Tell me about the theory of relativity.

[lysergic]

anything and everything.

[dragonoverlord]

I can't tell you much about it, except a teacher once told me there are like 3-4 people in the world who know the theory of relativity like truly understand it in its interity. Just my 2 Cents.

[dylanshmai]

funny you ask, I was just thinking about it. In fact I learned it by myself without ever having to read, hear, or watch a program describing it. It just means that everything is relative, everything is made of electrons and atoms, and then it goes on to a chemical/elemental scale, and so on and so on to achieve uniqueness. But in the end...its just relative (how we move, and human activity next to a plant, the galaxy, universe, circular motions). if your really interested I would watch Pi a few times and try and understand the meaning of the movie. Because that takes all those writings and tries to put it in a story of how humans can come to understand it. Great story/movie and very informative with its clues. Its not for the faint of heart though, it puts a perspective on how everything can be so jaunting. your going to feel like someone just stabbed you in the head watching it.

[lysergic]

funny you ask, I was just thinking about it. In fact I learned it by myself without ever having to read, hear, or watch a program describing it. It just means that everything is relative, everything is made of electrons and atoms, and then it goes on to a chemical/elemental scale, and so on and so on to achieve uniqueness. But in the end...its just relative (how we move, and human activity next to a plant, the galaxy, universe, circular motions). if your really interested I would watch Pi a few times and try and understand the meaning of the movie. Because that takes all those writings and tries to put it in a story of how humans can come to understand it. Great story/movie and very informative with its clues. Its not for the faint of heart though, it puts a perspective on how everything can be so jaunting. your going to feel like someone just stabbed you in the head watching it. i will look into that movie.

[ninja9578]

The basic principal behind it is that nothing can go faster than the speed of light. Relativity explains why. Look up Lorenz-Fitzgerald transformation. Basically as your velocity speeds up, your length gets shorter and shorter. At the speed of light you have no length and also time has sped up to infinity so you could travel across the universe in an instant. The space-time continuum warps around moving gravitational fields, bending it and making time and space shorter or longer depending on the speed of the object in it.

[dylanshmai]

The basic principal behind it is that nothing can go faster than the speed of light. Relativity explains why. Look up Lorenz-Fitzgerald transformation. Basically as your velocity speeds up, your length gets shorter and shorter. At the speed of light you have no length and also time has sped up to infinity so you could travel across the universe in an instant. The space-time continuum warps around moving gravitational fields, bending it and making time and space shorter or longer depending on the speed of the object in it. yeah, and why not? I thought you were a dreamer. Theory of relativity, wasn't made to prove that bending space and time wasn't possible, but that we could not do in the physical world. I believe it will happen one day, aren't you a dreamer?! haha. Also, since the theory of relativity, there has been a lot of new discoveries that have been puncturing holes in it. Black matter, the big bang even (which probably did happen at the speed of light) and rays. Who is to say that the materiel world is more important than the one of imagination and dreaming?

[ninja9578]

Actually the big bang was faster than light. There was no matter in the first few seconds and there is no limit to the speed of pure energy or space-time itself.

[Sandform]

The basic principal behind it is that nothing can go faster than the speed of light. Relativity explains why. Look up Lorenz-Fitzgerald transformation. Basically as your velocity speeds up, your length gets shorter and shorter. At the speed of light you have no length and also time has sped up to infinity so you could travel across the universe in an instant. The space-time continuum warps around moving gravitational fields, bending it and making time and space shorter or longer depending on the speed of the object in it. The faster you are the slower time is for you...I thought. Anyway here is a good story for you to understand the relativity. This one is relativity for speed. Fore the rest click here. http://www.costellospaceart.com/html..._of_light.html I’ll begin with part of Einstein’s “Theory of Relativity.” One of the things this theory states is that “time” is relative to ones motion and also to the amount of gravity exerted on one. This is the theory everyone has heard. It says that the faster you travel, the more time slows for the traveler. This is true but only a part of the story. What does this mean? Let me give you an example. This is slightly different but it represents a good example of two people seeing the same thing but with two different perspective to what their seeing. It was written by Steven Hawkings in his book “ A Briefer history of Time.” It is a good analogy of where you’re thinking has to go to understand what I’ll be talking about in a few paragraphs so I’ll use it again and thank the original writer of it. It begins, there are two people. One (Bill), is standing on the platform of a railroad station waiting for the train to pull in. The other, Mary, is on a train coming towards the train station. The only thing abnormal about this scene is that the train on one side, the side facing the platform, is missing its side but only to anyone on the outside of the train. People on the outside of the train can see into one side of the train because that one side seems to be missing its wall, but if your inside the train it seems like the wall is there and you can’t see outside. I know it sounds weird but just follow me because we need it to be that way but it doesn’t have much to do with what we’ll be talking about. So again Bill on the platform can see into the train but Mary inside the train cannot see out. That’s easy enough. Now inside the train, Mary is sitting on a chair in the center of the train, against the wall on the side opposite of the train platform where Bill is standing and she is facing the platform side. As she sits, Mary is watching two people play ping pong on a table in the center of the train car. Looking at the train the player towards the back of the train is about to serve the ball towards his opponent on the side of the table towards the front of the train. He is serving in the direction the train is moving. At the same time he makes his first serve, the train is passing the train station platform. The train is moving at a speed of 90 miles an hour and traveling past the train station going to the next station. Now as the train passes Bill on the platform, his eye catches the ping pong game so both he and Mary are watching the player make his first serve. Here comes the strange part of who, what, where and when. When the player hits the ball, the ball will be moving 10 miles an hour in the direction the train is moving. As Mary watches the player hit the ball, she sees the ball move towards his opponent at a speed of 10 miles an hour. Because Mary is traveling inside the train at the trains speed, she sees the ball hit and move at 10 miles an hour. As Bill watches standing on the platform, the train is wizzing by him at 90 miles an hour. When the ball is hit he sees the ball move at 100 miles an hour because he not only sees the ball move at 10 miles an hour, he also sees the train moving at 90 miles an hour so it appears to him that the ball is traveling 100 miles an hour. Which one is right, Mary who sees the ball move at 10 miles an hour or Bill who sees the ball move at 100 miles an hour. The answer is, they are both right. How can that be you ask? Good question. The answer is relativity. What they see is relative to where they are. Mary sitting inside, is moving at the speed of the train but can’t see outside and doesn’t perceive the movement of the train so for her the only thing she sees moving is the ball that when hit moves at 10 miles an hour. For Bill, he has a different perspective as he sees the surroundings and sees the movement of the train with the movement of the ball. For Bill, the ball is moving much faster than it is for Mary. That difference between what Mary sees and what Bill sees, is where you have to take your thought processes for the next few paragraphs as I explain Relativity as it comes to two and more different perspectives. These are good brain exercises because some of the theories on time travel are pretty far out there, almost like watching a script out of “The Twilight Zone.” Some seem like they must be complete fantasy but when you start to understand how our Universe works, you begin to understand the possibilities of some of the weirdest things you could only understand in some nightmarish dream. Whether it’s possible to pull any of these things off is another story because the technology even if possible is way beyond our capabilities with the still young technology we have today. Even though according the Einstein, we can never travel the exact speed of light, science says it should be possible to travel close to it, even 99% of it, just not “the speed of light.” The question is, is it really possible with all the pressures of traveling through space on a ship for us to ever make a ship that we can survive on traveling at the speeds we are talking about. Physics tells us that yes it is possible but is it really possible to make it happen? We won’t know until our technology catches up to our ideas. It still is fun to think about regardless but it’s even more important for us to try and find if it is possible. Maybe the goal, if there is other intelligent life in the Universe is, the first one to the edge of the Universe wins.

[dylanshmai]

yeah, but did it have to be that long?! haha. anyways, I hope all of you check out the movie Pi, and Requiem For A Dream (both made by the same director)

[ninja9578]

The fundamental is that the speed of light never changes. Say that you are traveling from my perspective at the speed of light and you turn on a light. I would perceive that light traveling at the speed of light, but since you are traveling at half that speed, I would see it going away from you at half that speed. You, even though you are traveling at half the speed of light, must still see the light traveling at the speed of light, so time must slow down for you. You can not see light travel away from you at half the speed of light.

[skysaw]

I love the movie Pi (and RFAD), own it, and have watched it a number of times. It's fantastic, but it has nothing at all to do with the theory of relativity. It does touch on Fibinacci, the Golden Spiral, fractals, pattern recognition, and the Torah, however.

[Emi Chan]

This stuff is my life, one things for sure is that the speed of light is so great that our intuition is of little use. All the observations about speed that you have ever made, all of the experience upon which your common sense is based, are in a tiny area of physical reality that we could label "extremely low speed" compared with light. One can make approximations that apply over a limited region of reality, but that fail when we examine a larger range. For instance, objects fall at 9.8 metres per second per second in a confined area like inside your home. But this is not true in high orbits, or at the centre of the Earth. Remember Newton’s theory of gravity that showed predictions regarding celestial bodies orbital movement? He stated that it would be possible for 3 planets with equal masses to race around one another in a strange looking orbit mimicking a figure 8. Einstein’s theory of general relativity seemed to be in conflict with Newton’s work in which one could come to the conclusion that one theory clearly doesn’t support the other. Einstein’s theory predicts if a sum of strange space coincidences were to bring two planets to cling to each other through gravity, one would orbit the other by transitioning a continual ellipse. Now if you were to throw together 3 or more planets, their interactions would become so complex that chaos clearly would reign. It kind of makes you wonder why our solar system remains so orderly. Einstein’s theory would support that orderly fashion is because our sun is so heavy that each planet follows it’s lead and more or less ignores the other planets. This could also be a factor in the decision of Pluto considering Pluto doesn’t actually follow the same orbital pathway as the other 8 planets in the solar system. NASA would definitely consider Pluto to be more of a Trans-Neptunian object. So I guess in a sense Einstein’s theory would seem to produce confliction with Newton’s theory but if you look closer Einstein’s theory predicting that gravity is actually the warping of space and time themselves so it doesn’t actually conflict, it just makes small but profound changes of Newton’s theory. It says, for instance, that when one planet orbits another space body, the orbit of the first will slowly turn, like the hour on a clock, to produce a complicated flower-like pattern that doesn’t repeat. So in theory the strange figure 8 orbit should suffer from similar distortions.

[dylanshmai]

wtf, thats crazier than thinking the sun is a black hole...which it sort of is

[skysaw]

wtf, thats crazier than thinking the sun is a black hole...which it sort of is Yes. Except not.

[Sandform]

You, even though you are traveling at half the speed of light, must still see the light traveling at the speed of light, so time must slow down for you. You can not see light travel away from you at half the speed of light. Doesn't that blow your mind? =).