Einstein for Everyone

A mini-course offered through the Cornell University Public Service Center Graduate Student School Outreach Program (GSSOP)

Spring 2004

David Rothstein
Cornell University Department of Astronomy

TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract Course Description Introduction Course Goals General Suggestions Graduate Student Biography Individual Session Descriptions Session 1: Relativity and the Curved Earth Session 2: Straight Lines and Maps Session 3: Optical Illusions and Relative Motion Session 4: Gravity and Falling Light Session 5: Black Holes Session 6: Einstein's Dreams Session 7: Relativity without Gravity Session 8: The Mathematics and Applications of Relativity Resource Material Appendix 3 3 3 4 6 7 12 22 30 43 64 66 73 80 83

Abstract Black holes, time travel, and a universe which expands faster than the speed of light... it seems like science fiction, but astronomers study these things on a daily basis! In this course, well learn about Einsteins theory of relativity and discuss what it has to say about the most mind-boggling topics in the universe. What would it be like to fall into a black hole? How can you travel into the future, using nothing more than your feet? Well also take a look at the evidence astronomers have been building up the past few years which seems to confirm some of Einsteins most outlandish ideas. Since we cant do too many hands-on experiments related to relativity, well structure the course around "thought-experiments" a technique pioneered by Einstein in which a little logic can go a long way toward understanding how the universe works. This course can be taken by anyone at the high school level, but it would be ideal for students who have a little bit of physics background, since it will reinforce what they have already learned.

Course Description Introduction The theory of relativity is one of the most important developments in the history of science, and also one of the most interesting. Who isnt curious about Einstein, black holes, and time travel? Nonetheless, these subjects are rarely covered in any detail in the high school curriculum. Most people grow up feeling that the theory of relativity, and astrophysics in general, is too hard for them to understand. Mini-Course Goals The main point of this course is to get students to realize that it is possible for them to understand some of the details and applications of the theory of relativity. In particular: They will learn that although there is a lot of complicated mathematics associated with relativity, there is also a lot that can be understood on an intuitive physical level, by doing experiments (with your brain or with your hands) and even by observing popular culture and movies. They will learn that Einstein himself wasnt particularly skilled at mathematics; he came up with the theory of relativity not because of his mathematical ability, but rather because he was persistent in thinking about questions that other scientists either ridiculed or did not think were worth spending time on.

They will learn that the theory of relativity has an incredibly strong experimental basis; as bizarre as it is, it is an extremely accurate description of the way our universe works. They will learn about some of the applications that scientists and engineers have found for the theory of relativity. Many of these applications involve trying to understand the most exotic processes in the universe, such as black holes and objects moving near the speed of light, but they will also learn that relativity has many important practical uses that its creators never would have imagined. For example, the Global Positioning System (GPS), which these days is used by almost anyone who wants to navigate on the Earth, would not work correctly if scientists didnt understand the theory of relativity.

General Suggestions I taught a mini-course similar to the one presented here in Richard Armstrongs 11th grade English class at Ithaca High School in Ithaca, New York during March-May 2004. The class was taught over 10 sessions, each slightly longer than one hour. Most of the students in this class had no prior physics background and very little mathematics background, but by the end, most of them considered the course to be a success and came away from it with a basic understanding and appreciation of the theory of relativity. Note that the material presented here is in a slightly different order and has slightly different content from the material I actually taught; these changes are based on the experience I gained while teaching and listening to the students comments. The general philosophy which I began with (and have preserved in the version presented here) is that it is possible to teach relativity with a minimum of mathematics, and that doing so frees the teacher to discuss the most interesting, intuitive parts of the theory first. Traditionally, classes on the theory of relativity begin with special relativity, which applies to objects moving near the speed of light but where the effect of gravity is ignored. Special relativity has the advantage that it can be understood using high school mathematics, but the disadvantage that it is conceptually confusing and difficult to motivate. The full theory of general relativity, which includes the effect of gravity and therefore encompasses some of the more interesting applications that students want to hear about (such as black holes), is usually not taught at an introductory level because the mathematics is too complex. However, on a conceptual level it is probably easier to understand. Teaching relativity without emphasizing the mathematics therefore frees the teacher to focus on the most interesting parts of the theory first, and only later (at the end of the course) give students a flavor of the mathematics involved in a particular, small subset of it. One suggestion I have for this course involves the use of multiple-choice questions, which I have sprinkled throughout the individual session descriptions below. During
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parts of the course that seemed in danger of getting too technical, I found it useful to give the students a simple, interactive way to participate print out large sheets of paper with A, B, and C written on them, distribute them to the students, and have them hold up their answers to each multiple choice question. The teacher can quickly scan the room and determine the level of students understanding, then have them explain the reasoning behind their answers (either to the whole class or to their neighbors) as appropriate.1

Thanks to Britt Scharringhausen for introducing this teaching technique to me.

Graduate Student Biography I grew up in the Trenton, NJ area and graduated from Princeton Day School in 1996. I attended Haverford College, where I majored in physics and astronomy and graduated in 2000. After that, I came to graduate school in the astronomy department at Cornell University, where I have been ever since. My research focuses on accretion disks and jets around black holes. I observe these objects with infrared and X-ray telescopes and also try to model their behavior on a computer. Specifically, I am trying to understand the complex changes in brightness that material undergoes as it spirals through the accretion disk into the black hole, and also the jets of material that get flung away from the accretion disk at nearly the speed of light. I anticipate graduating around August 2005, after which I am interested in a career that combines some aspects of science research, teaching, and public outreach.

Session 1: Relativity and the Curved Earth Learning Outcomes Upon completion of this session, students will: Know some basic concepts contained within the theory of relativity Understand that geometry works differently on the surface of the Earth than it does on a flat surface Duration Approximately 1 hour Activities This session contains the following activities: An introduction to the theory of relativity and some of the main highlights of the course A discussion of the concepts of space and time; students will try to define these words themselves and discuss why they are so hard to explain An overview of the myths of the theory of relativity; students will learn some of the basic concepts that relativity introduces to our understanding of the universe A game in which students close their eyes and pretend to walk around an imaginary world; they will learn that if the world is curved (like the surface of the Earth), the paths they take will be different from what they initially expect Materials This session uses the following materials: A globe String Tape Scissors Small round stickers Background, Procedures, and Suggestions Introduction Begin the class by asking students what they have heard about Einstein and the theory of relativity. Relativity is one of the most famous theories in all of science, and students may have heard many strange things about it, some of which arent true. However, the

parts of relativity that are true are strange enough! Relativity tells us about black holes, time travel, the expansion of the universe, and the bizarre things that happen when you try to make something go at the speed of light. The theory of relativity is also one of the most successful theories in the history of science, at least in the regimes where it has been tested by experiment. Finally, it is one of the most useful theories, although in ways that Einstein might never have dreamed of. For example, the Global Positioning System (GPS), which well talk about later, would not work correctly if it had been designed without taking the theory of relativity into account. Explain that in order to understand the theory of relativity, you need to be willing to stretch your mind and ignore much of what common sense tells you. If relativity teaches us nothing else, it teaches us that our senses can deceive us. The behavior of the universe is much more complex and rich than the tiny sliver which we, stuck here on planet Earth, are able to directly perceive. The theory of relativity involves a lot of complicated mathematics, but Einsteins skills did not lie in that area. Most of the mathematics that is used in the theory of relativity was developed decades before anyone had heard of Einstein, and it took Einstein himself many years of study (and tutoring from his mathematically-inclined friends) to understand it. Rather, Einsteins great contribution to science was that he was willing to challenge basic assumptions, to ask questions that everyone else thought were stupid. Explain that in taking this course, it is much more important to ask questions (even if they seem obvious or stupid) than to be able to come up with the mathematical equations that provide the exact answers to those questions. Space and Time Space and time are two of the things that Einstein thought about differently from what common sense tells us. Ask the students to write down definitions of these words. (By space we mean all the space that we live in, including the Earth; in other words, dont write down a definition of outer space.) Ask the students to break up into pairs and do role-playing; one person has to describe space to someone who doesnt have the sense of sight or touch, and the other has to describe time to someone whos never seen or heard of a clock. Ask the students why they think it is so hard to come up with definitions for these simple words. For reference, the dictionary.com definitions are: Space: A set of elements or points satisfying specified geometric postulates or The infinite extension of the three-dimensional region in which all matter exists Time: A nonspatial continuum in which events occur in apparently irreversible succession from the past through the present to the future
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Explain that one of the things that the theory of relativity tells us is that space and time are not as different as they first seem. In fact, they are really two sides of the same coin. The Myth of Relativity Lewis Carroll Epstein, author of Relativity Visualized, points out that when people learn a new scientific idea, they also want to learn a myth to help them out a universal dogma that they can believe in that gives them some logical way to look at the new situation they are encountering. Explain that before we start learning about relativity, were first going to talk about a myth (which Epstein talks about in his book) that encompasses much of what relativity tells us. Explain that although students might not understand every detail of the myth right now, its worth writing down and talking about so that they will have something to keep in their minds as we go through the course. The main part of the myth is that everything in the universe is always traveling at the speed of light no more, no less. We arent traveling at the speed of light through space, however; rather, were traveling through something called spacetime. Ask the students if they can guess how they could be moving at the speed of light right now, when they are obviously sitting still. Some might suggest that the Earth is rotating, or orbiting around the Sun, so in fact they are really moving. From the point of view of someone watching us from outer space, that is true; it is an example of motion through space, although not at the speed of light. However, motion through spacetime means that we can also be moving through time, not just space. As we sit here in the classroom, our bodies are aging, and in that sense we are moving through time. What the myth of relativity tells us is that right now, we are actually moving through time at the speed of light. Every little thing in the universe, every atom in your body, is trying to move through spacetime in a straight line. It will succeed in following a straight line provided that nothing resists it. Ask the students if they can think of examples where objects move in straight lines until something resists them. Finally, spacetime can sometimes be curved by the presence of gravity. No one really knows how to visualize what this means, but we do know lots of curved things in everyday life which can help us understand. When objects move through a curved spacetime, the straight lines they travel in will appear to do funny things.

Explain that for the rest of todays class, were not even going to talk about the theory of relativity, but rather about examples of space in only 2 dimensions, which students are already familiar with. The Imagination Game Have everyone in the class close their eyes. Tell them to imagine a world either the Earth, another planet, a fictional world like Middle Earth (for Lord of the Rings fans), or another place of their choosing. Make sure it is a really big world, though, many miles or even hundreds or thousands of miles in size. Tell them to fly over the whole world in an airplane and remember what landmarks are where (for example, forests, deserts, oceans, lakes, cities). Now tell them to zoom in on one point and land their plane there. Get out and plant a red flag in the ground. Stand next to the red flag and dont move. At this point its a good idea to go around and tap students on the shoulder and ask them to describe where they are. Tell the students to look around their imaginary location and pick one direction. Face that direction, and pick a particular distance in their mind. The distance should be big (miles, at least). Have them walk in that direction whatever distance they picked, and tell them to make sure that they walk in a straight line, regardless of what obstacles come in their way. Again, tap students on the shoulder and ask them to describe where they are now, and also where their flag was. Now tell the students to make a 90 degree right turn and walk the same distance they did before. Repeat this one more time, so that they will have walked a total of three legs, with 90 degree turns in between. Ask the students if any of them are standing next to a red flag. They will all probably say no. Now ask the students how they would get back to their flag from where they are now. All of them will probably say that they would need to make another right turn and walk their distance one more time. Explain to the students that in the world youve been imagining, you dont need to take any more steps to get to the red flag; youve already come back to it! Ask if they can guess what world you were on. Explain to the students that you were actually on the Earth! Take a globe (using string, tape and stickers might help here), and show that if you start off in a jungle (specifically the Amazon in Brazil), face north, walk of the Earths diameter to the North Pole, turn right, walk of the Earths diameter
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again to a desert in eastern Africa, then turn right and walk of the Earths diameter again, you will actually be right back in Brazil where you started! Show by drawing a square on the board that in the world all of the students imagined, you need to travel 4 legs (with right turns in between) in order to get back to your starting point. On the surface of the Earth, its possible to do it in 3, as we just showed. Try to draw this on the board (i.e., a triangle with three 90 degree angles), and show that its impossible to draw correctly. Geometry on a sphere is much different than geometry on a flat plane; for example, all the students are likely to have learned that the sum of angles in a triangle is 180 degrees, but here we have a triangle with angles that sum to 270 degrees! Mention to the students that well come back to this idea later. Ask the students if they can find a way to get back to their starting point on the Earth in less than 3 legs. They might come up with the idea that you can do it in 2 legs by walking of the Earths diameter and then making a right turn, and they will almost certainly come up with the idea that you can do it in 1 leg simply by walking in a straight line until you go all the way around the Earth and come back to where you started.

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Session 2: Straight Lines and Maps Learning Outcomes Upon completion of this session, students will: Understand that when we make a flat map of a curved surface, the surface gets distorted Understand how to draw a straight line (geodesic) on any curved surface Learn some specific differences between geometry on a sphere and geometry on a flat plane Duration Approximately 1 to 1 hours Activities This session contains the following activities: A discussion of several paths between Ithaca, New York and Rome, Italy and what these paths look like on a map An activity in which students find straight lines between two points on a tennis ball An activity in which students trace out a map of a tennis ball and see how these maps look different when transferred to a flat surface A discussion of some of the specific differences between geometry on a flat plane and on a sphere Materials This session uses the following materials: A transparency projector and transparencies of the figures at the end of this section Tennis balls, each with two dots marked on it at somewhat-separated locations String (cut up into pieces large enough to wrap around a tennis ball) Tape Scissors A globe Saran wrap Blank transparency sheets Transparency markers (a different color for each student or group of students)

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Background, Procedures, and Suggestions Going from Ithaca to Rome Tell the students that last time we imagined walking around the Earth; this time, were going to do something more practical. Show the students the map of the world (included at the end of this session description) with Ithaca, New York and Rome, Italy marked on it. Rome is about of the way around the Earths surface and approximately due east of Ithaca. Tell the students that we want to figure out a path to travel between these two cities (although New York City to Rome might be a little more realistic for a plane trip!). Get some input from the students on this question. What path would you take between the two cities, and what method would you use to follow that path? Some students might say that the best way is to go due east, either by using a compass or by some other method to make sure that you are going straight. Show the students the map with arrows drawn on it. Ask them which path they think is shorter on the globe: (A) red or (B) green. Ask them which path they would follow if they started off heading east and continued to move in a perfectly straight line, putting one foot in front of the other: (A) red, (B) green, or (C) blue. The correct answers are (B) for the first question and (C) for the third! Students may not believe this at first, so remind them that last time, when we took straight lines on the curved Earth (such as the three sides of a triangle) and tried to draw them on the flat blackboard, things got screwed up and it was impossible to draw correctly. Here, we have been fooling the students a little bit by showing them a flat map of the Earth from the beginning. Tell them that if we consider the actual curved surface of the Earth, we will find that the blue path really is a straight line heading east, and the green path really is a straight line between Ithaca and Rome. Tell the students to forget about the map for a minute. If you want to find the best path between two points on the Earth, what is the general procedure you follow? For example, ask them how they would get from their seats to the door if they were so sick of class that they had to get out as quickly as possible. Ask them how they would get from here to a tree on the horizon. In both cases, the answer is simply that you find the direction to the object you want to walk towards, face that direction, and then walk in a straight line. For something over the edge of the horizon (for example, Rome), the procedure isnt going to be any different you still want to find the correct direction and walk in a

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straight line towards it. The only difference is that you cant see the correct direction any more. Ask the students how they might find the correct direction if they were equipped with a gigantically long string. (The answer is to have their friend hold on to the other end of the string, go to Rome by any means possible, and then pull the string tight. The string will then mark out the straight line from here to Rome.) Great Circles on a Tennis Ball Give the students tennis balls, string, and tape. Each tennis ball should have two dots pre-marked on it, at somewhat-separated locations. Ask the students to use the string to mark the best path between the two dots, then extend the rest of the length of the string past the second dot in whatever direction it goes. All the students should find that their string makes a loop around the tennis ball which appears to split the tennis ball in half. This is called a great circle, which is really just a fancy name for a straight line on a spherical surface. Its called a great circle because its the largest possible circle you can make on the sphere. Tell the students that there is even a fancier name for straight lines: geodesics. On a sphere, a straight line is called a great circle, and on any arbitrary surface, it is called a geodesic, although its probably better to just call them straight lines, since thats what they really are: the path you would follow if you stood on the surface and walked by carefully putting one foot exactly in front of the other. Ask the students if they can describe what geodesics would be like on other objects. For example, on a donut, students should realize that the size of a geodesic depends on what direction you start off in. You can get a short geodesic by walking the short way around the donut (through the donut hole) and coming back to where you started, or a much longer one by going off in some arbitrary direction. Show the students a globe and ask them to indicate some straight lines, or great circles, on it. All the north-south lines (longitude) are great circles, but the only east-west (latitude) path which is a great circle is the equator the others are too small. It should now be easy to show students (with the globe and a piece of string) that the straight line path between Ithaca and Rome does not go due east, but rather a bit north of that (the green path on the map), and that the straight line which does start off going east will actually cross the equator somewhere in Africa, like the blue path on the map. Mapmaking Clearly, there is a problem with the map that we have been using. It takes some lines which are actually straight (blue and green lines) and makes them look curved, and other lines which are actually curved (red line) and makes them look straight. Yet students are
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probably used to seeing this particular map all the time and may even have one in their classroom! Ask the students why people continue to use this map if it is so wrong. The answer is that there is NO WAY to take a curved surface like the Earth and represent it accurately on a two-dimensional map. Give the students tennis balls, saran wrap, tape, a transparency sheet and a transparency marker (each student should get a different color). Tell them to make a map of the tennis ball by wrapping the saran wrap around it (as smoothly as possible, although they wont be able to get rid of all the wrinkles), tracing out the patterns on the ball, then laying the saran wrap out flat and tracing the patterns on it onto a sheet of transparency paper. The transparencies can then be displayed individually and overlaid one on top of the other, to show that some lines on the tennis ball get stretched during the mapmaking process, and that different lines will be stretched in different ways on different peoples maps. This is related to the fact that the wrinkles in each persons piece of saran wrap came out differently. Notice that the wrinkles are inevitable no matter how careful you are; there is no way to stretch the saran wrap around the tennis ball without producing them. Explain that just like with the tennis balls, there are many different ways to make maps of the Earths surface. This can be done mathematically so that there are no wrinkles (i.e. sharp discontinuities) but the mapmaker will still be forced to stretch parts of the map in different ways in order to make it flat. This would be like if students had used latex rubber to trace out the tennis ball instead of saran wrap. The map we have been looking at so far is a particular type of map called a Mercator projection. It was invented in 1568 by Gerhardus Mercator, a Flemish mapmaker. A Mercator projection is designed to accurately represent local directions (north-south and east-west are always perpendicular to each other on a Mercator map, just like they are in real life). Ask the students if they can guess why this map would have been popular when it was invented in Europe in the 1500s. The answer is that the map is useful for sailors. If the map accurately represents local directions, it must also accurately represent shapes, such as coastlines. Furthermore, paths that are easy for sailors to follow using a compass, east-west and north-south, are represented as straight lines on the map. Ask the students what the map does that is wrong. The answer is that it distorts sizes, especially near the North and South Pole. For example, Greenland and India are similar sizes on the globe, but Greenland looks many times bigger than India in the map. In fact, some people object to the use of the Mercator projection because they feel it marginalizes countries near the equator. Many of these countries were colonized by European navigators, and it has been argued that although the original purpose of the Mercator

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projection was to help sailors, it also came to serve a political purpose. People who are used to seeing the Mercator projection may unconsciously believe that countries in Europe and other northern locations are more important than those near the equator are. Mention to the students that there are many other types of maps that can be constructed. For example, an Aitoff projection renders the Earth as an ellipse; this map compromises by getting both shapes and sizes incorrect, but neither too badly. A gnomonic projection preserves straight lines; all the great circles on the Earth actually look straight on this map. However, it distorts other things by a huge amount, especially near the edges of the map, and its impossible to show the whole surface of the Earth at once in this way. Copies of both of these maps are included at the end of the session description. Geometry on a Curved Surface As weve already seen with our example of triangles on the Earth, geometry works differently on a curved surface than it does on a flat one. The angles of a triangle have to add up to 180 degrees on a flat surface, but not on a curved one; in our example, they added up to 270 degrees. The geometry students are used to, the kind they have learned about in math class, is called Euclidean geometry, and it only applies to a flat surface. Almost all the rules they learned in geometry class dont apply to a curved surface! There, we need to use nonEuclidean geometry. Mention that there is a branch of mathematics called differential geometry which deals with how to describe arbitrarily curved surfaces. It was developed in the 1800s (well before Einstein), but Einstein was the one who came along later and discovered its most interesting application: the theory of relativity. Differential geometry is very complicated, and Einstein had to spend a long time learning it from his mathematicallyinclined friends during the years he was developing the theory of relativity. Ask the students to list some laws they learned in geometry class and think about how they would be different on the surface of the Earth. Some examples are: Parallel lines never cross: Notice that any two north-south lines on the Earth start off parallel but DO cross at the North and South Pole. The Pythagorean theorem: As we showed during the first session when we imagined walking around the Earth, its possible to draw a triangle with three equal sides and three 90 degree angles. This is a right triangle, but its easy to see that the Pythagorean theorem doesnt work on it because x2 + x2 does NOT equal x2, where x is the length of each side of the triangle. If the students dont come up with it on their own, ask how they think circles work on the surface of the Earth. Would the circumference of a circle on the Earth be (A) 2 times the radius, (B) less than 2 times the radius, or (C) greater than 2 times the radius?
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The answer is B. If you stand on the surface of the Earth and draw a circle whose center is at the North Pole and radius is of the distance around the Earth, you get the Earths equator. The equator has circumference equal to the distance around the Earth, so the circumference is 4 times the radius, which is less than 2. Conclude by making sure that students remember two things from our discussion of curved surfaces: Geometry works differently on a curved surface. If you take a curved surface and pretend its flat, things get screwed up. Notice that the two points are related. When we take a curved surface and stretch or wrinkle it to force it to be flat, that stretching changes the way the geometry works.

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Session 3: Optical Illusions and Relative Motion Learning Outcomes Upon completion of this session, students will: Understand the basic idea which led Einstein to propose the theory of relativity: that all motion is relative, and there is no experiment which can be done to prove that a particular object is either moving or sitting still Duration Approximately 1 hour Activities This session contains the following activities: A discussion of some popular optical illusions that serve as a good analogy for the ideas behind Einsteins theory of relativity Reading of the introductory chapter of Martin Gardners Relativity for the Million and discussion of what it means for motion to be relative A viewing of the first scene of The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, which illustrates Einsteins theory of relativity Materials This session uses the following materials: A transparency projector and transparencies of the figures at the end of this section; I obtained these figures from the indicated website, but I do not know the original source of all of them or whether or not they are copyrighted Photocopies of the introductory chapter of Relativity for the Million (entitled Absolute or Relative?), by Martin Gardner; a newer version of this book is entitled Relativity Simply Explained Video or DVD of The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers Background, Procedures, and Suggestions Optical Illusions Explain to the students that we are now going to move on to actually start talking about the theory of relativity; the material we covered in the first two sessions was just background information, although we will see later how it relates to Einsteins ideas.

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This time, were going to talk about motion. Whereas before, we needed to use a lot of ideas from mathematics (specifically geometry), here we just need to be able to use our imaginations in order to understand the ideas that Einstein had. Show the students the first optical illusion (included at the end of this session description). Leave it displayed for a very short amount of time, then take it away. Ask the students to write a one-sentence description of what they just saw. Then go around the room and ask students to read their descriptions. Hopefully, some students will say that the picture is a view of an old woman, while others will say it is a picture of a young lady looking away from the viewer. In fact, the picture can be interpreted either way! If youre having trouble seeing it, the old womans nose is the young ladys jaw, and the young ladys ear is the old womans left eye. If you can only see one of the two, try covering the eye of the young lady or the left eye of the old woman; it might help you focus on the other. Show the students the other two optical illusions included at the end of this session description. The first picture is either a grinning skull or a woman looking into a bathroom mirror; the skulls two eyes are the face of the woman and its reflection, and the items on the bathroom counter are the skulls teeth. The second picture is either a saxophone player in black or a womans face in white with black shadows. Go back to the first optical illusion and ask the students which one it is really a picture of, an old woman or a young lady. Hopefully, students will understand that it is really a picture of BOTH; thats the whole point of the illusion. There is no right way or wrong way to describe the picture; depending on how you look at it and what you focus on, it might be a picture of an old woman or it might be a picture of a young lady. Explain that the above pictures are a good analogy for what we will be discussing today. Tell them to keep this in mind and always ask themselves whether one description we give of a particular physical situation is the right one, or whether we can find two equally valid ways to look at the same situation. Absolute or Relative Have the students read the first chapter of Relativity for the Million, entitled Absolute or Relative? Ask the students if they understand the basic ideas contained in the reading and if they have any questions. The basic idea is that many words and concepts (such as big, small, fast, slow, up, down, etc.) have no meaning except when used to compare two different things. For example, when we say something is big, we mean that it is big compared to something else; we would describe a person as big if we compare him to an ant, but small if we compare him to the Earth. A potentially confusing part of the reading, worth going over, is the discussion of what would happen if all the processes in a persons body were to speed up. The person
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would not notice anything different about herself, but she would notice everything in the world around her moving slower. That is because for every time her heart beats, or for every time it takes a single thought to pass through her brain, a lot less would be happening in the outside world than she was used to seeing before, so it would look to her like the outside world was evolving slower. Ask the students a question that was not in the reading, to make sure they understand the basic concept: What would happen if the entire universe and everything in it suddenly moved two feet to the left? (A) we would see ourselves two feet to the left from where we had been before; (B) we would see ourselves two feet to the right from where we had been before; or (C) its a meaningless statement. The correct answer is (C). If by the universe we mean everything that exists, then there is no scientific experiment that we or anyone else could do to say that our location had changed. To define a location, we need to define it with respect to a particular point (for example, I am standing three feet away from the wall), so if our location with respect to every possible point in the universe is the same now as it was before, then there is no basis for saying that anything moved, two feet to the left or otherwise. Ask the students for their input on the question at the end of the reading: Is motion absolute or relative? To push the discussion along, you can ask the students if they are moving right now. The answer depends on what your reference point is. For example, they certainly dont feel like theyre moving, and relative to the surface of the Earth they are not. However, the Earth is rotating, so from that point of view they are moving around the Earths center. From another point of view, the Earth itself is moving through space at very fast speeds, about 30 kilometers per second around the Sun. Meanwhile, the Sun, Earth and entire solar system are moving about 200 kilometers per second around the center of the Milky Way galaxy. Another example that many students may have experienced is sitting on a subway train stopped at a platform while another train passes on the other side. If you look at the other train out the window, you might feel like your train has started to move. It is only when you look back at the platform that you say you are standing still. This example shows that there is no way to feel your own motion; it is only external clues which give you that feeling. Another good example is sitting on an airplane that is flying smoothly. If you dont look out the window, how do you know youre moving? In fact, you dont; you can throw a ball up in the air and catch it, pour drinks, and walk around easily just like you do on the Earth. There is no experiment you can do on the plane that will tell you that you are moving. In fact, scientists now think that motion is relative, just like size, direction and the other ideas discussed in the reading. People suspected this well before Einstein came

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along, but it was Einstein who took the idea as the fundamental axiom of how the universe functions. He believed that the universe is set up in such a way that ALL motion is relative, and that there is absolutely NO experiment you can do to prove that a particular object is moving. This idea is sometimes referred to as the principle of relativity. Einstein developed the rest of the theory of relativity by following the consequences of this idea; as we will see later, it leads to some very bizarre predictions for the results of particular experiments. However, all the experiments that have been performed so far have been in accordance with Einsteins predictions; it seems like the universe actually does work the way Einstein thought it would! Explain to the students that Einsteins idea is simple and beautiful; regardless of what physical situation you find yourself in (sitting on the Earth, flying on a plane, even falling into a black hole), you can always consider the situation from your own point of view, where it looks like you are sitting still and everything else is moving around you. The results of that calculation will work just as well as if you had looked at the situation from a more complicated point of view, where you were moving in addition to or instead of other things. Ask the students if they have any questions about or objections to Einsteins interpretation. Probably, students will be comfortable with it in some situations more than others. For example, if you and a friend are floating out in space, with nothing else around you, and are moving towards each other, its easy to see that theres no way to distinguish whether you are moving towards your friend, your friend is moving towards you, or both of you are moving a little bit towards each other. Students will probably have more difficulty understanding cases such as a person running on a road; it makes much more sense to say that the person is moving, rather than saying that the person is standing still while the Earth moves underneath! Some of this confusion comes from the fact that the person is the one doing the work; theyre the ones pumping their legs, so obviously they must be moving forward. This objection can be dispelled by pointing out the example of a person running in place on a treadmill. In that case, the person is still pumping their legs, but it looks like the treadmill is moving, not the person. Students may still be uncomfortable with the size difference; when youre running on the Earth, its difficult to say that the Earth acts like a treadmill, since that means that one little person is strong enough to make the entire Earth move! This objection may be harder to dispel; however, you can explain to students that while it is certainly the case that one description of the situation seems the most convenient (person moving and Earth standing still), the point of Einsteins idea is that regardless of what common sense tells you, there is no EXPERIMENT you can do that proves the person is moving rather than the Earth. Therefore, it is perfectly legitimate to look at the situation either way. Another issue students might raise involves situations in which different parts of a single object move with respect to each other. For example, if a person is spinning, or

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moving his hand, or even standing still and having his lungs contract and expand inside him as he breathes, then we certainly have to say that he is moving! Some of these examples are a bit more complicated than others; a spinning object has internal forces and accelerations which need to be taken into account. We wont get to that level of detail in this course, but the basic way to explain these situations is to say that you sometimes need to modify your definition of what an object is in order to say that it is not moving. For example, if a person moves his hand, then certainly the hand and body are moving with respect to each other, but if you consider the hand as its own separate object, then you can look at the situation as either the body sitting still and the hand moving, or the hand sitting still and the rest of the body moving. Once again, motion is relative. Well come back to this idea of looking at things on smaller and smaller size scales later on. The Lord of the Rings Show the students the first few minutes of The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, and ask them to describe what happens in the scene. Students will probably say that the monster falls off the cliff, pulls Gandalf down with it, and the two of them fight for a few minutes while they are falling. Now rewind the tape and tell the students to watch the scene again, but this time imagine that Gandalf and the monster arent falling; instead, they are floating in space, while the walls of the cliff accelerate up past them. Students will probably have no trouble imagining the scene this way. In fact, you can point out that this way of looking at it is a lot closer to how the scene was filmed! Ian McKellen (the actor who plays Gandalf) didnt actually fall off a cliff; rather, he was probably filmed flailing about on a studio set, and the image of a cliff moving up was digitally added afterwards. Explain to the students that just like you can look at the optical illusions at the beginning of class in two different, equally valid ways, you can also look at the first scene from The Two Towers, and motion in general, in different, equally valid ways. This is the essence of Einsteins theory of relativity.

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Session 4: Gravity and Falling Light Learning Outcomes Upon completion of this session, students will: Understand that gravity accelerates all objects at the same rate Understand that a beam of light will fall at this same rate, in accordance with the theory of relativity Understand Einsteins argument that gravity doesnt really exist, but rather that it can be viewed as curved spacetime Understand the analogy between curved spacetime and the curved Earth Duration Approximately 1 hours Activities This session contains the following activities: A discussion of the fact that gravity accelerates all objects at the same rate, and a demonstration of this idea with an activity in which students time how long it takes tennis balls to hit the ground An explanation of why gravity must also make light fall, and an overview of some of the astronomical evidence showing this phenomenon A discussion of Einsteins idea of gravity as curved spacetime Materials This session uses the following materials: A transparency projector and transparencies of the figures at the end of this section, as well as the second transparency from session 2 (the map of Ithaca and Rome with paths drawn on it) Tennis balls, and a large outdoor area or gym in which they can be thrown a long distance String, and a small object to tie to it (such as a roll of masking tape) Background, Procedures and Suggestions The Basics of Gravity Explain to the students that Einsteins ideas about motion apply in many different situations. Not only do they work for the case of motion at a constant speed, but they can also work in cases where there is acceleration for example, if an object is falling to the

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Earth under the influence of gravity. We saw this at the end of the last session, with the example from The Lord of the Rings. In fact, the application of the theory of relativity under these circumstances led Einstein to understand a serious unsolved puzzle about how gravity works. Ask the students to imagine holding a loaded gun in one hand and a bullet in the other. If you fire the gun horizontally and drop the bullet at the exact same time, from the exact same height, which bullet hits the ground first: (A) the bullet you fired, (B) the bullet you dropped, or (C) both at the same time? The correct answer is (C), although most students who have never taken a physics class will probably guess (B). Take the students outside (or to a large gym) and give them tennis balls. Tell the students to break up into pairs or small groups and try the experiment. One student throws a tennis ball horizontally, and another student drops a different ball at the same time as the first student throws. It will probably take several tries for the students to get the timing correct. The hardest part is likely to be getting the students to throw the ball horizontally; they will naturally arc the ball up a little bit, since that is what they are used to doing when they throw. However, it should eventually be possible for students to see that if the experiment is done correctly, the two balls will hit the ground at the same time. Explain to the students that this idea has some important consequences for baseball and softball strategy, which we can show with a simple calculation. Ask the students how long they think it took the tennis ball to drop. They will probably say a little under 1 second. If you drop a tennis ball from a height of 6 feet, the exact answer is around 0.6 seconds, a number you can calculate in a physics course. Now ask students to consider the ball thrown horizontally, and to explain what equation they would use to determine how far it traveled in the horizontal direction before it hit the ground. Hopefully, students will be able to come up with the following formula: distance traveled = speed x time it spends traveling (If not, they can easily understand this equation if you ask them how far a car travels if it goes 60 miles per hour for 2 hours; the answer is 120 miles, which you get by multiplying the two numbers together.) In our case, the time is 0.6 seconds, which is about 0.00017 hours. Ask students how fast they think a human can throw a ball; they will probably know that even major league baseball players cant throw a ball faster than around 100 miles per hour. Since we usually want to measure the distance in feet, we need to multiply our speed by 5280 (the number of feet in a mile) to convert from miles to hour to feet per hour. The resulting formula is: distance traveled = (speed in miles per hour) x (5280 feet/mile) x (0.00017 hours) or:

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distance traveled in feet = 0.9 x (speed in miles per hour) Therefore, even major league baseball players can only throw the ball horizontally about 90 feet (the distance between two bases on the infield) before it hits the ground. Ask the students how baseball or softball players throw the ball in from the outfield. The answer is that they always arc it up into the air. Our calculation shows that the reason they do this is that otherwise they would never be able to throw it far enough. Throwing the ball up buys some time for the ball to go the extra distance. Ask the students what the disadvantage of arcing the ball up into the air is. The answer is that it takes a longer time for the ball to get in, so it will be harder to catch a runner who is trying to take an extra base. This is one of the reasons that outfielders are always taught to hit the cutoff man when throwing the ball in from the outfield, if you are trying to catch a runner at home plate. Even if you have a very accurate arm and can get the ball directly to the catcher from the outfield, you will waste a lot of time throwing the ball way up in the air. It is often faster to throw the ball on a nearly horizontal path to one of the infielders, who can then turn around and throw it horizontally to the catcher. Explain to the students that it is not just objects moving at different horizontal speeds which fall at the same rate; it is also any objects, regardless of their mass, composition, or horizontal motion. This can be demonstrated by dropping two different kinds of objects in the classroom. There is also a famous experiment performed by Apollo 15 astronaut David Scott, in which he stood on the moon and dropped a hammer and a feather at the same time. Because there was no air resistance on the moon to slow the feather down, the two hit the surface at the same time; a movie of this experiment is available from NASA at vesuvius.jsc.nasa.gov/er/seh/feather.html. This experiment can also be done in vacuum chambers here on Earth. Ask the students if they can think of other forces and whether or not these forces work in the same way that gravity does. In fact, gravity is the ONLY force that works this way. A magnet, for example, only pulls on metal, not wood, so objects of different composition fall at different rates. If you take a small, light block of wood and a big, heavy block of wood and attach a small bit of metal to each, a magnet will be able to pull the small block of wood towards it at a much faster rate. Another example of a force is one that you provide when you tie a rope to something and pull on it. It is much easier for you to accelerate a light object up to a fast speed than a heavy one. Explain to the students that up until Einstein, no one had a good explanation for why gravity works the way it does. Instead, they believed that gravity conspires to pull harder on bigger objects; the more mass, or inertia, something has to resist the forces applied to it, the harder gravity pulls on it, so the two effects cancel out. However, it was not clear to anyone why gravity should have this property while other forces dont; it was thought to simply be a coincidence.

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Explain to the students that it is this strange property of gravity which allows the example from The Lord of the Rings to work; if gravity made different objects, or different parts of the same object, move at different speeds, we would never be able to confuse people falling under the influence of gravity with people floating in space. In the first case, the people would all move up or down with respect to each other, but in the second case, they would not.2 For example, if Gandalfs shoes were made of metal and he were being pulled by a gigantic magnet rather than the Earths gravity, he would find himself always being pulled feet-first; if he stuck out his foot to try to change things, it would immediately snap back. This behavior would never occur in empty space! Falling Light Ask the students how they would expect a beam of light to behave under the influence of gravity in order to be consistent with Einsteins theory of relativity (for example, if Gandalf held a flashlight in his hand and shined it at the monster). After the beam of light leaves the flashlight, would it (A) fall at the same rate as Gandalf, (B) fall faster than Gandalf, or (C) not fall at all? The correct answer is (A), although students are likely to believe that beams of light are not affected by gravity (because they have no mass) and that therefore the correct answer is (C). As reasonable as it sounds based on everyday experience, this answer is completely inconsistent with the theory of relativity! One way to see this is to first imagine the Lord of the Rings scene from the point of view where there is no gravity; Gandalf and the monster are floating out in space. In that case, the light beam will obviously move in a straight line between Gandalf and the monster; there is no reason why it would fall down relative to them. Someone standing on the cliff (which moves upwards) would therefore see Gandalf, the monster and the light beam all moving towards him at the same speed (just like you see distant scenery rush by you all at the same speed when you are in a moving car); the light beam would not move up or down relative to Gandalf and the monster. If Einsteins theory is correct, then the same thing must be observed in the case where the cliff is standing still and Gandalf is falling. The person on the cliff would still see the light beam not moving up or down relative to Gandalf and the monster. However, since Gandalf and the monster are falling under the influence of gravity, the beam of light must also be falling under the influence of gravity, at the same speed, in order for it not to move up with respect to Gandalf and the monster. Explain to the students that this is the first of several examples in this course in which we use the theory of relativity to develop a new idea. Make sure they understand how

Note that in the first part of the Lord of the Rings scene, Gandalf actually does fall faster at the beginning in order to catch up to the monster, who fell first, but this is due to air resistance; Gandalf accomplishes this by making his body straight and aerodynamic to minimize the air resistance that is slowing him down.

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powerful Einsteins idea is, in the sense that it allows us to go back and forth between two different points of view without worrying about which is the correct one. Point out to the students that the above argument is NOT a proof that light must fall under the influence of gravity; rather, it is a proof that if Einsteins theory is correct, then light must fall under the influence of gravity. If we ever did an experiment showing that light does not behave this way, then we would know Einsteins theory was wrong. However, many experiments have been done to test this idea, and it appears that Einstein was right; gravity seems to behave exactly the way his theory predicts it should! Ask the students what they would expect to see if lights path were curved a significant amount by gravity: (A) nothing different from everyday life; (B) the positions of objects would appear shifted; or (C) objects would appear blurred into a curved shape. The correct answer is (B). One way to understand this is to suppose that a tennis ball is suspended in front of you, a little above eye level. Light from the tennis ball comes to your eyes from a particular direction, and you interpret the tennis ball to be located in that direction. If you reach out your hand in the direction which you see the tennis ball, you will touch it, indicating that the ball really was located where you thought it was. If, however, light from the tennis ball falls at a significant rate during its path from the ball to your eyes, then the light might come to you from a different direction. For example, the light might first go up, but then gradually fall down into a curved path so that it falls onto your eyes from above. You will therefore see an image of the tennis ball well above your head, but when you reach out your hand to touch it, this time you will not feel it, indicating that the ball is actually located in a different direction. Ask students if they can explain why we dont notice any evidence of light falling in everyday life. For example, when we reach out our hand to touch the tennis ball, we really do find it where we see it. The answer is the speed of light is extremely fast, around 300,000 kilometers per second. This means that light only spends a very short time traveling between the ball and our eyes, so it only falls a small amount. This is the same reason that a lot of students thought that a bullet fired from a gun doesnt fall as fast as a bullet dropped from your hand. If you fire a gun horizontally in a room, the bullet will hit the wall only a small distance below the level from which it was fired. However, this isnt because the bullet wasnt falling; instead, its because the bullet was moving so fast that it was able to traverse the length of the room in a very short time. Explain to the students that the first experiment to determine that light falls was performed in 1919 by a team led by the English astronomer Arthur Eddington. The members of this team waited for a solar eclipse (when the moon blocks out the glare of light around the Sun) and observed a star which was located in a very similar direction as the Suns edge. This stars light passed very close to the surface of the Sun on its way to the Earth and therefore was strongly affected by the Suns gravity. They found that the

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star appeared in a slightly different direction (relative to the other stars) than it did at other times (when the Sun was in a different place in the sky). This proved that the path of the light beam had been bent by the Suns gravity, and that it had done so by the same amount Einstein predicted. This event rocketed Einstein to international fame; it was the first proof of the theory of relativity, and it was also considered an omen of cooperation between the English and Germans after World War I (since Eddington was English and Einstein was German). Eddingtons original experiment was extremely difficult to perform, and the results are now considered controversial, but similar experiments have been performed many times and the results are no longer in doubt; Einsteins theory is correct. Show the students the first picture (included at the end of this session description).3 Explain that it is an extreme example of gravity bending light. The bright, yellow objects in the center constitute a very massive cluster of galaxies. The faint blue rings around the center are a single galaxy, located a large distance behind the central cluster. The strong gravitational pull of the galaxy cluster has bent the light from this distant galaxy, causing images of it to appear at several points far from where it is actually located. This phenomenon is called gravitational lensing. The second picture shows another example; there are several arcs and rings visible in the image, particularly those which encircle the bright yellow object on the left side of the picture. These arcs and rings also represent background galaxies which have been lensed by massive galaxies in the nearby cluster. The final picture shows the farthest galaxy known (at least at the time it was discovered). Three faint red smudges are seen inside the indicated regions of the picture. These smudges represent a distant galaxy which has been gravitationally lensed by the bright galaxies in the foreground of the image, causing it to appear in three spots. This picture illustrates another property of gravitational lensing; it can make objects seem brighter by focusing and bunching their light together, similar to the way that looking through a magnifying glass can cause the apparent size of an object to change. If it werent for gravitational lensing, this galaxy is so far away that it would be too faint to see, but the lensing focuses the light from the galaxy and makes it just bright enough to appear as a small, detectable series of smudges in the picture. Gravity and Curved Spacetime4 Explain to the students that the curious properties of gravity discussed above require an explanation, and that the theory of relativity provides one. There are several stories about how Einstein was inspired to develop his theory of gravity. Perhaps the most
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All the pictures included in this session were obtained with the Hubble Space Telescope. Note that if time constraints make it necessary, this section could easily be finished at the beginning of session 5 or moved to the end of session 5 or the beginning of section 6.

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interesting one is that in 1908, a painter in Einsteins town fell off of a roof. Einstein went to see him and asked him what it felt like to fall. The painter said that it didnt feel like anything; he did not feel his own weight at all, but simply felt like he was floating. Explain to the students that this is the same idea we have been talking about with the Lord of the Rings example. Its also something you can experience yourself if youve ever been bungee jumping, or if youre brave enough to jump a short distance with your eyes closed, perhaps onto a trampoline if you set it up very carefully! There is also a NASA airplane which flies to a large height and then drops down to Earth for several seconds, to allow people inside it to experience the weightlessness of floating through space. This airplane is used for training astronauts and was also used to film some scenes from the movie Apollo 13 (the airplane is informally known as the Vomit Comet, for obvious reasons). In fact, astronauts in orbit around the Earth are experiencing the same exact phenomenon; they are moving in a circular orbit around the Earth and therefore constantly falling towards it.5 Explain to the students that this idea of weightlessness is also sometimes called free fall or free float,6 and it is experienced by any object that is not touching the ground or being affected by other forces. Explain to the students that Einsteins solution to the problem of gravity is a very simple one. Einstein said that the reason you dont feel any forces on you when youre in free fall is that there are none. Gravity is not a force which pulls on you; rather, from a certain point of view, gravity does not exist. Ask the students if they are willing to believe this statement specifically, if they are willing to believe that right now, sitting in their chairs, gravity is not pulling on them! They are likely to respond that they certainly feel gravity on the Earth; for example, its what makes them tired if they stand for a long time. However, it should be possible to convince them that what they feel is not gravity itself, but rather other forces which are resisting gravity. For example, they feel the chair pushing up on them, or the muscles in their body pushing up on their bones to keep them from falling. It is not gravity which we feel, but rather the combination of other forces which prevent us from going on our natural, weightless state of free fall towards the center of the Earth. It may be helpful to give students an analogy to help them appreciate this concept. Ask the students if they have ever been on an amusement park ride in which they are placed inside a small chamber and forced to spin around very fast. They feel themselves thrown against the wall, and they are likely to say that it is centrifugal force which is pushing them outward.
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It is a popular misconception that there is no gravity in outer space, but this is not true! It is the gravity of the Earth which keeps the astronauts in orbit; otherwise they would fly away from the Earth in a straight line. 6 The term free float was coined by the astrophysicist John Wheeler.

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However, what is really pushing them out against the wall? The wall certainly doesnt have any mechanism to pull them towards it; rather, it can only push them away, towards the center of the ride. Ask the students what would happen if the wall werent there. The answer is that that they would be flung away from the ride. This is easy to demonstrate with an object attached to a piece of string; if you swing the string above your head and let go, the object will fly off in a straight line. What you feel pulling you out on the amusement park ride is simply your natural tendency to move in a straight line being interrupted by the wall which gets in your way. Its the same thing that would happen if you tried to walk in a straight line through the classroom wall; the wall would push back on you and prevent you from passing. Explain to the students that Einstein said gravity works in a very similar way. You are trying to be in your natural state of floating through space, but the ground gets in your way and keeps you from doing so. You have been taught to think of this process as a mysterious force called gravity (whose cause you have no way to determine) pulling you down to the center of the Earth; but in fact, Einstein says, there is no mysterious force: there is only the ground pushing back on you as you try to go through it. Explain to the students that this idea provides a natural way to understand why gravity causes everything, including light, to fall at the same rate. If objects are not really falling, but rather in a state of weightless free float similar to what they would do in empty space, then different objects would naturally try to take the same path, just like different-sized people on the amusement park ride would fly off along the same straight lines if the outer wall of the chamber were removed. Therefore, if we stand on the surface of the Earth, we perceive gravity as pulling on these objects, including light, at the same rate. Ask the students if they have any problems with the above ideas. There are likely to be several, which are addressed below; you can raise these issues yourself if students dont come up with them. The first problem is that gravity does not cause objects to move in straight lines; rather it causes them to move along curves. This can be illustrated by drawing a large picture of the Earth on the board and showing several curved paths that might be taken by objects under the influence of the Earths gravity for example, a spaceship in a circular orbit, a satellite or asteroid with an unusual elliptical orbit around the Earth, and a person jumping on the surface and taking a small parabolic path before they hit the ground again. Objects moving along curves clearly look different from objects floating along straight lines in empty space, so there seems to be a problem with our interpretation of gravity! Explain to students that this is partially an issue of size scales, the same problem which was discussed in session 3. From the point of view of the entire Earth, these objects are moving in very different curved paths. However, each individual object

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perceives itself to be in free float that is, if the person who is jumping or the astronaut who is in orbit closes his eyes, he will perceive himself to be in empty space, either sitting still or moving in a straight line path. Another way to state the issue is that all of the paths drawn on the board feel like straight lines to the person who is following them, but they dont look like straight lines when drawn on the board. Ask the students if they can come up with any ideas for how to interpret this situation. If they dont come up with it on their own, show them the second transparency from session 2 (the map of Ithaca and Rome with arrows drawn on it). Recall that in this example, paths which were actually straight (on the curved surface of the Earth) looked like they were curved when drawn on a flat map. This was a two-dimensional situation, but Einsteins theory claims that something very similar happens in our threedimensional world. According to Einstein, certain paths which look to our eyes like they are curved (such as the path a ball takes when it is thrown) are actually straight lines! This is because our three-dimensional world is somehow a curved surface, curved in a way beyond anything we can imagine. Our brains pretend that the three-dimensional world outside of us is actually flat, and lines which are actually straight therefore look curved in the map we construct inside our heads. Einstein says that a massive object (such as the Earth) curves the space around it; the consequences of this effect are what we call gravity. We dont really have any way of understanding what curved space would look like, since we are limited to thinking in three dimensions. However, we do have a way to imagine what four-dimensional beings might see if they looked at our three-dimensional world. We can do this by considering two-dimensional beings living in a twodimensional world for example, on the blackboard. Students can be asked to draw where the eyes, nose, ears and internal organs of such a creature would be. Note that if you draw a stick figure on the board, the eyes, ears and nose would all have to be on the outside of the head (i.e., around the surface of the head) in order to receive signals from the rest of the two-dimensional blackboard. If you draw the eyes on the front of the face (like you normally would for a stick figure), then they would actually be located inside the two-dimensional persons body. Instead, the brain should be located in this region! From this drawing, we notice that it is possible for us to simultaneously see a 2dimensional persons clothes, skin and internal organs, all at the same time. Similarly, if four-dimensional people looked at our three-dimensional bodies, their view would not be obstructed by our clothes or our skin; they would be able to see every part of the inside and outside of our bodies, all at the same time.7
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Another interesting fact about two-dimensional people is that they probably would have to regurgitate all their waste through their mouths. If students draw a picture of a two-dimensional person with food entering the stomach through the mouth and exiting it through another opening, they will see that the person has been split into two separate parts! Many more details about life in a two-dimensional world,

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The second problem students might raise is that different objects which start off along the same path dont actually follow the same free fall trajectories through space. If you throw two balls in the same direction but at different speeds, they will go very different places (one might hit the window and break it, while the other bounces harmlessly on the floor). So how can we say that gravity does not really exist and that objects simply move along their natural free float paths through curved space? The way that objects move in this situation seems to be very different from the way objects move in curved two-dimensional space; if two people walk in a straight line from Ithaca to Rome in the same direction but at different speeds, they will follow the same exact path. The solution to this problem lies in the fact that although the two people follow the same path, they will arrive in Rome at different times. We can say that although their paths through space are the same, their paths through spacetime are different. This can be illustrated if we make a graph with time on the horizontal axis and space (or distance traveled in space) on the vertical axis. An object moving in a straight line at constant speed will trace out a particular line on this spacetime graph, but students should also be able to recognize that an object moving at a faster speed will trace out a different, steeper line (since it will cover more distance in the same amount of time). Therefore, if we consider things from the point of view of spacetime rather than space, we see that two balls thrown in the same direction but at different speeds will be following different initial paths, so we do expect their behavior to be different. However, two balls which start off along the same path in spacetime (with the same initial direction and speed) really do follow the same path in real life, as we would expect. Einsteins theory therefore requires not just that gravity curves space, but rather that it curves spacetime. The effect of curvature on time is not easy to picture, but it turns out that it causes time to actually run slower near a massive object. Therefore, students can imagine living their whole lives on a mountain and then going down to the valley for a vacation. When they return, all of the other people on the mountain will have aged a bit more than the students have; therefore, the students will have traveled into the future! The fact that the Earths gravity slows down time is a proven fact, and it has been measured in several ways, including an experiment in which very precise atomic clocks were flown on airplanes and then brought back to the Earths surface.

including the examples discussed here, can be found in the book Flatland by Edwin Abbott Abbott.

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Session 5: Black Holes Learning Outcomes Upon completion of this session, students will: Understand some of the basic properties of black holes and the observations that astronomers have made of these objects Duration Approximately 1 to 1 hours Activities This session consists of viewing and discussing several images and animations of black holes, both actual astronomical observations and computer generated graphics. Materials All the images used in this session are included at the end of the session description. Many of them could be printed out on transparencies and shown using a projector, but several of them are still images taken from animations (those labeled as such), so it would be necessary to download these and show them to students using a computer. Websites from which the material in this session can be obtained are listed in the Resource Materials section at the end of the document. Note that the images and animations have also been copied to videotape format. If you are interested in obtaining this videotape, contact the author by email (dmr37@cornell.edu), and it may be possible to make a copy, although there is no guarantee that one will be available. Background, Procedures, and Suggestions The main procedure for this section is to go through the images and animations and discuss each of them (notes are included below). Black holes are a topic that students tend to be extraordinarily interested in, so be prepared to answer a lot of questions and to cover a lot of material out of order, depending on students interest! Image #1 Weve already learned that light falls towards massive objects and that the path of a light beam will appear bent due to gravitys curvature of spacetime. The more massive an object is, the more it causes the path of light beams (and other nearby objects, like tennis balls) to bend. This image shows that any massive object has something called an escape speed; its the initial speed which things like tennis balls or spaceships need to reach in order to escape the massive. For example, the escape speed from the surface of
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the Earth is around 11 kilometers per second, but from the surface of the Sun it is higher, around 619 kilometers per second. A black hole is an object whose escape speed is so high that it reaches the speed of light, 300,000 kilometers per second. A black hole bends spacetime so much that light cant escape; a beam of light shot up from inside the black hole will simply turn around and come back. If light cant escape, neither can anything else, since nothing in the universe can move faster than the speed of light relative to nearby objects. In order to make a black hole, we need to put a lot of mass into a very small region of space. The denser an object is, the more it causes spacetime to curve. How dense does a black hole need to be? If we wanted to take the Sun and turn it into a black hole, we would have to crush it down to the size of a small town. If we wanted to turn the Earth into a black hole, we would have to crush it down to a size that would fit in the palm of your hand! Images #2 and #3 We cant see black holes directly, but we can detect them by their effect on other nearby objects. These animations show the actual, observed motion of stars within a few light-years of the center of our galaxy.8 The first animation shows observed motions over an eight-year period, while the second shows the observed motions from 1995 to 2003, then stops and shows the predicted motions for the next several years. The center of the galaxy is at the location of the yellow cross in the first animation, and at the point near the center of the second animation where several of the orbital curves seem to cross. It is obvious from these animations that there must be a very massive, nearly invisible object at the center of our Milky Way galaxy whose gravity is affecting the motion of nearby stars! From an analysis of the exact paths that the stars take, astronomers have been able to prove that the invisible object at the center is a few million times as massive as our Sun, but that the material within it is constrained to something like the size of our solar system. This massive object at the center of the Milky Way galaxy is the strongest evidence astronomers have yet obtained for the existence of a black hole; it is very difficult to come up with a way for that much mass to be in such a small region of space without invoking a black hole. Image #4 Although the black hole itself is not visible, we can sometimes see light from material very close to the black hole. That is what we see in this animation; the same black hole (which was invisible in the previous images) is sometimes visible if sensitive enough measurements are made. Here, we are seeing light from material that is so close to the
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I think the reason they look so different is that background stars were edited out of the second animation.

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black hole that we cannot distinguish its position on the sky from the black holes position; therefore, it looks to us like the black hole itself is flaring. The variability of this light occurs on timescales as short as 40 minutes. This means that the size of the region from which the light is emitted is smaller than approximately 40 light-minutes (a light-minute is the time it takes light to travel one minute). This is because no signal can travel faster than the speed of light; if we imagine a disturbance occurring in one location near the black hole, that disturbance cannot propagate faster than the speed of light, so if it takes 40 minutes for the light-emitting region of the system to vary, then this region must be at least 40 light-minutes in size. A similar situation applies to our solar system, where the Earth is around 8 lightminutes from the Sun. Light takes 8 minutes to get from the Sun to us, so if the Sun were to explode right now, it would take 8 minutes for us to notice that anything had happened. A distant alien astronomer would see the Sun explode, but then it would take at least 8 minutes before she noticed any disastrous effects occurring on the Earth. The fact that the material near the center of the Milky Way varies on 40 minute timescales is more evidence which suggests that the massive object that lurks there is very small by astronomical standards; after all, 40 light-minutes is only five times the distance between the Sun and the Earth! Image #5 When we look at material coming from very close to black holes, we have to look at all different kinds (or colors) of light, not just the optical light which we can see with our eyes. This image shows different kinds of light. Objects which are hotter tend to emit light with shorter wavelengths; for example, the surface of a star or the filament inside a light bulb emits optical light, but your body (which is cooler) emits infrared light (light which is more red than red) that can be detected with night vision goggles. The material near black holes can sometimes get so hot that it emits X-rays, while some of it might also emit radio waves (through more exotic processes not directly related to how hot the object is). Images #6 and #7 Astronomers think that almost all galaxies have massive black holes in their centers, not just our own Milky Way galaxy. Some of these objects are referred to as AGN (active galactic nuclei) because the black holes inside them seem to be extremely active, sucking in lots of material and emitting huge amounts of light. The object shown here is the galaxy Centaurus A, the nearest example of an AGN (it is still pretty far, though around 13 million light-years away from us). The black hole inside it is very massive, probably around 1 billion times the mass of our Sun!

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These images show why it is important to look at black holes in different colors of light. The first image is taken in optical light, and there is no particular evidence for a black hole; the most interesting thing about the picture is that there is an unusually large amount of dust in the plane of the galaxy which prevents us from seeing in to the center. The second image, however, taken with the Chandra X-ray Observatory, shows that there is a large amount of X-ray light coming from the center of this galaxy and a huge jet (around 30,000 light-years long) shooting out from the center in a direction perpendicular to the galactic plane. These jets are thought to be important features of black holes; they represent material that approaches the black hole but then somehow gets diverted away at very fast speeds. The reason that jets form the way they do is not completely understood. Another important feature of this image is the many dots of X-ray light which surround the center of the galaxy. Many of these are thought to be smaller black holes (those which are only a few times as massive as our Sun), with very hot material close to them that is also emitting X-ray light. Image #8 This image shows a galaxy (on the left) from which huge jets (seen in radio light) are being emitted. It also shows that if we zoom in on the center of the galaxy (on the right), we see a rather flat disk (known as the accretion disk) which represents material that is spiraling into the black hole. Astronomers think that a lot of the light we observe from black holes either comes from the accretion disk or from the jets which emanate from the accretion disk. Image #9 This image (taken in infrared light) shows a black hole in our galaxy known as GRS 1915+105, along with three nearby stars of similar infrared brightness. This black hole is around 14 times more massive than the Sun. The image illustrates why it is necessary to use many different types of light to observe black holes; from the infrared image, it is impossible to determine which is the black hole and which are normal stars! In fact, the black hole is the one on the right, and in this case we can figure out which one is the black hole from infrared light alone; the object on the right is very variable and changes its brightness quite often, while the other three stars always remain at a similar level. Image #10 One of the reasons that the infrared light from GRS 1915+105 looks so much like the light from a normal star is that part of the GRS 1915+105 system actually is a normal star. The drawing on the right shows what we think is occurring in small black holes like this object. Two stars start off in a binary system, and then one of them becomes a black hole. This happens when the star runs out of all possible sources of internal pressure that
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are strong enough to resist the pull of gravity. Nuclear fusion inside the center of the star sustains it against collapse for much of its life, but when the nuclear fuel runs out, some stars those which are many times more massive than our Sun do not have any other form of pressure that they can produce within them that is strong enough to resist gravitational collapse, and so the star collapses in on itself and forms a black hole. After this, the second star can spiral in so close to the black hole that it begins to be ripped apart, and the material ripped from it spirals in to form an accretion disk. The accretion disk is hotter near the black hole and emits more blue light there; thats why the accretion disk is drawn as multicolored in this picture. Image #11 This animation shows observations of GRS 1915+105 taken in radio light. We see large jets (just like in the supermassive black holes), but because GRS 1915+105 is so much smaller, we can see things evolve much more quickly in it, and so we actually get to see the jets form and move away. This animation shows the formation of two blobs (moving in opposite directions) from a location along the jet of GRS 1915+105 (the center of which is marked with a yellow cross), over a timescale of about one month. The blob on the left appears to move 1/10 of a light-year across the sky in that one month. You can ask students if there are any problems with that, and they should realize that 1/10 of a light-year is greater than a light-month, so the jet appears to be moving faster than the speed of light! In fact, astronomers think that what is really happening here is that the jets are not moving directly left and right across the sky, but rather are moving at some angle to our line of sight. Although it looks like the left jet is moving faster, astronomers think that both jets are actually moving at the same speed (still very fast over 90% of the speed of light), but that the left jet is angled slightly towards us and the right jet slightly away from us. The jet moving towards us then appears to be moving faster than light, because it is moving so fast towards us that it is almost catching up to the light it previously emitted. Two beams of light which the blob emits at very different times (so that the jet has moved a large horizontal distance between the two times) will reach our telescope one right after the other, so we will navely assume that there was only a short time interval between them and therefore that the jet has moved an impossibly large distance during that time interval. Image #12 This image shows that GRS 1915+105 is variable on much faster timescales than a single month. The top panel shows how bright the object was in X-rays, and the bottom panel shows how bright it was in infrared light, over a particular period of about half an hour. The X-rays (which come from the accretion disk) and infrared light (which comes mainly from the jet) are both very variable. Observations like these show that the X-ray
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and infrared light from this object vary in a correlated way, which means that there is a physical relationship between material spiraling in through the accretion disk and material that gets shot out in the form of a jet. Image #13 This image is a computer animation showing what would happen if you fell into a black hole. It is important to realize that black holes dont suck things in; you would only fall into a black hole if you happened to be headed in a direction that took you very close to it. Far away from a black hole, gravity works exactly the same as it does for a star of similar mass; for example, if the Sun were to suddenly become a black hole (which is not going to happen!), we wouldnt notice any effect on the orbit of the Earth or other planets. As you fall towards the black hole, the dark spot which you see on the sky represents the size of the event horizon or Schwarzschild radius; this is the part of the black hole from within which light cannot escape, and therefore the point from within which you can never escape once you cross it. Somewhere along your journey (either before or after you reach the event horizon, depending on the mass of the black hole), you will be stretched like a piece of spaghetti and eventually ripped apart; this is due to the difference in the strength of gravity on your feet and on your head (if you are falling in feet first). Also notice that the images of background stars get distorted as you get closer to the black hole and the hole begins to fill up your field of view. This is due to the gravitational lensing of background light that we discussed in session 4. The ring of light around the event horizon is due to the magnifying effect discussed in session 4; the black hole bunches together the light from many different background stars into a small region, making them easier to see. Once you get inside the black hole, you will reach the singularity, the point where all the mass is thought to be located. We dont really know what happens to material at the singularity; its still a puzzle physicists are working on! People have speculated on all sorts of possibilities for what could occur inside a black hole; for example, the astrophysicist Kip Thorne has talked about the possibility of wormholes (tunnels through space) existing inside a black hole, which you could theoretically use to undergo a limited form of time travel in which you would be able to interact with the past. A popular account of Thornes ideas is given in his book Black Holes and Time Warps. Alas, it appears that it would be extremely difficult for exotic objects such as wormholes to exist in nature; they would tend to be very unstable. One way we can use black holes for time travel involves traveling into the future, similar to the method discussed at the end of session 4. Time slows down near any massive object, but it approaches an infinitely slow rate near the event horizon of a black hole. So if you were to travel near a black hole and then come back, your body would
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have aged much less than everyone elses, and you would be able to travel as far into the future as you wanted to. If someone watched you fall into a black hole, they would see you appear to move in slow motion and then eventually freeze and fade away as you reached the event horizon. Remember that in accordance with Einsteins principle of relativity, though, you wouldnt notice anything different about yourself as you fell towards the black hole (until you got to the point where tidal forces began to take over); rather, you would see your own time going by normally while the universe around you appeared to speed up as if it were on fast forward. Image #14 This animation shows what would happen if you were to orbit around the black hole; the light from background stars gets distorted in extremely complicated, mesmerizing ways! In fact, there are some black holes (specifically those which are themselves rotating) that can force you into an orbit around them, if you get close enough. Essentially, the black hole drags the spacetime around it as it rotates. It turns out that there is a mechanism known as the Penrose process which can be used to extract some of the energy of the black holes rotation; if you bring two objects near a rotating black hole and send one into the hole in a particular way, the other object can take some energy away from the black hole and carry it off. Daedalus, a columnist for Nature magazine (and perhaps others before him), has speculated on the possibility of future civilizations using this process as an efficient method of recycling their garbage. You can imagine building a giant city around a black hole, then throwing all your garbage into the black hole in such a way that the trash goes into the black hole but the dumpster comes back with some of the holes energy, which can then be used to power your civilization! There is an additional mechanism called Hawking Radiation which is similar to the Penrose process, only it occurs on subatomic scales near the event horizon of the black hole, without any outside intervention. This process can cause black holes to slowly radiate away their energy in the form of very long wavelength light; it is a negligible effect for black holes as big as the ones that have been discovered in nature, but if tiny black holes ever existed, they could be evaporating away their mass as a result of Hawking Radiation, and eventually disappear completely.

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Session 6: Einsteins Dreams Learning Outcomes Upon completion of this session, students will: Be able to imagine how the universe would function differently if time worked in different ways Duration Approximately 1 to 1 hours Activities This session consists of reading excerpts from Einsteins Dreams by Alan Lightman, and having students write and act out skits in which time works in some of the different ways described in this book. Materials The only materials used in this section are photocopies of several chapters from Einsteins Dreams. Background, Procedures, and Suggestions Hand out copies of the prologue and first chapter of Einsteins Dreams to the students. Explain that in previous sessions, we saw that time is able to curve and slow down and that it does so in a particular way near any massive object (including a black hole). Einsteins Dreams is a fictional account of dreams that Einstein might have had during the time that he was formulating the theory of relativity. Each chapter is a dream from a different night, and in each dream, time works in a different way. In the first chapter, for example, time runs in a circle, so that events always repeat over and over again. Have the students read the prologue and first chapter out loud and discuss it with them. Have the students break up into small groups of 3 or 4 and hand them each a photocopy of a different chapter of Einsteins Dreams. The four chapters I used were 26 April 1905 (in which time runs slower the farther away you are from the Earth), 29 May 1905 (in which time runs slower for moving objects), 2 June 1905 (in which time runs backwards) and 20 June 1905 (in which time runs at different rates in different locations). Instruct each group of students to write and rehearse a small skit in which time works in the way described in their reading. The skits can take place wherever the students want, although one interesting possibility is to have them be set at the students school or
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even based on events that took place previously in the classroom. Tell the students not to explicitly reveal within their skit the exact way in which time works. After all the skits have been prepared, each group should take turns performing its skit and having the other students guess the exact way that time works in it.

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Session 7: Relativity Without Gravity Learning Outcomes Upon completion of this session, students will: Understand that light is a wave Understand the ways in which light behaves differently from other waves Understand why the theory of relativity requires that all observers measure the same value for the speed of light Understand how to derive a formula for the distance light travels that is valid for all observers Duration Approximately 1 hour Activities This session contains the following activities An introduction to relativity without gravity (special relativity) An interactive discussion in which students learn about the unusual properties of light that were measured in the late 1800s and later explained by Einstein Derivation of a formula for the distance light travels Materials This session uses the following materials: A transparency projector A blank sheet of transparency paper Transparency markers (several different colors) Background, Procedures, and Suggestions Relativity Without Gravity Explain to the students that in previous sessions, we learned what the theory of relativity has to say about situations involving gravity. Today, we will start talking about what the theory of relativity says about situations in which there is no gravity. Remind the students that when gravity was taken into account, Einsteins principle of relativity led us to conclude that the presence of mass causes the nearby spacetime to curve, and that other objects move in straight lines through this spacetime. Review the reasons we had for saying spacetime and not space. Two balls thrown along the same initial path in space can follow different trajectories (if their

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speeds are different), so gravity cannot be entirely explained as a geometric curvature of space; there must be some other aspect of gravity that causes the balls to be affected in different ways. However, two balls thrown along the same initial path in spacetime (i.e. with the same initial direction and speed) do actually follow the same path, regardless of any properties of the balls. Therefore, gravity can be entirely explained as a geometric curvature of spacetime, and we do not need to invoke any force or other explanation to explain the trajectories that the balls take. Ask the students what they think objects should do in situations where no gravity is present. Hopefully, students will realize that if objects move in straight lines through spacetime when it is curved, they will still move in straight lines through spacetime when it is not curved; i.e., when there is no gravity. Students should be familiar with the fact that objects move in straight lines when no forces act on them, but they are used to thinking of this as straight lines through space. Relativity tells us that the straight lines are actually located in spacetime; the differences between these two points of view are subtle, but they will lead to some interesting consequences. Explain to the students that relativity without gravity is referred to as special relativity. Historically, it is the first part of the theory, developed by Einstein in 1905. It contains explanations of many effects that students may have heard about but that we have yet to talk about explicitly in this course for example, what happens to an object when it moves near the speed of light. Another important point about the flat spacetime of special relativity is that the math is extremely simple! During this session and the next one, we will learn how to derive and use some of the equations of special relativity, all without using any more complicated mathematics than what has already been discussed in this course. The Properties of Light Ask the students to imagine their favorite baseball pitcher standing on a railroad car, throwing the ball to a catcher who is sitting on the ground. The railroad car moves toward the catcher at 60 miles per hour, and the pitcher winds up and throws a 100 mile per hour pitch. What horizontal speed does the ball hit the catchers glove at: (A) 100 miles per hour, (B) 40 miles per hour, or (C) 160 miles per hour? The correct answer is (C). The ball has the 100 miles per hour given to it by the pitcher, plus 60 miles per hour with which it initially moved towards the catcher as it was being carried along by the train. One student in my class gave an interesting incorrect answer to this question; he said the ball would have to be moving slower than the train, because if you consider a similar situation in which you lean out of a bus window and spit, the spit will blow back into your face! The reason this happens, however, is actually that the spit is held back by air resistance and the bus catches up to it; without air
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resistance, the spit would move forward faster than the bus. With an object as heavy as a baseball, the effect of air resistance is much smaller, although probably enough to slow the ball down to a little less than 160 miles per hour when it hits the catchers glove. Now ask the students to consider what would happen if the pitcher yells at the catcher, rather than throwing a baseball. Students should know that sound moves at a fast, but finite, speed through the air (around 330 meters per second). If not, you can remind them of the old trick where you estimate how far away a lightning strike occurred by measuring the time between seeing the lightning and hearing the thunder; this trick works because light moves so fast that it reaches us almost instantaneously, but sound moves at a much slower speed, so the thunderclap which occurs at the same time as the lightning flash will appear delayed by an amount proportional to its distance. In this case, what speed does the sound wave made by the pitcher have when measured by the catcher: (A) the same speed as if the pitcher were standing still, i.e. 330 meters per second; (B) a faster speed than if the pitcher were standing still; or (C) a slower speed than if the pitcher were standing still? The correct answer is (A). This is unlikely to be something that students know, but it turns out that the speed of a wave (such as sound) does not depend on how fast the object that makes the wave is moving. It is possible to understand this if you realize that a sound wave is a pressure vibration in the air, each crest of which starts in a particular location (determined by the location of the source) and then propagates away from that location as each disturbed air molecule collides with its neighbors. This propagation occurs based on properties of the air molecules themselves, so the speed is determined by properties of the medium rather than by the motion of the source. Now ask students the same question, only this time assume that the catcher is running towards the train as fast as he can. What speed does the sound wave have when measured by the catcher this time: (A) the same speed as if the catcher were standing still, i.e. 330 meters per second; (B) a faster speed than if the catcher were standing still; or (C) a slower speed than if the catcher were standing still? The correct answer here is actually (B). The speed of a wave doesnt depend on the motion of the source, but it does depend on the motion of the receiver with respect to the medium in which the wave travels. It might help to imagine a series of water waves moving in the ocean rather than sound waves moving in the air; if you swim away from shore (towards the incoming waves), you will encounter more wave crests in a given amount of time than if you stood still and let the waves come to you. Therefore, you will measure the waves to be moving faster. Explain to students that these two properties of waves are responsible for some interesting phenomena for example, sonic booms. A sonic boom occurs when an airplane moves faster than the speed of sound and is actually able to catch up to its own sound waves. Notice that this would not occur with a baseball, since the baseball would

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always travel at 100 miles per hour away from the plane. When a plane catches up to its own sound waves, all the sound that it creates continually builds up right in front of the plane, creating a shock wave which we experience as a sonic boom. Now ask the students what they think would happen with light; that is, if the pitcher shines a flashlight at the catcher while the train is moving, how fast will the catcher measure the light to be traveling: (A) the same speed as if the pitcher were standing still, i.e. 300,000 kilometers per second; (B) a faster speed than if the pitcher were standing still; or (C) a slower speed than if the pitcher were standing still? The correct answer in this case is (A) once again; light appears to behave the same way that sounds waves do. Scientists have known this fact for a long time, and just like sound waves move through air and water waves move through water, they assumed that there had to be some medium through which light moved. They called this invisible medium the ether. The ether essentially consists of space itself; it is something which you cant touch or feel, but which had to exist in order for light to be a wave. Explain to the students that even though you cant touch or feel the ether, scientists assumed that there would be a simple way to detect it. Ask the students if they can guess what that method would be, based on the previous discussion. Hopefully, students will figure out that you should be able to measure your speed through the ether by measuring how the speed of light differs from 300,000 kilometers per second, just like the catcher measures different speeds of sound depending on how fast he is moving through the air. Now ask the students what they think Einsteins principle of relativity would have to say about measuring your speed through the ether. The answer is that it should not be possible! If the ether consists of space itself, then motion through the ether is equivalent to absolute motion. You could be floating out in empty space, and all you would need to do is measure your speed with respect to a passing beam of light in order to determine whether or not you were undergoing absolute motion. If you found a different speed than 300,000 kilometers per second, then you would not be justified in assuming that you were sitting still and other objects in the universe were moving past you. In fact, there are many fundamental equations in physics (particularly those in electromagnetism) that contain the value of the speed of light (that is, 300,000 kilometers per second) and only work correctly if you plug that particular value into them. If you were to measure something besides 300,000 kilometers per second for the speed of light, then you would need to make some kind of correction (taking into account your absolute motion through the ether) in order to use the equations of electromagnetism. If Einsteins principle of relativity is correct, then it must somehow be the case that everyone measures the same speed of light, regardless of how fast they are moving with respect to each other. Once again, many experiments have been done to test this idea, and it turns out to be true. In this case, actually, the experiments showing that the speed of light does not depend on the observer were done in the 1880s, before Einstein came

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along with his theory. These experiments were performed by Albert Michelson and Edward Morley, who measured the same exact speed of light in different directions and at different times of the year (note that as the year goes by, the Earth orbits the Sun and changes its direction, so its motion with respect to the ether should continually change). Explain to the students that scientists were extremely perplexed by the results of these experiments. What the experiments mean is that light sort of behaves like a baseball (in the sense that you can never have a sonic boom where you catch up to light that you have emitted), but it also sort of behaves like a wave (in the sense that it doesnt reach you any faster just because the flashlight which emitted it is moving towards you). To understand how bizarre this behavior is, students can try to imagine what would happen if a truck behaved like light did. Suppose you are driving a car down the highway and a truck is slowly overtaking you in the passing lane; perhaps its speed relative to you is 5 miles per hour. If the truck behaves like a light beam, then its speed relative to you will always be 5 miles per hour, regardless of what you do. No matter how much you hit the accelerator, the truck will still pass you at that speed. What happens if you slam on the brakes? The truck will not zoom past you; rather, it will continue to go by you at 5 miles per hour. Even if you stop the car and get out, or drive the car backwards, the same thing will occur. It will look to you like the truck driver has been shadowing your every move. The catch, however, is that it will also look to all the other drivers like the same truck has been shadowing them. You can compare notes with a person in the third lane who was doing the exact opposite thing you were doing (slamming on the brakes when you were accelerating, speeding up when you were slowing down), and she too will somehow think the truck had been shadowing her! Explain to the students that it is okay if they think this behavior contradicts all of our logical expectations; in fact, it does, and many scientists sought out complicated ways to explain it! Einstein, however, took a different tactic; he simply accepted the results of the experiment at face value. Einstein said that there is no such thing as an ether, no medium through which light moves. He then asked what the consequences would be if the speed of light were a fundamental constant but everything else (including space and time) were allowed to change depending on who was observing it. As we will see later, this assumption led Einstein to conclude that the only way the two drivers in the above example can explain away their conundrum is if each of them perceives the others space and time to be distorted. Each of them would say to the other: Your ruler is too small, so you measured the locations of the truck incorrectly, and your clock is running too slowly, so you measured the times that the truck did certain things incorrectly. That is why you got the wrong results for the trucks behavior. It wasnt really shadowing you; it was shadowing me! Each person will make this statement about the other; neither will perceive anything wrong with her own rulers or clocks. Each person will see herself as

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sitting still and the other person as moving, and they will think that this motion causes a distortion of that persons space and time. The Mathematics of Light Travel Explain to the students that we are now going to derive a simple formula for the way light moves that will allow us to mathematically derive some of Einsteins ideas, including the concept of traveling into the future by moving near the speed of light. Draw a right triangle on the board, with the hypotenuse labeled distance, the two endpoints of the hypotenuse labeled 1 and 2, the horizontal leg of the triangle labeled dx and the vertical leg labeled dy. Make sure the students understand the Pythagorean theorem applied to this triangle; that is, distance2 = dx2 + dy2. Ask the students what would happen if point 2 were pulled out of the board, so that the distance between 1 and 2 now had a component in the third direction (call it dz) as well as in the x and y directions already shown. Hopefully, students will be able to guess that the correct formula in this case is distance2 = dx2 + dy2 + dz2. You can motivate this by symmetry (there is nothing special about the z direction that would cause it to enter the formula in a different way); also, it is possible to derive this formula by applying the Pythagorean theorem to a right triangle whose hypotenuse is the new distance between 1 and 2 and whose two legs are (1) dz and (2) the old distance between 1 and 2 (i.e. the square root of dx2 + dy2). Now return to the original triangle and label it as follows: distance = 5, dx =3, dy =4. Ask the students which of the following things will all observers agree on, regardless of what angle they look at points 1 and 2 from: (A) the distance between 1 and 2 is 5, the x or horizontal distance between 1 and 2 is 3, and the y or vertical distance between 1 and 2 is 4; (B) just distance = 5; or (C) just x distance = 3 and y distance = 4? The correct answer is (B). This can be illustrated by drawing the points 1 and 2 and the line between them on a sheet of transparency paper, then rotating and flipping the transparency in different ways and each time drawing the horizontal distance (dx) and vertical distance (dy) using a different color, to show that these values change when the transparency orientation changes. The point of this exercise is that while different observers might measure different values of dx and dy (the coordinates of points 1 and 2), everyone will agree on the same value of dx2 + dy2 (the square of the distance between points 1 and 2). Explain to the students that this idea allows us to write a formula for the square of the distance traveled by a beam of light that is valid for all observers. One expression for this distance is dx2 + dy2 + dz2, as shown above, where dx, dy, and dz are the distances traveled by the light beam in each direction. Now ask the students how to write a formula for this distance in terms of dt (the time it takes light to travel between the two points). Hopefully, they will remember the
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formula distance = velocity x time. If we use the letter c to represent the speed of light (300,000 kilometers per second), we get that the distance is c dt, and the distance squared is therefore (c dt)2. We now have two formulas for the distance squared, so both of these formulas must be equal to each other. We therefore have: (c dt)2 = dx2 + dy2 + dz2 or: 0 = dx2 + dy2 + dz2 - (c dt)2 Remind the students that we never specified who the observer was; each observer may measure his or her own values of dt, dx, dy and dz for a particular beam of light, but all observers will find this equation to be true for each beam of light that they measure.

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Session 8: The Mathematics and Applications of Relativity Learning Outcomes Upon completion of this session, students will: Understand the mathematical basis for the myth of relativity discussed in session 1 Be able to use the equations of special relativity to explain time travel Understand how the Global Positioning System (GPS) functions and its dependence on the theory of relativity Duration Approximately 1 to 1 hours Activities This session contains the following activities A discussion of the rules of four-dimensional spacetime Derivation of time travel using the equations of special relativity A discussion of the Global Positioning System (GPS) Materials This session does not use any special materials. Background, Procedures, and Suggestions The Rules of Four-Dimensional Spacetime Begin the class by writing down the last equation from the previous session and reviewing what each of the terms in it refers to. Point out that although it may have been hard work to derive this equation, one of the advantages of mathematics is that it allows us to derive things generally and then apply them to many different, specific situations. For example, you can ask the students how we would modify this equation if instead of referring to light, it referred to a baseball or a sound wave. The only difference is that we would replace c (the speed of light) with either vbaseball (the speed of the baseball) or vsound (the speed of the sound wave). Point out that in fact, the version of the equation which applies to light is actually a lot simpler than the version which applies to baseballs or sound waves. This is because the speed of light is the same for all observers, so it is just a number that we can plug into the equation. For baseballs or sound waves, the measured speed depends on who is

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observing them, so we would need to calculate this number again and again for each new observer we were considering. Explain to the students that in the case of light, the right side of the equation looks an awful lot like a four-dimensional version of the Pythagorean theorem. In three dimensions, the Pythagorean theorem is a sum of squares (dx2 + dy2 + dz2). Here, we have added yet another term to the equation, (c dt)2, which looks very similar to the first three terms; it is the square of a constant number c times a coordinate dt. The only real difference with this extra term is that there is a minus sign in front of it; however, the analogy still looks pretty convincing. Observations such as these led Hermann Minkowski (a former teacher of Einsteins) to come up with the idea of spacetime, a crucial development in the history of the theory of relativity. Minkowskis ideas allow us to cast Einsteins theory in a simple, intuitive form. Explain to the students that thanks to Einstein and Minkowski, we now have a series of rules for how to operate in four-dimensional spacetime. These rules are as follows: Just like space has points labeled by (x,y,z), spacetime has events labeled by (x,y,z,t). An event in spacetime is something which takes place at a particular place at a particular time for example, me standing 2 feet north, 3 feet west and 2 feet above the green floor tile, when my clock reads 4:00 pm. Just like every pair of points in space has a distance between them, every pair of events in spacetime has an interval ds between them, defined by the following formula: ds2 = dx2 + dy2 + dz2 - (c dt)2, where dx, dy, dz and dt are the differences in coordinates between the two events. Ask the students if the two events are a beam of light over here and the same beam of light over there, a little bit later, what is the value of the interval ds between these two events? Hopefully, students will be able to see that since dx2 + dy2 + dz2 - (c dt)2 = 0 for a beam of light (as discussed earlier), ds must be 0 also. The next rule is therefore: All observers measure the same value of ds (specifically, ds = 0) for the interval between two light events that is, two events which the same beam of light passes through. Although we wont prove it here, it is possible to show that if the previous point is true, and if the speed of light is constant for all observers, then every pair of events has a unique value of ds which is measured by all observers. The last point is the main one to remember; it means that intervals in fourdimensional spacetime behave just like distances in three-dimensional space used to: they are constants that do not depend on who is observing them. Just like when we rotated the transparency and saw different values of dx and dy but the same value for the distance, we can also imagine looking at spacetime from different points of view; different
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observers might measure different values of dx, dy, dz, and dt, but all will measure the same value of the interval ds. Explain to the students that we are now ready to understand the basis for the myth of relativity that we talked about in session 1. Even an object that is sitting still in space (dx = dy = dz = 0) will still be moving through time and will accordingly have an interval ds = c dt; in other words, the speed of light multiplied by the time that passes. This is our basis for saying that even if you are sitting still in the classroom, you are still moving through spacetime at the speed of light. The rules of four-dimensional spacetime then tell us that all observers will see the same interval and will therefore also see you moving through spacetime at the speed of light. The only difference is that some observers will see you moving through space (for example, observers in a car driving by you). The faster they see you move through space, the slower they see you move through time; thats the only way that they can still measure you moving at a constant speed of light through spacetime. This example shows that moving clocks must tick slower. If you see someone moving by you at a fast speed, you will observe their time to run slower; conversely, they will see you moving by them at a fast speed, so they will observe your time to run slower. It may be worth pointing out that this is exactly the situation depicted in the 29 May 1905 chapter of Einsteins Dreams; of all the dreams Einstein had in that book, this was the only one that turned out to accurately represent the way in which time works in our universe. Time Travel Explain to the students that we can actually use the rules and equations discussed earlier to derive how time travel works. Tell the students to imagine two events: (1) Me, sitting on a train moving at 60 miles per hour, and (2) Me, sitting in the same seat on the same train, after my clock has ticked through 1 hour. The observer in this case is me, with my x axis pointed in the same direction that the train is moving. Notice that it is always important to specify exactly who the observer is and what coordinate system the observer is using.9 Ask the students what value of dx is measured by the observer in this case: (A) 60 miles, (B) -60 miles, or (C) 0 miles? The correct answer is (C). This shows the importance of Einsteins principle of relativity! Everyone always measures himself to be sitting still; from my point of view, I have been sitting on the train the whole time, so I havent moved at all. Now ask the students what value of ds is measured by the observer: (A) 1 light-hour, (B) 60 miles, or (C) 0?
9

Technically speaking, the special theory of relativity only works if each observer has an infinite array of rulers and clocks attached to him, with one clock at the intersection of each set of rulers that records the time at that location in space. Otherwise, you run into all sorts of problems interpreting the results of your measurements, concerning the light travel time between an event and the location of your clock.

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The corret answer is (A). My clock ticks 1 hour, and we multiply that by the speed of light to get 1 light-hour. Now tell the students to consider a new observer, one sitting on the side of the railroad tracks. What is the value of ds measured by this observer: (A) 1 light-hour (B) 60 miles, or (C) 0? The correct answer is (A). As stated above, all observers must measure the same value of ds. Now ask the students what value of dt is measured by the new observer: (A) 1 hour, (B) less than 1 hour, or (C) more than 1 hour? The correct answer here is (C). This observer sees me moving, and therefore measures a nonzero value for dx; i.e., she obtains a greater value for dx2 than I did. In order to measure the same value of ds that I did, we can see from the formula for the interval, ds2 = dx2 - (c dt)2, that she must also measure a larger value of (c dt)2, and therefore of dt, than I did. Ask the students how to interpret this calculation. Hopefully they will understand what it means; the person sitting on the side of the railroad tracks will see her own clock tick more than an hour while mine only ticks one hour. Therefore, she will see my time (in other words, my clock and everything else on my train) slow down. Ask the students what I would see as I looked out the train window at the person sitting on the side of the tracks. The answer is that I would see her time slow down; all motion is relative, so from my point of view I am sitting still and she is moving through space, so she must be moving through time slower than I am, and therefore her clock and everything else outside the train will slow down. Explain that although this effect appears to be an optical illusion that each person sees when looking at the other person, the effect is actually real and can be used to travel through time into the future. Students can imagine a space traveler who goes off in a rocket ship at very fast speeds (near the speed of light) and then turns around and comes back to Earth. Because the traveler had to fire his rockets to decelerate his ship and turn it around, he wasnt moving on a straight line through spacetime, so the above analysis isnt valid from his point of view. But it is valid from the point of view of the people who stayed on Earth, and it turns out that if you do a careful analysis from the point of view of the space traveler, he will also agree on the end result. The travelers clock will have run slower throughout the course of his trip, so that he may only have aged 2 years during his journey, while everyone back on Earth might have aged, say, 50 years! He will therefore come back to Earth and find that he has traveled 48 years into the future. Any children he fathered before leaving Earth may now be old enough to be his parents! Explain to the students that there are many other effects that can be derived from the above equations. For example, the lengths of moving objects will appear to shrink along their direction of motion; a moving meter stick will appear shorter than a meter. The

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equations also tell us that its possible for a space traveler to traverse any distance in the universe within a human lifetime, provided that his spaceship can move arbitrarily close to the speed of light.10 Relativity tells us that there is no theoretical limit to the regions of space we are able to explore! The Global Positioning System The Global Positioning System (GPS) is a worldwide system of satellites which is able to tell anyone with a GPS receiver his exact location on Earth, down to an accuracy of a few meters. GPS has many important applications; the military uses it to hit targets accurately, and civilians around the world use it every day to keep from getting lost. We will see in this session that GPS would fail miserably if scientists didnt understand the theory of relativity. Explain to the students that the basic principle of GPS is that if you know the location of an object with respect to the center of the Earth, and if you known your own location with respect to that reference object, then it is easy to calculate your location with respect to the center of the Earth in other words, your position on the Earths surface. GPS uses satellites as its reference objects. Ask the students if they can think of some advantages of this choice. One advantage is that orbiting satellites are high up in the sky and easily visible from anywhere on Earth (so you only need a few of them in order to guarantee that everyone will be able to use GPS regardless of his location). Another advantage is that satellites orbit in space, where there is no air resistance to worry about, so it is relatively easy to calculate their precise orbits (and therefore know their precise locations) from simple laws of physics. Explain to the students that if you know your distance from several of these satellites, it is possible to figure out your exact location with respect to them and therefore with respect to the center of the Earth. Draw a point on the board and tell the students that this represents one of the GPS satellites. Suppose I know that I am located somewhere on the board, 1 foot away from this point. What shape are all the possible places I might be: (A) a square with sides 1 foot or (B) a circle with radius 1 foot? The correct answer is (B). Draw this circle on the board, and then draw another point (representing a second GPS satellite) with a circle around it. The circles should intersect at two points. Explain to the students that if the first GPS satellite tells you that youre somewhere on the first circle, and the second GPS satellite tells you that youre somewhere on the second circle, then you have to be at one of the two points where the satellites intersect.
10

From the point of view of the traveler, the distance to his destination will shrink to an arbitrarily small value, and from the point of view of an outside observer, the travelers clock will tick arbitrarily slowly, allowing him plenty of time to reach his distant destination.

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Ask the students how they would go about figuring out which of the two points they are located at. The answer is that the two points are located very far away from each other, so it should be obvious from other clues which one is the real location; for example, in most situations one of the points will be on the surface of the Earth and the other will be far off in outer space, so its pretty obvious which point youre located at! Ask the students how many satellites we would need if we wanted to know our location in three dimensions, not just on the two-dimensional blackboard. Hopefully, they will figure out that we need to add a third satellite; each satellite gives us a sphere of possible locations, and the intersection of the three spheres tells us where we are. Three satellites would be enough if each satellite were able to tell us its exact distance from us, but unfortunately, it cant do that. The satellite knows its exact location, and it knows its exact time because it carries an atomic clock on board, but it doesnt know anything about where we are. All it can do is broadcast radio waves communicating its exact location at every point in time; this is the information we get on our GPS receiver. If we had an atomic clock on our GPS receiver, we could easily solve the problem. That is, we could calculate the distance to each satellite by subtracting the time the GPS signal tells us it was emitted from the time our own atomic clock tells us it was received.11 However, atomic clocks are extremely expensive, and it turns out there is a much cheaper way to get the information we need. Instead of using the signal from three GPS satellites, we can use the signal from four satellites; this extra information allows us to figure out where we are located in space and time. There are several ways to understand how this works, but the clearest one is to think of things in four-dimensional spacetime. If we needed two satellites to get our location in two-dimensional space and three to get our location in three-dimensional space, then clearly we need four to get our location in four-dimensional spacetime. Ask the students what the distance from us to each satellite is in four-dimensional spacetime, keeping in mind that for each satellite, the first event is the satellite sends us a radio wave and the second event is we receive the radio wave. Hopefully, students will realize from our previous discussion that the interval (four-dimensional distance) for each pair of events must be 0, since these are light events! In that case, we know the interval between us and four separate satellites in four-dimensional spacetime, so we can calculate our location in space and our location in time. Notice that we get some free information with our GPS receiver; in addition to telling us where we are located on the Earth, it also tells us the time, with the accuracy of an atomic clock. Ask the students if they can think of some ways in which the theory of relativity would be used in GPS. Perhaps the most basic way is that we always use c = 300,000
11

Note that an atomic clock is necessary if we want to know our location to an accuracy of a few meters; if we divide a few meters by the speed of light, we obtain something like 10 nanoseconds, or 0.00000001 seconds, for our required time accuracy.

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kilometers per second for the speed of light in all our GPS calculations, regardless of how we and the satellites are moving with respect to each other. This is in accordance with Einsteins argument that the speed of light is constant for all observers. We also need to take into account the fact that as seen by us on Earth, the GPS satellites are moving at relatively high speeds; therefore, we will perceive their clocks to run slower than they actually are, and we need to take this discrepancy into account. Finally, Earths gravity curves spacetime; we therefore need to take into account the fact that the beam of radio waves moves through curved spacetime on its journey from the satellite to us. Specifically, clocks tick slower near the surface of the Earth, so we have to correct for the fact that our clocks are ticking slower than the ones aboard the satellites, which are orbiting at a large distance. It turns out that if we didnt take into account these effects, we would get errors in the GPS times on the order of 10 microseconds per day (0.00001 seconds). Earlier, we said that GPS needs to be accurate to 10 nanoseconds in order to get a positional accuracy of a few meters. Without taking into account the theory of relativity, GPS would be 1000 times worse than it actually is; we would only know our position on Earth to an accuracy of a few kilometers (and it would get worse every day). You could be driving down one street, and the GPS receiver in your car would tell you that you are actually located halfway across town! In short, without taking into account the theory of relativity, GPS would be completely useless.

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Resource Materials I found many of the following materials useful in preparing to teach this course. They are good sources of material (written at the popular level) for students or teachers interested in learning more about the theory of relativity. Books: Black Holes and Time Warps (by Kip Thorne) Written by an expert on relativity; talks about black holes, worm holes, time travel, etc. How the Universe Got Its Spots (by Janna Levin) Discusses the size and shape of the universe; also an autobiography which talks about the personal struggles of being a young scientist Einsteins Dreams (by Alan Lightman) Short essays about what the world would be like if time worked in different ways Flatland (by Edwin Abbott Abbott) Fictional story of life in a two-dimensional world, and what happens when people in that world discover the third dimension Relativity Visualized (by Lewis Carroll Epstein) Ways to understand relativity without using math A Journey into Gravity and Spacetime (by John Wheeler) Another book about relativity from an expert in the field; this ones a little more advanced Einsteins Mirror (by Tony Hey & Patrick Walters) Talks about the many experiments which have validated the theory of relativity Relativity for the Million (by Martin Gardner) A book about relativity for general audiences; a bit old, and some of it is very out of date, but it has some very good explanations of several topics; note that a newer version has been published under the name Relativity Simply Explained Relativity: The Special and General Theory (by Albert Einstein) Einsteins own description of relativity, written for a general audience; this book is very old and sometimes confusing, but very interesting if you want to see what motivated Einstein to come up with his theories! Websites: Ask an Astronomer at Cornell University (curious.astro.cornell.edu) This website (which I help run) has sections on relativity, black holes and many other topics Astronomy Picture of the Day (antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod)

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Lots of great pictures about all areas of astronomy, each with a paragraph explanation The Hubble Space Telescope (hubble.nasa.gov ; hubblesite.org ; heritage.stsci.edu) Lots of pretty pictures from Hubble The Theory of Relativity in Words of Four Letters or Less (http://www.muppetlabs.com/~breadbox/txt/al.html) Exactly as described a very amusing read

Trimble GPS tutorial (www.trimble.com/gps)

A good discussion of how GPS works Sources for Session 5: Note that some of the following material may be copyrighted, but most of it is not. Image #1: Black Holes: Out With a Bang (www.valdosta.edu/phy/astro/pl_shows/bh_2001/bh) From a planetarium show at the Department of Physics, Astronomy & Geosciences at Valdosta State University; the image used here is #35 in the show Image #2: Astronomy Picture of the Day (antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap001220.html) Image by A. Eckart & R. Genzel, SHARP I, NTT, La Silla Observatory, ESO Images #3 and #4: UCLA Galactic Center Group (www.astro.ucla.edu/~jlu/gc/pictures) Images by A. Ghez et al. Image #5: Imagine the Universe (imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/science/know_l1/emspectrum.html) Image #6: Astronomy Picture of the Day (antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap030806.html) Image by M. Rejkuba et al., ISAAC, VLT ANU telescope, ESO Paranal Observatory Image #7: Chandra X-ray Observatory (chandra.harvard.edu/photo/cycle1/0157blue) Image by NASA, SAO, R. Kraft et al. Image #8: SEDS (www.seds.org/hst/ngc4261.html) Image by the Hubble Space Telescope Image #9:

Image from a paper by D. Rothstein, S. Eikenberry & K. Matthews, 2004, The Astrophysical Journal (to be submitted)

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Image #10: Astronomy Picture of the Day (antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap021008.html) Image by CXC, NASA; illustration by M. Weiss (CXC) Image #11: Homepage of Luis Rodriguez (www.astrosmo.unam.mx/~luisfr) Image by F. Mirabel & L. Rodriguez; the animation used here is the file grs_anim.gif in the above directory Image #12: The Astrophysical Journal (www.journals.uchicago.edu/ApJ/journal/issues/ApJL/v494n1/975737/975737.html) Image from a paper by S. Eikenberry et al., 1998, The Astrophysical Journal, volume 494, page L61 Images #13 and #14: Virtual Trips to Black Holes and Neutron Stars (antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/htmltest/rjn_bht.html) Animations by R. Nemiroff

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Appendix This appendix contains an evaluation form and quiz that can be handed out to students at the completion of the mini-course. The answers to the quiz are given below.
(1) #1, #3 and #5 are the straight lines. (#2 may also be; its not really clear without tracing it out carefully on a globe.) (2) #3 is the shortest path between Ithaca and Rome. (3) #3 is a straight line path between Ithaca and Rome. (4) #5 is the straight line path you would take if you started off in Ithaca heading east. (5) #1 is the straight line path you would take if you started off in Ithaca heading north. (6) (a) dt = 1 year (b) dy = 0 and dz = 0 (c) dx = 1 light-year (since he sees it moving at the speed of light) (d) ds = 0 (e) ds = 0 (since all observers must measure the same ds) (f) dx = 0 (since she is moving with the light beam) (g) dt = 0 (h) Since dt = 0 for the second observer, Mr. Armstrong would see no time pass by on her clock during the full 1 year that passes on his. He would therefore see her frozen and would never notice that she was trying to wave to him.

(7) If someone forced your head and feet to each move perfectly north, they both would wind up exactly on the North Pole. Your body would either have to contract along its length, or fold up in an uncomfortable way, in order to allow this to happen. Even though your head and feet both moved in initially parallel straight lines, these straight line paths eventually cross, forcing your body into an uncomfortable position. Something similar happens near a black hole. Your head and feet both try to move along straight lines; however, in this case, the straight line paths diverge because spacetime is curved. Therefore, your body will be stretched and ripped apart as your head and feet follow their different straight line paths.

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Evaluation
Einstein for Everyone mini-course

What did you think of each of the major activities we did in the mini-course? (1 = terrible; 5 = wonderful) Close your eyes and imagine walking around activity going from Ithaca to Rome activity mapmaking activity (tracing out tennis ball on Saran Wrap) Optical illusions / Lord of the Rings Throwing tennis balls (timing how long it takes to hit the ground) Discussion/pictures of gravity bending light Gravity curves spacetime discussion (analogy between curved space and the surface of the Earth being curved) Black hole video Einsteins Dreams and skits Relativity without gravity / mathematics of relativity and time travel Voting on multiple choice questions activity Discussion of how GPS works

1 1 1 1 1 1

2 2 2 2 2 2

3 3 3 3 3 3

4 4 4 4 4 4

5 5 5 5 5 5

wasnt in class that day wasnt in class that day wasnt in class that day wasnt in class that day wasnt in class that day wasnt in class that day

wasnt in class that day

1 1 1 1 1

2 2 2 2 2

3 3 3 3 3

4 4 4 4 4

5 5 5 5 5

wasnt in class that day wasnt in class that day wasnt in class that day wasnt in class that day wasnt in class that day

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1. How was the pace of the course? Too fast, too slow, just right?

2. Did we cover material that you were interested in, or were there other subjects that you would rather have learned about?

3. Overall, what did you think of my teaching style? Was there anything I could have done to improve?

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Quiz

(1) Which of the above five lines are straight lines (geodesics) on a globe? (2) Which is the shortest path between Ithaca and Rome, #3 or #4? (3) Which is a route that you could use to walk between Ithaca and Rome if you walk by putting one foot exactly in front of the other, #3 or #4? (assume you can walk on water) (4) Which is the path you would take if you started in Ithaca heading EAST, then walked by putting one foot exactly in front of the other, #3, #4 or #5? (5) Which is the path you would take if you started in Ithaca heading NORTH, then walked by putting one foot exactly in front of the other, #1 or #2?

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(6) Use the following formula:

ds2 = dx2 + dy2 + dz2 - (c dt)2

Suppose we have a light beam that moves in the x direction. The observer is: Mr. Armstrong The two events we are interested in are: The lights location now The lights location when Mr. Armstrong measures himself to have aged 1 year. (a) What does Mr. Armstrong measure for dt between these two events? (b) What does he measure for dy and dz? (Hint: theyre the same) (c) What does he measure for dx (in units of light-years)? (d) What does he measure for ds, the interval between the two events? (e) Now consider a different observer, one who is riding along the light beam. What does she measure for ds between the same pair of events? (f) What does she measure for dx? (g) What does she measure for dt? (h) Based on your answer to parts (a) and (g), what would Mr. Armstrong see as the woman flies past him? What would he see if she tried to wave hi to him?

(7) Einstein says that gravity isnt a force. If youre falling under the influence of gravity, you

wont feel anything pulling on you; youll just feel like youre floating (i.e. the Lord of the Rings example, or astronauts in orbit around the Earth). However, if you get too close to a black hole, we said in class that the black holes gravity will pull harder on the part of you which is closest to it and therefore stretch you out like a piece of spaghetti and rip you apart. (This effect is sometimes called the tidal force, because its a more extreme version of what causes ocean tides on the Earth.) How can you explain what the black hole does to you if gravity isnt really a force, but rather a curvature of spacetime through which everything moves in straight lines? (Hint: Remember that a rough analogy for curved spacetime is the curvature of the Earths surface. Suppose you were to lie down along the equator, and somebody forced your feet and your head to each move NORTH in a perfectly straight line. What would happen to your body when you got to the North Pole?)

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