Describe how moral relativism was influenced by Einstein's Theories of Relativity and subsequently the trend toward the idea there are "no absolutes".
Answers
Explanation:
Albert Einstein, German-Swiss physicist and Nobel laureate, is best known for the special and general theories of relativity and for his bold hypothesis concerning the particle nature of light. He is perhaps the most famous scientist of the 20th century.
He was born in Ulm, Württemberg, in March 1879. Even as a youth in Munich, he showed an intense curiosity about nature and an ability to understand difficult mathematical concepts. He led an undistinguished career through high school, excelling in mathematics but failing utterly in the classics, considered so important at the time to any who would go on to university. He hated the dull regimentation and unimaginative spirit of school.
At 16 Einstein moved away from his family to Switzerland, where his credit in mathematics barely got him into a technical college in Zurich. Again, he did not enjoy the methods of instruction and skipped almost all lectures, preferring to play his violin or to study physics independently at the library.
He graduated in 1900 with the help of a friend’s lecture notes, but his professors did not recommend him for a place in university. In spite of his less-than-brilliant scholastic achievement, his non-Swiss citizenship and his Jewish race, he secured a junior position in the patent office at Bern. As the 20th century began, Einstein took up Swiss citizenship.
While in his job in the patent office, Einstein developed his most famous methodology—establishing fine theoretical science using his mind and a pencil rather than a laboratory. In 1905 he achieved the credits necessary to be awarded his doctorate at Zurich in addition to writing three influential papers in widely different domains of physics.
One paper dealt with the photoelectric effect and the nature of light; applying Planck’s quantum theory, which had been proposed five years earlier and quietly forgotten, Einstein was able to explain how metals absorbing energy from light will at some point emit an electron.
The second paper explained Brownian motion—the random jostling of molecules suspended in a fluid, and established much about the nature of molecules. This paper won him the Nobel Prize in physics 16 years later.
Not mentioned in the text of the award, however, was his third paper, “On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies.” It was this third paper that was to have the most profound effect on modern physics. It contained Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity, which radically simplified the way we understand the interaction between radiation (such as light) and matter.
Einstein proposed that it was meaningless to speak of one body moving and another body being still. Bodies can only be thought of as moving in relationship to each other; all motion is relative to some frame of reference, and the laws of nature apply unchanged, whatever that frame of reference.
In particular, this means that the speed of electromagnetic radiation (such as light) is always the same, no matter the frame of reference. Einstein’s perceptive and bold viewpoint made this theory difficult to understand, even by prominent scientists. But in subsequent years, results predicted on the basis of his theory were confirmed over and over again, and the Special Theory of Relativity eventually revolutionized how scientists viewed matter, space, time and all the things that interact with them.