Jacqueline’s Space: Math – A Grand Symphony

Remember high school math class? To me, math homework seemed like an incoherent string of abstract puzzles on a sheet of notebook paper. But when I read what Albert Einstein described as “the happiest thought of his life,” everything changed.

Imagine standing in an elevator, and someone cuts the cables. Weightless, you enter a free fall. Everything in the elevator floats, bounces and tumbles off the walls. 

Now, again imagine standing in an elevator, but this time, in the depth of space. The elevator is accelerating upwards at 9.8 meters per second squared, the acceleration of earth’s gravity. If you were in this elevator, you could walk, sit, throw an apple in the air and watch it fall to the floor, just as if the elevator was sitting safely on earth. 

Perhaps the thought of experiencing weightlessness seemed a joyous thrill to Einstein, living in the early 1900s, far before the floating and tumbling astronauts living on the International Space Station. 

But Einstein’s joy in this thought likely comes from what it revealed. In the weightless scenario, gravity is still acting upon you – you are still falling towards earth. In the accelerating elevator, there is no gravity and yet you feel your weight. He called this idea the equivalence principle, equating the effects of acceleration to gravity.

From here, Einstein found inferences about gravity based off acceleration. This thought experiment, joined by many others Einstein created, became his revolutionary theory of general relativity.   

Gravity is not a force tugging against you, as Isaac Newton thought. Gravity is the curvature of spacetime. 

This explanation may bring up more questions than answers. If you’re curious about Einstein’s theory of general relativity, I recommend the YouTube video “Why Gravity is NOT a Force” by Veritasium. However, it’s the very complexity of this topic that highlights my point. 

Einstein used his imagination to explain how everything in the universe interacts. Why the moon orbits the earth, why earth orbits the sun and why the solar system exists in the Milky Way. What a complex topic. Yet, Einstein didn’t sit idly at a desk crunching numbers until they worked. Einstein was a visionary.

Then, over many years, Einstein took his daydream and made it a reality. Here is where the mathematical music begins to play, with Einstein as the great composer.

He could hear the music, but then he had to write it down. Instead of notes, rests and key signatures, Einstein’s pen wrote equations that turned these creative thought experiments into mathematical equations. Math became the applicable expression of his creative daydream — his symphony.

His daydreams could now be tested. Since then, scientists have been playing the piece. So far, the notes harmonize. 

In 1919, Einstein’s theory was proven when starlight bent around the sun during an eclipse, just as he predicted, because of the curve of space time.

In 2015, the first gravitational waves, ripples in spacetime were recorded, as Einstein predicted.  

Einstein also foresaw something he didn’t even think was real: the black hole. In a 1939 paper, Einstein conceived the idea of a black hole, however he concluded that such an idea was not actually real in nature. But in 2019, scientists photographed a black hole, just as Einstein described it. Like an artist at an easel, Einstein could use his theory to paint something into reality.

But, of course, Einstein could be wrong. Here is where the word choice of Einstein as a composer, not simply the conductor of a grand piece already written, is important. Because someone else could come along and begin to write an original composition far grandeur and far more accurate. 

What does this all say about math? So many times, we see math as literal, like there can only be one answer. But it is inherently creative. Einstein could not just sit down at a table and work numbers to come up with his theory. He had to think. He had to imagine.

To Einstein, math was an art because he used his imagination to bring his math homework to life. So, maybe try a little creativity before you grudge over your next math assignment. You might just become the next Einstein. 

Hale is the editor-in-chief. Follow her on Twitter.