Einstein, Relativity, and the Future of Time – Alan Lightman

Dr. Alan Lightman will launch his inquiry into Albert Einstein, focusing on the mysterious years from his birth in 1879 to the year 1905, when he produced his theory of time (special relativity), which has been revealed recently by new research into his letters with his wife Mileva Marić. Dr. Lightman will expound on the theory of special relativity, staring with electricity and magnetism, then on to wave phenomena and Einstein’s postulates about the behavior of light, as well as the consequences for these postulates for the behavior of time. He will finish with a brief discussion of Einstein’s theory of gravity (general relativity), and how gravity also affects the flow of time, including how it effects GPS and the movement of time, and how our (the human experience of time) and a computer’s “experience” of time even impacts the speculative perception of time into the far future, when homo sapiens has evolved into homo techno, part human and part computer.