[...]... instantaneously, from a far off object, such as the Sun, to the Earth with nothing like a discernible push or pull One of the manifestations of the greatness of Newton was that he resisted the temptation to “explain” gravitation He wrote down the law and then derived the consequences Over the next century the aether, or aethers, became a “theory of everything.” There was an electrical aether that transmitted... in terms of atoms, because these are themselves “indefensible conceptions However, it is in terms of the ill-defined notion of mass, that Newton makes his second definition; 21 Secrets of the Old One Definition II Quantity of motion is the measure of it by the velocity and quantity of matter conjointly “Quantity of motion” is what we would now call “momentum.” It is usually designated by the letter... distances one after another; but yet without any sensible interval of time, and continually urged forward by a principle of motion, which in the beginning accelerates them, till the resistance of the aethereal medium equals the force of that principle, much after the manner that bodies let fall in the water are accelerated till the resistance of the water equals the force of gravity But they, like not... consider the right-moving ones alone Because of the motion of the air and the tuning fork there will be regions of compression and rarefactions These regions will assume a periodic character reflecting the periodic motions of the tuning fork Newton described this picturesquely as “fits of easy reflection” and “fits of easy transmission.” If you plot the pressure measured at any point as a function of time... through the air, by particles that penetrated the aether The other held that light was in fact a series of vibrations of the aether, resembling sound, but moving very much faster It was known that light, unlike sound, could be transmitted through whatever vacua could be made in the laboratory–but these 26 The Prehistory Figure 1.4 Descartes’ aether had vortices and swirls 27 Secrets of the Old One “vacua”... transmitted electrical influences There was a heat aether—caloric—that was the medium that transported heat Indeed, it was heat It was well understood that sound was transported in media like the air–a material aether Beginning in the time of Newton, there was also a “luminiferous aether” that, in one form or other, transmitted light Indeed, there were two theories of light One of them argued that light was... measure of absolute time (duration), estimated by the motions of bodies, whether accurate or in equable, and is commonly employed in place of true time; as an hour, a day, a month, a year —Isaac Newton Our study of the prehistory of relativity begins with Galileo Galilei who was born in Pisa in 1564 We shall focus on one paragraph in Secrets of the Old One one of his books, Dialogue Concerning the Two... definition the momentum p is equal to mv, p = mv, where “v” is the velocity and “m” is the mass In terms of these definitions Newton then stated the Second Law Law II Change of motion [i.e., of momentum] is proportional to the moving force impressed, and takes place in the direction of the straight line in which such force is impressed This statement of the Second Law is more general than the one I used... additional complexity of the scheme, namely a displacement of the centers of the circles trigonometric functions If you keep enough terms in the Fourier series, you can reproduce the original motion to any accuracy 3 I would like to thank Owen Gingerich for helpful communications 13 Secrets of the Old One Earth Center of Earth's orbit Sun Mars Figure 1.2 The treatment of Mars on the Copernican system... periodically But the periodicity of the wave itself consists of the pattern of compression and rarefaction that reflect the oscillations of the tuning fork Later I will discuss light waves more carefully, but here I will just note that they oscillate in a plane at right angles to their movement, while sound waves oscillate in the direction of their movement, hence the term “longitudinal.” The way a wave-length . SVNY072-Bernstein September 7, 2005 17:42 Secrets ofthe OldOne i SVNY072-Bernstein September 7, 2005 17:42 Secretsofthe OldOne Einstein,1 905 JEREMY BERNSTEIN COPERNICUS BOOKS A N IMPRINT OF SPRINGER. Media springeronline.com Library of Congress Control Number: 2005926763 987654321 ISBN-10: 0-3 8 7-2 600 5-6 e-ISBN 0-3 8 7-2 590 0-7 ISBN-13: 97 8-0 38 7-2 600 5-1 iv SVNY072-Bernstein September 7, 2005 17:42 Contents Acknowledgments. papers is wrong. One can teach the theory of relativity from the third paper, and one can also teach the implications of the quantum nature of light from the first. In all the papers, the writing is