Einstein Was Wrong

Could Einstein's definition of time have been one of the greatest hindrances to the advancement of human knowledge that history has ever known?

About Time: Einstein Was Wrong

Discussions about how to define ‘time’ inevitably become philosophical debates. As I’ve noted previously, ‘everybody knows what time is until they try to define it’. For the framework of this article, let’s limit our discussion about time to looking at Einstein’s definition of time in special relativity and contrasting that with the understanding of time in quantum mechanics.

In special relativity, Einstein defined time simply as a measure of how long an event takes, as measured by a clock. This is a sensible, straightforward measure. For example, the time it took me to read the previous paragraph, measured by a stopwatch, was 10 seconds.^{Footnote [1]} In special relativity, clocks are used as an objective standard for measuring the time intervals of physical processes.

The problem is that this sensible measure of time becomes time itself.

For example, if an atomic clock is observed to slow down (it registers fewer oscillations of the caesium atom at a different altitude), this is not understood as a change in the clock's operating speed. In relativity, this slowing is interpreted as a slowing in the rate of time itself.

YouTuber Dialect brilliantly points out how this mistaken interpretation commits an error that Sir Isaac Newton warned us against in his Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica.

Newton wrote, ‘Relative quantities are not the quantities themselves whose names they bear, but sensible measures of them.. and by the names time, space, place, and motion their sensible measures are to be understood; and the expression will be unusual if the measured quantities themselves are meant. ..those violate the accuracy of language, who interpret these words for the measured quantities.’

Putting this concept into the modern context, even when the motion of light in a vacuum is used as the standard ‘clock’ to measure time, it is still just a physical entity that can be influenced by other physical processes, known or unknown. This was Einstein’s biggest mistake; he employed a physical process (the motion of light) to serve as a stand-in for time itself. In Newton’s words, he expressed a sensible measure of time as time itself.

French philosopher Henri Bergson, a contemporary of Einstein, disputed relativity’s portrayal of time by arguing that there is a difference between time itself and what clocks display. Clocks display arbitrary fractions of periodic events such as the motion of the Sun across the sky (as shown on a sundial), grains of sand moving through an hourglass, the number of swings of a pendulum, or the number of oscillations of a caesium atom (the current standard), but this is not the physical reality of time itself. The physical reality of time is the standard against which we can compare these events.

Further to this argument, the definition of time used in Einstein’s special relativity does not address the more fundamental aspect of time in the extremely small intervals where quantum mechanics holds. At the quantum level, time cannot be slowed down or interact with space. According to quantum mechanics, time is treated as a universal and absolute parameter. It does not vary according to the observer's motion but is the same for everyone, everywhere.

It is ironic that six months before publishing his theory of special relativity in 1905, Einstein published a paper that contributed significantly to the birth of quantum physics. In this paper, Einstein hypothesised that light consisted of tiny packets of energy called quanta. Einstein showed that if the frequency of light shining on a metallic surface exceeded a certain threshold, the surface would emit electrons, a phenomenon known as the photoelectric effect. Although this effect had long been known in physics, Einstein was the first to explain it in these terms and was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for this work.

Discarding Absolute Space and Time

For Einstein, time and length changed their properties according to a Lorentz transformation, the mathematical tool used to calculate how one inertial frame of reference is transformed into another. Time slowed down, and length contracted at one geometrically defined location in space (one frame of reference) only because it was in motion relative to another location. In this way, the properties of time and space were only relative to other frames of reference and not absolute. Observers moving with different velocities with respect to each other were thus deemed to have their own space and time, determined by their relative motion.

In 1923, Einstein said:

‘To harmonize the relativity principle with the light principle, the assumption that an absolute time (agreeing for all inertial frames) exists, had to be abandoned. Thus, the hypothesis is abandoned that arbitrarily moved and suitably set identical clocks function in such a way that the times shown by two of them, which meet, agree.’¹

In this way, a specific time is assigned to each inertial frame to keep the requirement that the speed of light remains constant. Einstein goes on to say:

‘The time for each inertial frame is measured by identical clocks that are stationary relative to the frame. The laws of transformation for space coordinates and time for the transition from one inertial frame to another – the Lorentz transformations as they are termed – are unequivocally established by these definitions and the hypotheses concealed in the assumption that they are free from contradiction. Their immediate physical significance lies in the effect of the motion relative to the used inertial frame on the form of rigid bodies (Lorentz contraction) and on the rate of the clocks.’²

Although Einstein’s special relativity revolutionized people’s view of space and time, it was initially ignored by the physics community. This began to change when it received the attention of one particular physicist, the founder of quantum theory and arguably the most influential physicist of his generation, German Max Planck (1858–1947). Years later, when Einstein was asked to write an introduction to a compilation of Planck's essays, he initially declined, stating that it wouldn't be appropriate for Planck's work to feature a contribution from someone of lesser importance. Einstein conveyed his opinion that Planck’s discovery of quantum theory was of much greater significance than relativity. On this point, it seems Einstein may well have been correct.

References

1.       Janssen (2002) Reconsidering a Scientific Revolution: The Case of Einstein versus Lorentz. Phys. perspect. 4, 421–446. https://doi.org/10.1007/s000160200003

2.       Shanahan, D (2014) A Case for Lorentzian Relativity. Found Phys 44 pp.349–367

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[1] More recently, some philosophers have claimed that Einstein believed the passage of time was an illusion and that the past, present and future all coexist, a view known as the Block Universe theory. However, this view is not based on the original interpretation of relativity espoused by Einstein and his contemporaries.