(3 of 4)
E. F. Fitzgerald discovered that an object changes its shape somewhat, according to its position or movement. Albert Einstein proved that objects change with time, that time itself is not a definite thing. It is different according to the viewpoint. Your hour is not my hour. . . . The scientists, in short, got a long way from the short man rapidly walking down a broad street. They had noted details. The short man was perhaps 5 ft. 4 in. tall; he weighed 145 Ibs.; wore unpolished black leather half-shoes, black lisle socks, a grey tweed suit, a taupe-colored felt hat pulled down over his bespectacled hazel eyes. His black, curly hair was awry and needed cutting. His hands were in his pockets, with one nickel, one dime and one quarter. Other people of other descriptions were milling and bumping around him with other gaits. Traffic was moving, rumbling and screeching. The earth quaked from subway trains and building blasting. . . .
Only a superb mind could note and keep track of all those people, all their attributes, all their movements. Albert Einstein's is such a superb mind.
In his world nothing stands still. All moves; all changes. There are no straight lines. Everything curves. The world has an end but no boundary. It is like an orange with the rind pared down to nothing and the pips taken out. Within and around that imaginary sphere which remains of the orange, intangible forces wave in every direction. Some waves bump and dampen each other's motion until they have no movement left. But their energy is not lost. It goes into other waves which may bump and merge and thereby strengthen each other. Electrons and protons form and attract each other. They create atoms of matter, the atoms molecules, the molecules earth, water, air. Fire (heat) is one effect of their interaction.
The Einstein world is a great "field" which has height, breadth, depth and time as its elements. Measuring those four elements requires a new kind of geometry—fourth dimensional geometry, Einstein geometry. It is infinitely more complicated than Euclidean geometry taught at high schools and colleges.
Special Theory of Relativity. Einstein did not develop his conception of the world suddenly. He began by suspecting that nothing in the world was privileged, neither matter, nor motion, nor anything else. His suspicion led to the perception that there is one great physical law which describes everything.
First he inspected electrical and magnetic phenomena. Everyone knows, and had known, that they are intimately related. Electricity flowing through a wire coiled around a piece of iron makes that iron magnetic. As a piece of wire passes between the prongs of a horseshoe magnet, an electric current is generated. James Clerk Maxwell showed that the laws of electricity and of magnetism were very much alike. Albert Einstein, in 1905. showed that the forces were different aspects of the same mother force.
Maxwell said that two orphan boys resembled each other very much. Albert Einstein hunted around until he found that they were brothers, sons of the-same electro-magnetic mother.