Special & General Relativity made easy =p 1/4

Sign in or sign up now!
Alert icon
Upgrade to the latest Flash Player for improved playback performance. Upgrade now or more info.
3,053
Loading...
Alert icon
Sign in or sign up now!
Alert icon

Uploaded by on Feb 15, 2010

Do you have a fascination with Einstein's theory of relativity? What I mean is, do you find yourself fascinated by the weird predictions of this theory and would like to get to the bottom of it once and for all? While relativity Is not a light read (all puns here are accidental, BTW), pieces of it can be easily understood. This is particularly the case with Special Relativity.

I'll attempt to explain in an intuitive way, why the time of a rapidly traveling object seems (from your point of view) to slow down. That is, why an object seems to age more slowly when it travels at very high speeds.

You will have to take two things on faith: the speed of light is constant (an experimental fact) and that all frames of reference traveling at constant speed have equal validity. The explanations that follow rest completely on these two conditions.

Our brains are wired for survival purposes for a 3 dimensional and very slow moving environment. Compared to the speed of light, the everyday objects that our brains perceive and reason about are barely moving at all. Our common sense about how the world works is specialized for dealing with an almost non-moving or static environment (again, that's compared to the speed of light).

What this means, is that what our common sense tells us about our sluggish everyday world is mostly correct but otherwise it's judgements cannot be trusted when dealing with extremely fast things.

So when experiments and mathematics tell us things that are contrary to our crude perceptions about how things should work, we find it to be totally bizarre
cont'd http://www.squidoo.com/relativity_explanation
Want some more juice for your brain ? =p
http://www.phys.unsw.edu.au/einsteinlight/
http://www.einstein-online.info/en/elementary/index.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_relativity
http://www.einstein-online.info/en/elementary/generalRT/index.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_relativity
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Einstein
sitll want some more yummies?
buy a book :D
http://www.amazon.com/Einstein-Life-Universe-Walter-Isaacson/dp/0743264746/re...
Special Thanks to
This video series was produced by: The Cassiopeia Project - making science simple!

The Cassiopeia Project is an effort to make high quality science videos available to everyone. If you can visualize it, then understanding is not far behind.

http://www.cassiopeiaproject.com/ Please visit this great website !

also thanks to marcellojun youtube channel!
Subscribe! Listien! Learn! Practice! Share! Teach! The calosophy way ;)

  • likes, 3 dislikes

Link to this comment:

Share to:
see all

All Comments (3)

Sign In or Sign Up now to post a comment!

  • holy. THANKS

    MyTrustpro 3 weeks ago

  • Woo hoo! much easier!

    timberlyee 2 years ago

  • nice

    TheJanehair122 2 years ago

Loading...

Alert icon
0 / 00Unsaved Playlist Return to active list
    1. Your queue is empty. Add videos to your queue using this button:
      or sign in to load a different list.
    Loading...Loading...Saving...
    • Clear all videos from this list
    • Learn more