The uncertain, unreasonable, and unintuitive worlds of Einstein's generation.
"What poet will furnish us with the metaphors for which the new language cries out? How can we possibly imagine the amalgam of space and time? What supreme view of harmony will enable us to accord repetition in time with symmetry in space?"
Gaston Bachelard.
"Reality is not an exhibit for man's inspection, labelled 'Do not touch.' There are no appearances to be photographed, no experiences to be copied, in which we do not take part."
I Hidden likenesses are discovered only by free, open, and unrestricted inquiry
II “There have always been two ways of looking
at truth”
III The necessity of human dignity in distinguishing
higher, deeper, enduring truths.
"The visible part of the electromagnetic spectrum covers only those wavelengths from 1/700,000 centimeter (red) to 1/400,000 centimeter (violet). On each side of that narrow window of sight, the lengths of the electromagnetic waves lengthen and shorten by a factor of about a million billion, from the longest radio waves to the shortest gamma rays. . . . that was a lot of potential information, and certainly worth a look . . . ."
Panek, The Invisible Century, p. 195.
Knowable in that it is comprehensible.
This universe was here before we were born.
The physical reality is that the universe is expanding in spacetime.
From the view of perspective of the visible spectrum, all these stars in this universe appears to us as light from the past.
"So the invisible has allowed us to take what was implicit in the conception of the universe that moves and make it explicit; It moves over time. When we see the outer universe now –photographs for instance, of radio-wave remnants of the big bang in full color– we see it as a system with a beginning and, maybe, an end."
Panek, The Invisible Century, p. 206.
"Over the course of the twentieth century we have similarly reimagined the universe."
Panek, The Invisible Century, p. 205.
But without the aid of instruments such as these Einstein and Freud brought us to a new world; a world we discover is invisible; but nonetheless real."
" . . . to create a common vision: . . . but there is more to the universe than meets the eye at all."
Panek, The Invisible Century, p. 207.
Einstein himself first called his work an ''invariant theory,'' not a ''relativity theory.'' Einstein does not say ''everything is relative,'' or anything remotely like it. And on the whole Mr. Panek's presentation is accurately emphatic on this and Einstein's habits of mind.
"Over the course of the twentieth century, we have . . . reimagined the universe. What access to the invisible has allowed us to see is the universe in motion over time."
p. 205, Panek.
". . . it spurred the greatest change in our perception of the universe in which we live since Euclid wrote," 300 BCE.
"Einstein's general theory of relativity transformed space and time from passive background in which events take place to active participants in the dynamics of the universe."
p. 21.
"this separation between past, present, and future is only an illusion, however tenacious."
Tentative Conclusiveness
- We are the reluctant heirs to a revolution unlike any other in its extent and implications for which we have no sufficient expressions
- The Universe was forever altered
- We have denied that it happened
Consequence of verities
- So many people retreated into fantastic and fascinating fables when they should have been a wake to the universe calling them to grow.
- The world is not as 17th century geniuses imagined; predictable, subtle, and controllable; instead the universe random, uncertain, stochastic, and filled with so many possibilities that only a few are embodied in lasting forms.
- We have an obligation to endure, together with our mistress this universe that gave us this exquisite Earth a splendid self-renewing ensemble that we are wrecking to feed our fantasies, our greed, and our emotional vapidity.
What Panek, Hawking, Kaku, and Bronowski have revealed to us is many unsettling assumptions. Such as "science that is done not by studying what you can see (including with a telescope, microscope or any other instrument) but" by investigating what you don't see. Einstein nailed the essence out of reality; it is beyond our grasp.
Nonetheless we better be alert, smart, and more accurate about what we experience or we run the risk of being snuffed out by a dimensional universe beyond our simple, primal comprehension. Einstein transformed our confident, positivist and predictive self-reflective reinforcement of our cherished beliefs into a stark naked eternity of light, energy and mass equivalency, and curved reality where we are pilgrims, not lords of the universe.
