Saturday, September 4, 2010

It seems a trifle queer


"The time has come", Said Eddington,
"To talk of many things;
Of cubes and Clocks and meter-sticks,
And why a pendulum sings,
And how far space is out of plumb,
And whether time has wings.

'You hold that time is badly warped,
That even light is bent;
I think I get the idea there,
If this is what you meant;
The mail the postman brings today,
Tomorrow will be sent',

'The shortest line', Einstein replied,
"Is not the one that is straight;
It curves around upon itself,
Much like a figure 8,
And if you go too rapidly,
You will arrive too late.

'But Easter Day is Christmas time,
And far away is near,
And two and two is more than four
And over there is here.'

'You may be right,' said Eddington,
'It seems a trifle queer.'

To summarize, general relativity entails, not by design but by necessity, a radical reconceptualization of space and time, henceforth visualized mathematically as a single structure called spacetime. The geometry of this spacetime is determined by the distribution of matter; gravity itself no longer appears explicitly. That is one way of putting it, anyway.

But for an altogether less dry précis, we turn to a send -up of Lewis Carroll's 'The Walrus and the Carpenter' written in 1924 by a Professor W. Williams, a specialist in relativity theory Entitles 'The Einstein and the Eddington', it contains the above mentioned verses.

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