A Stubbornly Persistent Illusion Part 1: Intro
The story about the remarkable insight that led to Special Relativity and shattered the conventional idea of time that held sway for nearly three centuries.
This essay in four parts was inspired by a recent photograph of simultaneous lightening bolts posted on social media.
In the year 1955, Albert Einstein wrote the following passage in a letter of condolence to the family of his dear friend Michele Besso who’d just died.
“Now that he [Besso] has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me, that means nothing. People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.”
Besso was not only Einstein’s dearest lifelong friend, but also his colleague at the Swiss Patent Office in Berne with whom Einstein discussed his revolutionary ideas of 1905, the year that has been given the epithet ‘annus mirabilis’ or ‘the miracle year’. Besso had borne witness to that pivotal moment when the bolt of insight had struck his friend unlocking a great cosmic secret, an astonishing secret about the nature of time. Einstein's famous paper on Relativity, after all, contained neither citations nor footnotes, but did end with an acknowledgement of his friend — who had been his most loyal and reliable sounding board — a remarkable anomaly in the history of science. The acknowledgment read:
"In conclusion, let me note that my friend and colleague M. Besso steadfastly stood by me in my work on the problem discussed here, and that I am indebted to him for many valuable suggestions.”
In a span of a few months between March and September of 1905, the twenty-six year old examiner at the Swiss Patent Office in Berne, pondering the mysteries surrounding the nature of light in his spare moments, would publish four groundbreaking papers. Among the ideas proposed in them was a new conception of time, one that would go on to shatter the existing physical theories of the day that physicists had inherited from Isaac Newton over two centuries ago.
Below is a short clip from the National Geography documentary that captures the exact moment when Einstein was truck by the idea of relative time, a faithful rendition of the actual events as was described by Besso many years later.
Einstein’s bold proposition would give us a completely new way of looking at and understanding the universe in its most fundamental aspects: space and time, matter and light, motion and energy. Among the bold new ideas, it was his reimagining of time that would later inspire Einstein’s quote that time was a “stubbornly persistent illusion”.
Why did Einstein think that time was but an illusion, a stubbornly persistent one at that? In this series of essays, I will attempt to tell the story of the ideas regarding the nature of light, space and time, which were so revolutionary, and whose profound implications would transform not just the world of science, but the whole of human culture including arts and culture, with consequences as far reaching as the development of the nuclear bomb, of GPS technology, and wireless communication, ushering in the modern age as we know it.
Coming up…
For nearly two millennia, from fourth century BC to fifteenth century CE, the dominant view of nature and her governing laws were based on Aristotle’s conception of natural philosophy, the precursor to modern science. Aristotle’s theories of motion were endorsed and sanctioned as accepted dogma by the Hole Roman Empire. Though Aristotle is rightly credited for formalizing the philosophical inquiry into the phenomenal world of objects and motion including the idea of natural laws, his ideas of the geocentric universe and the four fundamental constituent elements (earth, fire, air, water) have long been proven obsolete. But there was another error in Aristotle’s theories that proved more stubborn, which stood as an obstacle to any real progress in the science of motion for nearly a thousand years before being challenged by the great Italian scientist Galileo.