Chapter 13 Chapter 8 Journey to Subspace

The special theory of relativity describes the unimaginable knowledge of space, and believes that light, time and space are all distorted by gravity.The theory of relativity is the key to unraveling the secrets of the universe. What is the truth of the universe?Human beings are uncovering it step by step. Newton pondered for many years on the problem of objects falling to the ground. Obviously, there must be some form of information transmission from the earth to objects, but what about the medium?Newton could not solve this puzzle, and even Einstein three hundred years later could not fully explain it.Of course, it is not transmitted by air, because Newton knew from his mathematical calculations on moving objects that, like the moon, on an airless planet, objects will fall to the ground.The mystery is a frustrating flaw in his laws of gravity that encompasses the universe, everything seems to stay there, the universe is pulled together by mysterious and invisible gravitational forces, the planets are in the most delicate and harmonious orbits It orbits the sun. After Newton, someone discovered that the solar system itself also orbits the center of the Milky Way, and it orbits once every nearly 200 million years, which is counted as a solar year.

But space is empty, a fact that still haunts us today.On average, every cubic yard of space in space contains only one hydrogen atom, and the rest is empty.So, how can the gravitational wave transmit at two points by itself?Both Newton and Einstein were interested in this question, but only theoretically.And in the next century, it will determine the future of mankind.We will learn from experiments with the nature of space itself whether it is possible to travel to planets outside our solar system within reasonable travel times. At present, given enough money to the engineer, he is capable of designing an interstellar ship, and without regard to these intractable problems, his ship can only reach the nearest planet after a tolerable voyage time due to the vastness of interstellar oblivion.Its maximum speed does not exceed 670 million miles per hour. According to Einstein's theory of relativity in 1905, the speed of any object cannot exceed the speed of light in a vacuum. When approaching this speed, its length is moving The direction will approach zero, and the energy required for propulsion will approach infinity.Although, as we have seen, a perfect explanation of relativity theory is about to appear, those orthodox relativity experts still believe that it is impossible for a spacecraft to have no length and infinite energy.The limitation of the speed of light is an insurmountable obstacle for human expansion ambitions.In short, they think interstellar travel is absurd.Edward of Harvard University.Purcell said: All the ramblings about traveling the universe in a space suit, except for the exploration of specific areas, will return to where it came from, in the barn.

But, happily, space today is a much more complicated place than special relativity describes.Halden recently predicted that we will never understand the universe.I think, he writes, that it is not only stranger than we think; it is even stranger than we can imagine.When I first saw the theory of relativity, it described a very chaotic and irregular universe.The following two dialogues vividly express: Nature and natural laws are clouded: God said: Let Newton out!Everything fell into place. When the matter was over, the devil cried out: Hey! Einstein out!Idolatry was restored. The strange idea proposed by Einstein in 1905 is time stretching.His thinking seems to be contrary to all common sense; he himself said that common sense is the accumulation of prejudices implanted in the mind before the age of eighteen.He overturned Newton's conclusion with a bold series of four equations. Newton thought that the time in every place flows forward hour by hour along a certain route.If an astronaut in a spaceship leaves the earth at 99 percent of the speed of light, he will age seven times slower than a person on earth, their spaceship will shrink by a factor of seven, and it will take seven times to maintain the acceleration energy supply engine.This is not an illusion for psychologists to explain; the astronauts' measuring tapes and the watches on their wrists can record the timing and length of these changes.They themselves are not surprised.If they have a telescope that works well, they will find that behind them everyone on Earth seems to be aging more slowly.This is explained by the fact that since astronauts lived seven times slower, they also processed their data seven times slower.When they returned to the earth, they found a mistake. On their return journey, the people on the earth did not age seven times slower, but seven times faster!If, during the voyage, they could successfully accelerate beyond 99.9999 percent of the speed of light, they would find that the Earth ages millions of times faster than you do, not seven times.

At the speed of light (assuming it is achievable), the astronauts' time would stop completely, and their journeys would be instantaneously simultaneous, and beyond the speed of light, their time would be reversed. This impossibility inspired the following limerick: There is a girl named Ah Kuai, Go faster than light! leave early in the morning, run like a god, Come back that evening. She must have encountered a copy of herself before she set off, but this is absurd, there can never be two fast girls, because the original girl had no memory of meeting her copy the night before when she set off.The doggerel that goes on points out that these faster-than-light trips will produce an infinite number of fast girls.

The girl's name is Yueniang, but she is not bright, She will tie today to tomorrow: It ended in two days, Then four days and then eight days, Her husband's soul went to heaven. In all these absurd adventures, the law of cause and effect is broken.The law of causality opposes any faster-than-light travel through the known universe, because the outcome cannot occur earlier than the event that produced it, otherwise we would have to assume that there are an infinite number of identical worlds traveling on different trajectories.It's an incredible idea, but it's caught in all logical impossibility.

Going back to the theoretical possibility, the special theory of relativity can be described by a thought experiment, that is, the twin paradox.One of the twins remained on Earth, and the other was an astronaut who, at the age of thirty, set off for Planet X in another galaxy at ninety-nine percent of the speed of light.Five years later the traveler came back and found that his brother was sixty-five years old. Five years in space equaled thirty-five years on earth. It is meaningless to say which time is right and which is wrong. Both are right.The rate of elapsed time is determined by the speed of the clock that measures time as it travels through the universe.

The whole strange mathematical structure of special relativity arises from the fact that it has not yet been able to explain the behavior of light. When Einstein was a boy, two American physicists, Michelson and Morrie, learned through a series of experiments that light travels in a vacuum. Moving at a speed of 670 million miles per hour, regardless of the speed of the light source.Assuming a star is coming towards us at half the speed of light, we would think that its light reaches us at one and a half times the speed of light, but Michelson and Morey proved this wrong, regardless of the speed of the light source, regardless of the speed of light. We come or carry us, light always arrives at exactly 670 million miles an hour.Two cars colliding each other at fifty miles an hour must collide at a hundred miles, but not with light, they don't collide head-on at twice the speed of light, as we often think.They meet at a full 670 million miles per hour.So, how does time shrink at high speeds?It becomes clear when you think about the behavior of light.An astronaut rushing through space at half the speed of light, measured the speed of light emitted by a star directly facing him, it is exactly 670 million miles per hour, but the speed is greater, because he himself has a starward speed , he must have thought the gauge was broken.In one sense, he was right.He could only draw conclusions; his clock was running slowly.He may conduct further experiments, assuming that he crawls out of the cabin, sits on a spaceship, and measures the time it takes for the light beam from the planet to travel from the bow to the stern. Since the ship has a speed with respect to the light source, he will conclude that the light beam will move at half the speed of light.In fact, the beam travels the length of the ship at exactly the speed of light.The astronaut could only conclude that the length of his ship must have contracted in the direction of motion, but he could not prove it, because everything on the ship contracted in the direction of motion, and so did the sky tester. When he looked toward the bow, even The length from the back of his head to the tip of his nose has shrunk.

When he was doing these experiments, he was passing a planet where the astronomers were watching the spacemen and ships passing by with very fine telescopes, but they didn't see the normal form of the spacemen or the usual shape of the ship.They saw an unbelievably thin man standing on top of an oddly squashed cabin.Astronauts themselves are not aware of any abnormality. When facing the bow of the ship, if they measure the distance from the back of the head to the tip of the nose, they find it is normal.How could he detect the shrinkage of the real ruler he used to measure?A visual inspection told him nothing.Only reasoning based on his measurements of star beams can prove to him that his ship shrinks, his watch slows, and that no matter how fast he rushes toward the speed of light, he will never move faster than 670,000,000 per hour. Miles faster to hit the beam.

To understand the more complicated general theory of relativity proposed in 1916, one must first understand special relativity.General relativity led to a strange science of geometry that began to reveal to us the existence of those hidden paths through space.We will see that through these paths, an object disappearing in one place in the universe will appear in another place at the same time, just like Kiki in Alice in Wonderland.Using this mysterious path, the object does move at a speed greater than the speed of light, but in order to take a shortcut, it must avoid the speed limit of special relativity.A new interpretation of general relativity leads inexorably to the conclusion that such amazing journeys often occur in the universe.

Einstein, unlike many of his admirable colleagues, was not satisfied that his special theory of relativity could explain the shortcomings arising from the experiments of Michelson and Cheli.He wanted a unified field theory to completely describe the universe and explain all cosmic events.He meditates on the dreams of Laplace, the eighteenth-century French mathematician who speculated about an intelligence: This kind of intelligence can know at a moment all the dynamic forces of nature, and the relative positions of all objects, and if it is powerful enough to analyze all this information, it can cover in one equation from the largest to the lightest objects in the universe. the motion of atoms; with it, nothing is indeterminate; the future appears to it as the past.

Einstein longed to imitate that great intelligence, thinking why astronauts age slowly, why light behaves so mysteriously, why mass increases with speed, why, why, why.The only conclusion is that all this stuff comes directly from the force of gravity, a force that has baffled astronomers for years and still doesn't fully understand it even today. Some writers have ridiculed the twin paradox, claiming that it is impossible for the one in space to age slower than his brother on Earth. Of course, they say, the Earth can be said to be moving away from the spaceship at the same speed as the spaceship is moving away from the earth, but why must Think of the earth as a fixed reference coordinate and the spaceship as a moving object?The answer given by Einstein said that when the earth moves, the whole universe moves with it, but when the spaceship moves, it only moves alone. The twins on the earth have no relative motion to the universe, but the one in space does. He uses the engine to move Break away from the natural orbit that gravity has given him.The mass of his spaceship is far less than that of the universe, so it is the gravitational field of the universe, not the spaceship's, that has an effect.If the paradox is wrong, the spaceship would need a mass equal to the universe; to contain millions of galaxies.But since the spacecraft is actually much smaller than Earth, it must obey the laws of objects far exceeding its mass. A small town in America must be especially proud of its sky-high independence, which it may use in many beautiful and harmless ways.When the state government limited speed on highways to 70 miles per hour, the town agreed to comply, but took a different approach. The town council ruled that motorists could go at any speed except 71 miles per hour. The parties involved will be punished.When someone is driving at eighty or ninety miles an hour, it is considered that in order to achieve that speed, he must at some point be driving at seventy-one miles, and therefore he is breaking the law.The same is true of the twin in space, it is not his speed that slows him down, but his acceleration before reaching that speed.He has accelerated to escape the permanent flight orbit without using the engine, resisting the inertia.The phenomenon of inertia was incorporated by Newton in his first law of any object at rest or in constant motion in a straight line unless acted upon by an opposing force.Therefore, inertial behavior is exactly the same as gravity. Einstein caught on to this.His interpretation is surprising. Newton would also think that insane inertia and gravitational behavior behave in the same way, because they are exactly the same thing, just said differently!Imagine a heavy cannonball and a ball of balsa wood falling at exactly the same speed, contrary to what Aristotle thought: the cannonball hits the ground faster than the wooden ball.But the gravity pushes it down, and the inertial force pulls it, so it falls at a certain speed. The wooden ball will fall slowly because of its light weight, but its inertial force is much smaller, so the speed at which it is pushed down is the same as The shells happen to be the same.Regardless of the air effect, even if the mass of an object is as large as a mountain, it will not fall faster or slower than a feather.Gravitational and inertial forces always cancel each other out, and gravitational mass is proportional to inertial mass. The ball will fall to the ground only if it is dropped at a lesser height. If a thing is released about three hundred miles above the ground, it will never touch the ground. Although it will continue to fall forever, it will become a satellite, in orbit. detour.I made this clear in order to show that objects on the ground do exactly the same thing as they do in orbit forever: they are moving through space along the path of least resistance.There are no instruments precise enough to measure any curvature of the ball as it hits the ground, but anyone can see satellites orbiting in curved paths, just as the Earth follows a curve around the sun.Every object in the known universe orbits another object in some sort of curved orbit.Newton described the force of gravity that produces these orbital paths as a push and pull force that causes objects to follow their orbits.But Einstein and his Polish colleague Minkowski proposed a completely different explanation, which is accepted by most experts today.They invented a brand-new concept called four-dimensional space-time. Some people think of the fourth dimension as a mystical quality related to ghosts, but it is not, it is a dimension of time without which matter cannot exist.Every object is a four-dimensional space.Imagine a brick: it has length, width, height, and the three dimensions are perpendicular to each other.Time is the fourth dimension, perpendicular to the other three.We describe the dimensions of the brick as follows: it is four inches long, six inches wide, and nine inches thick, and it has existed for a hundred years.Meaning, at the end of a hundred years, it crumbles into dust and ceases to exist.We have seen how the four dimensions of space-time change when a spaceship travels at high speed.Relativistic physics says that time behaves exactly like the other three degrees. Abandoning Newton's theory of gravity, Einstein and Minkowski explained why the earth revolves around the sun in its elliptical orbit.The sun does not pull the earth, but its huge mass bends time and space in the surrounding area.The mass of the sun creates a tunnel, the walls of which are curved space and time, through which the earth travels forever.The concept of time bending is lurid and unbelievable, but only because we've never seen anything like it while we're here on Earth.Even the stars and galaxies in the universe are busy in this game of generating gravitational fields, the result of which are corridors containing curved space-time.The innumerable number of such passages is the essence of general relativity. General relativity contradicts the geometry we were taught in school.Ovan Reed's statement that parallel lines never intersect and that the angles of a triangle add up to 180 degrees is strictly wrong because they assume the shortest distance between two points is a straight line.Einstein and Minkowski proved that there is no such thing as a straight line in relativity.All lines are curved if they extend into space.A ray of light travels from a point through the universe, and it travels a complete circle back to its starting point.This would explain Einstein's famous joke to reporters that if a man with special vision looked into the sky, he would see the back of his own head, and of course he would have to wait tens of millions of years for the light and shadow in the back of his own head to travel Universe, but this joke helps to understand that light travels in curves because space is curved. General relativity was first demonstrated during a lull in a tropical storm in the Portuguese colony of Principe in the Gulf of Guinea in West Africa in 1919.Arthur.Eddington, a bright young astronomer, was excited to continue Einstein's work, where he led a expedition to take pictures of the planet during a regional solar eclipse.He wanted to find out whether beams of light from stars would be deflected by the sun's mass, as predicted by general relativity. The eclipse at Principe occurred at 2:15 p.m. local time and would last only five minutes.While Eddington was preparing the telescope and camera that morning, the rain was pouring down.He tried to protect the instruments inside the canopy, but the rain kept splashing in, almost destroying the negatives.When the moon was in front of the sun and the sky was partially clear, he took the opportunity to take a picture of a star near the edge of the moon, a total of 16 photos, but a few clouds drifting over made him doubt whether the negatives could be developed.Fifteen photos were useless, while the sixteenth managed to show a cluster of bright stars.They are carefully inspected to see if there is any deviation from normal position. Einstein was very concerned about the results of the inspection.He originally went to Leiden University in the Netherlands to give lectures and listened to a famous speech by Lorenz, a famous German theorist who once wrote one of the main equations of the special theory of relativity.Einstein was giving a speech when Lorenz appeared at the podium waving a telegram.The telegram was from Eddington in London, stating that the position of the stars on the Principe photograph was deflected by an average of 1.7 seconds of arc, exactly within the range predicted by Einstein. Hundreds of people were present The students and professors burst into cheers, and the sound exploded into the sky. The news shocked and galvanized a postwar Europe that was mired in misery, and Einstein was surrounded by journalists, amateur astronomers and politicians.There is even a cigar maker that wants to make Einsteins that shorten when they are smoked; or that they shrink in the direction of motion.People rushed out at night with torches to illuminate the surrounding fields, and many found that they could see the beams being bent by the gravity of the earth.There is a cartoon artist who draws two detectives in Sherlock Holmes' house, holding a torch, and the light beam turns at a right angle in the corner to illuminate a thief, basically, dear Einstein, one detective said to the other.Naturally, many despised the new theory.Some professional astronomers, even some of whom had long accepted the results of Michelson-Moray's experiments, thought the whole thing was boring.A physicist, Gibbs said, a mathematician can say what he likes, but a physicist must at least have a clear mind.Picard, permanent secretary of the French Academy of Sciences, said, I see red lights on the subject of relativity.Krichman called the theory blasphemous.Sailors have been using the positions of the planets for a long time to sail, always seeing them in the same position, and the sailors also think that Einstein is talking nonsense. Most importantly, a strong intellectual effort was required to reject the old ideas and accept the novelty of Einstein.The layman often finds this almost as difficult as the very old scientist.A New York Times editorial in 1928 wrote: Tennyson calls for the function of trusting to believe what we cannot prove.The New Physics ventures to prove things that none of us can believe. Countless textbooks on relativity try hard to explain it, and mostly succeed in teaching a vague concept of an analogy or metaphor that, when painstakingly read word for word, seems to have a hazy comprehension, when He lost it again when he turned his mind from the book. The flawless logic of Einstein's unalterable logic finally convinced the most skeptical.Today's mathematicians, physicists, astronomers and cosmologists accept both theories without thinking.Michelson's and Morey's experiments, Eddington's, were repeated over and over again with the same results.The mass-energy relation E∥mc<2 that appears in the theory of relativity gives us nuclear energy and the atomic bomb.Professor Wheeler of Princeton said: Any theory that contradicts the predictions of general relativity cannot pass the test of time, and no logical flaws can be found in its foundation.There is no acceptable alternative that is simpler and more inclusive. An amazing new twist on general relativity today, his explanations in the next chapter and a new cosmology that arose out of it, are revealing to us those hidden paths in space that will one day make space The time it takes for a ship to travel from Earth to a habitable planet in another galaxy is as short as it is today to fly from New York to Tokyo.