Why do friends laugh at philosophy

LZ, in a remote village called Sobral in southern Brazil. The sun has just risen. God gave the local people eternal peace. In their eyes, the world is nothing more than blue sky, wheat fields, grasslands and sheep. Even the just-concluded smoke-filled World War I seems to be a legend in the horizon.

But I was awakened early in the morning, and a group of strange foreigners came at the door. Some greeted them in broken Portuguese, some gestured to borrow water, and more people were busy setting up astronomical telescopes and cameras.

At noon, the bright sunshine slowly began to dim, and the famous total solar eclipse of this century took place. The onlookers stirred up and drew crosses on their chests. Some people hurried to the priest, while those foreigners began to observe with confidence.

They are an astronomical observation team from far away England, and the purpose of this trip is to test a strange theory of a German.

Soon the data was processed and the negative was developed.

The professor leading the team is a standard English gentleman. Although what gentlemen admire most is calm style, the professor's eyes clearly show expectation and anxiety. The professor's hands and beard soon trembled with excitement when he put the wet film under the lamp. Whether the universe is bounded or unbounded, whether the space we belong to is straight or curved, and whether Newton's thought is victorious or subversive depends on these small movies. He took a deep breath and opened his eyes.

Soon, even 50 meters away from the house, a rude howl could be heard: "My God, is that German named Einstein right?" ! "

On the two overlapping negatives, it can be clearly seen that when a straight beam of starlight passes through the sun in the shadow, it is actually deflected, and the deflection angle is seconds.

The hall of the Royal Society is crowded with scientific elites from the British Isles. Some of them may realize that this will be an unusual day and put on holiday clothes on purpose.

When Sir Thomson, the chairman of the conference, adjusted his glasses and slowly announced that the theme of the conference was "Verification of General Relativity in Astronomy", scholars at the bottom began to whisper to each other, and then the voice became louder and louder. Some even stood up and argued loudly across the oak table without waiting for the host to call. Thomson tried several times to control the situation without success. He shook his head regretfully and smiled awkwardly at several members beside him.

But when Lord Eddington, a famous astronomer and the general leader of this astronomical survey, attended the meeting, the following suddenly quieted down. His face was dusty, his voice was hoarse, and his speech was short, but even the people farthest from him could clearly hear these words. "... the ironclad fact ... the lamp was bent ... was completely consistent with Dr. Einstein's calculation results ..."

The meeting was held very late, and no one left the meeting early, or even stood up to speak. Bright red carpets and flickering candlelight make the faces of scholars in meditation bright or dark. No one feels hungry, no one feels tired, and what's worse, the staff seems to be influenced by the physicist's demeanor, so careless that they even forget to serve dinner. But people don't care about this at all, from white-haired old pedants to energetic new ones, they are all thinking silently and excited.

Both pro-camp and anti-camp know that this is indeed an important day. Not only did a generation of physics giants rise in the 20th century, but he, Einstein, personally swung a sledgehammer and smashed the first crack in the classic physics building that Newton painstakingly created and completed in a hundred years.

Newton was wrong, and physics was chaotic? This is the end? Ah, Isaac? Newton, the God in our hearts, we are all your loyal followers. How will you guide us? People turned their eyes to the huge portrait of Newton in the center of the hall.

Newton didn't speak, just smiled mysteriously.

In London, the next day, the influential Times headline reported that the light was bent and Newton's myth was shattered, praising Einstein as the greatest physicist after Newton. He revised human's view of time and space, expanded human's thinking world, and asserted that the influence of his theory of relativity would never be limited to the twentieth century. Soon, from the street vendors in London to the dark-faced coal miners, they all vaguely knew that earth-shattering things had happened in the scientific community recently. As for the impact on others, they can't understand it for a while. After all, it is still 26 years before the birth of the atomic bomb, one of the by-products of relativity.

On the other side of the Atlantic in new york, The New York Times, who was used to grandstanding, took "Russian Revolution" as the title, but then wrote "Einstein's Victory" with a bigger title. "The stars are not where they should be, but it seems that there is no need to worry." According to their report, the public has begun to doubt the correctness of 1999 multiplication table, and students have begun to refuse to do geometry problems. It is also said that when Einstein delivered his works to the publisher, he warned that only one person in the world understood the theory of relativity, but the publisher was willing to take the risk.

In Paris, the "theory of relativity" in the salon immediately became the most fashionable word. Elegant female aristocrats can caress pugs in their arms and talk about relativity with their girlfriends with great interest, just like talking about the opera just performed last night. They don't need paper and pens.

In Berlin, when the official institutions are trying to promote this legendary scientist who is not a German but a Jew, people in the beer hall on the street are talking about Einstein and his theory of relativity mysteriously and excitedly. Yes, it has been a long time since World War I was defeated in Germany. Germans are seldom respected by the victorious countries. Overnight, even primary school students wrote Einstein's famous formula into their exercise books.

The smoke of the First World War has just cleared away. People inspired by nationalism, after revelry or crazy sadness, find that there is really nothing left except heavy artillery, led zeppelin, devastated buildings and cannon fodder served by millions of relatives. Rationality finally returned in people's calmness, and science was once again pushed to the supreme position.

Anyway, Einstein was in full swing in 2008.

As soon as the tram stopped, a middle-aged man with messy hair in a brown trench coat came down. On the tram just now, the vigilant conductor almost regarded him as a thief, because he really seldom saw such a man with a tie around his neck and slippers on his feet. But if he knew that this was the famous professor Einstein, he would be too surprised to speak. Mr Einstein has just learned from his friend Professor Lorenz's telegram that the general theory of relativity has been confirmed. He just smiled. Naturally, everything is expected.

After all, he is in a good mood. As he walked, he hummed Schubert's serenade, but before long, his voice dropped. Einstein, a famous wise man in history, once again shook his huge head and lost in thought. What is he thinking? ...

What year, month and day, Albert? Einstein was born in Ulm, a quiet town in southern Germany. Like Newton, this man who is destined to shock the world has no special childhood.

His father, Hailmann? Although Einstein is a businessman, his talent in mathematics at school is obvious to all. His mother elsa is a music lover and often reads Schiller's poems aloud at family gatherings. With his father's mathematical talent and his mother's artistic talent, Einstein Jr. should be brilliant. However, the child's reticence made his worried mother wonder if he was mentally retarded.

But when his mother plays the piano, little Einstein will bend over his head and listen. His blue eyes are so deep that the child clearly understands. This is beauty. Perhaps this is the root of the beauty of natural harmony that he pursued all his life.

Einstein soon found that the environment in the small town was not suitable for him. Curved narrow streets, solemn Gothic churches and magnificent fortresses seem to be more suitable for cultivating a group of bloody Germanic warriors than a thinker who regards freedom as his life. On the grand military parade, the rigid military orders of Prussian officers and the monotonous pace of soldiers often become the objects of children's imitation. At this time, poor Einstein grasped the adult's hand nervously and wanted to go home. The bugle and bayonet are things he hated all his life.

The situation at school seems to be no better. He is a Jew, and the anti-Semitic custom in Europe has a long history. The students around him intentionally or unintentionally hurt, making little Einstein more withdrawn. The teachers didn't notice him crouching in the corner of the classroom. In the teacher's view, children who can't master Latin grammar have no future. Einstein always seems to be slow in answering questions. They can't understand this because Einstein's thinking is much deeper than his peers.

During this period, something happened that touched Einstein's life.

His father gave little Einstein a compass. No matter how he moves the pointer, it always points in one direction. This is common to adults, but it is full of magic in children's eyes. There must be some mysterious force pushing it. How can we find this force? The child has been worried about this for some time.

When he entered middle school, he first came into contact with geometry. This is a magical world. In the final analysis, all kinds of complex theorems in the book are derived from several axioms. Everything is so simple that the proof process is impeccable. Nature has its unique beauty of order.

What surprised Einstein even more was that nature could deceive people! The conclusions drawn by people through superficial intuitive experience are often so unreliable. God is not only naughty, but also stingy. He often kicks the truth deeper like a ball, and then turns around and makes faces at people. Man's pursuit of truth is like wrestling with God. "Maybe our view of the world is fundamentally biased, because it is only based on a few axioms. What if there are loopholes in these axioms? " When Einstein Jr. fiddled with compasses and triangles, the idea rose in his mind. Of course, he didn't say, saying it would only lead to adults reaching out and touching their foreheads nervously. No one believes that this weak child will gently subvert the whole world view of mankind in a few years.

For Einstein, the long-term influence of music endowed him with aesthetic feeling and imagination, and the deep thinking of common things trained his insight, while the labyrinth reasoning of geometric problems made his thinking more meticulous. He is undoubtedly lucky.

However, Einstein was still not sharp enough to answer the teacher's questions and was looked down upon. He still had to hand over his carefully crafted but still ugly clay bench and was laughed at by his classmates. His Latin exam was stuttering, and his arithmetic exam was full of mistakes because of carelessness. His studies throughout his youth were mediocre.

From 2000 to 2002, Einstein studied in Zurich University of Technology, Switzerland, which was a very peaceful and comfortable place in his life.

Hundreds of years after the founding of Switzerland, the atmosphere of freedom is beyond Europe's reach. Einstein can't hear the soldiers killing endlessly here. The air is fresh and the sunshine is particularly charming. Even the policemen patrolling the streets are slow, with smiles in their eyes.

Here, Einstein's freedom was brought to the extreme. He can go in and out of the classroom in slippers, stay in the lab all day without trimming, discuss freely with his classmates and skip classes he doesn't like. He even perfunctory about such an important class as mathematics. In his view at that time, the physical world was simple and beautiful, and God only favored mathematics, which only increased the complexity in form. This even affected his research work after many years.

From now on, mathematics and physics at that time were far from fully developed. It was not until the end of the twentieth century that we found that the intersection between mathematics and physics was getting deeper and deeper. In the past, physics simply looked for tools from mathematics, but now even physics can lead to a breakthrough in mathematics.

I remember in a report that Dr. Li Zhengdao, winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics, held out his hands and said, "Physics and mathematics are like two leaves on a branch."

But generally speaking, people with great insight and philosopher temperament may not be competent for trivial, precise and logical mathematical reasoning.

No one can have both, neither Newton nor Einstein.

More importantly, Einstein found that the branches of mathematics in front of him were very complicated, such as number theory, geometry, topology and so on. Any one of them will exhaust the energy of his life. This situation is like a donkey in Brittan. The poor donkey couldn't choose which pile to eat because the two piles of straw in front of him were the same thickness, and eventually starved to death.

However, Einstein will soon pay the price for his choice. Before the exam, he was in a daze at the scattered notes. Fortunately, his old friend Mr. Grossman was born to be the opposite of Einstein everywhere, and his notes were as neat and meticulous as others. It was more than ten years later when Einstein found that he lacked geometric knowledge when developing general relativity and turned to Grossman, who was already a professor of mathematics at that time.

Einstein used Grossman's notes to cope with the exam hastily, but this did not change the teacher's opinion of him. In the eyes of the professor, he is extremely lazy and eccentric, and he is the only student who greets the professor and says "hello". This is also the reason why Einstein was ignorant and naive when he was a child, although he was extremely clever.

Minkowski, his math teacher, saw Einstein run out of the laboratory in a disheveled manner and stopped him.

"Einstein, you may be a wise man, but you are definitely not suitable for physics. Why not try other careers, such as studying medicine or law? "

"Maybe." Einstein answered lightly.

Only a few years later, Minkowski waved the flag for the special relativity of his "hardworking" students, and when he became famous all over the world, a reporter asked untimely:

"Professor, why do you assert that Einstein is not suitable for physics?"

"He was too lazy, at least at that time." The professor shrugged.

Unfortunately, Mr Minkowski soon became stubborn. Before he died, he expressed great emotion: It's a pity to die in the year when the theory of relativity was just born.

It cannot be said that Einstein has done nothing in recent years. His main energy is spent in the laboratory. At that time, physicists all over the world were searching for ether, and he had designed several experiments. Obviously, bad conditions and nonexistent ether made his efforts in vain.

He also often goes to a coffee shop called Metropolis with his friends. They often discuss philosophical topics here, and once a classmate introduced Mach's working mechanics to him. Mach was the first person to fire at Newton's classical mechanics. He sharply attacked Newton's concepts of absolute space and absolute time.

If Einstein got the treasure, he would take it back immediately and read it all night. Mach's thoughts are like stars in the dark, space is absolute and time is absolute. Since they are all absolute and isolated, how can we feel the existence of time and space?

The night is already deep, and the lights in Einstein's room are still flashing. The thought giant has begun to sharpen his knife.

Einstein walked out of school and found himself on an adventure island. His father's Italian company went bankrupt, which didn't help him at all. He tried to apply to stay in Zurich Polytechnic, but the professor above him turned him down coldly. Nobody likes eccentric fighters.

It's quite cold in Switzerland on autumn nights. Our Mr Einstein is wearing a dark trench coat, and his old suitcase contains all his things. The cool wind blew his hair, and he walked quietly on the long street, with the street lamps drawing oblique shadows.

It's really quiet In fact, Einstein spent his whole life in this quiet, not only the external environment, but also his heart. Whether he is poor in Geneva, famous in Berlin or unappreciated in Princeton, he always feels lonely.

Later, he repeatedly said that his favorite career was watching lighthouses. A bright light on the rough and dark sea lit up his heart to guide the ship. This is more like a prayer room, where he can quietly listen to God's instructions. He doesn't even want to accept the professor's salary, but prefers to study physics as a hobby. It seems that he was obviously influenced by Spinoza, a great philosopher in the Middle Ages. His official occupation was grinding lenses in a remote optical shop in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.

But now I'm really worried, hungry, my wife's anxious eyes, and the baby in my belly. ...

There was a broken newspaper blowing in front of him, and Einstein glanced at it listlessly. On it was printed a job advertisement: "Berne Patent Office, to recruit a second-class engineer, must have a higher education and be proficient in mechanical engineering or physics ..."

Einstein's eyes lit up.

Soon the staff of Bern Patent Office welcomed a new colleague, who looked very busy. I work very hard, but I often queue up with my wife to buy bread, or walk around the park with a stroller, and secretly write and draw on paper at work. Fortunately, his boss didn't know how fast young Patent examiners finished the task, otherwise his poor performance would soon be exposed.

It was already 2000, and Einstein was in 2000. At that time, the physical field he had been away from for a long time fell into greater chaos, and the experiment of finding ether failed completely. Some physicists have put forward various explanations. For example, Fitzgerald, an Irish physicist, suggested that a moving object might be shortened by the compression of the etheric wind, but this was refuted by more people. Not only that, a few years ago, the rays discovered by Roentgen made people more aware of the more basic structure of matter, and the quantum theory put forward by Planck in 2006 has also opened a new chapter in physics, but no one realized it at that time. In any case, "rain is coming" is more appropriate to describe the situation at that time.

However, Einstein was in a very closed state academically. He has no chance to listen to lectures or attend seminars in the college. The people who interact with him frequently are just folk physics lovers. But that didn't stop him from reaching the peak of physics.

He has been thinking hard about the "mystery of the ether", and his path is different from everyone else. When he was still in middle school, he used to worship Mequez Wei's electromagnetic theory. This is not because it can solve many practical problems, such as the discovery of electromagnetic waves. Einstein took a fancy to the perfect symmetry of the formula itself, but obviously this covariation conflicts with Newton's classical theory.

For example, according to Newton's mechanics, if a person stands in a car with a speed of 0 and throws a ball forward at a speed relative to the speed of the car, the speed of the ball is equal to the speed of a person standing on the ground. Any beginner in physics will come to this conclusion. However, we know that light is also an electromagnetic wave, and its speed in a vacuum is, if a person standing in a car holds a flashlight, what speed is light for people on the ground, or is it added? Can it be simply superimposed?

If you catch up with a beam of light at high speed, what kind of scene will you see? Will you see the light waves shaking in place?

Einstein took a risk. In order to start from the simple aesthetic point of view of symmetry, he would rather give up people's accustomed experience. He also believes in God, but he doesn't believe in the God who controls the fate of mankind in one hand, but in the order and harmony of all things.

We call it adventure because only a few decades later, two young people studying in the United States put forward the theory of "parity is not conserved in weak interaction" when studying the mystery of elementary particles, which was simply the destruction of symmetry and caused an uproar at that time. According to the explanation of ordinary Americans, they overthrew Einstein's theory of relativity. In fact, it was not the theory of relativity that was overthrown, but people's beautiful fantasies about nature since ancient Greek civilization. It seems that countless physicists have finally unveiled the veil on the head of the dream lover God, but they are disappointed to see a pitted old woman's face.

These two young people who are worthy of the pride of all mankind are from China. One of them is Li Zhengdao and the other is Yang Zhenning.

Undoubtedly, the major revision of ideas has brought a lot of trouble, especially for the founders of new ideas. Soon Einstein's mind was so full of ether, quantum, time and space that he was often distracted when feeding his baby Hans with a bottle. The logical confusion made Einstein even more at a loss.

He came home from the office tired and dizzy. However, Einstein intuitively concluded that there was a very common experience at work. What is that? The more he thought about it, the more sleepy he became, and his eyes slowly closed. At this moment, his wife mileva shouted in the kitchen, "Albert, it's time for dinner. Why don't you clear the table?"

"Time! ? "Like a meteor passing through his mind, Einstein almost jumped out of his chair. He quickly opened Newton's philosophy of natural science. Newton wrote in a firm tone:

"Absolute space, by its very nature, has nothing to do with anything outside. It is always static and motionless. "

"Absolute and true mathematical time itself passes by evenly according to its nature and has nothing to do with anything outside."

"When the coordinates of a moving system and a stationary system change, obviously, time is constant."

Not like this, definitely not like this. Einstein walked around with his head buried. The time a person sees in a moving car is not necessarily the same as the time a person sees standing still on the ground. Hehe, there is no absolute space and time at all. In this case, our efforts to find the ether and deliberately trying to measure the speed of the earth relative to absolute space are all in vain. Ether is not impossible to find, but it doesn't exist at all! !

Within a month, the little-known Einstein published four papers to the most prestigious magazine "Yearbook of Physics" in Germany. He picked out the lightest article, the content of which was to determine the size of atoms through the diffusion and internal friction of dilute solutions of neutral substances, and sent it to his alma mater, the Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, where he obtained his doctorate effortlessly. The other is about studying Brownian motion of suspended particles, which also opens up a new direction.

The third chapter is the famous photoelectric effect. The theory of light quantum is put forward for the first time in history, which is of great significance in the development of quantum mechanics, and is called the two cornerstones of physics in the twentieth century together with the theory of relativity. A few years later, it won the Nobel Prize in physics only for this, not for the theory of relativity. In fact, as far as Einstein's contribution is concerned, he can get on the Nobel Prize podium five times in his life. Optical quantum theory; Special theory of relativity; General relativity; Bose-Einstein condensation in statistical physics: and the theoretical work of laser that we are familiar with is also attributed to him.

The name of the fourth paper is very simple, called "On Electrodynamics of Moving Objects". However, anyone who knows a little about the history of physics knows that this is a shocking article, which announced the birth of special relativity. In this article, Einstein did not show off his dazzling mathematical skills, but plain and profound is the consistent style of Einstein's papers. Understanding it does not require profound mathematical knowledge, but requires revolutionary ideas and courage to break away from daily experience, especially at that time.

Einstein's hypothesis is simple. First of all, we can't be sure whether a relatively stationary object is stationary or moving at a uniform speed. Because absolutely still space no longer exists, all stillness is relative. Second, the speed of light in a vacuum will never change or be surpassed, which has nothing to do with the speed of the light source. That is to say, for people standing on the ground, the speed of light emitted by cars is the same as that of rockets flying at the speed of light (which is of course impossible).

The first strange conclusion drawn from these two assumptions is that the so-called "simultaneity" is relative! Suppose we stand on the ground and an airplane flies in front of us at a constant speed. In the eyes of people on the ground, the people on our right waved and the people on the left bent down at the same time, but the people on the plane strongly disagreed. They thought that the people on our right waved first and the people on our left bent down later. On the contrary, people on the plane think that the stewardess accidentally broke a plate at the nose, and the passengers at the tail lit a cigarette, while people on the ground said in unison that the plate fell to the ground first and then lit the cigarette.

Is it funny? I advise you not to take a stopwatch on the plane to prove the authenticity, because the time difference between "simultaneous" events in the eyes of another group of people is one thousandth of a second, and you don't have that reaction ability. This is because although the speed of the plane reaches several hundred meters per second, it still lags far behind the speed of light. But it's also good, at least in normal times, when we say "these two things happen at the same time", we don't need to add complicated adverbials like "in the eyes of our relatively static people"

In order to better explain the special theory of relativity, Einstein designed a famous thought experiment. The so-called thought experiment is an imaginary experiment under the condition that the laboratory on earth can't realize it, because since the beginning of the twentieth century, people have almost exhausted the research on materials in the usual state. They often study the low temperature of absolute zero or the high temperature of hundreds of millions of degrees, the movement close to the speed of light or the space of 10 thousand meters. This is familiar to Einstein, the master of thought, and soon became a sharp weapon for his academic attack or defense.

Einstein assumed: "When an observer stands on a railway, there is a point along the direction of the train and a point at the same distance in the opposite direction. At a certain moment and at the same moment, the observer naturally thinks that these two points are flashing at the same time, because the propagation speed of light is constant, and he just stands in the center of the two flashing points. "

"Suppose when lightning strikes, a train moves from one point to another. At the moment of two lightning flashes, the observer in the train happened to be in a position opposite to the ground observer, but he was running towards the flash point and left the flash point. Naturally, he saw the flash of the spot earlier than that of the spot, but he knew he was moving. According to the speed of his own movement, it is easy to conclude that two lights appear at the same time. "

But according to the first two basic assumptions, we can also imagine that the train is stationary and the ground is moving backwards. Therefore, the observer on the train saw one flash after another, so he came to the conclusion that some lights came on earlier than others. He also knows that his position is in the middle of two flashes. Because he thought he was still, he had to conclude that the first flash he saw was earlier than the next one he saw. "

Interestingly, observers on the ground can't help but agree with this conclusion. He did see two flashes happen at the same time. But he should be on the move by now. When he considered the speed of light and the fact that he was moving to the light spot, he also came to the conclusion that the light spot flashed earlier than the light spot.

In short, the question of whether lightning happens at the same time cannot be said yes or no, but should be answered according to the selected reference system. 1038 1 I hope it will help you!