StageView: Picasso at the Lapin Agile

Einstein

It had been a long evening.  Exhausted and defeated, Albert Einstein, 26, boarded the streetcar and headed home from the apartment of his good friend and principle sounding board Michele Besso.  For hours the pair had wrangled with a seemingly irresolvable contradiction: Newtonian mechanics and the concept of absolute space and time were incompatible with the equations of the 19^th century Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell, who proposed constancy for the speed of light.  With Newton, velocity could be added or subtracted; not so for light, according to Maxwell.  Both couldn’t be right, and yet, together, they formed two basic pillars of physics as it was understood in 1905.  Einstein knew overturning one would require a massive reorganization of the science. 

Physicist Michio Kaku reports what happened next: “Although Einstein was depressed, his thoughts were still churning in his mind when he returned home that night.  In particular, he remembered riding in the street car in Bern and looking back at the famous clock tower that dominated the city. He then imagined what would happen if his streetcar raced away from the tower at the speed of light.  He quickly realized that the clock would appear to stop, since light could not catch up to the streetcar, but his own clock in the streetcar would beat normally.”

“A storm broke loose in my mind,” Einstein would later say, as he realized Maxwell was right.  The solution to the problem appeared simple.  Kaku explains: “Time can beat at different rates throughout the universe, depending on how fast you moved . . . One second on Earth was not the same length as one second on the moon or one second on Jupiter. In fact, the faster you moved the more time slowed down.”   Einstein also would go on to state that approaching the speed of light would make yardsticks shorter.  There was no absolute meaning for time or length.

Einstein returned to Besso the next day and announced, “Thank you, I’ve completely solved the problem.” He then set about writing “On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies,” the third of the three masterpieces accepted for publication in the famous Volume 17 of the Annalen der Physik in that “magical year” of 1905.  Overall in the papers, Einstein set out to explore the structure of radiation. The first proposed a theoretical expedient: the representation of light as a particle or “light quantum.”  Most physicists of the day believed light traveled as a wave through the “luminiferous ether,” a mysterious background substance that pervaded the entire universe.  The second used principles of thermodynamics as a means to determine the size of atoms.  Einstein proposed this at a time when the existence of atoms was not yet universally accepted.  The third became one of the most far-reaching theories in physics.  In it Einstein concluded that not only was the speed of light a constant, it represented the ultimate velocity in the universe.  Moreover, no longer could space and time be considered independently; they were inseparable, two sides of the same coin that constitute a fourth dimension, spacetime.   From there, Einstein eventually concluded that energy and matter are also the same. This became the basis for that most famous equation known as the General Theory of Relativity.

-Joseph Whelan, Publications Director at Syracuse Stage

“Einstein’s relativity paper is unparalleled in the history of science in its depth, breadth and sheer intellectual virtuosity.” -Arthur I. Miller, Einstein, Picasso: Space, Time and the Beauty That Causes Havoc.