DAY 7 - Big Questions Review & Einstein

We did some review of the Big Questions - Personhood, Supreme Being, Nature of Reality/Matter, and we ended up talking about the nature of the universe a la Einstein - see below:

Space-time curvature

Does it seem strange that Einstein keeps popping up in a philosophy course? Yet, when you are asking the question 'what is reality?', few people have contributed so much to changing our view of what reality is as he did. Indeed, Einstein's famous equation E=mc² actually expresses a big philosophical position too; basically, matter and energy are the same thing, but just perceived differently.

Likewise, Einstein's theory of relativity explains how something as accepted as time isn't always guaranteed. Gravity and velocity can cause time dilations, which means that if you are near something heavy enough or are going fast enough, time slows down for you (this might explain the feeling you get after eating a huge meal or when you're racing to get to the bathroom after a long class!). If you were travelling on a space ship going 0.999999c (where c = speed of light), the journey to Pluto from Earth would only take 42 seconds for the people on the spaceship, but back on Earth over 5 hours would have passed. In essence, you would be travelling into the future! But such concerns are not merely for science fiction; GPS device manufacturers are intimately aware of relativity since ignoring the theory would result in their satellites not functioning.

The subject of reality grows stranger yet when you consider the recent speculation into String theory. Simply, String theory suggests that the universe as we know it is merely an infinitesimally small part of a series of interwoven, vibrating strings... So, even if reality really is an illusion, the question now becomes: which illusion is it?

Resources
Animated Theory of Relativity 
Animated Time Dilation Calculator 
String Theory Website