About twice a year I wander over to the Gutenberg site and download bunches of books. Some of the things I snatch I have no current interest in, rather I’m trying to determine if I could gain an interest in the subject. Normally my downloads are on philosophy, religion, math, science, gardening or photography. I’ll download 30 or so volumes of which I may eventually read one or two. The others are abandoned after a few pages.
There is one subject that I’ve struggled to understand across the years and even though I’ve downloaded several books related to subject I still cannot wrap my head around Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. A download from my last visit to the Gutenberg site has gone a long way in helping me both understand the Theory and to help me understand why I have such difficulty in understanding the Theory. (Does that make sense?)
Interestingly, even though the volume was written in 1921, the author used a ‘crowd sourcing’ technique to flesh out contributions from roughly 300 different authors. Anyway, here is a brief excerpt that expertly expresses the challenges with understanding the Theory:
The conceptual difficulties of the theory arise principally from attributing to space and time the properties of things. No portion of space can be compared with another, save by convention; it is things which we compare. No interval of time can be compared with another, save by convention. The first has gone when the second becomes “now”. It is events that we compare, through the intervention of things.
Our measurements are never of space or of time, but only of the things and the events that occupy space and time. And since the measurements which we deal with as though they were of space and of time lie at the foundation of all physical science, while at the same time themselves constituting, as we have seen, the only reality of which we are entitled to speak, it is in order to examine with the utmost care the assumptions underlying them. That there are such assumptions is clear—the very possibility of making measurements is itself an assumption, and every technique for carrying them out rests on an assumption.