Is the world we live to complex to comprehend? Or are we simply short on a few facts?

Albert Einstein, the world-renowned physicist, put forth his theories of Relativity in the early 1900's. A half century later, scientists were still devising experiments to corroborate his theories. That is, what Einstein understood with intuition, the average scientist needed high-tech experiments to confirm. Today, Einstein's perception of the universe stands as a pillar of some of the most fundamental aspects of physics.

It is with little wonder that the word "Einstein" has become synonymous with genius. Here was a man who envisioned revolutionary ideas which other scientists (forget about average people -- other scientists) could not conceive of. In a sense, Einstein was more than just a genius. We're used to referring to as a genius someone who comes up with revolutionary ways of dealing with tangible ideas -- a method of prefabricating houses, a lotion that cleans any stain off any material, a plane that can take off as a helicopter or as a plane, etc. But coming up with ideas which take others years to grasp and ultimately turn out to be the foundation of a branch of science, is beyond our simple understanding of genius. Out of lack of an adequate term, I would simply call it beyond-human genius.

Although it is generally known that Einstein is responsible for the formula E=mc2 and that he is the father of the Atom Bomb, the average person knows very little about what his theories say. Probably because if scientists have had a hard time understanding his theories, the average person has surely found them incomprehensible. And rightly so. Some of Einstein's theories seem to defy common sense and logic.

But there are ways of getting a "glimpse" of something that may otherwise be incomprehensible when done in "small, limited doses." It is in this vein that I'd like to touch on some of the "hair-raising" ideas presented by Einstein.

First I should note that the "Theory of Relativity" actually consists of two theories: Special Relativity, dealing with high-speed motion, and General Relativity, dealing with gravity. The technical differences between the two theories, however, are beyond the scope of and irrelevant to this article. I therefore simply refer to them as "The Theory of Relativity."

One of the great puzzles confronting Einstein and his contemporaries was the consistency of the speed of light. Experiments showed that light, which travels at 186,000 miles per second, maintained the same speed (through empty space) no matter how fast the observer was travelling towards or away from the light-source, and no matter how fast the light-source was traveling in relation to the observer. Logically, this doesn't seem to make any sense. If you stand on the front end of a train moving at 50 miles per hour and throw a ball forward at 10 MPH, someone standing on the tracks in front of the train should get hit with a ball flying at 60 MPH. (Of course, he should also run like crazy.) This is simple mathematics, and it holds up in practice -- the ball will travel at 60 MPH.

The opposite is also true. If the guy on the tracks throws the ball at you, you will be hit with the impact of a ball flying at 60 MPH.

For some strange reason, however, when it comes to light, the simple business of combining speeds just doesn't seem to work. If you were to travel toward the sun at half the speed of light and measure the speed of the sun's rays coming toward you, you would find the light traveling no faster than 186,000 miles per second (MPS). On the other hand, if you were to travel away from the sun at half the speed of light, you would find the sun's rays coming in from behind you at no less than 186,000 MPS. Furthermore, if, while you're moving forward at half the speed of light, someone were to fly toward you at close to the speed of light with an open flashlight, you would find the light coming at you no faster than 186,000 MPS.

If you think that's confusing, try this. If the same beam of light were to be measured by three different observers, one traveling against the light at high speed, one traveling away from the light, and one "standing still," all three observers would record the light as traveling no faster or slower than 186,000 MPS. This is more than just confusing, this is downright disturbing.

But Einstein somehow saw the "logic" in all this. What set Einstein apart from the rest was, while other scientists racked their brains on "chopping up" old theories and formulating new ones to make sense out the seemingly illogical behavior of nature, Einstein intuitively understood that some of our most basic perceptions of "nature" are out of whack. Einstein realized that there are no absolutes in our universe -- everything was relative. It is easier to understand this concept with speed. If you're traveling on a highway at 50 MPH next to another car traveling at the same speed, relative to the other car you're not moving. In fact, if you pulled up close to the other guy you could pass an object to him just as easily as if you were standing still. Yet, to someone standing at the side of the road, the other guy is moving at 50 MPH. So when you ask, "How fast is the other guy moving?" the answer depends on who you're asking.

The genius of Relativity, however, is not that simple. Relativity says that just as speed is not absolute, neither are time and distance. Meaning, what you call one hour may actually be, under certain circumstances, two hours or a half an hour to someone else. Likewise, lengths or distances may "change" relative to moving observers. Ultimately, you wind up with an altered perception of speed. That is, measuring speed is nothing more than measuring the time it takes to go from point A to point B. But what if your clock ran slower than someone else's? Your perception of how fast you're going would be altered. By the same token, if for some reason you measured the distance between New York and California as only 500 miles, you would conclude that you must have been driving awfully slow to take five days to get from coast to coast.

Relativity says that when an object moves, especially at high speeds, time and distances become distorted. An hour isn't an hour anymore, and a mile isn't a mile. As in the case of the ball thrown at the train, it's all relative. That is, how much time something took or how far you traveled, all depends on which observer you ask. And as diverse opinions as you will get, none of them will necessarily be wrong.

Again, the mathematical and physical technicalities of exactly how this happens is beyond the scope of this article. The point here is simply that Einstein understood that the consistency of the speed of light had something to do with movement, which distorts time and distance.

By now you're probably thinking this business of distorting time and distance may sound impressive theoretically, but in reality it's just a lot of gibberish -- let's face it, an hour is an hour. Wrong. An hour is not an hour. In confirmation of Einstein's theories, tests have been performed which prove that time can literally go slower.

Einstein's Theory of Relativity says that the faster you move the slower time will go. Literally. That is, by moving, your watch will actually go slower than someone else's. But at the relatively slow speeds which people move on a daily basis, time differences are negligible. At high speeds, however, the differences become somewhat pronounced. If you could get into a spaceship and travel close to the speed of light for let's say twenty years, you might age only several months (without a facelift) while your friends back on earth would be twenty years older.

This aspect of the slowing of time was tested with highly accurate atomic clocks. Synchronized atomic clocks were flown around on planes and later compared to clocks left behind on earth. The clocks from the planes were slower (by very small amounts) than the ones left on earth by precisely the amounts predicted by Einstein.

Decades after Einstein postulated his theories, another test was performed with subatomic particles. There are some subatomic particles which are known to live for only fractions of a second. If these particles could be accelerated to speeds close to that of light, scientists reasoned, they should, according to Einstein's theories, live longer. Using particle accelerators, scientists hurled subatomic particles around at very high speeds. Sure enough, they lived several times their normal life-spans, in precise agreement with Einstein's theories.

If you don't quite see the relationship between speed and the slowing of time, you're not alone. There are many others just like you. In fact, there are people smarter than you and me who don't see the relationship at first glance. There are even people who don't see the relationship after the fourth or fifth glance. But that doesn't necessarily make them stupid. It simply means they're not Einstein.

The brilliance of Einstein's theories was evident not so much in that other's didn't come up with them first. The brilliance was in that even after Einstein explained his theories people found them difficult to grasp. Of course, there are plenty of others who have all sorts of "theories" that nobody understands. The "Big Bang" was supposed to explain the birth and evolution of the universe, which, according to more recent observations, it far from does -- the world was supposed to come to an end several times -- and California was supposed to slide into the ocean (I'm not sure if that was supposed to happen before or after the end of the world). But Einstein's theories are not quite on the same level. Apparently, Einstein perceived of some highly sophisticated phenomena which were eventually confirmed, but only after decades of high-tech developments. That's brilliance.

How does all this relate to God? Well, sometimes people have questions about how God "runs the world." "How can a righteous person suffer?" "How can a wicked person prosper?" "How could the Holocaust have happened?" Although satisfactorily addressed by some scholars, these questions continue to linger on in the minds of some. Occasionally people have problems on a more immediate and personal level that they find difficult to comprehend, which sometimes leads to reservation and doubt as to whether "there's justice in this world?" Although I don't believe there's anything wrong with trying to understand why things happen, there is certainly something wrong with the conclusions reached by some people.

Doubt sets in with the notion that "if it made any sense I would have understood it, and since I find it incomprehensible there must be something wrong with what's happening." Not necessarily so.

Einstein was a mere human being. Yet he entertained thoughts which the average person finds, to an extent, incomprehensible. The fact that you may not fully understand the Theory of Relativity does not mean there is something wrong with the theory -- it's been proven to be correct. And even if you spent a year trying to understand how speed slows down time and still found it difficult to grasp, that still wouldn't mean there's something wrong with the theory. It would only mean that your comprehension is not quite at Einstein's level. And most people will readily admit to and understand this.

Yet, when it comes to "how God runs the world," people's logic sometimes seem to go awry. God is many times more intelligent than Einstein ever was -- He created Einstein and the laws of nature which support the Theory of Relativity. How can anyone believe that although he cannot comprehend the thoughts of a mere human being, Einstein, he should be able to understand every minute detail of how God runs the world?

And sometimes there are the more "enlightened" among us who understand that a situation is beyond our grasp, "but only because it hasn't been explained to us." That's not necessarily so, either. If the Theory of Relativity can be incomprehensible to even people who have heard it explained over and over, what makes anyone so sure they could understand why certain things happen even if God personally explained it to them? Isn't it logical to assume that when dealing with intelligence literally infinitely greater than that of Einstein you're bound to run into things which are incomprehensible, whether or not they're explained? And that doesn't necessarily mean "there's something wrong with the way the world is run" any more than there is something wrong with the Theory of Relativity. It only means that our ability to comprehend certain matters sometimes falls short.

The point is that full comprehension of everything under, and certainly "above," the sun is not humanly possible. Believing that one is wise enough to understand everything is the confidence of a fool. Understanding that God's wisdom can at times make a mortal feel like a fool can make a wise person out of a foolish mortal.

by Josh Greenberger from shopndrop.com

Josh Greenberger: A computer consultant for over two decades, the author has developed software for such organizations as NASA's Goddard Institute of Space Studies, AT&T, Charles Schwab, Bell Laboratories and Chase Manhattan Bank. Since 1984, the author's literary works have appeared in such periodicals as The New York Post, The Daily News, The Village Voice, The Jewish Press, and others. His articles have ranged from humor to scientific to topical events.

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