Crtd 15-10-00  Lastedit 20-12-13

Relativity Theory
Maybe this was just TOO crazy

After recently finishing the part of Musil's Der Mann Ohne Eigenschaften that had set out to relate [see my Musil relation], I had promised myself to finally acquire understanding of relativity theory, probably because Musil's protagonist Ulrich's last career disappointment had been ... mathematics! Ulrich's disappointment came a few days before the day where Musil's book starts: for the first time a horse had had been called "genial" in a newspaper which had prompted him to abandon his highly promising university math post with immediate effect. He was 32, very good at it,  known in the literature for some results. No doubt he knew relativity theory: it was new, sensational, and if you are trained to read it, you do so. Surely if you are Ulrich. But then came the genial horse. At the start of Musil's book, Ulrich had lost his very last jealousy and ambition and, now firmly aware of the ridiculous state of man, from small to great, and his history, took time off to search back in Vienna for purpose, albeit with a worryingly blank notebook.

Not me. I would need quite a bit more time to loose my ambitions, also to learn relativity theory, certainly after reading, in Der Mann, the opinions of top Austrian Imperial government dignitary Graf Leinsdorf, who shouted in 1913, when Einstein was engaged in publishing his general version of relativity theory while few yet had understood the previous very simply first version: "This psychoanalysis and relativity theory or how you call all that crap, it bubbles up irresponsibly, and does not care for the larger social consequences! ... we quickly knock something together and before we even started to look whether it is something viable we are already engaged with the next, or even missed the whole thing! A piggery!". I can't help thinking of those cats and dogs of new Microsoft Windows versions raining on us. And not only that! His Serene Highness Count Leinsdorf had a point indeed.

But I had no time for relativity theory: my head, in 1982, was fully occupied with my dissertation that caused, to my total surprise, a row among the midget economics professors of Amsterdam University in 1983 and then got read by nobody, at least nobody serious - probably no reason for the world to mourn, though it is excellent, original and could have helped the intelligent mathematical economist to efficiently order his procedures - but again: there surely was no disaster there to prevent. Anyway, who listens to them?

I am still remembering with pleasure the making that analysis, 25 years old, with a university salary that I totally failed to consume, a 25% teaching load and no publication pressure to threaten the quality of my work.

... my summer 1982 first reading (it looks I've just started!) of Musil's Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften (got into it through Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus by Ulrich's contemporary Viennese Ludwig Wittgenstein who no doubt forms a substantial part of Musil's material for Ulrich's personality) while writing my dissertation on dynamic logico-mathematical analysis of economic theories  (published as Neoclassical Theory Structure and Theory Development, Studies in Contemporary Economics, Vol. 4, Berlin, Heidelberg, New York, Tokyo: Springer Verlag, 1983 ...

In my early academic profession, relativity theory was the most admired of theories. This surely was caused by its overturning of a very admired and totally established general theory of physics, Newtonian mechanics, replacing it with something looking very weird to the ordinary eye which nevertheless yields more accurate predictions and descriptions of physical processes.

In the nineteenth century, the prediction and description problems of Newtonian mechanics increased with the increase of the number of ways and of the accuracy by which one learned to measure not only body movements, but especially electricity and light in the nineteenth century. A proliferation of inperspicuous and unsatisfactoy special laws and corrections to match theory with measurement began to cause more and more headaches and frustrations among theoretical physicists: things became a mess!

Roughly the choices were to 1) let chaos grow, 2) try to find a general error in which mankind was used, for thousands of years, to measure time, or distance, or both, or, by far the most absurd option, 3) to concede that our way to measure meters and seconds did not result in the identical quantities for every method of measuring physical processes, that is, to concede that when meters and seconds in a system are measured from another system that moves, they are meters and seconds of different lengths. This most absurd third option to straighten the growing mass of measurement "errors" out (implying they were no errors after all) turned out to win the prize, gain general acceptance and become the new truth.

First, as so often in such cases, the idea was proposed by a nerd who had found a living outside the academic world. After all, universities were originally founded to maintain tradition, and keep doing so up into the wearing of those ridiculous black guild suits of three centuries ago. We should be happy that this outsider did so a century ago, since nowadays he would surely not have found people willing to consider his very strange and difficult solution of the puzzle. There are so many of those fools aren't there? And we have no more time nowadays to read other people's thoughts: we have to publish!

Einstein presented a crude relativity theory for very special cases of systems moving in space without any acceleration or deceleration, hence even without gravity forces.

Many physicists, and not the worst, opposed relativity theory. Despite the extremely restrictive conditions of the first version, these Heroic Defenders of Academic Tradition quickly lost the battle, due to overwhelming success of relativity in applying to many cases with far less need for cumbersome special corrections to make things fit. Relativity theory soon did better in quite some applications than Newtonian mechanics in describing lots of processes involving, roughly, speeds of more than 100,000 km/sec, that is more than about a third of the speed of light. Those are areas way off the public domain, only known to specialist physics experimenters. In generally known common lower speed processes relativity should be better than Newton as well, but measurement had not yet reached the required precision to measure the difference, and once it finally started to do so, these differences were, usually, only of interest to experts.

My good luck was to find an emeritus professor of physics in the 12footdinghy racing competitions, so I could get some help collecting the literature and solving problems. But those came earlier than I thought and were more serious: in a popular exposition, Einstein does the fundamental Lorentz transformation. The most simple case even. The math is easy, but I got no clue whatsoever what we were talking about: space and time shift relative to the objects moving around but the speed of light is assumed constant. But what is "constant"? Speed means: abridging some amount of space in some amount of time. Now it does so while both keep changing. That light must be smart indeed to keep track of all those movements, far smarter than myself to say the least!  I might need a real teacher ...

... Lorentz-transformation. This was most of what Einstein needed for his first (1905) revolution ...

The Utrecht University web site turned out a total disaster. Paddling around a home page that was aggressively trying to divert my attention to a "virtual sleeping coach" and an "anti-teasing program", I found, with great strain, a course name "mechanics", but could not even find the address of the offices of the physics staff, let alone the books, lecture rooms  and times of service. Nothing left but taking my car and heading for the "Uithof".

At the entrance of the large university campus a signpost encourages me to navigate on the name of the street I wish to reach. A bit discouraging for I had come in search of it. The design of the campus clearly shows how its planners had wanted the world to be: wide empty bicycle lanes and bus lanes, empty buses hence and forth. Totally crammed paid parking lots with electronic signposts "FULL" in front, in between spacy grass fields that nobody ever uses except the extensive fleet of motorized lawn mowers ... and even sheep, at some places. I considered I might move towards and around in Uithof cheaply and with carefree parking on a sheep, but wait ... could not even a donkey or a horse do the job ... ecology and all that ... turds would contribute to the global warming we need to survive the upcoming end of the interglacial ...

"Physics"? To the university security officer engaged in writing number plates of illegally parked cars that word not ring a bell, but he did give me a quarter of compass that held, in his opinion, an above-average chance. I managed to park. Legally. Large distances from car parks to venues made me lucky with the foldable bike I routinely keep in my car, but it would get stolen a week later.

I entered a building. Its signpost featured the building's name, that of someone I never heard of - not was I ambitious to - but nothing else, in particular: not what could be found inside. An exiting student apologized for not knowing the whereabouts of physics: he was in informatics. I asked the muscular Arabic receptionist for the physics department, but his face made clear that both the term "physics" and the word "department" needed more explanation (where in the latter case I made no progress trying the word "faculty").

"Well you know", the muscular Arabic receptionist told me, "This is the beta building".

"That's not so bad at all", I replied "physics is pretty beta. But is there any staff up here?"

"Staff ...", the man repeated with some hesitation.

"I mean the office rooms of the people who teach here".

"Oh yes, cross the hall and go up".

... I thought I was wrong: which physicist in his senses would associate himself with a man so mistaken in his physical ideas as Spinoza, who, MIND YOU, lived under Newton, so could easily have learned the physics of his time ...

I first thought I was dreaming: which physicist in his senses would associate himself with a man so mistaken in his physical ideas as Spinoza, who live when Newton's works reached Holland, who could easily have learned decent physics instead of sticking to outdated Cartesian crap of a universe totally filled with very fine particles, with no gravity, so they can only push each other and form kind of twisters, small and big. Yes, he really believed such twisters pushed the planets round en kept pushing himself against the surface of the earth.

... trotting up: police arrest wing colours and hardware, physicists should be locked up firmly, seems the opinion ...

... blue darkness, blind doors ...

... Top floor: Spinoza Instituut ...

Behind that door I suddenly was in a bright comfortable top floor unit with lots of roof light. A top research institute in physics. Spacy rooms, though usually shared. In some, people were typing, in others two or three were talking matrices, tensors, equilibria and filling chalk boards with wide gestures. One thing was clear: if I would be given a desk here and allowed to ask any question arising while studying relativity, I would be done in a few days. The other: I did not belong here. These guys and girls were too good. All around thirty, no Dutch people either, except for the manager who kindly named the building where they know all about bachelor teaching.

Thank you.

Would not want to have missed this short digression.

... Homing in on target, my foldable bike did not mind me to stay away long ...

The "Buys Ballot" building was surrounded by bicycles of the encouraging type: the ones with those locks of a price equal to the bike itself. And the reception staff knew the room number of Els, the manager of physics courses. Els gave me all data of my mechanics course, and a staff web page to find those data next time.

... reception knew Els' room, she helped me out ...

Not long after I returned home, my schedule sported signs it had not seen for 16 years (blue is 12footdinghy competition sailing):

... Last time my schedule sported this type of shit was December 1999 (but then even worse: as a lecturer)  ...

They had already started some weeks ago, but classical mechanics (Newton, Kepler) had been done as well, most of which should be familiar to me.

So, the next Monday morning my alarm clock unchained me, I arrived early, students told me what books and what lecture notes were used, and what is the floor and room number to buy them.

... this is serious! ...

There I sat, taking blackboard shots every one of which seemed to require hours of work at home. Students are updated by a digital "blackboard" of which I of course have no login. Well, by now I should have enough. I now realized why my search for my target had been a bit erratic: I had accidentally taken a shrewd unused inroad over a campus security officer, muscular Arab receptionist, Spinoza and Els. Smartly circumventing the university's web welcoming page's "virtual sleeping coach" and "anti-teasing program", I inadvertently managed to squeeze my notoriously oversized body through an unmonetized mouse hole entrance! I saved a value of at least some sizeable boxes of excellent Cuban sigars, very agreeable smoking while covering paper with math (and then throwing most them in the dustbin).

150 audience or so. Astronomy and physics bachelors. At face value I seemed the only black student. Among these 17 and 18 year olds there were one or two half African, quite some Asian, even more Arabic, everyone speaking Dutch. By far most students were white and Dutch, but clearly from all strata of society: here selection had been on brains only! What a relief hearing them talking functions and equations in the intermission instead of the ordinary adolescent bullshit.

... On September 28, 2015, I starting to cover paper with math ...

... old habits revived: non-digital hardware use ...

Since I last used non digital studying hardware twenty years ago (I lost my last books in a tornado on Lake Victoria, without much regret: all on internet now) the quality of colour pencils have risen, multo-ring handling has become even more comfortable, pencil sharpeners have further improved, geo-triangles are thinner and more flexible and there still is replacement filling for my beloved carbon pencil (left at arrow) I kept on me for over 15 years living in the Alps, Africa, and wandering with my Kangoo microcamper from Inverness to Marrakech.