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[I]ndividuals who are moving with respect to each other will not agree on their observations of either space or time.

The history of the twentieth century—in psychology, literature, and psychoanalysis—has been a series of revolutions of subjectivity. Greene begins his discussion of string theory by contextualizing it within this modern framework. Einstein’s theories of relativity were groundbreaking not just for the physical truths they unveiled but for what they revealed about individuals’ power to determine the “truth” of their experiences. Historically, science, like religion, proclaimed that one point of view was right and the other wrong. Einstein’s theories of relativity undid the simplicity of that formulation and replaced it with an all-pervading subjectivity. There is no longer one correct answer or measurement for the motion of objects in space.

And yet, even as it emphasized the significance of different perspectives, relativity also demonstrated the deficiencies of human intuition, as Greene points out above. It is by no means intuitively obvious that everyone experiences time differently. Indeed, the notion undermines everything humans believed about distance and time and motion. Relativity shows that many movements in the universe far exceed humans’ capacity to apprehend them in day-to-day experience—or even to make sense of them. In special relativity, this hard-to-comprehend motion is the speed of light, which never changes. In general relativity, the tricky motion is gravity.

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