Imagining and Drawing Space-Time

Catalog description

Einstein’s theory of relativity fundamentally changed the way physicists imagined space and time. His thought experiments are often thought of as day dreams involving falling elevators and clocks in space, but in fact can be drawn on graph-like diagrams that allow physicists to understand and experiment with Einstein’s theory. However, physicists are often unable to construct any visual representation and must resort to heuristic or artistic pictures that tell a convincing story, and not a graphical translation, of the underlying math. How, for example, does one draw 10-dimensions? Does the black hole in the film Interstellar really look like that? What is at stake when our ability to "picture" space-time is insufficient at best and, at worst, completely wrong? The aim of this course will be to understand the relationship between the theories of space-time and its various representations—narrative, pictorial, and diagrammatic—as well as to use these representations to solve real problems in physics. In addition to readings and class discussion, this course will involve a large amount of physics, which depends on understanding and manipulating equations, which will depend on High School math that we will review to get everyone up to speed.