Between the early sixteenth century and early eighteenth century was one of the most momentous events of history and which led to the modern world as we understand it today. This is the Scientific Revolution, which opens with Copernicus and his heliocentric theory of the solar system and ends with what is considered the greatest scientist of all time, Newton.
Isaac Newton was born in England and made his great contribution in the field of physics, laying the foundations of classical mechanics with the laws that bear his name and the discovery of the law of universal gravitation. In 1687 published a scientific work setting forth his findings, which is still considered the most important ever published and continues to have an unquestionable effect on systems macroscopic and moving at speeds away from the light. And, if there is a scientist who three hundred years has managed to overshadow the genius of Newton that has been Albert Einstein and it was his Theory of Relativity, which showed that Newtonian physics was worthless when the body is studied moves close to the speed of light.
For classical mechanics, if an observer standing on the platform of a railway train is passing a hundred kilometers per hour and within one of its cars a passenger threw a ball forward to fifty miles per hour, the observer would the ball is moved to one hundred fifty kilometers per hour. That is, to calculate the overall speed of the ball, just add it speeds compared to the wagon train and the observer. Until the early twentieth century this was so long, but the appearance of the Theory of Relativity dismantled one of the most well established ideas in physics.
Suppose now that the train was moving at a hundred thousand kilometers per second and the passenger imagination, instead of throwing a ball forward, light a lantern that emits a beam of light, moving at three hundred thousand kilometers per second. According to classical mechanics, the light would shift over the observer's platform to four thousand kilometers per second, but it is not, and that light is always propagated at the same speed, regardless of the reference system we use to measure it. That is, the beam will be traveling to three hundred thousand kilometers per second, both for the traveler to the observer platform.
This idea may turn out to be shocking is that if light travels at the same speed for both, in a certain time it must go through the same space, and might think that this is not true because "we" that this time the light travels more space when traveling in the train. What really is happening, and this is the great contribution of the Theory Einstein, is that the perception of space and time is different for each of the observers. That is, the measurement of space and time is relative to the observer.
One of the most important consequences of this theory is that time is getting slower for an object traveling at a speed approaching that of light. Another consequence is that the geometry of spacetime is affected by the presence of matter. Suppose we lived in a flat universe, in a folio. And that this sheet was divided into equal squares. Suppose that we move at a constant speed and to get from one grid to another will take us a minute. Now imagine that we put an object in this sheet and it gives as the network that receives a trapeze. As we have assumed grid sheet is elastic, it will deform more so the closer you are to where we placed the order, so take a minute to follow to get from one grid to another, we should now move faster and this speed will be faster the closer we are to the object. Well, that's exactly the gravity to the Theory of Relativity, a fictitious force that arises from a simple warping of space time due to the presence of matter.
Notwithstanding the foregoing, the appearance of the Theory of Relativity did not come to remove to classical mechanics. The only thing that Einstein did was to develop a description of the nature that was, under certain conditions, more accurate than Newton. It is likely that in some years when a new scientific find better. Still, the nature will behave the same and every new theory simply get closer to its infinite complexity.
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