The World We Know. Or Do We?

-Abir Shoaib (Guest Writer)
(E-mail: abirshoaib017@gmail.com)

It's 1887. Physics is almost complete. We almost know enough to see the clockwork of the universe. only one last great question remains. The question of the Aether wind. The question of the way light travels.

Two men are setting up a set of mirrors deep inside a basement of a dormitory in Case Western. Their strange apparatus sits on a monumental block of sandstone resting on top of a pool of mercury. They are about to perform one of the most important experiment of all time. The Michleson Morley experiment. They are looking for proof of the great invisible fluid, Aether, through which light flows.

At the time, light was largely assumed to be a wave like sound or wave of water. But unlike any other waves, light travels through vacuum and needs no medium to travel. Experiments after experiments showed that light needs no medium to travel which was impossible for a wave. To answer this, scientists came up with a theory of some giant incompressable invisible fluid that filled the dark between the stars and subsumed the voids between the worlds which they named Aether and it was through this liquid light moves. But as physics got more and more advanced, we had to assign wilder components to it. But still there was no better explanations than it, the idea of Aether served as the working theorem for most scientific world.

The Michleson-Morley experiment was precise enough to show the effect of the speed of earth on speed of light. Unfortunately the earth moves very slow compared to the speed of light which made this a pretty challenging thing to test. Hence them burying the experiment underground, resting it on mercury and placing limestone on that mercury. the would need to measure something so small that they couldnt have any wayward tremors messing up their results, even as they adjusted their experiment and spun it around. But, and this is one of the triumphs of experimental physics, THEY DID IT! Their experiment was so exact that it was hard to dispute that it should be able to pick up the affects of the Aether wind. Only... it didn't. There was none. They got no effect at all. Light moved at the same speed no matter how they turned their device, no matter when the took the reading. It was astonishing. The experiment took place countless time by different scientists hoping for a different result and countless times it was just to prove the non-existence of the great Aether wind.

This experiment threw science into chaos. What could the explanation possibly be? How could we make sense of this? In 1905, a young man named Einstein would propose a solution. He offered the solution with the term 'Special Relativity' which denies the existence of an absolute frame of reference in Physics, aka The Aether. This lead to a number of conclusions:
-The speed of light in vacuum is constant
-It isnt affected by a frame of reference
-Space and Time is a one contiguous thing

But this theory suggested something else,something stranger than the idea that space and time was One. This is the idea that space time might be curved. And the curvature of the space-time might be affected bt gravity.
And its that curvature of space-time, and the way those curves get warped and changed is what suggests that we might not live in an Euclidean Universe. We might use Euclidean geometry to explain what we see around us and solve problems regarding those, but it doesnt represent the world as it actually is. The Non-Euclidean strange geometries are much closer to the truth. They are far more accurate representation of the universe as we now understand it. And it is those 'bizarre' geometries that we use now for much of modern physics.

The geometry that we built all of mathematics on, that we built all our Calculus and our Cartesian Coordinate System out of, that gave us Newtonian physics, in the end, it WASN'T IN ANY WAY REAL! It was and is simply a useful tool created by mankind to measure and think which was found to be profoundly valuable but that only MIMICKED the real world on a VERY TERRESTRIAL SCALE. When we look at something vastly large or imperceptibly small, we see that Euclidean geometry only offers us an approximation, not a precise result.

Well does it mean that every scientist and discoveries we made using was wrong all the way? It doesn't. It simply tells us that our knowledge about this universe is always evolving. It means that it might be the inaccurate things that pushes us one step closer to accuracy. And most importantly, it teaches us that there is always more out there to learn and discover and we should never stop learning.

Here you can see some visual examples of Non-Euclidean Geometry and how it works
>>>https://youtu.be/kEB11PQ9Eo8

The World We Know. Or Do We?