Einstein’s Relativity Explained

in 4 Simple Steps
The revolutionary physicist used his imagination rather than fancy
math to come up with his most famous and elegant equation.
BYMITCH WALDROP

PUBLISHED MAY 16, 2017

• 9 MIN READ

Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity is famous for predicting

some really weird but true phenomena, like astronauts aging
slower than people on Earth and solid objects changing their
shapes at high speeds.
But the thing is, if you pick up a copy of Einstein’s original
paper on relativity from 1905, it’s a straightforward read. His
text is plain and clear, and his equations are mostly just
algebra—nothing that would bother a typical high-schooler.
That’s because fancy math was never the point for Einstein.
He liked to think visually, coming up with experiments in his
mind’s eye and working them around in his head until he
could see the ideas and physical principles with crystalline
clarity. (Read “10 Things You (Probably) Didn’t Know About
Einstein.”)
To bring his process to life, National Geographic created an
interactive version of one of Einstein’s most famous thought
experiments: a parable about lightning strikes as seen from a
moving train that shows how two observers can understand
space and time in very different ways.
Here’s how Einstein got started on his thought experiments
when he was just 16, and how it eventually led him to the
most revolutionary equation in modern physics.
1895: Running Beside a Light Beam
By this point, Einstein’s ill-disguised contempt for his native
Germany’s rigid, authoritarian educational methods had
already gotten him kicked out of the equivalent of high
school, so he moved to Zurich in hopes of attending the
Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH). (Also see “Why
the FBI Kept a 1,400-Page File on Einstein.”)
First, though, Einstein decided to put in a year of
preparation at a school in the nearby town of Aarau—a place
that stressed avant garde methods like independent thought
and visualization of concepts. In that happy environment, he
soon he found himself wondering what it would be like to
run alongside a light beam.
Einstein had already learned in physics class what a light
beam was: a set of oscillating electric and magnetic fields
rippling along at 186,000 miles a second, the measured
speed of light. If he were to run alongside it at just that
speed, Einstein reasoned, he ought to be able to look over
and see a set of oscillating electric and magnetic fields
hanging right next to him, seemingly stationary in space.
Yet that was impossible. For starters, such stationary fields
would violate Maxwell’s equations, the mathematical laws
that codified everything physicists at the time knew about
electricity, magnetism, and light. The laws were (and are)
quite strict: Any ripples in the fields have to move at the
speed of light and cannot stand still—no exceptions.
Worse, stationary fields wouldn’t jibe with the principle of
relativity, a notion that physicists had embraced since the
time of Galileo and Newton in the 17th century. Basically,
relativity said that the laws of physics couldn’t depend on
how fast you were moving; all you could measure was the
velocity of one object relative to another.
But when Einstein applied this principle to his thought
experiment, it produced a contradiction: Relativity dictated
that anything he could see while running beside a light beam,
including the stationary fields, should also be something
Earthbound physicists could create in the lab. But nothing
like that had ever been observed.
This problem would bug Einstein for another 10 years, all the
way through his university work at ETH and his move to the
Swiss capital city of Bern, where he became an examiner in
the Swiss patent office. That’s where he resolved to crack the
paradox once and for all.

1904: Measuring Light From a Moving Train

It wasn’t easy. Einstein tried every solution he could think of,
and nothing worked. Almost out of desperation, he began to
consider a notion that was simple but radical. Maybe
Maxwell’s equations worked for everybody, he thought, but
the speed of light was always constant.
When you saw a light beam zip past, in other words, it
wouldn’t matter whether its source was moving toward you,
away from you, or off to the side, nor would it matter how
fast the source was going. You would always measure that
beam’s velocity to be 186,000 miles a second. Among other
things, that meant Einstein would never see the stationary,
oscillating fields, because he could never catch the light
beam.
This was the only way Einstein could see to reconcile
Maxwell’s equations with the principle of relativity. At first,
though, this solution seemed to have its own fatal flaw.
Einstein later explained the problem with another thought
experiment: Imagine firing a light beam along a railroad
embankment just as a train roars by in the same direction at,
say, 2,000 miles a second.
Someone standing on the embankment would measure the
light beam’s speed to be the standard number, 186,000 miles
a second. But someone on the train would see it moving past
at only 184,000 miles a second. If the speed of light was not
constant, Maxwell’s equations would somehow have to look
different inside the railway carriage, Einstein concluded, and
the principle of relativity would be violated.
This apparent contradiction left Einstein spinning his wheels
for almost a year. But then, on a beautiful morning in May
1905, he was walking to work with his best friend Michele
Besso, an engineer he had known since their student days in
Zurich. The two men were talking with about Einstein’s
dilemma, as they often did. And suddenly, Einstein saw the
solution. He worked on it overnight, and when they met the
next morning, Einstein told Besso, “Thank you. I’ve
completely solved the problem.”

May 1905: Lightning Strikes a Moving Train

Einstein’s revelation was that observers in relative motion
experience time differently: it’s perfectly possible for two
events to happen simultaneously from the perspective of one
observer, yet happen at different times from the perspective
of the other. And both observers would be right.
Einstein later illustrated this point with another thought
experiment. Imagine that you once again have an observer
standing on a railway embankment as a train goes roaring
by. But this time, each end of the train is struck by a bolt of
lightning just as the train’s midpoint is passing. Because the
lightning strikes are the same distance from the observer,
their light reaches his eye at the same instant. So he correctly
says that they happened simultaneously.
Meanwhile, another observer on the train is sitting at its
exact midpoint. From her perspective, the light from the two
strikes also has to travel equal distances, and she will
likewise measure the speed of light to be the same in either
direction. But because the train is moving, the light coming
from the lightning in the rear has to travel farther to catch
up, so it reaches her a few instants later than the light
coming from the front. Since the light pulses arrived at
different times, she can only conclude the strikes were not
simultaneous—that the one in front actually happened first.
In short, Einstein realized, simultaneity is what’s relative.
Once you accept that, all the strange effects we now associate
with relativity are a matter of simple algebra.
Einstein dashed off his ideas in a fever pitch and sent his
paper in for publication just a few weeks later. He gave it a
title—“On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies”—that
spoke to his struggle to reconcile Maxwell’s equations with
the principle of relativity. And he concluded it with a thank
you to Besso (“I am indebted to him for several valuable
suggestions”) that guaranteed his friend a touch of
immortality.

September 1905: Mass and Energy

That first paper wasn’t the end of it, though. Einstein kept
obsessing on relativity all through the summer of 1905, and
in September he sent in a second paper as a kind of
afterthought.
It was based on yet another thought experiment. Imagine an
object that’s sitting at rest, he said. And now imagine that it
spontaneously emits two identical pulses of light in opposite
directions. The object will stay put, but because each pulse
carries off a certain amount of energy, the object’s energy
content will decrease.
Now, said Einstein, what would this process look like to a
moving observer? From her perspective, the object would
just keep moving in a straight line while the two pulses flew
off. But even though the two pulses’ speed would still be the
same—the speed of light—their energies would be different:
The pulse moving forward along the direction of motion
would now have a higher energy than the one moving
backward.
With a little more algebra, Einstein showed that for all this to
be consistent, the object not only had to lose energy when
the light pulses departed, it had to lose a bit of mass, as well.
Or, to put it another way, mass and energy are
interchangeable.
Einstein wrote down an equation that relates the two. Using
today’s notation, which abbreviates the speed of light using
the letter c, he produced easily the most famous equation
ever written: E = mc2.