"In light of knowledge attained, the happy achievement seems
almost a matter of course, and any intelligent student can
grasp it without too much trouble. But the years of anxious
searching in the dark, with their intense longing, their alterations
of confidence and exhaustion and the final emergence into
the light -- only those who have experienced it can understand
it."
Einstein's theories sprang from a ground of ideas
prepared by decades of experiments. One of the most striking,
in retrospect, was done in Cleveland, Ohio, by Albert Michelson
and Edward Morley in 1887. Their apparatus,
shown above, was a massive stone block with mirrors and crisscrossing
light beams, giving an accurate measurement of any change in
the velocity of light. Michelson and Morley expected to see
their light beams shifted by the swift motion of the earth in
space. To their surprise, they could not detect any change.
It is debatable whether Einstein paid heed to this particular
experiment, but his work provided an explanation of the unexpected
result through a new analysis of space and time.
As noted on the previous
page, when Einstein used his equations to study the motion
of a body, they pointed him to a startling insight about the
body's mass and energy.
Conversion of energy into
mass.
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The deep connection Einstein discovered between
energy and mass is expressed in the equation E=mc² . Here
E represents energy, m represents mass, and c² is a very
large number, the square of the speed of light. Full confirmation
was slow in coming. In Paris in 1933, Irène and Frédéric
Joliot-Curie took a photograph showing the conversion of energy
into mass. A quantum of light, invisible here, carries energy
up from beneath. In the middle it changes into mass -- two
freshly created particles which curve away from each other.
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Click here for Einstein's voice explaining
the formula
Meanwhile in Cambridge, England,
the reverse process was seen: the conversion of mass into
pure energy. With their apparatus John
Cockcroft and E.T.S. Walton broke apart an atom. The fragments
had slightly less mass in total than the original atom, but
they flew apart with great energy.
(In 2005, the centennial of Einstein’s great year,
a team made the most accurate test yet of his equation. They
measured the tiny change in mass of radioactive atoms before
and after the atoms emitted gamma-rays. And they measured
the energy of the rays. The missing mass times c² equalled
the energy of the rays to within 4 hundred-thousandths of
one percent.) |
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