It is my goal to discuss the Unified Field Theory with everyone, and if my target audience could include kids in the fourth grade, that would be excellent. For that reason, I thought that I would introduce the idea of ‘frames of reference’ and the idea of ‘relativity’ for the benefit of those who might not be familiar with the concepts.





In the image above we show, on the left side of the image, the position of John and Martha within a gravitational field. John is higher up in the field (the top left corner) and Marge is down below in a lower level of the gravitational field (bottom left corner). Both John and Martha have a one meter long measuring rod, and they both determine the official length of a meter using the standard method of counting the number of wavelengths of a certain frequency of electromagnetic radiation. They both get the same result, and they both consider a meter stick to be a meter stick and they both think that their clock is running normally.

We will refer to John and Martha as being in two different ‘frames’. When Martha looks up at John’s frame (the purple line) she sees that John has a long stick, relative to the length of her stick, and that his measuring light wave has redshifted, while at the same time his clock has sped up. When John looks down at Martha’s frame he sees that Martha has a short stick, and that her measuring wavelength has blue shifted, becoming a higher frequency and a shorter wavelength, while at the same time her clock has slowed down, so apparently she doesn’t notice a difference.

Everything appears normal to those who are within their own frame, and the saying ‘everything is relative’ only applies when you look outside your frame and consider the frame of someone else, in which case you would find that everything is indeed relative to some frame of reference.