There’s an old story that goes something like this: (This version is taken from the paper: Verifying the Theory of Relativity by Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar) “Sir J.J. Thomson, as President of the Royal Society at that time, concluded a meeting of the society with the statement, ‘I have to confess that no one has yet succeeded in stating in clear language what the theory of Einstein’s really is.’
“As the meeting was dispersing, Ludwig Silberstein (the author of one of the early books on relativity), came up to Arthur Eddington and said, ‘Professor Eddington, you must be one of three persons in the world who understands general relativity’. On Eddington demurring to this statement, Silberstein responded, ‘Don’t be modest, Eddington.’ To which Eddington responded: ‘On the contrary, I am trying to think who the third person is!’”
The second person, of course, would have been Albert Einstein who came up with the theory of specific, and later, general relativity.
While it was Einstein’s big brain came up with the theory, Eddington was the one who provided the most compelling proof that Einstein was right. Einstein, you see, was a theoretical physicist. He read all the papers, did a bunch of math, then came up with these ideas that changed our understanding of how the world worth.
One of the ideas he proposed was the idea of General Relativity, which is … really complicated (yet elegantly simple at the same time). One of the key ideas is that gravity is a force that can bend space and time.
Which sounds good on paper, but how do you actually measure it? Well, according to the classic Newtonian view of physics, gravity would bend light, but if Einstein was right, gravity would bend light about twice as much as you’d expect according to Newton.
But how to observe gravity bending light? You need a huge source of gravity. The moon? Too small. Jupiter? Too far away. The sun? Too bright.
But wait, they thought. What if you were to observe the light from stars on the other side of the sun during a solar eclipse? That way, the stars would be visible, the light bending around the sun and Einstein’s theory would have its first major proof.
To be fair, it wasn’t Eddington who came up with the idea; that was German astronomer Erwin Freundlich who worked with Einstein on the matter, and who tried to make the observations during a 1912 eclipse. But it rained.
In 1914, there was another eclipse and another attempt to make the observations, but World War I broke out and the German astronomers—who had traveled to Russia to see the eclipse—were arrested. Another eclipse in 1918 was foiled by clouds in one location and cheap equipment in another.
Which brings us to the 1919 eclipse. Again, two teams were sent out. Eddington and his team went to the island of Principe off the coast of West Africa. The other team was frustrated by clouds, but Eddington and his team were able to get the photos, and the light indeed bent according to Einstein’s theory, not Newton.
It wasn’t a complete proof for relativity, not by a long shot. Indeed, new proofs for the theory have been discovered since then. In 2016, for instance, Gravitational waves—posited by the theory—were directly detected for the first time.
All this is to say that science is hard, and new discoveries are being made all the time and that the whole point of science is not to make definitive and conclusive statements about anything. Indeed, Einstein himself rejected and tried to disprove the quantum mechanics, which his research laid the groundwork for.
There was a point in time, not too long ago, when it was possible to hold the sum of human knowledge in your head. 350 years ago, give or take.
Indeed, we even know who the last person to know everything was. He was a Jesuit priest named Athanasius Kircher who died in 1680.
Of course by “everything” we mean “everything that was known in that place at that time.” Still, it was impressive.
But around the time he died, the Age of Enlightenment began, and just knowing things wasn’t enough. The quest was to discover new things. Indeed, things were changing all around him. When Kircher was about 40, a babe was born who would grow up to be Isaac Newton. Three years after Kircher died, Newton published his Principia, which would change our understanding of the universe. Kircher, even though he knew everything, didn’t know that an object in motion stays in motion, or that every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.
And it wasn’t just Newton. Four years after Kircher died, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz invented Calculus.
Indeed, everybody who was anybody was interested in science, and was making new discoveries, or observations about the natural world.
That was just over 300 years ago. And the rate of change since then has only accelerated. The list of new discoveries in the last hundred years can and does fill entire libraries. Einstein’s theory of general relativity was less than 120 years ago. We didn’t realize what galaxies were until 1924. Penicillin was 1928. Salk made the polio vaccine in 1953. Before 1964, there wasn’t really a thing called blood transfusion. Man went to the moon in 1969. Computers. The Internet. MRI machines. iPhones. Teslas. The list is endless.
Basically, what I’m saying is, it is impossible to know everything anymore. And things that we don’t understand? Can be scary, from nuclear power to MRNA vaccines. I was going to say that we can sometimes be like early First Nations people, who believed that photographs could steal a part of a person’s soul but I just found a recently published paper that argues the reason young, attractive female celebrities fall from grace so quickly is because cameras actually do steal a part of their soul, and because they get photographed so much…
The more things change….
Trent is the publisher of Tumbler RidgeLines.
