Up to Date: What’s the Fuss About Einstein and Relativity?

This post is part of a series dedicated to fundamental-assumption-shattering scientific breakthroughs. If you lived centuries ago and thought the Earth was flat, and would want to find out that the Earth was round (even if it meant nothing to your daily life), then this series is for you. The material is basic and the implications profound. For the first article of the series click here: For Those Who Care to Know That The Earth is Round.

You’ve seen his face. What was so mind-blowing about this guy?

You probably have heard about E=MC^2, seen pictures of Albert Einstein with funky facial expressions, and maybe learned of the “Theory of Relativity.” But I have noticed that not a lot of people are not familiar with the implications of century-old, mind-blowing advancement. It’s probably because we often don’t consider ourselves scientific, at least not enough to understand all sorts of crazy equations. In this post, we will leave crazy mathematics for the scientists, and just take a look at the implications of the science. If you are familiar with relativity, then you might want to skip this post. If you are not familiar, then I will attempt to break it down for you very simply. Simply enough that even if you have never looked at science since schooling, you will get the bizarre implication of Einstein’s Theory of Relativity and will be able to see that it is an advancement in the same category as finding out that the Earth is round. I will keep it brief and simple, I promise–just stick with it. Then you can go learn about it more if you want.

For Those Who Care to Know That The Earth is Round

Every once in a long while, science hits us with some shattering updates. I’m not talking about finding a cure for a disease. I’m not even talking about decoding the human genome — we knew there was some code that we just didn’t decode yet. I’m talking about literally shattering news. What is shattered exactly? Our view of how everything works and functions. What’s the difference?

• Going from thinking the common cold has no cure to finding out there is one
• Going from thinking that the Earth is flat to finding out that it’s round (or thinking the Earth is the center of the universe and everything revolves around it to finding out we revolve around the sun)

The latter represents a shift in a wildly fundamental assumption we make about this entire thing around us we term “existence.” Would your life be any different if you didn’t know that the earth was round? Probably not. Regardless, it represents a place holder in this big image that we have in our head for how everything is.

Albert Einstein says

“We can will ourselves to act, but we cannot will ourselves to will.”

I’m excited to begin making some science-related posts shortly!