In 1905 Albert Einstein published his (Wikipedia) Theory of General Relativity .
This post has been included on this site mainly because that in order to understand the theory or explain it in basic terms, one must be willing to view it as a reality whose phenomena are modified by and become a part of one’s perception of it. In that way it has some similarity to our practice of healing in the tradition of Sat Nam Rasayan. In either case, we recognize that we are immersed in a universe that defies any orthogonal or even linear representation of it. In it our perception becomes a “transverse” experience of what we commonly agree to as time and space. Practitioners of the Healing Art of Sat Nam Rasayan may be able to recognize intuitively some aspects of what Einstein’s theory explains. Physicists recognize that the fabric of time and space, i.e., space-time geometry is distorted in the presence of a strong gravitational field. In it neither space nor time behave independently nor in the linear way in which we are accustomed to observing the universe. One can still devise equations that describe the mechanics of motion and time, much like Sir Isaac Newton did centuries ago, but they must operate in a new geometry where space-time is not orthogonal nor a constant, but distorted by gravity.
It has been agreed generally among physicists that Einstein’s theory of general relativity should reliably predict the behavior of matter and energy in space-time. The question in the scientific community has been, does it describe reality? Where is the proof?
A generally agreed on basis for a proof for this lay in the measurement of “gravity waves”. Gravity waves are described as phenomena that appear in the presence of a gravitational field that produce forces that interact with matter producing local orthogonal periodic “tides” and that travel over vast distances much as electromagnetic radiation does. The proof rests in the assumption that gravity waves could be detected and that the observed behavior of matter under their influence matches the mathematical models. The problem is that gravity is a weak force and astronomical events that could produce measurable tidal distortions across a vast distance would have to be enormous, even by astrophysical standards.
Well, Professor Kip Thorne and his colleagues built an apparatus (LIGO) that measured just such an event one night in February. It was the merging of two black holes 1.3 billion light years distant that produced an energy output of about 3 solar (our sun) masses (E=mc2) of energy, over a duration of about 0.5 second. The measured tidal distortion waves matched the mathematical models perfectly, not once, but twice, in two redundant instruments located in Louisiana and in Washington State…QED
On this page below is a link to an audio recording of Professor Thorne’s lecture on the subject from March 11, 2016.
My audio recording of the event
See Caltech’s You Tube video of the same event
Kip Thorne is a professor of theoretical physics at Caltech http://www.its.caltech.edu/~kip/
He was involved with the project to build apparatus to measure gravity waves. LIGO
He consulted with the producers of the movie Interstellar regarding what happens in the vicinity of a black hole.
http://www.amazon.com/The-Science-Interstellar-Kip-Thorne/dp/0393351378.
It’s kind of like how Arthur C Clark wrote 2001: A Space Odyssey after the movie came out. There is also an article in Scientific American
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/parsing-the-science-of-interstellar-with-physicist-kip-thorne/
Here’s a meditation: Master Time and Space
