Special Relativity also affects the notion of simultaneity. The speed of light is a large number, and so it necessarily follows that just a minute quantity of mass can be transformed into an enormous magnitude of energy. This is expressed in Einstein’s equation, E = mc², where E means energy, m stands for mass, and c² is the speed of light multiplied by itself. Einstein stated that any object with mass could never attain the speed of light.Īnother outcome of Special Relativity is that energy and matter are equal and can be changed from one form to another. This shortening is caused by the spaceship’s mass, which is resisting the tremendous speed at which it is moving. The same spaceship will also appear to you as shorter than its actual size. Physicists identified this phenomenon as time dilation. However, this slowing down can only be seen by an external observer who is not traveling at the same speed. This is because clocks traveling close to the speed of light slow down. You will see that the clock inside his spaceship is ticking twice as slow compared to your clock. By way of thought experiments, he showed that the implications of special Relativity baffle conventional human logic:Īssume you’re inside a space observatory, and a friend in a spaceship traveling at 99 percent the speed of light hurtles past you. Using these two premises, Einstein illustrates that time and space are interwoven in ways that humans have never understood before. This speed at which light travels stays the same no matter how fast an observer moves or how fast a light-radiating object is moving. Light travels at a constant speed of 299,792.458 kilometers per second.Einstein recognized this hypothetical situation as a fundamental problem of physics. Einstein explained that if the two trains were moving slowly at the same speed, it would be impossible for the person to tell. For instance, when a person is on a train and looks out the window and sees another nearby train in an apparent forward motion, the person will have a hard time figuring out whether his train is the one that is moving or if it is indeed the nearby train. When an object moves along a straight path at a constant speed, the laws of physics stay the same for all objects that move along a straight path at an unchanging speed. There is no “real” or preferred frame of reference, no standard observation point.Special Relativity is based on two premises:

Special Relativity is called such because it covers special cases, including super-fast speeds, huge amounts of energy, and immense distances in space, without involving gravity in the discussion.

Albert einstein theory