Who cares about relativity?

I am apparently "one of approximately 2,600 students... out of nearly 2.8 million high school seniors" to be a candidate for the presidential scholars award. Interesting.

It used to be that I was just known as the musical kid. Now that is being eclipsed by my academic performance. I don't want people to forget, though, that music is what really matters. Music can touch everyone. Music can do what science and A+'s never can. It can pull people together with a universal language.

Today I was arguing with Siobhan about whether my clock was fast. She said hers was correct, because it was satellite time (sp?). I told her that according to the theory of relativity, time stretches and slows down near massive bodies, so mine was more accurate, as it was on earth, and time was more stretched on earth than in space (which would technically mean that my watch should be slow, but Siobhan didn't bother to think about that). Anyway, Siobhan said, "So?" And I said, "It's part of relativity!" And she said, "Nobody cares about relativity but you MIT people."

It made me very sad. Maybe sadder than it should have made me. It's true, though, I guess. Most of the world doesn't care about relativity, or quantum mechanics, or infinite or finite space stretching or expanding and yanking time along with it. How could they not care?

I love thinking about those things. Like the fact that everything in our three dimensions travels in geodesics, because three-dimensional space is warped and curved because of gravity etc., but that those geodesics are actually straight lines in four dimensions, they just looked curved because our reality is curved, the way the shadow of a jet's straight path across the sky looks curved on the curved surface of earth.

And the idea that time is measured by space. Newton believed in absolute time, so he believed that his definition of displacement over time would always work. However, Einstein (and others) came along and realized that at speeds of light, time stretches. According to the Newtonian definition of time, that would mean that light, at its speed, would actually be going faster than it's speed from our perspective, enabling it to eventually go faster than itself and escape the speed of light. But Einstein shot that down by saying that not only does time stretch at the speed of light, distances stretch, so that time relies on space, which means, according to Hawking, that there could be no time without matter.

Isn't that interesting to you? No, probably not. Most people don't care. And maybe they shouldn't. I mean, what does science do for us without love or interpersonal maturity? What are atomic bombs worth if people don't love each other enough? Our world needs far more help in humanities than it does in science. But I am so drawn to science... I am drawn to the idea that I can understand the universe or multiverse, that I can discover things about the way the huge expanses of space work. It doesn't really matter, I guess. Who cares about relativity? But it means something to me.

I care!