It's Not All Relative

If any word defines the 20th-century cultural and intellectual ethos, it is "relativity." The century began with Albert Einstein proposing theories that were understood both as showing that the cosmos can be deeply puzzling (a typical Einsteinian finding: moving faster makes your weight increase while your dimensions shrink, but you age more slowly) and that there is no "correct" view of physical reality. Taking off from this, thinkers have since proposed that everything is relative. Morality, art, literature, systems of government, faith--nothing is clearly good or bad, no one thing is true while other things are wrong. It's all relative. Many who maintain that relativity rules ground their assertions in Einstein. After all, didn't history's most brilliant scientist prove that nothing is definite?

Yet Einstein's theories do not say this, at least not in the way many people think. And certainly, Einstein's ideas of relativity have nothing to do with whether we should believe in God, as many people seem to think, assuming Einstein to have been the ultimate pure-science atheist. Einstein was a theist, believing that a creator is present but rejecting organized religion. He penned such thoughts as, "God reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists." Had Einstein chosen only slightly different words for his work, he might have sent the century an entirely different message.

In 1905, Einstein published his first big idea: the Special Theory of Relativity. This postulate held that physical laws are the same for all observers regardless of position and speed; that the speed of light is always the same from all points of view; and that matter and energy are equivalent (that's the E=MC2 part). For techno-reasons we can skip here, applying these three assertions overturned classical, or "Newtonian," physics, which assumed that the universe is simply a gigantic version of the same effects seen on Earth. Under the Special Theory of Relativity, for example, there is no fixed length for an object. To an observer standing on Earth, a 10-foot pole is 10 feet long; to an observer in a spacecraft at high velocity, it may appear five feet long. Neither is the "correct" dimension; both are equally valid relative to perspective. Under the Special Theory, time can "dilate," seeming to move at different rates from different perspectives. In unusual circumstances, even the order of events may become unclear. That is, two different observers might have opposite opinions on whether A came before B or B came before A.

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