Hey, Einstein! I understand!

So – for a good deal of my first 64 years I have been trying to understand relativity, special and general. I know it’s not supposed to make intuitive sense, but it should make some sense. And there have been times, when reading certain books, that it has all seemed to come together. Then I put the book down and in 24-hours or so I lose it.

But about 24 hours ago I was meditating and unbidden a wonderful explanation of a significant part of what he has to say came to me and I don’t think I’m going to lose this one. Of course, it may not be right – but it feels good now ;-) It goes like this.

Question: Without wanting – or trying – to think about this, I suddenly found myself asking a simple question: Why does the speed at which I am moving have anything to do with time? That is, why in the world would my movement across a spatial dimension, slow down time?

Answer: A vision of a two-dimensional rectangle –spatial of course, we’re talking width and height – suddenly jumped into my head. But the important fact about this particular rectangle was it’s area was constant. This meant you could stretch out one direction – say width – and the other, would, of course have to change accordingly. So if I made the width real long, the height would have to get shorter to keep the area constant. That made common, intuitive sense.

I moved from that to seeing the two dimensions change in my mind from width and height to space and time, with the constant being the speed of light. So it became clear that if you changed one dimension – space for example – then time would have to change accordingly so that when combined the speed of light remained the same.

From this it seemed logical that if you moved faster, you covered more space – so the space dimension gets larger – result, the time dimension ha to gets smaller, or they won’t continue to add up to the speed of light which remains constant. If the space dimension gets smaller – that is, I slow down, then the time dimension gets larger – that is time, slows down – there’s more of it in a given space.

Then phrases I had frequently read, such as “space/time continuum” sand “you really have to “talk about space-time” as one popped into my head. Aha! Light bulb goes on. The “duh” reaction! Or maybe not? It felt right yesterday – it still feels right today – and it helps me grasp on some deeper level the sort of thing I had only nodded my head at when I heard before, then moved on as if I understood it when I really didn’t. Now at least I think I understand it – until some really bright person who actually does understand it, tells me I’m wrong.

As a side benefit from this reflection, for the first time in my life I don’t have trouble with the whole concept of extra dimensions. Up until now the idea of something like the ten or more dimensions they talk about in String Theory seemed totallu ungraspable to me. I’ve never been able to get past the three spatial dimensions. Even when I used to throw time into this mix, I did so as another spatial di,mension. Well – I’m still visualizing spatial dimensions because they fit my common experience, but I can now apply different labels to them, see them interact with one another, and “know” them as something genuinely different, only represented in a spatial sense, but existing in some other . .. some other, well . . . dimension ;-) Hmmm … so the word dimension simply means something which we can measure and assign a value to?

OK – about now I know you are thinking that either this is all:

1. Absolutely brilliant
2. Absolutely obvious (duh)
3. absolutely wrong.

Feel free to enlighten me.