E=MC2

THE famous equation. Made famous not so much by the enormous press Einstein received and still receives, but by its association with those stunning images of A-bombs and H-bombs, it's the formula of something everybody knows but very few understand.

From E=MC2 we got many of the staple science-fictional gimmicks of the middle 20th century. Time dilation in starships traveling at near light speeds. Radioactive mutations that typically made insects as large as pickup trucks. Atomic-powered everything.

Until the concept of nanotechnology was made popular by Eric Dexler, there was nothing to replace or even compare with the science fictionally magical properties associated with atomic energy 60-ish years ago. The wonder of that era was, I think, based in our fascination with the invisible action at a distance of Ra: radio, radiation, rays. It was almost as if radiation replaced spiritualism in the public's mystical mind. From things that went bump in the night to things that glowed in the dark: vacuum tubes, radium dial wrist watches (the closest to personal atomic appliances we’ve come), television screens. Tesla stacks for the indulgent or adventurous.

It was a different world.

It is curious that the Golden Age continuum of sci-fi ground itself out in post-apocalyptic pessimism by the 70s. Our disillusionment and disappointment by the promise of atomic energy too cheap to merit paying for, atomic rockets that would blast us off to Jupiter, and good-old atomic powered everything from inflatable love dolls to lawnmowers, seemed to express itself in our official Fiction of Wonders.

After awhile, a Holy Trinity replaced the Great God Ra of yore. Cybernetics, quantum mechanics, and molecular engineering (of both DNA and raw matter), replaced those wonderfully spooky ghosts from our machines: invisibility rays, force fields, anti-gravity gizmoes, and huge metallic atomic rockets, even though, ironically, the Holy Trinity was far more likely to provide such capabilities than the Old Testamental Ra.

(neologism for religious right fundamentalist lunacy: testa-mental)

In the beginning was E=MC2. What do it mean, peoples?

Oh, it means all kinds of things, and many of us have read the Relativity for Dummies spectrum of layman level explanations. They mostly don't work. Worst of all, they don't give us the core answer: what does E=MC2 MEAN????????????

We know what it says: Energy equals Mass multiplied by the Speed of Light (186K miles per second) multiplied by the Speed of Light (186K miles per second).

So, the energy of one ounce equals one ounce times the speed of light squared. I still don't feel illuminated. How about you? It doesn't help that explanations provided express this in statements like "enough energy to light ten million light bulbs for 3 weeks!" or "which explains why a pound or two of plutonium can make such a huge explanation!". (Should read 'explosion’ but I like Freudian typos, don't you?)

We still don't know what E=MC2 is saying.

Frustrated by this, I interrogated E=MC2 mercilessly for hours one evening in the early 1980s. I had an epiphany. Like being shot in the forehead by a one-ounce pencil traveling 186Kmps2, or, 43,596,000mps. E=MC2 is a linear equation, and so is a pencil whose mass is completely converted into kinetic energy in a straight line going one way. That's what E=MC2 means, of itself, raw and unadorned by any permutations like dividing both sides of the equation by E or anything like that, the doing of which is how lovely oddities like Lorentzian contractions and time dilations are found, as well as the conclusion that nothing can travel as fast or faster than the speed of light.

Yes, the fact that nothing but light can travel as fast or faster than the speed of light makes it impossible for a one-ounce pencil to smite one's forehead at 43,596,000 mps. Sue me. Before one can 'do the math' that shows why nothing but light can travel as fast or faster than the speed of light, it helps to viscerally intuit what the dang equation MEANS.

That is, if you believe a high school dropout who can scarcely do more than the 1 of Algebra 101. I have offered this explanation to several physics profs and numerous college grads who felt they knew relativity physics enough to speak with authority on the matter. Few of them have comprehended it; the few who did said I was wrong but either a) admitted they couldn't tell me why I was wrong, or b) when they attempted to "correct" me vaulted over my head into arcane verbal reaches of science, none of which addressed or even mentioned poor little E=MC2. I am not exaggerating.

It seems so obvious to me that my explanation by 'pencil analogy' is a) not an analogy, b) bears rigorous fidelity to the terms of the equation, and c) makes perfectly easy sense. It is no more difficult than a 6th grade word problem about driving at x mph from Boston to New Delhi (hey, it's only a word problem not a geography lesson) in y hours thus traveling ? miles. I stand my ground and yield to no one unless they can make even more perfectly easy and sensible sense of this abusively revered equation.

It is as if the physics community believed Einstein's genius sprang forth from his forehead like a pencil retreating like a tachyonic entity from the inconceivably huge explosion it made in his forehead seconds before encountering the impossibility of traveling through Albert's forehead -- or anything, including total vacuum -- at C squared. Or a Zeus goose cleaved by Hephaestus' ex, Athena, or... this is relativity, people. It's supposed to be too confusing for mere mortals to comprehend. Or so it is said.

'Twas a time when mere mortals struggled to comprehend heliocentric planetary motion or the idea that an invisible force, gravity, bound it all together in invisible celestial clockworks. The idea that something thrown could continue indefinitely if not for the weight of the earth pulling it down, only it wasn't weight it was mass, which produced weight by squeezing itself into itself.... the understanding of Newton's Apple required, I suspect, something like the myth of Newton's apple epiphany to cut through the mystic post-Scholastic/Ptolemaic bullshit and make simple sense of gravity to idjits like me and maybe you. 'Twas a time when "an object in motion tends to stay in motion unless acted upon by another force or object" was as mysterious a concept to the denizens of those days as time slowing down as we go faster via relativistic time dilation is for us now. None of the objects they experienced seemed to act that way because Nature abhors a vacuum and the world of Terra’s surface is never without some force or object to keep our would-be home runs inside the park. To grasp Newtonian physics one had to imagine both a perfect vacuum, that is, total absence of interfering objects or forces, and then within that vacuum imagine an invisible force called gravity. (One had to imagine some kind of outer space void of air, a concept we grew up with, explained by high-definition color-print textbook images and educational Disney cartoons. We saw humans in silver suits float in outer space during what are absurdly called ‘space-walks’. (A better and certainly more poetic term would be ‘cosmic dip’ or ‘universal swim’.) We grew up in a world that placed no cosmic spheres between us and the cosmos. When John Lennon sang “Imagine there’s no Heaven” he meant in some other science-fictional dimension, not in the sky. We’d already unimagined that much.)

When Einstein began pondering those things that were to become the theory of relativity, he didn’t start with ‘enough light bulbs to illuminate three weeks of ideas’ nor with sophisticated side-effects like time dilation. He started with a simple idea that I will describe crudely (for crude is good): what if light were your car? And your car traveled 186k mph, and that it didn't matter if other cars or buildings or yea, even the very streets thereof (I was raised Mormon and lapse into BoM-speak at odd moments) traveled toward it or away from it at 60 mph or 100k mph, because your car would approach them or depart them at the same speed relative to them irregardless. It just would. And a head-on collision between your car and another car would happen at the same speed whether the other car were headed toward you at 60 mph or 100k mph. It just would. What would that mean?

A very simple, and very absurd, idea. Comic book fodder.

Einstein was a loon. A poetic, violin-playing, day-dreaming loon. Surely no one was more surprised than him when this premise tied the riddles together, when the math balanced out, when subsequent field experiments verified the conclusions.

He didn't START with E=MC2. He CONCLUDED with E=MC2. Because E=MC2 was the simplest, most elementary equation that could embrace the implications of light speed being absolute in relation to all other motion. It was simple, or as physicists say, "Elegant". And so, in its crude, impossible, fantastically explosive way, is a one-ounce pencil of epiphany traveling through the insight of my third eye at 34,596,000 mps.
copyright Robin Morrison