Chasing Einstein

I was thirteen years old sitting on a bus, midway to the back, with about fifty other kids on a field trip to a NASA facility where rockets were tested and astronauts trained. I stared compulsively at the girl sitting in front of me. She wore small silver wire-rimmed glasses and her coarse dark-blonde hair hung to the base of her neck in an almost spherical curve, an unusually simple style for that time. The tour guide, a thick, middle-aged man who spoke with friendly-but-firm authoritativeness, posed a question: “Does anyone know why they always launch from Florida, and always towards the east?”

Damn, if anyone could answer this, it ought to be me, I thought. I had a longstanding obsession with space and astronomy, and had read nearly everything I could find on the subject. If no one but I knew, the girl would be impressed. I tried to think while the other kids fired off answers: Debris from a crash could fall harmlessly in the ocean – Ah, but launching west from California would also work in that case, the guide pointed out. The girl turned her head quickly left, swinging her hair around in slow motion on a trajectory not unlike the rotating Earth tossing its inhabitants into orbit.

My heartbeat accelerated. I waited silently for the others to exhaust themselves. When all were quiet, I spoke barely loud enough for the guide to hear. “You get a boost from the Earth’s rotation. It’s fastest near the equator.”

All eyes turned on me. The girl whose hair had given me the answer said, wide-eyed, “How did you know that?”

Oh shit. They think I’m a freak. “Uh, I guessed.”

The next day, riding in the car with my father, I told him about my answer to the tour guide’s question. “You’re just trying to prove how smart you are,” he replied. A bad thing to do, clearly. I changed the subject by asking him if I could increase the speed of a light beam by aiming it out the window of a speeding car. I had a fantasy of traveling at the speed of light. My earlier fantasies of invisibility and super powers had not panned out. But I read that light could actually circle the Earth seven times in one second, traveled from the sun to the Earth in eight minutes, from the nearest star to Earth in four years, and from the Andromeda galaxy in two million years. Still, the speed of light was starting to seem too slow for me, and being a mathematician, my dad often knew such things.

“No,” he answered. “The speed of light is always the same, even if the source is moving.”

“How about sound? Would the speed of sound do the same thing?” I asked.

“No. Sound always travels the same speed relative to the air. So if the wind is blowing, sound will speed up. Also, you can catch up with a sound wave if you go fast enough. But light, on the other hand, always moves toward or away from you at the same speed, no matter how fast you go.”

“Wait, so you’re saying it would speed up if I chase it.”

“It would seem that way to you. But a person standing on the side of the road would also see it traveling towards him at the same speed, as if the car were not moving.”

“That seems impossible.” I sat frozen, staring at the passing roadway.

I was still staring silently when we arrived at our destination, a gathering of my father’s and stepmother’s friends. At thirteen, I was the youngest person by at least twenty years, and sat by myself with a book. At one point I saw my father speaking to a few people, all glancing towards me. I got up and approached them, figuring I ought to say something. But he spoke first, smiling, looking steadily into my eyes and saying to the group of adults, all strangers to me, “Jeff is afraid of girls.” I figured he was wrong about that; I talked to girls pretty regularly. On the other hand, most boys were probably way ahead of me in that department. But I was good at other things – science, for example. I certainly didn’t want anyone feeling sorry for me. Best to drop the subject. Everyone seemed a bit uncomfortable.

I couldn’t sleep that night, the impossibly constant speed of a light beam still bouncing around in my head. I had difficulty paying attention in school for several weeks. I dedicated myself to figuring out how nature performed such an incredible trick, certain I would be rewarded with some unimaginably powerful insight.

Over the next few months I obsessively built imaginary scenarios, trying to visualize the strange behavior of light beams. One day while walking home from my friend Nick’s house an image crystallized with unusual clarity. I saw that people riding in a car driving close to the speed of light will see the headlights working normally, the beams speeding out ahead of them at exactly 186,282 miles per second, illuminating their destination far ahead of their arrival. Those awaiting them at their destination, on the other hand, will see the light beams approaching at 186,282 miles per second with the car alongside at nearly the same speed, and thus arriving at almost the same instant. That had to be the key: the time delay was different for the people in the car versus the people on the ground. Time itself must slow down for those in the moving car. No other explanation could account for what my father had told me. The insight was more powerful than I had hoped for; I simultaneously laughed and cried. I had often fantasized about time travel while reading my astronomy books, but the notion had always seemed vague and unreal. I had to tell someone. But I had to say it out of sight and sound from my father. He would tell me I was wrong, what a stupid mistake I had made.

Only this time I knew I wasn’t wrong.

The next day I went to the library to look up information about time travel. I quickly found that the constancy of the speed of light my father told me about was first figured out by Einstein, whose fame I had known of, but not the reason for it. Einstein realized not only that time slows down for a moving object, but space shrinks in its direction of motion, and its mass increases towards infinity as it approaches the speed of light. This was his famous theory of relativity.

I suddenly realized I couldn’t tell anyone about this. No one would believe me. Although I hadn’t figured things out in nearly the depth that Einstein did, he was twenty-six – twice my age – when he did it. Most crucially, I didn’t dare ever let my father find out under any circumstances whatsoever. He would surely parade me as a liar to everyone I knew.

Still, not too shabby, I thought. Maybe this was something I could be good at. I even wondered if someday I could be as good at it as Einstein was.

I eventually got a Ph.D. in physics. It turned out I wasn’t as good at it as Einstein was. But I still viscerally sense that the strange reality of relativity (and even more so quantum physics, which I learned about a few years later) points to a deeper mystery underlying the superficial appearance of the world, a mystery that even Einstein passed over. If I ever figure out the solution to it, I might recapture the joy I felt during the moment, at age thirteen, when I first grasped the true nature of time.