Successive Steps Toward Generality

Einstein's Theories of Relativity and Gravitation by Albert Einstein, is part of the HackerNoon Books Series. You can jump to any chapter in this book here. Successive Steps Toward Generality

Successive Steps Toward Generality

Is then our laboriously acquired geometry of points in a three-dimensional space to go into the [188]discard? By no means. Jeans, investigating the equilibrium of gaseous masses, found the general case too difficult for direct attack. So he considered the case where the masses involved are homogeneous and incompressible. This never occurs; but it throws such light on the general case as to point the way toward attack on it.

Euclidean geometry excludes motion, save that engineered by the observer; and then the time is immaterial. Time does not enter at all; the three space dimensions suffice. This simple case never occurs where matter exists; but its conclusions are of value in dealing with more general cases.

When we look into a world alleged to be that of Euclid and find motion, we may retain the Euclidean concept of what constitutes the world and invent a machinery to account for the motion; or we may abandon the Euclidean world, as inadequate, in favor of a more general one. We have adopted the second alternative.

Newton’s laws tells us that a body free to move will do so, proceeding in a straight line at uniform velocity until interfered with. We do not ask, nor does the theory tell us, whence comes the initial motion. There is no machinery to produce it; it is an inherent property of Newton’s world—assured by the superposition of the time continuum upon Euclid’s world to make Newton’s, accepted without question along with that world itself.

But Newton saw that his world of uniform motion, like Euclid’s, was never realized. In the neighborhood of one particle a second is interfered with, forced to give up its uniform motion and acquire a [189]constant acceleration. This Newton explained by employing the first of the alternatives mentioned above. He tells us that in connection with all matter there exists a force which acts on other matter in a certain way. He does not display the actual machinery through which this “force” works, because he could not discover any machinery; he had to stop with his brilliant generalization of the observed facts. And all his successors have failed to detect the slightest trace of a machinery of gravitation.

Einstein asks whether this is not because the machinery is absent—because gravitation, like position in Euclid’s world and motion in Newton’s, is a fundamental property of the world in which it occurs. His point of attack here lay in precise formulation of certain familiar facts that had never been adequately appreciated. These facts indicate that even accelerated motion is relative, in spite of its apparently real and absolute effects.

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This book is part of the public domain. Albert Einstein (2020). Einstein's Theories of Relativity and Gravitation. Urbana, Illinois: Project Gutenberg. Retrieved October 2022.

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