Einstein’s Childhood Curiosity and Its Impact

In the year 1894, a 16-year-old German child sitting on the last bench asked his teacher a question. Instead of answering his question, the teacher threw him out of the class. The name of that child was Albert Herman Einstein.

Now Einstein went out of the class at that time. But that question still kept on revolving in his mind. The question was how the world will appear when light runs away from speech. Now this question sounds quite childish, like. So how did Einstein turn a simple question into a theory with a whole new concept and what flaw did Einstein find in Newton’s theory due to which the theory which everyone was considering as God’s word for 200 years?

The Path to Scientific Discovery

How does the mind of these scientists work? Can I also think something like this? If yes, then how? Well, today you will understand from Einstein’s story how the origin and evolution of his entire theory happened? The deep ideas he had. And for this I would highly suggest you to read this article completely because being a science enthusiast when I read Einstein’s story I personally found it very eye opening which inspired me to see this world from a different perspective. So let’s get right into it.

Breaking the Myth About Newton and Relativity

Now, France, in the beginning I would like to highlight this point that many people feel that Einstein’s relativity which explains gravity has been developed from Newton’s theory of gravity, so let me tell you, you guys are absolutely wrong. Because Einstein’s relativity has actually been developed from two such theories of Newton which have no relation whatsoever with gravity.

So what happened was, Newton presented three fundamental theories to the world in his time. According to this theory, if two vehicles are moving in the same direction with the same speed, then they will appear stationary to each other. But if they travel in the opposite direction, then their speed will appear double. The speed of every moving thing depends on its own speed. Now here you can see, these three theories are quite different things, which explain gravity, light and motion. At first glance, they seem to be different from each other.

The Light Debate and Young’s Experiment

In fact, the combination of these three theories started in the year 1678 when Dutch physicist Christiaan Huygens challenged Newton’s light corpuscular theory. Newton had proposed that light is made of corpuscles i.e. small packets. But according to Huygens, light bends when it passes from one medium to another. And that is why it should be treated as a wave and not a particle.

But because Huygens did not have much time to prove his theory at that time, in 1801, a British physicist Thomas Young proved Huygens’ wave theory with his famous double slit experiment. Young basically passed light through two slits and absorbed them on a screen. And he saw that the light coming out of the slits was showing alternate light and dark bands.

That is, for the first time Young’s experiment proved Newton’s theory wrong and proved that light is actually a wave. But wait, let’s hold on a bit over here. We all know that any wave needs a medium like water or air to travel. In such a situation, there is only vacuum in outer space, then how would light travel there. This question was troubling many scientists at that time.

The Ether Theory and Michelson-Morley’s Failure

And now coming back to the topic, we were discussing that there is only vacuum in outer space, then how does light travel there. Now in response to this, a group of scientists hypothesized that from where the light comes to the earth, there is a vacuum. And hence two scientists of the same group, Albert Michelson and Edward Morley, performed an experiment in 1887. And you won’t believe that the results of that experiment were so embarrassing that.

Look, the theory of Michelsen and Morley was quite simple. According to them, if there is ether and it is flowing in one direction, for example, west to east, then when light travels in the direction in which ether is flowing, then its speed should be fast. And when it travels in the opposite direction of ether, then its speed will be less. Simply speaking Michelson and Morley thought that if we prove that the speed of light changes, then the existence of ether will also be proved automatically but the question before them was how to prove it.

Then they realized that in Young’s Double Slit Experiment, both the light waves were coming from the same direction and at the same speed and were creating an interference pattern. Now in such a situation, if two light waves of different speeds collide with each other, then the interference pattern formed between them should break. And to verify this assumption, they sent the light waves in two opposite directions and reflected them from the mirror so that they come back to the same point and create an interference pattern.

But when they performed this experiment once again they were extremely disappointed. They did not see any change in the interference pattern of both the light waves, which means that there are two important things from this. First, no medium like luminiferous ether exists. And secondly, light always travels at the same speed in all directions. That means its speed is constant. Which means, all in all, to prove the existence of ether, this concept of ether was disproved forever.

Einstein’s Game-Changing Thought

But as soon as Michelson and Morley proved that the speed of light is constant, Newton’s other unpopular theory relativity came to prominence again. So in 1905, an idea came to Einstein’s mind that according to Newton, speed is relative. That means if someone comes in front of me at the same speed as I am traveling, then I will perceive his speed to be double. So let me start with the speed of light.

And if another beam of light comes from the front, then its speed should also be double to me. But just now we saw that Michelson and Morley proved that the speed of light is constant in which case if the speed of light is double, then. For this, Einstein performed the Thord experiment. He imagined a train travelling on the speed of light.

Light is flashing on both its ends. Now in such a situation when he is standing on the platform, then. This is because the light beam coming from the first coach will have to travel less distance to travel to Einstein’s position and the light coming from the last coach which has to come back to Einstein will have to travel more distance.

As we discussed earlier, the speed of light toh constant hai na, then exactly what is changing? Well, Einstein thought that if both the lights are arriving at the same time while standing at the station and both the lights are arriving at different times while sitting in the train, then what if time is the thing that is actually changing? And just here Einstein’s special theory of relativity was born.

According to which, the faster we travel in space, the more time will slow down for us. And there will come a point, when our speed will become so fast, that time will stop completely for us.

From Special to General Relativity

You can see how ironic this is in itself. Because, normally the general version of anything comes first and then its special version comes after that. But this is probably the only theory where due to the special version.

So in 1905 Einstein published his Special Theory of Relativity but he himself was not completely satisfied with his theory because his Special Relativity theory was telling that time will stop at the speed of light but why will this happen? There were some observations in his theory which he could not explain completely, what is its reason, what is its origin, like how Newton gravity is created, he could not explain this. Today we know that the answer to the why of both things is the curvature of space time fabric. But at that time both Einstein and Newton were unaware of this. And so very soon Newton’s gravity and Einstein’s special.

Gravitational Curvature and Time Dilation

Actually Einstein asked a question to himself. Suppose you are walking on an empty road. Then when will your speed decrease. Ovisly when you have a pit or some type of resistance in front of you. So what if time also travels through a medium. Firstly, the problem that had arisen in Newtin’s theory about the relation between mass and gravity was solved and secondly, the answer to why time would slow down while keeping light constant was also found.

Basically, he thought that all those who have concentrated mass, they create holes in the space-time fabric. And when an object falls in this hole, then it will seem to us that the object is getting attracted towards the other massive object. Means, through this visualization, Einstein answered why and how gravity attracts objects. Along with this, when a fast object whose light travels through this curved space-time fabric, then it will have to travel a longer distance than in flat space-time and because the speed of light is constant and hence the time will slow down for light while passing through this curved space-time.

Experimental Proof of General Relativity

So you can see how with the help of a simple thought, Einstein easily explained the mechanism of both his special theory of relativity and Newton’s gravity. Now the need was to connect all these links together and verify this theory experimentally.

For this, in the year 1915, Einstein formulated his general theory of relativity. But maybe you don’t know this, along with mathematical proofs, Einstein successfully proved GTR theory experimentally as well. With the help of General Relativity, he found a solution to a big problem which no scientist had been able to solve for the last 200 years.

Then Newton saw that his theory accurately predicted the orbits of all the other planets. Except Mercury. Because when Astronomers observed Mercury, he did not see that his theory was correct. You saw that Mercury’s orbit tilts by a specific angle every hundred years. But no such tilt was predicted in Newton’s calculations. That is, clearly in the case of Mercury, Newton’s predictions were accurate.