Illustration: Matt Manley

In this centennial year of Albert Einstein's revolutionary theories of space, time, and gravity, humanities scholars say that his influence extended far beyond science.

Time is a nebulous thing, except maybe for lunchtime. That's a lesson from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, the science-fiction romp by Douglas Adams that was thrown into Hollywood's Infinite Improba bility Drive and emerged as an early-summer movie hit.

Consider the elaborately imagined history of the Guide itself, and of its various editors. We learn that one Lig Lury Jr., hired by a publishing consortium operating from a chunk of celestial real estate called Ursa Minor Beta, "never formally resigned his editorship--he merely left his office late one morning, and has never returned since. Though well over a century has now passed, many members of the Guide staff still retain the romantic notion that he has simply popped out for a sandwich and will yet return to put in a solid afternoon's work." In these mysterious circumstances, all subsequent editors have been designated acting editors. And Lig's desk is still preserved the way he left it, with the addition of a small sign that says "LIG LURY JR., EDITOR, MISSING, PRESUMED FED."

Time moves on, for this particular high-velocity editor. Yet time stands still from the perspective of the cohorts he left behind. So it goes in a universe of relativity.

Icons of Science

This year is the centennial of Albert Einstein's so-called miracle year, of which relativity was a big piece. At the age of twenty-six, Einstein published one paper demonstrating that electromagnetic radiation is composed of discrete energy units and setting the stage for quantum mechanics; another that, in looking at random motion, provided experimental support for the existence of atoms and molecules; a third outlining special relativity and exploring the observed behavior of physical systems in motion relative to the observer; and a fourth proposing that mass and energy are inter-convertible--the paper that gave rise to the formula E=mc2.

Einstein introduced a notion that has to be considered, well, universally unsettling: Things aren't what they seem to be. As Seymour Mauskopf, a Duke historian of science, puts it, "Einstein is postulating, deducing from his theory, consequences that predict states of affairs that are so counterintuitive as to seem bizarre," such as the idea that distances and durations are not absolute, but are affected by one's motion. "Nobody had done that. And in general relativity, postulating things like the curvature of spacetime. Certainly deducible from general relativity are things like the existence of black holes, which are far beyond anything that any of us, despite the bad movies, can envision."

In the old Newtonian system, time and space existed separately from each other and from matter; time was the same in all parts of physical space and so was indifferent, as it were, to where one was located in space. But according to general relativity, time for observers is not the same at all points of physical space; time and space do not behave as if they exist separately from each other and from matter. Instead, time and space merge into spacetime, and spacetime interplays with matter.

Illustration: Matt Manley

The more we understand about Einstein's universe, Mauskopf says, the stranger it seems. In conceiving special relativity, Einstein worked from two principles already accepted by the scientific community: first, that all the laws of physics apply universally in all frames of motion; second, that the speed of light is, in vacuo, invariant. "Individually, each principle was unexceptional. It was when they were put together that the trouble began," Mauskopf says. "Their juxtaposition necessitated the abandonment of the intuitive concepts of universal spatial and temporal metrics--Newtonian absolute space and time."

Einstein created a new physics in which the metrics of duration of time, spatial dimension, and material mass were determined by the relative motion of the system of the measurer and that of the system being measured. If they were in motion, an observer in one system, in reference to an observer in another system, "would note a slower passage of time, a contraction of distance, and an increase of mass of objects in the other system," Mauskopf says. Such shifts in physical realities become more pronounced at velocities close to the speed of light.

These projections painted a weird universe indeed. Duke mathematics professor Arlie Petters, who teaches Relativity Theory, says it takes some time for students to digest the theory. (Petters is planning a relativity conference to be held at Duke in the fall; it will involve talks on aspects of special and general relativity along with a competition among student teams challenged to solve relativity problems.) The formula E=mc2 describes mass as having an enormous amount of energy; the energy extracted by a reactor from one kilogram (about two pounds) of enriched uranium oxide can power a 100-watt light bulb for nearly 700 years. Another facet of the theory, Petters says, is that energy has mass--the formula m=E/c2. If you increase the internal energy of any object by heating the object, then the object's mass and, hence, its weight increases--though the weight increase is so tiny that its measurement is outside the scope of current technology.

To incorporate gravity, Einstein had to extend special relativity to an even more remarkable theory, general relativity. "This theory gives us Big-Bang cosmology, which addresses the origin and evolution of the universe, and predicts the existence of black holes and ripples in spacetime," Petters says. A black hole, he explains, is a particularly weird region of spacetime. The gravitational pull is so immense that no observer inside the region can send a signal that reaches the outside world, because the required escape velocity of the signal exceeds the speed of light.

The mathematics of Relativity Theory is equally odd, says Petters. "In high-school geometry, we learned about triangle inequality, which states that a side of a triangle is less than the sum of the other two sides. In special relativity, triangle inequality can be backwards--a side of a triangle can be greater than the sum of the other two sides. The mathematics of general relativity is even stranger and more challenging. It describes the geometric warping of the four-dimensional, spacetime continuum."

Because Einstein's work deals with space, time, and gravity, it touches on issues of broad philosophical appeal. In the view of historian of science Mauskopf, Einstein produced a revolution in how we think about duration, simultaneity, and distance. "In a sense, Relativity Theory marks a significant way station in the information age that we're still in. Biotechnology, computer technology--these are all about information, how information is stored, how it's deployed, be it in genes or in microchips. Special relativity is a paper about how information is transferred from point to point--by light or by electromagnetic waves. In that sense, it's a tract for the twentieth century. This ties in with telegraph signals and telephones and all of the new electromagnetic communication devices."

Literature, in its themes and its style, was also a tract for the twentieth century. Einstein's work paralleled the work of modernist writers who were drawn to new ideas about information and communication, says Priscilla Wald, an English professor at Duke. Wald studies American literature and culture, including the intersections among law, literature, science, and medicine. "When you unmoor a really profound assumption," like the assumed physical reality of the universe, "you're going to unmoor potentially all assumptions," she says. "Relativity is so counterintuitive to our daily experience in the world. That's something that is so highly theoretical, the idea that time is static and not changeable."