(ONE MAN'S ATTEMPT TO HELP THE WORLD UNDERSTAND THE VEXING QUESTIONS OF BIG SCIENCE ONE BEER AT A TIME)

Have you ever had the notion that Einstein was probably the only person who really understood relativity, and that the rest of us just go along with it because it seems like he must know what he’s talking about?   (He is, after all, EINSTEIN.)

He came up with this idea that, by any standard, is WAY out there – that space, time, energy and matter are all rather interchangeable. Einstein proclaimed that energy equals mass at the speed of light and that space and time form a fabric.  The Universe is a giant hammock, and mass and gravity can likened to a bowling ball rolling around on that hammock.  The bowling ball deforms the fabric and the depression represents gravity.

(And honestly now, how many times have you been bent-out-of-shape depressed about some grave situation?  Eh?  OK.  So we’re on to something.  Now stay with Einstein and I on this one.)

The more mass an object has, the more it depresses the fabric.  As the bowling ball depresses the hammock, time and space are bent around it and the pizza crumbs and pocket change fall into the low spot.  Essentially, Einstein lived off the spare pocket change of the Universe until the relativity thing finally began to pay.

“It’s all relative!” he proclaimed.

“Brilliant!” everyone replied.

“Stupendous!” we shouted.

“Monumental!” we marveled.

“Changes everything!” we agreed.

And then we all picked up our racquets and trotted off to play tennis...

To me, relativity means taking space and time, energy and matter, throwing them into a large coffee can and shaking the living daylights out of them.  When you open the can, relativity is what spills out. 

BUT, because it’s moving at the speed of light, you never see anything.  That’s why the can looks empty.  And because energy equals matter, what doesn’t matter has no energy.  And what has no energy gets pretty tired and the space/time fabric of the hammock begins to look better and better.   

So ultimately, I just take the stupid bowling ball off the hammock, dust off the pizza crumbs and put my butt in the huge black hole where the ball had been.  And because a black hole is so dense that nothing, not even light, can escape it – I shrug my shoulders and resign myself to the reality that I’m probably gonna be there for a while.

I leave the pocket change for Albert as a tip.