Albert Einstein and the start of our journey of discovery

Several hundred years ago scientists considered that the weight of an object was fixed and absolute. Then Isaac Newton demonstrated that an object weighed less at the top of a mountain than it did at sea level, where gravity was stronger. (Weight is a measure of the force that gravity exerts on an object). So a new term was coined ..... mass.

The mass of an object was considered constant, but its weight varied with height. The higher the object above the earth's surface, the less was the effect of gravity, hence the less its weight.  But height did not affect the "mass" of an object.

So for a long time mass was considered absolute. Then along came Einstein with his relativity theory. He proved that mass actually varies depending on the speed it was travelling. The closer a mass gets to the speed of light (186,000 miles per second) the greater its mass becomes. When it reaches the speed of light its mass becomes infinite and as it would take an infinite force to accelerate an infinite mass then nothing solid can exceed the speed of light.

So speed became more important than mass which had become more important than weight.

At the same time Einstein found that when an object travels very fast, close to the speed of light, time slows down so the astronauts who travelled to the moon and back have aged a fraction of a second less than us earthbound mortals.

If an astronaut travelled outward for 5 years at near the speed of light and then turned around and made the same journey back to earth he might be 10 years older while back here on earth something like 50 - 100 years would have passed.

So everything is relative to speed. Both time and mass are determined by speed.

  Quantum physics and the power of expectation