Tag / gravitation

by David D. Nolte

The Light in Einstein’s Elevator

Gravity bends light!

Of all the audacious proposals made by Einstein, and there were many, this one takes the cake because it should be impossible.

There can be no force of gravity on light because light has no mass.  Without mass, there is no gravitational “interaction”.  We all know Newton’s Law of gravity … it was one of the first equations of physics we ever learned

Newtonian gravitation

which shows the interaction between the masses M and m through their product.  For light, this is strictly zero. 

How, then did Einstein conclude, in 1907, only two years after he proposed his theory of special relativity, that gravity bends light? If it were us, we might take Newton’s other famous equation and equate the two

Newton's second law

and guess that somehow the little mass m (though it equals zero) cancels out to give

Acceleration

so that light would fall in gravity with the same acceleration as anything else, massive or not. 

But this is not how Einstein arrived at his proposal, because this derivation is wrong!  To do it right, you have to think like an Einstein.

“My Happiest Thought”

Towards the end of 1907, Einstein was asked by Johannes Stark to contribute a review article on the state of the relativity theory to the Jahrbuch of Radioactivity and Electronics. There had been a flurry of activity in the field in the two years since Einstein had published his groundbreaking paper in Annalen der Physik in September of 1905 [1]. Einstein himself had written several additional papers on the topic, along with others, so Stark felt it was time to put things into perspective.

Photo of Einstein around 1905 during his Annis Mirabalis.
Fig. 1 Einstein around 1905.

Einstein was still working at the Patent Office in Bern, Switzerland, which must not have been too taxing, because it gave him plenty of time think. It was while he was sitting in his armchair in his office in 1907 that he had what he later described as the happiest thought of his life. He had been struggling with the details of how to apply relativity theory to accelerating reference frames, a topic that is fraught with conceptual traps, when he had a flash of simplifying idea:

“Then there occurred to me the ‘glucklichste Gedanke meines Lebens,’ the happiest thought of my life, in the following form. The gravitational field has only a relative existence in a way similar to the electric field generated by magnetoelectric induction. Because for an observer falling freely from the roof of a house there exists —at least in his immediate surroundings— no gravitational field. Indeed, if the observer drops some bodies then these remain relative to him in a state of rest or of uniform motion… The observer therefore has the right to interpret his state as ‘at rest.'”[2]

In other words, the freely falling observer believes he is in an inertial frame rather than an accelerating one, and by the principle of relativity, this means that all the laws of physics in the accelerating frame must be the same as for an inertial frame. Hence, his great insight was that there must be complete equivalence between a mechanically accelerating frame and a gravitational field. This is the very first conception of his Equivalence Principle.

Cover of the Jahrbuch for Radioactivity and Electronics from 1907.
Fig. 2 Front page of the 1907 volume of the Jahrbuch. The editor list reads like a “Whos-Who” of early modern physics.

Title page to Einstein's 1907 Jahrbuch review article
Fig. 3 Title page to Einstein’s 1907 Jahrbuch review article “On the Relativity Principle and its Consequences” [3]

After completing his review of the consequences of special relativity in his Jahrbuch article, Einstein took the opportunity to launch into his speculations on the role of the relativity principle in gravitation. He is almost appologetic at the start, saying that:

“This is not the place for a detailed discussion of this question.  But as it will occur to anybody who has been following the applications of the principle of relativity, I will not refrain from taking a stand on this question here.”

But he then launches into his first foray into general relativity with keen insights.

The beginning of the section where Einstein first discusses the effects of accelerating frames and effects of gravity
Fig. 4 The beginning of the section where Einstein first discusses the effects of accelerating frames and effects of gravity.

He states early in his exposition:

“… in the discussion that follows, we shall therefore assume the complete physical equivalence of a gravitational field and a corresponding accelerated reference system.”

Here is his equivalence principle. And using it, in 1907, he derives the effect of acceleration (and gravity) on ticking clocks, on the energy density of electromagnetic radiation (photons) in a gravitational potential, and on the deflection of light by gravity.

Over the next several years, Einstein was distracted by other things, such as obtaining his first university position, and his continuing work on the early quantum theory. But by 1910 he was ready to tackle the general theory of relativity once again, when he discovered that his equivalence principle was missing a key element: the effects of spatial curvature, which launched him on a 5-year program into the world of tensors and metric spaces that culminated with his completed general theory of relativity that he published in November of 1915 [4].

The Observer in the Chest: There is no Elevator

Einstein was never a stone to gather moss. Shortly after delivering his triumphal exposition on the General Theory of Relativity, he wrote up a popular account of his Special and now General Theories to be published as a book in 1916, first in German [5] and then in English [6]. What passed for a “popular exposition” in 1916 is far from what is considered popular today. Einstein’s little book is full of equations that would be somewhat challenging even for specialists. But the book also showcases Einstein’s special talent to create simple analogies, like the falling observer, that can make difficult concepts of physics appear crystal clear.

In 1916, Einstein was not yet thinking in terms of an elevator. His mental image at this time, for a sequestered observer, was someone inside a spacious chest filled with measurement apparatus that the observer could use at will. This observer in his chest was either floating off in space far from any gravitating bodies, or the chest was being pulled by a rope hooked to the ceiling such that the chest accelerates constantly. Based on the measurement he makes, he cannot distinguish between gravitational fields and acceleration, and hence they are equivalent. A bit later in the book, Einstein describes what a ray of light would do in an accelerating frame, but he does not have his observer attempt any such measurement, even in principle, because the deflection of the ray of light from a linear path would be far too small to measure.

But Einstein does go on to say that any curvature of the path of the light ray requires that the speed of light changes with position. This is a shocking admission, because his fundamental postulate of relativity from 1905 was the invariance of the speed of light in all inertial frames. It was from this simple assertion that he was eventually able to derive E = mc2. Where, on the one hand, he was ready to posit the invariance of the speed of light, on the other hand, as soon as he understood the effects of gravity on light, Einstein did not hesitate to cast this postulate adrift.

Position-dependent speed of light in relativity.

Fig. 5 Einstein’s argument for the speed of light depending on position in a gravitational field.

(Einstein can be forgiven for taking so long to speak in terms of an elevator that could accelerate at a rate of one g, because it was not until 1946 that the rocket plane Bell X-1 achieved linear acceleration exceeding 1 g, and jet planes did not achieve 1 g linear acceleration until the F-15 Eagle in 1972.)

Aircraft with greater than 1:1 thrust to weight ratios
Fig. 6 Aircraft with greater than 1:1 thrust to weight ratios.

The Evolution of Physics: Enter Einstein’s Elevator

Years passed, and Einstein fled an increasingly autocratic and belligerent Germany for a position at Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study. In 1938, at the instigation of his friend Leopold Infeld, they decided to write a general interest book on the new physics of relativity and quanta that had evolved so rapidly over the past 30 years.

Title page of "Evolution of Physics" 1938 written with his friend Leopold Infeld at Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study.
Fig. 7 Title page of “Evolution of Physics” 1938 written with his friend Leopold Infeld at Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study.

Here, in this obscure book that no-one remembers today, we find Einstein’s elevator for the first time, and the exposition talks very explicitly about a small window that lets in a light ray, and what the observer sees (in principle) for the path of the ray.

One of the only figures in the Einstein and Infeld book: The origin of "Einstein's Elevator"!
Fig. 8 One of the only figures in the Einstein and Infeld book: The origin of “Einstein’s Elevator”!

By the equivalence principle, the observer cannot tell whether they are far out in space, being accelerated at the rate g, or whether they are statinary on the surface of the Earth subject to a gravitational field. In the first instance of the accelerating elevator, a photon moving in a straight line through space would appear to deflect downward in the elevator, as shown in Fig. 9, because the elevator is accelerating upwards as the photon transits the elevator. However, by the equivalence principle, the same physics should occur in the gravitational field. Hence, gravity must bend light. Furthermore, light falls inside the elevator with an acceleration g, just as any other object would.

The accelerating elevator and what an observer inside sees (From "Galileo Unbound" (Oxford, 2018).
Fig. 9 The accelerating elevator and what an observer inside sees (From “Galileo Unbound” (Oxford, 2018). [7])

Light Deflection in the Equivalence Principle

A photon enters an elevator at right angles to its acceleration vector g.  Use the geodesic equation and the elevator (Equivalence Principle) metric [8]

to show that the trajectory is parabolic. (This is a classic HW problem from Introduction to Modern Dynamics.)

Solution:

The geodesic equation with time as the dependent variable

This gives two coordinate equations

Note that x0 = ct and x1 = ct are both large relative to the y-motion of the photon.  The metric component that is relevant here is

and the others are unity.  The geodesic becomes (assuming dy/dt = 0)

The Christoffel symbols are

which give

Therefore

or

where the photon falls with acceleration g, as anticipated.

Light Deflection in the Schwarzschild Metric

Do the same problem of the light ray in Einstein’s Elevator, but now using the full Schwarzschild solution to the Einstein Field equations.

Schwarzschild metric

Solution: 

Einstein’s elevator is the classic test of virtually all heuristic questions related to the deflection of light by gravity.  In the previous Example, the deflection was attributed to the Equivalence Principal in which the observer in the elevator cannot discern whether they are in an acceleration rocket ship or standing stationary on Earth.  In that case, the time-like metric component is the sole cause of the free-fall of light in gravity.  In the Schwarzschild metric, on the other hand, the curvature of the field near a spherical gravitating body also contributes.  In this case, the geodesic equation, assuming that dr/dt = 0 for the incoming photon, is

where, as before, the Christoffel symbol for the radial displacements are

Evaluating one of these

The other Christoffel symbol that contributes to the radial motion is

and the geodesic equation becomes

with

The radial acceleration of the light ray in the elevator is thus

The first term on right is free-fall in gravity, just as was obtained from the Equivalence Principal.  The second term is a higher-order correction caused by curvature of spacetime.  The third term is the motion of the light ray relative to the curved ceiling of the elevator in this spherical geometry and hence is a kinematic (or geometric) artefact.  (It is interesting that the GR correction on the curved-ceiling correction is of the same order as the free-fall term, so one would need to be very careful doing such an experiment … if it were at all measurable.) Therefore, the second and third terms are curved-geometry effects while the first term is the free fall of the light ray.

  

Post-Script: The Importance of Library Collections

I was amused to see the library card of the scanned Internet Archive version of Einstein’s Jahrbuch article, shown below. The volume was checked out in August of 1981 from the UC Berkeley Physics Library. It was checked out again 7 years later in September of 1988. These dates coincide with when I arrived at Berkeley to start grad school in physics, and when I graduated from Berkeley to start my post-doc position at Bell Labs. Hence this library card serves as the book ends to my time in Berkeley, a truly exhilarating place that was the top-ranked physics department at that time, with 7 active Nobel Prize winners on its faculty.

During my years at Berkeley, I scoured the stacks of the Physics Library looking for books and journals of historical importance, and was amazed to find the original volumes of Annalen der Physik from 1905 where Einstein published his famous works. This was the same library where, ten years before me, John Clauser was browsing the stacks and found the obscure paper by John Bell on his inequalities that led to Clauser’s experiment on entanglement that won him the Nobel Prize of 2022.

That library at UC Berkeley was recently closed, as was the Physics Library in my department at Purdue University (see my recent Blog), where I also scoured the stacks for rare gems. Some ancient books that I used to be able to check out on a whim, just to soak up their vintage ambience and to get a tactile feel for the real thing held in my hands, are now not even available through Interlibrary Loan. I may be able to get scans from Internet Archive online, but the palpable magic of the moment of discovery is lost.

References:

[1] Einstein, A. (1905). Zur Elektrodynamik bewegter Körper. Annalen der Physik, 17(10), 891–921.

[2] Pais, A (2005). Subtle is the Lord: The Science and Life of Albert Einstein (Oxford University Press). pg. 178

[3] Einstein, A. (1907). Über das Relativitätsprinzip und die aus demselben gezogenen Folgerungen. Jahrbuch der Radioaktivität und Elektronik, 4, 411–462.

[4] A. Einstein (1915), “On the general theory of relativity,” Sitzungsberichte Der Koniglich Preussischen Akademie Der Wissenschaften, pp. 778-786, Nov.

[5] Einstein, A. (1916). Über die spezielle und die allgemeine Relativitätstheorie (Gemeinverständlich). Braunschweig: Friedr. Vieweg & Sohn.

[6] Einstein, A. (1920). Relativity: The Special and the General Theory (A Popular Exposition) (R. W. Lawson, Trans.). London: Methuen & Co. Ltd.

[7] Nolte, D. D. (2018). Galileo Unbound. A Path Across Life, the Universe and Everything. (Oxford University Press)

[8] Nolte, D. D. (2019). Introduction to Modern Dynamics: Chaos, Networks, Space and Time (Oxford University Press).

Read more in Books by David Nolte at Oxford University Press.
by David D. Nolte

How to Teach General Relativity to Undergraduate Physics Majors

As a graduate student in physics at Berkeley in the 1980’s, I took General Relativity (aka GR), from Bruno Zumino, who was a world-famous physicist known as one of the originators of super-symmetry in quantum gravity (not to be confused with super-asymmetry of Cooper-Fowler Big Bang Theory fame).  The class textbook was Gravitation and cosmology: principles and applications of the general theory of relativity, by Steven Weinberg, another world-famous physicist, in this case known for grand unification of the electro-weak force with electromagnetism.  With so much expertise at hand, how could I fail but to absorb the simple essence of general relativity? 

The answer is that I failed miserably.  Somehow, I managed to pass the course, but I walked away with nothing!  And it bugged me for years.  What was so hard about GR?  It took me almost a decade teaching undergraduate physics classes at Purdue in the 90’s before I realized that it my biggest obstacle had been language:  I kept mistaking the words and terms of GR as if they were English.  Words like “general covariance” and “contravariant” and “contraction” and “covariant derivative”.  They sounded like English, with lots of “co” prefixes that were hard to keep straight, but they actually are part of a very different language that I call Physics-ese, 

Physics-ese is a language that has lots of words that sound like English, and so you think you know what the words mean, but the words have sometimes opposite meanings than what you would guess.  And the meanings of Physics-ese are precisely defined, and not something that can be left to interpretation.  I learned this while teaching the intro courses to non-majors, because so many times when the students were confused, it turned out that it was because they had mistaken a textbook jargon term to be English.  If you told them that the word wasn’t English, but just a token standing for a well-defined object or process, it would unshackle them from their misconceptions.

Then, in the early 00’s when I started to explore the physics of generalized trajectories related to some of my own research interests, I realized that the primary obstacle to my learning anything in the Gravitation course was Physics-ese.   So this raised the question in my mind: what would it take to teach GR to undergraduate physics majors in a relatively painless manner?  This is my answer. 

More on this topic can be found in Chapter 11 of the textbook IMD2: Introduction to Modern Dynamics, 2nd Edition, Oxford University Press, 2019

Trajectories as Flows

One of the culprits for my mind block learning GR was Newton himself.  His ubiquitous second law, taught as F = ma, is surprisingly misleading if one wants to have a more general understanding of what a trajectory is.  This is particularly the case for light paths, which can be bent by gravity, yet clearly cannot have any forces acting on them. 

The way to fix this is subtle yet simple.  First, express Newton’s second law as

which is actually closer to the way that Newton expressed the law in his Principia.  In three dimensions for a single particle, these equations represent a 6-dimensional dynamical space called phase space: three coordinate dimensions and three momentum dimensions.  Then generalize the vector quantities, like the position vector, to be expressed as xa for the six dynamics variables: x, y, z, px, py, and pz. 

Now, as part of Physics-ese, putting the index as a superscript instead as a subscript turns out to be a useful notation when working in higher-dimensional spaces.  This superscript is called a “contravariant index” which sounds like English but is uninterpretable without a Physics-ese-to-English dictionary.  All “contravariant index” means is “column vector component”.  In other words, xa is just the position vector expressed as a column vector

This superscripted index is called a “contravariant” index, but seriously dude, just forget that “contravariant” word from Physics-ese and just think “index”.  You already know it’s a column vector.

Then Newton’s second law becomes

where the index a runs from 1 to 6, and the function Fa is a vector function of the dynamic variables.  To spell it out, this is

so it’s a lot easier to write it in the one-line form with the index notation. 

The simple index notation equation is in the standard form for what is called, in Physics-ese, a “mathematical flow”.  It is an ODE that can be solved for any set of initial conditions for a given trajectory.  Or a whole field of solutions can be considered in a phase-space portrait that looks like the flow lines of hydrodynamics.  The phase-space portrait captures the essential physics of the system, whether it is a rock thrown off a cliff, or a photon orbiting a black hole.  But to get to that second problem, it is necessary to look deeper into the way that space is described by any set of coordinates, especially if those coordinates are changing from location to location.

What’s so Fictitious about Fictitious Forces?

Freshmen physics students are routinely admonished for talking about “centrifugal” forces (rather than centripetal) when describing circular motion, usually with the statement that centrifugal forces are fictitious—only appearing to be forces when the observer is in the rotating frame.  The same is said for the Coriolis force.  Yet for being such a “fictitious” force, the Coriolis effect is what drives hurricanes and the colossal devastation they cause.  Try telling a hurricane victim that they were wiped out by a fictitious force!  Looking closer at the Coriolis force is a good way of understanding how taking derivatives of vectors leads to effects often called “fictitious”, yet it opens the door on some of the simpler techniques in the topic of differential geometry.

To start, consider a vector in a uniformly rotating frame.  Such a frame is called “non-inertial” because of the angular acceleration associated with the uniform rotation.  For an observer in the rotating frame, vectors are attached to the frame, like pinning them down to the coordinate axes, but the axes themselves are changing in time (when viewed by an external observer in a fixed frame).  If the primed frame is the external fixed frame, then a position in the rotating frame is

where R is the position vector of the origin of the rotating frame and r is the position in the rotating frame relative to the origin.  The funny notation on the last term is called in Physics-ese a “contraction”, but it is just a simple inner product, or dot product, between the components of the position vector and the basis vectors.  A basis vector is like the old-fashioned i, j, k of vector calculus indicating unit basis vectors pointing along the x, y and z axes.  The format with one index up and one down in the product means to do a summation.  This is known as the Einstein summation convention, so it’s just

Taking the time derivative of the position vector gives

and by the chain rule this must be

where the last term has a time derivative of a basis vector.  This is non-zero because in the rotating frame the basis vector is changing orientation in time.  This term is non-inertial and can be shown fairly easily (see IMD2 Chapter 1) to be

which is where the centrifugal force comes from.  This shows how a so-called fictitious force arises from a derivative of a basis vector.  The fascinating point of this is that in GR, the force of gravity arises in almost the same way, making it tempting to call gravity a fictitious force, despite the fact that it can kill you if you fall out a window.  The question is, how does gravity arise from simple derivatives of basis vectors?

The Geodesic Equation

To teach GR to undergraduates, you cannot expect them to have taken a course in differential geometry, because most of them just don’t have the time in their schedule to take such an advanced mathematics course.  In addition, there is far more taught in differential geometry than is needed to make progress in GR.  So the simple approach is to teach what they need to understand GR with as little differential geometry as possible, expressed with clear English-to-Physics-ese translations. 

For example, consider the partial derivative of a vector expressed in index notation as

Taking the partial derivative, using the always-necessary chain rule, is

where the second term is just like the extra time-derivative term that showed up in the derivation of the Coriolis force.  The basis vector of a general coordinate system may change size and orientation as a function of position, so this derivative is not in general zero.  Because the derivative of a basis vector is so central to the ideas of GR, they are given their own symbol.  It is

where the new “Gamma” symbol is called a Christoffel symbol.  It has lots of indexes, both up and down, which looks daunting, but it can be interpreted as the beta-th derivative of the alpha-th component of the mu-th basis vector.  The partial derivative is now

For those of you who noticed that some of the indexes flipped from alpha to mu and vice versa, you’re right!  Swapping repeated indexes in these “contractions” is allowed and helps make derivations a lot easier, which is probably why Einstein invented this notation in the first place.

The last step in taking a partial derivative of a vector is to isolate a single vector component Va as

where a new symbol, the del-operator has been introduced.  This del-operator is known as the “covariant derivative” of the vector component.  Again, forget the “covariant” part and just think “gradient”.  Namely, taking the gradient of a vector in general includes changes in the vector component as well as changes in the basis vector.

Now that you know how to take the partial derivative of a vector using Christoffel symbols, you are ready to generate the central equation of General Relativity:  The geodesic equation. 

Everyone knows that a geodesic is the shortest path between two points, like a great circle route on the globe.  But it also turns out to be the straightest path, which can be derived using an idea known as “parallel transport”.  To start, consider transporting a vector along a curve in a flat metric.  The equation describing this process is

Because the Christoffel symbols are zero in a flat space, the covariant derivative and the partial derivative are equal, giving

If the vector is transported parallel to itself, then there is no change in V along the curve, so that

Finally, recognizing

and substituting this in gives

This is the geodesic equation! 

Fig. 1 The geodesic equation of motion is for force-free motion through a metric space. The curvature of the trajectory is analogous to acceleration, and the generalized gradient is analogous to a force. The geodesic equation is the “F = ma” of GR.

Putting this in the standard form of a flow gives the geodesic flow equations

The flow defines an ordinary differential equation that defines a curve that carries its own tangent vector onto itself.  The curve is parameterized by a parameter s that can be identified with path length.  It is the central equation of GR, because it describes how an object follows a force-free trajectory, like free fall, in any general coordinate system.  It can be applied to simple problems like the Coriolis effect, or it can be applied to seemingly difficult problems, like the trajectory of a light path past a black hole.

The Metric Connection

Arriving at the geodesic equation is a major accomplishment, and you have done it in just a few pages of this blog.  But there is still an important missing piece before we are doing General Relativity of gravitation.  We need to connect the Christoffel symbol in the geodesic equation to the warping of space-time around a gravitating object. 

The warping of space-time by matter and energy is another central piece of GR and is often the central focus of a graduate-level course on the subject.  This part of GR does have its challenges leading up to Einstein’s Field Equations that explain how matter makes space bend.  But at an undergraduate level, it is sufficient to just describe the bent coordinates as a starting point, then use the geodesic equation to solve for so many of the cool effects of black holes.

So, stating the way that matter bends space-time is as simple as writing down the length element for the Schwarzschild metric of a spherical gravitating mass as

where RS = GM/c2 is the Schwarzschild radius.  (The connection between the metric tensor gab and the Christoffel symbol can be found in Chapter 11 of IMD2.)  It takes only a little work to find that

This means that if we have the Schwarzschild metric, all we have to do is take first partial derivatives and we will arrive at the Christoffel symbols that go into the geodesic equation.  Solving for any type of force-free trajectory is then just a matter of solving ODEs with initial conditions (performed routinely with numerical ODE solvers in Python, Matlab, Mathematica, etc.).

The first problem we will tackle using the geodesic equation is the deflection of light by gravity.  This is the quintessential problem of GR because there cannot be any gravitational force on a photon, yet the path of the photon surely must bend in the presence of gravity.  This is possible through the geodesic motion of the photon through warped space time.  I’ll take up this problem in my next Blog.

This Blog Post is a Companion to the undergraduate physics textbook Modern Dynamics: Chaos, Networks, Space and Time, 2nd ed. (Oxford, 2019) introducing Lagrangians and Hamiltonians, chaos theory, complex systems, synchronization, neural networks, econophysics and Special and General Relativity.