From your own experiential perspective, the laws of physics are stacked against you if you ever hope to achieve immortality. From a thermodynamic perspective, every system tends toward increasing entropy-and-disorder, and the only way you can combat that is by constantly inputting an external source of energy; in other words, your body and mind will eventually break down.
And although you might try to leverage the power of relativity to dilate time and slow its passage, that will never work from your individual perspective; time only dilates or slows relative to an observer in a different reference frame from your own.
While this may confine a human’s dream of immortality to solutions that rely on technological enhancements or science-fiction level technology that relies on novel physical laws and/or phenomena, there’s still plenty for relativity to say about living forever: at least, relative to the rest of the Universe.
While this may confine a human’s dream of immortality to solutions that rely on technological enhancements or science-fiction level technology that relies on novel physical laws and/or phenomena, there’s still plenty for relativity to say about living forever: at least, relative to the rest of the Universe.
While nearly all of us living today will certainly be dead in another century, should we all remain on Earth, the lessons from both special and general relativity teach us that there are a few physical situations that we should strive for if we truly want to maximize the amount of time that we can spend as living creatures within our Universe. Here’s the key insight we all need to understand.
The foundation of relativity: spacetime
Even though we normally credit Einstein with overcoming the disparate ideas of space and time that had held sway since the time of Newton and coming up with the revolutionary concept of a four-dimensional fabric that weaves them both together — spacetime — it wasn’t Einstein at all that came up with that key insight.
The foundation of relativity: spacetime
Even though we normally credit Einstein with overcoming the disparate ideas of space and time that had held sway since the time of Newton and coming up with the revolutionary concept of a four-dimensional fabric that weaves them both together — spacetime — it wasn’t Einstein at all that came up with that key insight.
It’s true that 1905 was indeed a banner year for Einstein, with the two key insights that powered special relativity key among them:
- That the laws of physics are invariant, or that they do not change, in all non-accelerating frames of reference.
- And that the speed of light in a vacuum, c, is identical for all observers, regardless of their motion or of the motion of the light source in question.
