Word: throughs
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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The Irish physicist George FitzGerald and the Dutch physicist Hendrik Lorentz were the first to suggest that bodies moving through the ether would contract and that clocks would slow. This shrinking and slowing would be such that everyone would measure the same speed for light no matter how they were...
But it was a young clerk named Albert Einstein, working in the Swiss Patent Office in Bern, who cut through the ether and solved the speed-of-light problem once and for all. In June 1905 he wrote one of three papers that would establish him as one of the...
In that 1905 paper, Einstein pointed out that because you could not detect whether or not you were moving through the ether, the whole notion of an ether was redundant. Instead, Einstein started from the postulate that the laws of science should appear the same to all freely moving observers...
This unease continued through the 1920s and '30s. When Einstein was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1921, the citation was for important--but by Einstein's standards comparatively minor--work also carried out in 1905. There was no mention of relativity, which was considered too controversial. I still get two...
On his return to Zurich in 1912 Einstein had a brainstorm. He realized that the equivalence of gravity and acceleration could work if there was some give-and-take in the geometry of reality. What if space-time--an entity Einstein invented to incorporate the three familiar dimensions of space...