Background Information

Background Information:

Albert Einstein’s book on the general and special theory of relativity, Relativity, was targeted towards the layman; it is astounding that Einstein (shown below) was able to take his revolutionary ideas – even for physicists of the era – and tailor his findings to the average educated person. For the most part, Einstein is successful; however, his descriptions of relativity lack visual representation. This is where it becomes harder to understand Einstein’s concepts; he describes situations makes the readers visualize his hypothetical examples within their heads; they have no drawing or diagram to base their findings off of. This makes Einstein’s concepts harder to understand than they need to be.

Figure 1: Albert Einstein

Albert Einstein put forward his special theory of relativity in 1905, and he fully formulated his general theory ten years later, in 1915, publishing it in 1916. His account of these theories in his book in 1916 as well. Today, nothing within the macroscopic world has contradicted Einstein’s theory, although some quantum observations can contradict it. Many experiments, however, have proven his theory – Einstein’s equation of time dilation accurately predicted the time dilation of an atomic clock on a plane vs. on the ground (the difference, however, was in billionths of a second).

Some of Einstein’s theories have created what seem like logical paradoxes. For example, “the twin paradox” shows how a twin who leaves on a space ship at a speed of near the speed of light will return home younger than his brother. Time dilation causes a difference in their ages. Another popular paradox from relativity is the ladder paradox. If a ladder moves into a garage just smaller than the width of the ladder, then length contraction of the ladder would seem to allow the ladder to fit in. However, from the point of view of the ladder, the garage is moving, and the length of the garage is contracting, not the ladder. The image below shows both points of view of this situation and the resulting paradox.

Figure 2: A diagram of the two perspectives of the ladder paradox

Einstein’s theories are best shown with visual representation. In Relativity, Einstein depicts certain situations with words that we must visualize instead of using diagrams, possibly because of the limits of book printing when the book was published. Any diagrams used in Relativity were quite dull and vague. Today, it is common to depict scientific concepts with audio/visual representation. Technology Students of America (logo shown below, Figure 3) hosts a variety of technology based competitions, one of these focusing on Scientific Visualizations (SciViz). TSA describes Scientific Visualizations as "the graphic representation of complex scientific concepts." The depiction of a complex concept of relativity would be a perfect use of SciViz, and a wonderful topic to enter this contest.

Figure 3: Technology Student Association official logo

Einstein's theory of relativity wished for his message to be heard by the layman. However, his use of almost pure text failed to meet the visual needs of proper explanation of the theory. It is necessary to have a means to demonstrate this theory which defies normal human logic with illustrations that can mimic the illusory nature of the theory.

"Figure 1." Online image. KnowProSE.com. 22 October 2007. [http://www.knowprose.com/node/17112].
"Figure 2." Online image. Wikipedia.org. 24 October 2007. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ladder_paradox].
"Figure 3." Onling image. Techonology Student Association. 24 October 2007. [http://www.tsaweb.org].