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Paul Johnson's popular history of the twentieth century opens thus: "The Modern World began on 29 May 1919 when photographs of a solar eclipse, taken on the island of Principe off West Africa and at Sobral in Brazil, confirmed the truth of a new theory of the universe."1 The new theory of the universe was Einstein's General Relativity, a radical, mysterious, new explanation of gravity, destined to replace the more intuitive and accessible theory of Isaac Newton that had inspired and sustained the Enlightenment.
The emergence of the new theory also signaled the arrival of what cultural anthropologist Chris Toumey has called "Old Testament Science," a science "respected without comprehension" and revered because of "awesome signs," like the God of the Old Testament.2 This kind of science could not be popularized in a way that could be understood by the educated person. General Relativity was a highly mathematical description of space, time, matter, and their interactions. Time and space lost their straightforward Newtonian identities and dissolved into an abstraction called "spacetime." What we used to think of as time became another dimension, somehow similar to the more familiar dimensions of space, and perhaps something we could travel through instead of merely ride along. The formerly clear-cut notions of "space" and "time" were replaced by "spacelike intervals" and "timelike intervals," themselves abstractions from the physical structure known as "spacetime."
Spacetime is a four-dimensional matrix that can be twisted and distorted by massive bodies like stars in ways that are highly counterintuitive and even bizarre. Light, for example, no longer travels in "straight" lines; a planet in an orbit close to a star, like Mercury, does does not retrace its path each time around like its more distant companions; clocks run at different rates depending on the strength of the local gravitational field. Perhaps the most bizarre element of the theory is the prediction of black holes—collapsed stars with such intense gravitational fields that nothing, not even light, can escape them.
But that is not all. Certain mathematical solutions to the equations of relativity imply that spacetime can be warped in such a way that widely separated regions can actually connect to each other, much the same way that a steel rod might be bent into a circle so that the "ends"—initially as far from each other as possible—actually become adjacent, making what used to be the longest possible journey for an ant crawling along the rod the shortest. These different parts of spacetime are connected via "wormholes" which are "tunnels" with each end of the tunnel in a different part of "space" and "time."
But this suggests that something, say a spaceship filled with people who really wanted to hear Chopin perform live, could at least conceivably travel through such a tunnel to the past (or the future) and maybe even come back. And this in turn raises all the conventional paradoxes of time travel—like what would happen if you went back in time and killed your mother before you were born. Heady stuff. How are we to interpret and understand all of this? The truth of the matter is that it simply isn't possible to "understand" these and other esoteric phenomena of relativity in any meaningful sense of the word—this, after all, is "Old Testament Science" at its best.
Enter Clifford Pickover, research staff member at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research center, columnist, and author of an impressive if odd collection of books with titles such as The Alien IQ Test, Black Holes: A Traveler's Guide, Chaos in Wonderland, Keys to Infinity, The Loom of God, and Strange Brains and Genius.
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