Transcript

DAVID MITCHELL

60 Second Adventures in Astronomy. Number ten: Special Relativity.

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Does time fly when you’re having fun? In 1905, Albert Einstein introduced the theory of Special Relativity, which said that if the speed of light is constant, then people must experience time differently.

Which may sound impossible, but Richard Feynman later showed that you can prove it with just lights and mirrors. If you set up two mirrors, one of which had a flashbulb and a detector on it, you could build a clock which ticked every time the flash was reflected back to its original source. It would keep time perfectly, though it would make a slightly annoying alarm clock.

But if you make this clock go past you very quickly, the light has further to travel, and since light always travels at the same speed, the moving clock runs slower than when it was at rest. So, though time might not fly when you’re having fun, a moving clock does tick more slowly than the observer’s stationary clock – which may have changed the way we see the universe, but doesn’t always make for a good excuse.