1April, 95518th, the aneurysm ruptured and 76-year-old Einstein passed away. He wrote a speech and a 12-page equation beside his bed. Until the last moment of his life, he was still looking for a unified field theory of the universe.
Although the author has firmly remembered this name in his childhood, his deeds have always been meaningless. He has lived in my mind for more than 20 years as a traditional bookworm. He is a boring, asexual, speechless person who only knows how to calculate equations.
When I came into contact with the theory of relativity, I was completely impressed by his shocking imagination.
Since then, it's easy to get to know this great scientist bit by bit. I have to say that Einstein was married twice and had an affair with at least five women in his life. He is also an excellent violinist, and his performance is indispensable for every family gathering.
The interlude of piles is enough to see his real life. Today, I regret, because of the stereotype of scientific researchers, I have been reluctant to open his biography to understand Professor Einstein's "farewell forever" and the valuable qualities in his bones.
Einstein had an unforgettable experience when he was four or five years old, which changed his life.
One day, he was ill in bed and his father gave him a compass. The mysterious power made him tremble with excitement. Recalling that clip, he said, "I still remember that experience left a deep and lasting impression on me. I think there must be something deep hidden behind things. "
When I read his story, it was no exaggeration to say, "My hair stood on end." The world is all-encompassing. Counting the past, I wonder what happened.
1905 is called Einstein's miracle year, and he put forward a revolutionary theory of light quantum; The existence of atoms is indirectly proved; Explained Brownian motion; Subvert the concepts of time and space, and put forward the most famous equation E=mc? .
If you don't have deep curiosity, you will never be attracted by what you take for granted in the adult world, such as magnetic field, gravity and the speed of light.
"Man can't feel his own weight when he is in free fall" is the happiest thought in his life, which started Einstein's eight-year journey of general relativity and special relativity.
Newton's worldview tells us that there is gravity between two objects, such as the gravity between man and the earth. Standing on the ground, we can always feel that there are 20 pounds of fat on our body, which limits our body from jumping higher. Everyone jumps too high, which has long been commonplace.
Since an object is acted by gravity, why does this force disappear when it falls freely? At this moment, driven by curiosity, Einstein decided to move towards gravitational The Secret Behind.
Finally, the creator of space-time left a prediction: the gravity of the sun will deflect light about 1.7 arc seconds. 19 19 the royal society solemnly declared that "the results obtained by the eclipse shooting expedition convincingly proved that the light did deflect near the sun, and the amount of deflection was consistent with Einstein's general theory of relativity."
Gravity is not a real force at all, but a manifestation of the bending of time and space. The motion of planets around the sun is inertial, and so is the free-falling motion of objects on the earth.
In an instant, Einstein was deified and his name resounded all over the world. And the starting point of all this, as he said on his deathbed: "I don't have any special talent, but I am extremely curious."
When reading Einstein's biography, I have been looking for an answer, why he never accepted the theory of quantum mechanics in his middle and old age, but insisted on fighting it.
1In June, 924, he published a paper by young physicist Bose, and personally wrote three papers to expand it. In these papers, he applied the calculation method of Bose (later called "bose-einstein statistics") to actual gas molecules, thus becoming the main founder of quantum statistical mechanics.
But soon, Einstein began to express anxiety about the direction of quantum theory. In the process of refuting quantum mechanics, he once said: a kind God will create wonderful and subtle rules to decide most things that happen in the universe, leaving a few things completely to chance. This doesn't feel right. "if god wanted to do this, he would have wrapped things up completely instead of following a certain pattern ... he could have done it thoroughly. In that case, we don't have to look for the law at all. "
And this sentence leads to Einstein's famous saying to Born. "Quantum mechanics is amazing, but there is an inner voice that tells me that it is not true. This theory says a lot, but it doesn't bring us closer to the secret of the' old man' at all. Anyway, I am convinced that God is not throwing dice. "
Since then, Einstein has been competing with quantum theory, trying to make a more complete explanation of the universe and looking for a unified field theory that can combine electromagnetism, gravity and quantum mechanics.
In the next 30 years, he devoted himself to the exploration of unified field theory. Unfortunately, God is not as big and small as he imagined, and the world may not be so strict according to the law of cause and effect.
Then why does he have to spend the rest of his life alone?
As he mentioned when he opposed quantum theory: God does not roll dice. If God keeps randomness, contingency and uncertainty in a few things, then we don't have to look for laws at all.
Looking back on Einstein's life, we can know that he was busy looking for the basic laws of the universe and nature all his life. Discovering the law is his lifelong mission, and this belief germinated as early as he 15 years old.
In his later years, a Princeton middle school student named Rosso asked him math questions in the street. "I found that nature is constructed in a wonderful way, and our task is to discover the mathematical structure of nature itself," Einstein explained his views to Rosso at the age of 15. "This belief has helped me all my life."
If a part of the world is so random and accidental, then its mathematical structure is doomed to be illusory.
So, why did he resist? It is because of his lifelong mission and belief that this belief took root in his heart when he was 15 years old. This quality of pursuing a lifelong mission stays between you and me.
If "curiosity" is Einstein's motive force to find the laws of nature, and the belief of "lifelong mission" is a constant motive force, then the thinking mode of "basic hypothesis" is really the crystallization of Einstein's peak.
In real life, we almost live in an inductive world, and it is difficult to escape. Almost all experience comes from summing up the past.
It was in a completely different way of thinking that Einstein founded the general and special theories of relativity. It's called deduction.
Einstein described his preference for deductive methods in an article entitled "Induction and Deduction in Physics" in 19 19:
This article clearly tells us: the use path of basic hypothetical thinking. First of all, we should make complex things essential, that is, the so-called basic laws, and most of these laws are based on the assumptions that are directly perceived. Then, based on the obtained basic laws, we can deduce new and more comprehensive essential laws and verify them.
On the way to establishing the special theory of relativity, he put forward the principle of relativity and the principle of invariance of light speed.
Einstein extended Galileo's symmetry law and put forward the principle of relativity-all natural laws, including gravity, electricity, magnetism and light, remain unchanged in all unified reference systems. Starting from Maxwell's equation and the principle of relativity, he came to the conclusion that the speed of light is absolute. If the speed of light is absolute and time is relative, the special theory of relativity is born.
Induction stays in the past, only deduction can touch the future, but what stands behind deduction must be the determination that ordinary people can't reach.
For more than 200 years before the emergence of relativity, the world lived in Newton's absolute view of time. If time is relative, just like "in the movie Interstellar, before the hero set off from the earth, his daughter was a teenager, but when he came back, he was still young, but her daughter was already dying", this is a "myth" completely contrary to reality.
However, standing at the intersection of reality and logic, 26-year-old Einstein said: If logic contradicts reality, then change reality. Such a firm determination is like the star in the morning sky. No matter how big the moon is, it is difficult to hide the dawn signal it sends.
Einstein's achievements in modern science no longer need to be praised, but these three precious qualities left by Einstein to the world are always worth cultivating, exploring and recreating by contemporary people!