"Let There Be Relativity"

Einstein, ChatGPT, and the Flash shed light on Genesis

While walking the dog this morning, I was listening to Einstein’s Relatitivity: the Special and the General Theory¹ and asking ChatGPT to explain the parts I don’t get,² and I couldn’t help but be struck by how Einstein’s (and ChatGPT’s) descriptions of the function of light suggest not only an ordered universe, but one in alignment with Genesis.

I was trying to understand Einstein’s argument that light travels at a constant speed regardless of where you’re standing or how fast you’re moving.

We all know—if we think about it—³that if you’re traveling on a train moving 65 mph and you’re walking forward on the train at 5 mph, you’re actually traveling at 70 mph (relative to the unmoving tracks). Likewise, when you’re walking toward the back of the train at the same speed, you’re traveling 60 mph (because 65mph - 5mph).

But here’s the weird part, according to Einstein.

If you shine a flashlight forward or backward on that same train, the beam of light from the flashlight travels at the same speed it would travel even if you were standing on terra firma next to the passing train. Light travels at 186,000 miles per second, or for simplicity’s sake: C. The speed of the flashlight’s beam going forward is not 65mph + C, and the speed of the beam going backward is not C -65 mph. It’s always C.

I couldn’t quite wrap my brain around this, so I asked ChatGPT the natural question.

If The Flash were racing a beam of light, and was traveling 99.9 percent as fast as light, would the light look to him like a slowly advancing beam, or would it look the same to him as it would to me if I shined a beam of light while standing still?

The answer?

It would look exactly the same to the Flash as it would to me.

He would not see a slow-motion beam even though he was running 99.999 per cent as fast as the beam.

How does ChatGPT explain this?

To make that constancy of C work for all observers, the universe has to twist time and space itself. So:

1. Time dilation

Barry’s⁴ clock ticks slower compared to someone standing still.
He experiences much less time between departure and arrival.

2. Length contraction

To Barry, the space ahead of him — including the entire universe in his direction of travel — shrinks in length.
The finish line gets closer.

3. Relativity of simultaneity

Events that appear simultaneous to someone standing still (like “the light was turned on when the gun went off”) might not appear simultaneous to Barry.

🚫 What Barry can’t do:

• He can’t catch up to the light beam.

• He can’t see the beam as slowed down.

• He can’t enter a “light frame” where the light stands still — such a frame doesn’t exist.

There is no frame of reference in which a beam of light is at rest.
That’s not just a limitation — it’s a law of physics.

Apparently, time slows down and space warps to accommodate the constancy of the speed of light. So even if the Flash is running nearly as fast as light, light won’t seem to slow down for him the way a car would seem to slow down if I were catching up to it in my car.

“That’s not a bug in the math,” says ChatGPT. “It’s the defining rule of the universe.”

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Still with me? Let me put it in English major terms.⁵ Light always travels at the same speed (in a vacuum) no matter what, and other elements of reality that we normally consider to be eternally fixed—like time and space—change, adapt themselves to light’s fixity. Time slows down. Space warps.

“It’s as if the universe bows to one unchanging truth,” ChatGPT said, “and everything else rearranges itself around that principle.”

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When I read that, I couldn’t help but think of the Bible. What are the very first words of Creation?

“Let there be light.”

Now, I distinctly remember James Joyce making fun of this in Ulysses through Stephen Dedalus saying something like, “the writer of Genesis was a poor artist, having made God create light before creating the sun,”⁶ but actually, the writer of Genesis may have been a true poet and got things metaphorically, and maybe even literally, correct.

From a physics perspective, making light before the sun makes perfect sense. God is beginning with the very first law of the universe, the fundamental principle to which everything else must adapt.

It’s remarkable. After all, this certainly didn’t have to be the first commandment.

God could’ve said, “Let there be life.”⁷ He could’ve said, “Let there be matter.” He could’ve said, “Let there be earth, wind, and fire.” He could’ve said, “Let there be The Monkees.”

But He didn’t. He said, “Let there be that thing that Einstein is going to show is the thing to which everything else must adapt.”

I’m not trying to engage in some sort of apologetics here. I’m simply observing what seems to me to be an inspiring coincidence. A good atheist could easily hand-wave away such a coincidence as a function of pattern recognition or cherry-picking. Fine, this is an interesting coincidence, but X, Y, and Z in the Bible make no sense whatsoever.

I’m not making a truth claim, but a perspective one. I’m telling you what I can’t help seeing when I read Einstein, and what I’m seeing is that religion and science are not mortal enemies; what I’m seeing is that one sheds light on the other.

1. Because that’s just the kind of guy I am. And/but he wrote this for a lay audience.

2. Because I’m also that kind of guy, because it’s the closest thing I’ve got to J.A.R.V.I.S., and who doesn’t want to be Iron Man?

3. FYI, em dash notwithstanding, I do not use ChatGPT to craft sentences. I bounce ideas off it, ask it to explain stuff I don’t understand, run songs by it, and ask it how many fingers I’m holding up, but do not farm out my writing to it.

4. BTW, note that ChatGPT assumes I mean Barry Allen, the Silver Age Flash, who, so far as I’m concerned is the “real Flash” as much as Norrin Radd is the “real Silver Surfer”—despite what all you gender-swapping, “Earth 616”-citing “experts” might say about their being other Surfers like Shamalama Ding Dong or whatever. There’s the iconic Flash, the iconic SS, and there’s everyone else.

5. There’s been some discussion lately online about whether English majors are as smart as, say, engineers. Obviously, this is a ridiculous comparison of two diverse groups, and yet I can’t get one tweet out of my head: “Yeah, we’ve all heard of English majors who found the subject so difficult they dropped the major and switched to Engineering.”

6. This may be a mandela effect on my part. I asked ChatGPT to help me find the quote, and the best it could do was to hallucinate one. Does that mean ChatGPT is a useless stochastic parrot? Need I say that I, apparently, hallucinated the quote before it did? I’m positive it exists. But I’m also positive that Fruit of the Loom had a cornucopia. Maybe hallucination is not a sign of AI non-intelligence, but it is, in fact, closer to being human than we might even have thought.

7. Joyce did say this.