The year 2005 has been declared by the international physics organizations as the World Year of Physics, or more specifically, the year of Albert Einstein. 2005 marks the one-hundredth anniversary of the four months of March through June of 1905 in which Einstein produced four scientific papers that revolutionized science and changed forever our view of the universe. The most famous of these papers was the theory of special relativity which dealt with new ideas about time and space. Einstein had been thinking for ten years about a question that had been asked by Galileo in 1632. Galileo's question involved a sailor at the top of the mast of a moving ship If the sailor dropped a rock, where would it land? Intuition would say it would land behind the base of the mast, but actually it would land at the base. To the sailor it would drop straight down, but to an observer on a nearby dock it would fall in a curved path called a trajectory.
Einstein was discussing this problem one evening with his friend Michele Basso as they were walking home from work, and a light went on in his mind. Since a straight line is the shortest distance between the top to the mast to the base, then the curved path, as observed from the dock, was longer, and therefore the time of the rock's fall was longer. The time of the falling rock was different for the two observers. The sailor's watch and the dock worker's watch would not have synchronized. The greater the velocity of the boat, the greater would be the time difference. This idea that time is not constant shocked the scientific world.
Two years later in 1907 Einstein went mountain climbing with a Polish chemist, Marie Curie, and he spent most of the time talking to her about his thoughts on gravitation, and again a light went on in his mind which resulted in his general theory of relativity in 1915. The acceleration due to the earth's gravitation for a falling object in a vacuum is 32 feet/sec/sec. He reasoned that if a person were in an elevator in space ascending at that rate of acceleration, the person would be held to the floor with the same force as he would on a stationary platform on earth, so gravity and acceleration must be equivalent. Then he envisioned a light beam entering the elevator through a side window. Just as the rock followed a curved path, so would the light beam be bent. From this he postulated that a beam of light would be similarly bent in a gravitational field. His prediction was dramatically confirmed during the total eclipse of the sun May 29, 1919.
God is the Master of time and space. He stopped Joshua's clock; He reversed Hezekiah's clock; He transported Philip to a desert road; He propelled a boatload of disciples instantly to shore; and He is alive forever. Yes, 2005 belongs to Einstein, but time and space belong to God because He is "the Lord of time and space."
