So let's summarize Week 8 now, the, the

key topics we've covered.

We started off thinking about traveling
the galaxy, taking our twin paradox
analysis and applying it to the possibly
of a, a trip to the center of our galaxy,
approximately 30,000 lightyears away,
which we'd see even at the speed of
light.
It would take 30,000 years to, to get
there.
So it would seem totally impractical to
to do that.
And yet, using our twin paradox analysis,
which of course is, is based on time
dilation, length contractions, relativity
of simultaneity.
We showed that for the person on the
rocket, if it could get up to a high
enough speed, which is very close to the
speed of light, then they could even
reach the center of the galaxy in two
years and then come back in roughly, in
another, another two years.
so that, that was good news in a sense.
It would be very interesting to take a
trip like that.
The more sobering news, however, is that
when we thought about the energy actually
involved to do that, not to mention that
the practical consequences of how, you
know, how do you take enough food along
and, and so on and so forth.
But we talked about the famous equation,
Einstein's famous equation, E equals mc
squared.
The more general form of it being equals
gamma mc squared, and we saw that when we
reduce that for the low velocity limit,
0.1c or, or lower approximately.
It, it turned into mc squared, the famous
part of the equation, plus the kinetic
energy part.
And so I identified the, the mc squared
part with the energy associated with
mass, that somehow mass and energy are
equivalent to each other, and one can be
turned into another.
So we, we gave them the usual examples
of, of nuclear fission and nuclear
fusion.
Talked a little bit about that in, in
qualitative terms, how how that relates
to do equals mc squared there.
Then we turned our attention to the
general theory of relativity, just a few
of the, the foundational concepts there.
Talked about Einstein, where he said was
his happiest thought, his most fortunate
thought of his life.

And that came in 1970 when he realized

that, essentially being in an accelerated
frame of reference, such as, if you're in
an elevator that's accelerating upward,
that is equivalent to being in a
gravitational field.
Being in that elevator just on the
surface of the earth and, and feeling
the, the force of gravity pulling you,
pulling you down.
And using that with, became known as the
equivalence principle.
So again we have the, the equivalence of
energy and mass from here, but this is a
different equivalence principle and that
is the equivalence of an accelerated
frame of reference, being an accelerated
frame of reference, in other words,
you're accelerating, and a gravitation
field.
And what that allowed Einstein to do was
to do thought experiments, especially in
an accelerated frame of reference like,
like an elevator accelerating upwards and
derive certain consequences of that and
then say, well, because of the
equivalence principle, it must be the
same way for a gravitational field.
And this was, these, these, these were,
his initial forays into what became the
general theory of relativity.
And we pointed out two consequences of
this equivalence, equivalence principle
qualitative derivations of it.
One is gravitational time dilation.
In other words, that in a gravitational
field, because we, we showed this for an
accelerated frame of reference, that a
clock up here versus a clock down here,
okay?
this clock, the bottom clock closer, you
know, really feeling more gravity as it,
as it were, will run slower than this
clock.
All right?
Clocks higher up in a gravitational field
will run faster than clocks lower, lower
down.
And so that was one result that, that
came out of the equivalence principle.
Second result, again using sort of an
elevator analysis was that light would
bend in a gravitational field.
So those two results came out of this
idea of the equivalence principle.
And then we, we went on to talk about
just several final comments.
One of those where, was the idea of
crucial experiments, the, the popular
idea of sciences.

You get an experiment result, if it's

ag-, against a, the theory of the time,
then you must throw the theory out.
But we pointed out that theory is built
into the experiment as well.
The theory laid in this experiment.
So, in many cases, you're not quite sure
what's wrong.
And so we, we cited the example of
experiments by Walter Kaufmann of Germany
right about the time of the miracle year,
that essentially disproved Einstein's
version of the Special Theory of
Relativity and Lorentz's related version
as well.
And the data seemed to be good, results
seemed to be good Maxwell pointed out a
few things where it's not as clear-cut as
as maybe Kaufmann made it out to be.
But still, they were concerned that, you
know, what are you going to do, Einstein,
with this?
And Einstein's response essentially was,
I'm going with my theory.
Because my theory is based on very
fundamental general principles and these
experiments, and some of the alternative
theories they seem to support were more
ad hoc in nature, not as general and so
on and so forth.
And it turned out a few years later,
about ten years later or so, that as they
continued to do more experiments, that
there's some flaws found in, in
Kaufmann's earlier work on this.
So that was one crucial experiment where
it was rejected.
The results were rejected and turned out
to be right.
Another example were the 1919 eclipse
expedition results, that seemed to show
that, that did show the bending of, of
star light, in the grav-, around the
[UNKNOWN], around the sun, in the
gravitational field of the sun.
The question was whether the bending
actually matched up with Einstein's
prediction or not.
And, again, it, we sighted it to indicate
the human element of some of these
things, because you have to, in data
analysis.
You have the data there and your going,
you know, do we throw out that data point
because we think it's bad, something went
wrong with that measurement or maybe we
keep it in because we think it's a good
measurement.
It just doesn't fit what we think it
should be and so on and so forth.

So in the end, they did announce in 1919

the British expedition led by Arthur
Eddington, that it, it was in favor of
Einstein's theory.
It was confirmation of Einstein's theory.
And that really was a beginning of
Einstein's rise to fame, not only in the
scientific world which he had been fairly
well-known before that, but in the in the
general public, in the, the realm of
general public as well.
So a crucial experiments [INAUDIBLE] said
a few words about the nature of, of
genius.
The, one of the things we mentioned was,
it's the combination of, of passion plus
time.
Time spent on task, and going deep into a
subject plus talent.
So it's not just talent.
It's not necessarily just time.
It's not necessarily just passion.
But it's a combination of those, and to a
certain extent being in the right place
at the right time.
Einstein came together with his, the
various his, his background, his
upbringing, the things he was passionate
about and thinking about and the insights
he was able to, to generate from all that
in his in a way that you know, we would
call genius.
And it was, it matched up with some of
the key problems of the time and he was
able to make progress there.
Later on in his life he wasn't quite as
successful.
Although he did certainly for, for the
next 20 years or so after 1905.
He seemed almost every couple years, he'd
come up with a, a new a new result.
even things we didn't get a chance to
talk about in this course, but even
modern-day things like lasers go back to
some of the theoretical work Einstein did
in the early part of the twentieth
century.
So, Einstein's finger prints as it were,
are throughout modern science, not only
in relativity, but also in quantum
mechanics and in many other ways as well.
So, that's a few words on the nature of
genius.
And then relativity versus relatism,
relativism.
We know that they're, they're very
different things, although people often
confuse them.
And in fact somewhat ironic
misunderstanding because relativity

really is a theory of invariance, the

unchanging quantities, while relativism
as a philosophical theory says
everything's relative and everything
changes in a sense that way or you can't
can't choose between things as it were.
And then finally, just as a question, is
all this really real, this time dilation
stuff and length contraction and the twin
paradox, and everything else?
And we said it, it actually is.
It is part of the marvelous structure of
reality.
one of the original quotes.
We quoted from Einstein, that you know,
it's the way the world works.
We have good experimental evidence for
it.
From, you know, we cited the example of
of muons the GPS navigation system,
particle acceleration, so on, so forth.
None of that makes sense without the, the
underlying foundation that Einstein
provided with special theory of
relativity.
And then later on, his general theory of
relativity.