Chapter Four

Einstein’s Beginner’s Mind

Shunrio Suzuki, the great Zen master who first introduced Zen to the West is quoted as saying, “Achieving enlightenment is not difficult.  What is difficult is maintaining a beginner’s mind.”

Most Westerners, when they hear this for the first time have no idea what he means.  It sounds ridiculous.  Our society values and admires our “experts.”  The whole point in being a “beginner” is to later become an expert, right?  Why hold on to the ignorance of the beginners mind?

But Suzuki is not talking about our knowledge when he says “beginner’s mind.” He’s talking about the way we relate to that knowledge.  Do we use the information, or does the information narrow our scope of inquiry?

The simple way Suzuki put it was, “In the beginners mind there are many possibilities.  In the expert’s, there are few.”

Gary Zukov in The Dancing Wu-Li Masters uses Einstein as a classic example of the beginner’s mind.  A beginner sees things the way they are, not the way they must be.  As mentioned in the previous chapter, scientists at the turn of the century knew that the luminiferous aether must be.  They knew light was a wave and that waves needed to travel in something.  Thus, there MUST be aether for it to travel in.

Albert Einstein saw what was.  The speed of light was proven to be constant regardless of the motion of the viewer.  All Einstein did was raise this fact’s status from paradox to postulate and voilla,the Special Theory of Relativity was born.

Einstein’s two postulates that changed our understanding of the universe forever:

1. First postulate (principle of relativity)

 The laws by which the states of physical systems undergo change are not affected, whether these changes of state be referred to the one or the other of two systems of coordinates in uniform translatory motion.

2. Second postulate (invariance of c)

 As measured in any inertial frame of reference, light is always propagated in empty space with a definite velocity c that is independent of the state of motion of the emitting body.

The first postulate is a simple restatement of the Galilean principle of relativity covered in chapter two, with one small, but significant difference.  The Galilean principle referred only to mechanical laws while Einstein extended it to include Maxwell’s laws of electromagnetism.

Essentially, the first postulate implies the second.  If electromagnetic waves are unaffected by the motion of the emitting body, that means that they’ll always travel at the same speed.

At first glance these postulates don’t seem to add up to much.   OK, so light always travels at the same speed.  Cool… So what?

Here’s what:

1. Space-time – Space and time are fundamentally interrelated rather than two distinctly different quantities. Time is essentially a fourth dimension complementing the three spatial dimensions.
   
   
2. Relativity of simultaneity – Whether or not two events are simultaneous depends on the observer. One observer might see two events as occurring simultaneously, another as one of the events occurring first, and a third as the other event occurring first.
   
   
3. Lorentz contraction – An object moving near the speed of light will appear shorter as seen by an outside observer at rest. The amount of contraction depends on its speed, and its length approaches zero as its speed approaches the speed of light. To an observer moving along with the object its length appears normal.
   
   
4. Time dilation – As seen by an outside observer at rest, time will move more slowly for an object moving close to the speed of light. At the speed of light, time will stop as seen by an outside observer. To an observer moving along with the object all appears normal
   
   
5. Mass increase – The mass of an object moving close to the speed of light will increase as seen by an outside observer. The mass will approach infinity as the speed approaches the speed of light. Again to an observer moving along with the object the mass remains the same.
   
   
6. Speed of light limit – As an objects speed approaches the speed of light its mass approaches infinity. Therefore it would take an infinite external force to accelerate any object with mass to the speed of light. Therefore light, and anything else with no mass, can travel at the speed of light. But an object with mass cannot reach the speed of light. The best it can do is come arbitrarily close. Nothing can travel faster than the speed light travels in a vacuum. The speed of light in a vacuum is the ultimate speed limit in the universe.
   
   
7. E=mc2 – E represents energy, m represents mass, and c2 represents the speed of light squared. According to this famous equation mass and energy are interchangeable. Matter can change to energy and vice versa. The equation is sort of a conversion factor telling us how much matter corresponds to a certain amount of energy. For example, in nuclear reactions some of the mass is converted to energy according to this equation.

8. Everything moves through space-time at the speed of light.  The faster something moves through space, the slower it moves through time.  The sum of the speed through space and the speed through time always adds up to the speed of light.  That’s why for photons, which travel at the speed of light, time stops moving completely.  Brian Greene in his wonderful book, The Elegant universe explains this mind-bending truth in a very clear passage:

Imagine you have a long, wide stretch of concrete, like a long dragstrip. You have a car at one end, and drive 100 mph in a straight line to the other end of the strip. It takes 10 seconds. Now imagine if you drive 100 mph diagonally across the strip. It will take longer, as some of your speed is “used” to travel side to side as well as forward. Pretty basic, right?

Time is a dimension, too. There are three spatial dimensions, like X, Y, and Z, and a time dimension. Einstein theorized that everything moves through spacetime at the speed of light. Since we know that we move pretty slowly through space, of course not even approaching the speed of light, most of our “movement” then is through the time dimension. Now imagine the race car again. Once the race car started travelling diagonally–travelling faster in that dimension–it had to travel slower in the other dimension (“straight” down the track), and took longer to get from one end to the other. Our “speed” is shared between all the dimensions in which we travel. When you go faster in one dimension, it slows your progress in another. So if you take off at the speed of light in a spatial dimension, your speed must decrease in one of the other dimensions, including time.

These are the standard effects of special relativity recognized by the physics community today.  The effects of general relativity are even more far reaching and will be considered in a later chapter.  The most important effect for the reader to grasp in order to understand the Mass of Nows theory is the relativity of simultaneity.

The Relativity of Simultaneity

One of the stranger and most difficult to grasp effects of special relativity is that it mandates that observers in motion relative to one another will experience the same events happening at different times for each observer.  Furthermore, as in all relativistic effects, all experiences of the order of events are equally valid.  What this means is that each person’s experience of reality is reality, not an illusory effect.  The net effect of this is that there are an infinite number of valid different realities contained in our universe.

Just writing the above paragraph makes my head spin, but that is indeed the view of the universe that modern physics embraces as a result of special relativity; which has been tested and proven as well as any other theory in the history of science.

I will try to illustrate how this happens by using an example often used by others.

Imagine a train with a flat bed car travelling along at say, 50 MPH.  At either end of the car are two brothers, Ben and Jerry, each with a paint ball gun.  In the center of the car is the moderator of their paint ball contest, named Baskin.  Another moderator, Robbins, is waiting for them half a mile ahead on a platform.

The game is as follows:

The instant Baskin on the train comes face to face with Robbins on the platform he will set off a flare.  The flare signals Ben and Jerry to draw and shoot their paint balls at each other.  This insures that the contest is fair and that both shoot at once.

The game proceeds as planned with the flare set off as it passes Robbins.  Baskin sees that both Ben and Jerry draw their guns at the same time.  Robbins shouts, “Foul! Ben shot first!” 

They are both correct.

What happened was that since Baskin was not in motion relative to Ben and Jerry on the train, the light from the flare reached each of them at the same time and they shot together.  Robbins however, sees the light from the flare reaching Ben at the back of the flatcar before it reaches Jerry at the front, giving Ben the advantage.  The light has a 100 MPH greater speed to Ben than to Jerry.  Because the speed of light is always the same, for Robbins the relative speed of the train adds 50 MPH going back and subtracts 50 MPH going forward.   

Before Einstein introduced special relativity, the phrase ‘the whole of space at a particular time’ was thought to have exactly the same meaning for all observers. After Einstein’s work it was felt that each observer would understand what the phrase meant, but that different observers would disagree about what constituted the whole of space at a particular time. All observers would agree on what constituted space-time, but the way in which it was sliced up into space and time would differ from one observer to another, depending on their relative motion. No observer had the true view; they were all equally valid even though they might be different.

In our example above, Baskin and Robins each experienced an equally valid but different experience of a slice of space-time.  They were both right, even though they contradicted each other.

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Figure 25: (a) The pre-Einsteinian view of space and time. Not only are space and time separate and distinct, they are also absolute. All observers agree on what constitutes space and what constitutes time, and they also agree about what it means to speak of ‘the whole of space at a particular time’. (b)The post-Einsteinian view in which space and time are seen as aspects of a unified space-time. Different observers in uniform, relative motion will each slice space time into space and time, but they will do so in different ways. Each observer knows what it means to speak of ‘the whole of space at a particular time’, but different observers no longer necessarily agree about what constitutes space and what constitutes time.

Through special relativity, Einstein showed that every observer cuts up space-time into parallel slices that he or she considers to be all of space at successive instants of time, with the unexpected twist that observers moving relative to one another at constant velocity will cut through space-time at different angles.

Two observers in relative motion have nows-single moments in time, from each one’s perspective-that are different: their nows slice through space-time at different angles, And different nows mean different now-lists. Observers moving relative to each other have different conceptions of what exists at a given moment, and hence they have different conceptions of realty.

At everyday speeds, the angle between two observer’s now-slices is minuscule; that’s why in day-to-day life we never notice a discrepancy between our definition of now and anybody else’s. For this reason, most discussions of special relativity focus on what would happen if we traveled at enormous speeds-speeds near that of light-since such motion would tremendously magnify the effects.

Returning to our example above, what this means is that in Robbins’ “now” Ben’s paint ball is splattered on Jerry’s face while in Baskin’s “now” the ball is still in Ben’s gun.  The ball is in two different places at once in time, though it is always in the same space-time.  The difference is the relative speed.

This is a critical element in the Mass of Nows theory.  In space-time, which is an invariant unity, the particles that make up those paint balls must exist in different places at the same time in the different realities of Baskin and Robbins.  As we shall later see, this is why all matter must contain both a particle aspect in each of Baskin and Robin’s “now” as well as a wave aspect which allows it to exist in both.  In fact, the wave aspect of matter allows it to exist anywhere in the space-time of the universe.