Did Einstein Stand on Newton’s Shoulders? — No, on Maxwell’s!
“If I have seen a little further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.”
Isaac Newton
Why not on Newton’s shoulders?
Einstein’s revolution in science of space, time, and motion, was triggered by a mere rejection of time being absolute. Newton’s mechanics was based on the assumption that time interval Δt is the same everywhere and always, but if it is not, then velocity (as distance ΔS divided by Δt) does not obey Newton’s first law of inertia “object speed does not change unless acted by force”:
That leads to the violation of traditional conservation principles, like momentum conservation, energy conservation, and even particles entanglement. But we use Newton’s laws and his calculus in many technologies because time variability is miniscule in everyday life. Interesting that Newton defined gravitational formula, despite he could not figure out the real cause and the medium for gravity (which is caused by time dilation / time variability, as Einstein discovered).
Why on Maxwell’s shoulders?
We know Maxwell for his formulas for electromagnetism and for his popular result that relates his study with Einstein’s theories, which is the speed of light c is inverse to electromagnetic density of space/medium (such density is a geometric mean for permeability μ and permittivity ε, thus, c=1/√με). Again, it was just a math model and formulas, and not a real explanation on what is the medium. Besides that, Maxwell dropped some vague phrases about time and medium:
“The arrangement of the parts of space can no more be altered than the order of the portions of time.” — Matter and Motion
“There is an aethereal medium pervading all bodies, and modified only in degree by their presence.” — A Dynamical Theory of the Electromagnetic Field
Now let’s put ourselves in Einstein’s shoes back then. Can the speed of light, as inverse to some density of space/medium, vary in space? Or space vacuum is homogeneous everywhere and speed of light in vacuum is the same everywhere and always. Einstein did not come to the absolute speed of light in space right away. He explored variability of the light speed as well. Let’s do a thought experiment:
Let’s consider man #1, standing on the border between two differently dense mediums, shine two laser beams toward two men 300,000 km away from him: man #2 standing in the less dense area, man #3 standing in the denser area, and both #2 and #3 standing near each other.
Laser beam would reach man #2 first, and it appears that speed of light is different in these two mediums. But if the speed of light is the same 300,000 km/sec on both sides, will both men always receive light signals at the same moment? Einstein thought of the case below:
If time on the left side is twice faster (clock ticks twice faster on that side) than on the right side, then by the time when man #2 receives the signal, one second passes on his side, but only half a second passes on the right side, thus, the signal on the right side has traveled only 150,000 km by then. Such thinking changed a lot: it predicted and explained many interesting observations like light bending around the Sun, Mercury orbit precession, GPS clocks running faster on the orbit, and gravity caused by time dilation.
Even more, considering time as an aether/medium with time dilation factor as its density solves many problems in modern physics. Time as medium fills not only space, but matter as well, where it is even denser/slower than in the current space. See details in All We Know about Physics of Time in 4 Pages digest, and read “Time Matters” free eBook (also available on Google and Amazon).
P.S. Actually, “absolute speed of light” defines local unit of time:
- Local to an area second is defined as a time span, during which a light ray travels a distance of 299,792,458 meters in this area.
- Or to be more local: nanosecond is time for a light beam to travel 0.299 meters (about a foot).
- Or in microworld: attosecond is time for a photon to travel 0.299 nanometers (about 3 angstroms).
Thus, it is not c absolute, it is time variable.
P.P.S. Take one step further, when something crosses timezones and violates (or “tries to violate”) c-speed-limit:
Time “partially burns” to a faster, less dense, time in the pink area, that prevents c-speed-limit violation. Ashes from time burning is matter — it is how matter and galaxies appeared in our Universe from nothing but time and space: Galaxies, Not the Big Bang …
