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Light and Gravity<br />
CHAPTER NINE<br />
GENERAL RELATIVITY<br />
1911–1915<br />
After Einstein formulated his special theory of relativity in 1905, he realized that it was incomplete in at least two ways. First, it held that no<br />
physical interaction can propagate faster than the speed of light; that conflicted with Newton’s theory of gravity, which conceived of gravity as a<br />
force that acted instantly between distant objects. Second, it applied only to constant-velocity motion. So for the next ten years, Einstein engaged in<br />
an interwoven effort to come up with a new field theory of gravity and to generalize his relativity theory so that it applied to accelerated motion. 1<br />
His first major conceptual advance had come at the end of 1907, while he was writing about relativity for a science yearbook. As noted earlier, a<br />
thought experiment about what a free-falling observer would feel led him to embrace the principle that the local effects of being accelerated and of<br />
being in a gravitational field are indistinguishable.* A person in a closed windowless chamber who feels his feet pressed to the floor will not be able<br />
to tell whether it’s because the chamber is in outer space being accelerated upward or because it is at rest in a gravitational field. If he pulls a<br />
penny from his pocket and lets it go, it will fall to the floor at an accelerating speed in either case. Likewise, a person who feels she is floating in the<br />
closed chamber will not know whether it’s because the chamber is in free fall or hovering in a gravity-free region of outer space. 2<br />
This led Einstein to the formulation of an “equivalence principle” that would guide his quest for a theory of gravity and his attempt to generalize<br />
relativity. “I realized that I would be able to extend or generalize the principle of relativity to apply to accelerated systems in addition to those moving<br />
at a uniform velocity,” he later explained. “And in so doing, I expected that I would be able to resolve the problem of gravitation at the same time.”<br />
Just as inertial mass and gravitational mass are equivalent, so too there is an equivalence, he realized, between all inertial effects, such as<br />
resistance to acceleration, and gravitational effects, such as weight. His insight was that they are both manifestations of the same structure, which<br />
we now sometimes call the inertio-gravitational field. 3<br />
One consequence of this equivalence is that gravity, as Einstein had noted, should bend a light beam. That is easy to show using the chamber<br />
thought experiment. Imagine that the chamber is being accelerated upward. A laser beam comes in through a pinhole on one wall. By the time it<br />
reaches the opposite wall, it’s a little closer to the floor, because the chamber has shot upward. And if you could plot its trajectory across the<br />
chamber, it would be curved because of the upward acceleration. The equivalence principle says that this effect should be the same whether the<br />
chamber is accelerating upward or is instead resting still in a gravitational field. Thus, light should appear to bend when going through a<br />
gravitational field.<br />
For almost four years after positing this principle, Einstein did little with it. Instead, he focused on light quanta. But in 1911, he confessed to<br />
Michele Besso that he was weary of worrying about quanta, and he turned his attention back to coming up with a field theory of gravity that would<br />
help him generalize relativity. It was a task that would take him almost four more years, culminating in an eruption of genius in November 1915.<br />
In a paper he sent to the Annalen der Physik in June 1911, “On the Influence of Gravity on the Propagation of Light,” he picked up his insight<br />
from 1907 and gave it rigorous expression. “In a memoir published four years ago I tried to answer the question whether the propagation of light is<br />
influenced by gravitation,” he began. “I now see that one of the most important consequences of my former treatment is capable of being tested<br />
experimentally.” After a series of calculations, Einstein came up with a prediction for light passing through the gravitational field next to the sun: “A<br />
ray of light going past the sun would undergo a deflection of 0.83 second of arc.”*<br />
Once again, he was deducing a theory from grand principles and postulates, then deriving some predictions that experimenters could proceed to<br />
test. As before, he ended his paper by calling for just such a test. “As the stars in the parts of the sky near the sun are visible during total eclipses of<br />
the sun, this consequence of the theory may be observed. It would be a most desirable thing if astronomers would take up the question.” 4<br />
Erwin Finlay Freundlich, a young astronomer at the Berlin University observatory, read the paper and became excited by the prospect of doing<br />
this test. But it could not be performed until an eclipse, when starlight passing near the sun would be visible, and there would be no suitable one for<br />
another three years.<br />
So Freundlich proposed that he try to measure the deflection of starlight caused by the gravitational field of Jupiter. Alas, Jupiter did not prove<br />
big enough for the task. “If only we had a truly larger planet than Jupiter!” Einstein joked to Freundlich at the end of that summer. “But nature did not<br />
deem it her business to make the discovery of her laws easy for us.” 5<br />
The theory that light beams could be bent led to some interesting questions. Everyday experience shows that light travels in straight lines.<br />
Carpenters now use laser levels to mark off straight lines and construct level houses. If a light beam curves as it passes through regions of<br />
changing gravitational fields, how can a straight line be determined?<br />
One solution might be to liken the path of the light beam through a changing gravitational field to that of a line drawn on a sphere or on a surface<br />
that is warped. In such cases, the shortest line between two points is curved, a geodesic like a great arc or a great circle route on our globe.<br />
Perhaps the bending of light meant that the fabric of space, through which the light beam traveled, was curved by gravity. The shortest path through<br />
a region of space that is curved by gravity might seem quite different from the straight lines of Euclidean geometry.<br />
There was another clue that a new form of geometry might be needed. It became apparent to Einstein when he considered the case of a rotating<br />
disk. As a disk whirled around, its circumference would be contracted in the direction of its motion when observed from the reference frame of a<br />
person not rotating with it. The diameter of the circle, however, would not undergo any contraction. Thus, the ratio of the disk’s circumference to its<br />
diameter would no longer be given by pi. Euclidean geometry wouldn’t apply to such cases.<br />
Rotating motion is a form of acceleration, because at every moment a point on the rim is undergoing a change in direction, which means that its<br />
velocity (a combination of speed and direction) is undergoing a change. Because non-Euclidean geometry would be necessary to describe this<br />
type of acceleration, according to the equivalence principle, it would be needed for gravitation as well. 6<br />
Unfortunately, as he had proved at the Zurich Polytechnic, non-Euclidean geometry was not a strong suit for Einstein. Fortunately, he had an old<br />
friend and classmate in Zurich for whom it was.<br />
The Math