"John Dobson. Einstein's Physics Of Illusion (англ.)" - читать интересную книгу автора

John Dobson.

Einstein's Physics Of Illusion


Copyright © 1980 by John Dobson
Origin: http://www.magicpubs.com/dobson/PhysicsOfIllusion.html Ў http://www.magicpubs.com/dobson/PhysicsOfIllusion.html

This essay was delivered by John Dobson as a lecture at the Vedanta
Society,
Berkeley, USA, on 12th October 1980 and has been reprinted from:
The Vedanta Kesari May, 1988 (pages 181-189)


Some of you may think from the title "Einstein's Physics of Illusion",
that I'm going to talk about the physics which underlies what we think of as
magic. That is not what I expect to talk about. Some of you may think that I
suspect that Einstein had some special physics of illusions. If he did, I
don't know anything of it. Instead, what I want to do, with Einstein's help,
is to trace our physics all the way back to square one, and to find out
whether, underlying it, there may possibly be something akin to magic.
George Valens has written a charming book called The Attractive Universe. It
is subtitled "Gravity and the Shape of Space", and on the very first page he
says that when a ball is thrown straight up, after a while it comes to a
stop, changes its direction and comes back. He says it looks like magic, and
probably it is. Now what he is taking for granted is that it should have
gone off on a straight path without any change in speed or direction. But
you see, that also would have been the result of magic. We do not understand
in physics why the ball comes back. But we also do not understand in our
physics why the ball should have continued without any change in the
direction of its speed.
Now in the title, and in the remarks that I have made so far, what I
mean by magic or illusion is something like what happens when, in the
twilight, you mistake a rope for a snake. And this sort of thing was
analyzed very carefully by some people in North India long, long ago, and
they said that when you make such a mistake there are three aspects to your
mistake. First, you must fail to see the rope rightly. Then, instead of
seeing it as a rope, you must see it as something else. And finally, you had
to see the rope in first place or you never would have mistaken it for" a
snake. You mistook it for a snake because the rope was three feet long, and
you're accustomed to three foot long snakes.
But before I speak further about illusion, I want to say a few words
about what we do understand in physics, and I also want to point out a few
gaps in that understanding. When we talk about the universe, or when we look
out and see it, what we see is that the universe is made out of what we call
matter. It's what we call a material universe. And what we want to do, first
of all, is to trace that material back, not quite to square one, but to
square two at least, We want to find out whether we can think of all these
things which we see as being made out of matter, as really being made out of
only a few ingredients. And the answer is that we can. Long ago the chemists