Still Another Victory? Einstein's third prediction--the shifting of
spectral lines toward the red end of the spectrum in the case of light
coming to us from the stars of appreciable mass--seems to have been
confirmed recently (March, 1920). "The young physicists in Bonn,"
writes Prof. Einstein to a friend, "have now as good as certainty
(so gut wie sicher) proved the red displacement of the spectral lines
and have cleared up the grounds of a previous disappointment."
Summary. Velocity, or movement in space, is at the basis of Einstein's
work, as it was at the basis of Newton's. But time and space no
longer have the distinct meanings that they had when examined with
the help of Newton's equations. Time and space are not independent but
interdependent. They are meaningless when treated as separate entities,
giving results which may hold for one body in the universe but do not
hold for any other body. To get general laws which are applicable to
the cosmos as a whole the Fundamentals of Mechanics must be united.
Einstein's great achievement consists in applying this
revised conception of space and time to elucidate cosmical
problems. "World-lines," representing the progress of particles in
space, consisting of space-time combinations (the four dimensions),
are "strained" or "distorted" in space due to the attraction that
bodies exhibit for one another (the force of gravitation). On
the other hand, gravitation itself--more universal than anything
else in the universe--may be interpreted in terms of strains on
world-lines, or, what amounts to the same thing, strains of space-time
combinations. This brings gravitation within the field of Einstein's
conception of time and space.
That Einstein's conception of the universe is an improvement upon that
of Newton's is evidenced by the fact that Einstein's law explains all
that Newton's law does, and also other facts which Newton's law is
incapable of explaining. Among these may be mentioned the distortion
of the oval orbits of planets round the sun (confirmed in the case of
the planet Mercury), and the deviation of light rays in a gravitational
field (confirmed by the English Solar Eclipse Expedition).
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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