Einstein and a Wave of Light

Einstein and a Wave of Light

If you have walked through the pleasant Tuscan countryside in the 1890’s, you might have come upon a somewhat long-haired teenage high school dropout on the road to Pavia. His teachers in Germany told him that he would never amount to anything, that his questions destroyed classroom discipline, that he would be better off out of school.

Se the young man left and wandered, delighting in the freedom of Northen Italy, where he could ruminate on matters remote from the subjects he had been force-fed in his highly disciplined Prussian schoolroom. His name was Albert Einstein and his ruminations changed the world.

Einstein had been fascinated by Bernstein’s People’s Book of Natural Science, a popularisation of science that described on its very first page the astonishing speed of electricity through wires and light through space. He wondered what the world would look like if you could travel on a wave of light.

To travel at the speed of light? What an engaging and magical thought (quotations from Megan Jorgensen). Image : © Meg Jorgensen (Elena)

To travel at the speed of light? What an engaging and magical thought for a boy on the road in a countryside dappled and rippling in sunlight.

You could not tell you were on a light wave if you traveled with it. If you started a wave crest, you would stay on the crest and lose all notion of it being a wave.