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Einsteins Physics Of Illusion Einsteins Physics Of Illusion Copyright 漏 1980 by John Dobson This essay was delivered by John Dobson as a lecture at the Vedanta Society, Berkeley, USA, on 12th October 1980 and has been reprinted from: The Vedanta Kesari May, 1988 (pages 181-189) Some of you may think from the title Einsteins Physics of Illusion, that Im going to talk about the physics which underlies what we think of as magic. That is not what I expect to talk about. Some of you may think that I suspect that Einstein had some special physics of illusions. If he did, I dont know anything of it. Instead, what I want to do, with Einsteins help, is to trace our physics all the way back to square one, and to find out whether, underlying it, there may possibly be something akin to magic. George Valens has written a charming book called The Attractive Universe. It is subtitled Gravity and the Shape of Space, and on the very first page he says that when a ball is thrown straight up, after a while it comes to a stop, changes its direction and comes back. He says it looks like magic, and probably it is. Now what he is taking for granted is that it should have gone off on a straight path without any change in speed or direction. But you see, that also would have been the result of magic. We do not understand in physics why the ball comes back. But we also do not understand in our physics why the ball should have continued without any change in the direction of its speed. Now in the title, and in the remarks that I have made so far, what I mean by magic or illusion is something like what happens when, in the twilight, you mistake a rope for a snake. And this sort of thing was analyzed very carefully by some people in North India long, long ago, and they said that when you make suc