Light

Albert Einstein <Theory of Relativity>, Andrew Porter <The Theory of Light and Matter>

“So let’s now suppose the rocket ship is accelerating. (We will imagine that it is accelerating slowly, so we don’t approach the speed of light!) Since the rocket ship is moving upward, the first signal will have less distance to travel than before and so will arrive sooner than one second later. If the rocket ship were moving at a constant speed, the second signal would arrive exactly the same amount of time sooner, so the time between the two signals would remain one second. But due to the acceleration, the rocket ship will be moving even faster when the second signal is sent than it was when the first signal was sent, so the second signal will have even less distance to traverse than the first and will arrive in even less time. The observer on the floor will therefore measure less than one second between the signals, disagreeing with the ceiling observer, who claims to have sent them exactly one second apart.”

“According to general relativity, the floor observer measured less than one second between signals because time moves more slowly closer to the earth’s surface. The stronger the field, the greater this effect. Newton’s laws of motion put an end to the idea of absolute position in space. We have now seen how the theory of relativity gets rid of absolute time.”

Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow, A Briefer History of Time, Bantam Books, 2005

Experiments with light, a clock, and an accelerating rocket show how time passes at different rates in different places in an accelerating space.

“I put my arm around her then, and it felt good to have the full weight of her body against me. It had been a long time, years it seemed since she had let me hold her. I touched her hair and ran my fingers through it, and after a while, as the wind picked up, she leaned into my chest and closed her eyes. And for a moment I felt myself drift back to those late summer afternoons when we had sat on that patio as children, waiting for our father to return from work. I could still remember the way Amy would smile when she saw his headlights flash at the bottom of the hill. It seemed the simplest joy in the world-those lights, his car-the knowledge that the person you loved most was on his way home.”

Andrew Porter, The Theory of Light and Matter, University of Georgia Press, 2008 p.168

In the cabin, the protagonist experiences a sudden revelation about his older sister's relationship struggles with her fiancé, which fundamentally changes his perception of her, which he had previously seen as dominant and superior. At that moment, his mind is flooded with memories and images-a scene of him and his sister waiting for their father, with the flash of car headlights and her radiant smile.

In Gabriel García Márquez's novel One Hundred Years of Solitude, a character has a pig's tail. The novel is full of mythological elements created by the author's imagination. However, after receiving the Nobel Prize, the author received hundreds of letters sharing a similar experience: I kept my own pig's tail hidden in shame. But discovering a character like me in a Nobel Prize-winning novel brought me deep comfort and led me to express gratitude for the creation of the book. When he received the mail, he believed that the emergence of people with pig tails was not a result of their revealing their identities after reading his novel, but rather his depiction of the character in his writing brought them into being. In other words, if the author had not written the book, they would not exist.¹ Giving a name to something brings it into existence.

Einstein's formulation of the theory of relativity, explaining the variation of time in accelerating space, introduced me to the abstract concept of time through experiments with light and clocks aboard an accelerating rocket. Andrew Porter's literary creation of about 22 pages, detailing the intricate dynamics of a family and vividly depicting images of car lights, introduced me to the concept of literature.

1) Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude, Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 1967.
This reference is from a podcast episode featuring the works of Korean author Yeong-ha Kim.