As Minkowski put it, space and time are like shadows of spacetime. Think of a stick suspended from the

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