{"id":9969,"date":"2019-06-26T16:42:31","date_gmt":"2019-06-26T23:42:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/BigJimIndustries.com\/wordpress\/?p=9969"},"modified":"2019-07-06T16:45:39","modified_gmt":"2019-07-06T23:45:39","slug":"symmetry","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/2019\/06\/26\/symmetry\/","title":{"rendered":"Symmetry"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

from Quanta Magazine<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Simple Idea Behind Einstein\u2019s Greatest Discoveries<\/h1>\n\n\n\n

by K.C. Cole<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"\/
Rachel Suggs<\/a>\u00a0for Quanta Magazine<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The flashier fruits of Albert Einstein\u2019s century-old insights are by now deeply embedded in the popular imagination: Black holes, time warps and wormholes show up regularly as plot points in movies, books, TV shows. At the same time, they fuel cutting-edge research, helping physicists pose questions about the nature of space, time, even information itself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Perhaps ironically, though, what is arguably the most revolutionary part of Einstein\u2019s legacy rarely gets attention. It has none of the\u00a0splash of gravitational waves<\/a>, the\u00a0pull of black holes<\/a>\u00a0or even the charm of quarks. But lurking just behind the curtain of all these exotic phenomena is a deceptively simple idea that pulls the levers, shows how the pieces fit together, and lights the path ahead.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The idea is this: Some changes don\u2019t change anything. The most fundamental aspects of nature stay the same even as they seemingly shape-shift in unexpected ways. Einstein\u2019s 1905 papers on relativity led to the unmistakable conclusion, for example, that the relationship between energy and mass is invariant, even though energy and mass themselves can take vastly different forms. Solar energy arrives on Earth and becomes mass in the form of green leaves, creating food we can eat and use as fuel for thought. (\u201cWhat is this mind of ours: what are these atoms with consciousness?\u201d asked the late\u00a0Richard Feynman<\/a>. \u201cLast week\u2019s potatoes!\u201d) That\u2019s the meaning of\u00a0E<\/em>\u00a0=\u00a0mc<\/em>2<\/sup>. The \u201cc<\/em>\u201d stands for the speed of light, a very large number, so it doesn\u2019t take much matter to produce an enormous amount of energy; in fact, the sun turns millions of tons of mass into energy each second.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This endless morphing of matter into energy (and vice versa) powers the cosmos, matter, life. Yet through it all, the energy-matter content of the universe never changes. It\u2019s strange but true: Matter and energy themselves are less fundamental than the underlying relationships between them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We tend to think of things, not relationships, as the heart of reality. But most often, the opposite is true. \u201cIt\u2019s not the stuff,\u201d said the Brown University physicist\u00a0Stephon Alexander<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The same is true, Einstein showed, for \u201cstuff\u201d like space and time, seemingly stable, unchangeable aspects of nature; in truth, it\u2019s the relationship between space and time that always stays the same, even as space contracts and time dilates. Like energy and matter, space and time are mutable manifestations of deeper, unshakable foundations: the things that never vary no matter what.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[ click to continue reading at Quanta<\/a> ]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

from Quanta Magazine The Simple Idea Behind Einstein\u2019s Greatest Discoveries by K.C. Cole The flashier fruits of Albert Einstein\u2019s century-old insights are by now deeply embedded in the popular imagination: Black holes, time warps and wormholes show up regularly as plot points in movies, books, TV shows. At the same time, they fuel cutting-edge research, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":26,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9969","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture-art"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9969","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/26"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9969"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9969\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9969"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9969"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9969"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}