relativity
Category archives for relativity
“Einstein’s Greatest Blunder” was REALLY a blunder!
Posted by Ethan on May 17, 2013 
“Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new.” -Albert Einstein Back when Einstein first proposed his theory of General Relativity, his revolutionary picture of the Universe was met with a mix of curiosity, awe, and intense skepticism. It isn’t every day that your most cherished of all physical theories — the…
The Far Future of our Solar System
Posted by Ethan on May 8, 2013 
“No valid plans for the future can be made by those who have no capacity for living now.” -Alan Watts “They do not see what lies ahead, when Sun has faded and Moon is dead.” -J.R.R. Tolkien One of the most amazing facts about the Universe is that, despite only having spent a few hundred years…
Putting Einstein to the Test
Posted by Ethan on May 1, 2013 
“The views of space and time which I wish to lay before you have sprung from the soil of experimental physics, and therein lies their strength. They are radical. Henceforth space by itself, and time by itself, are doomed to fade away into mere shadows, and only a kind of union of the two will…
The Cosmic Speed Limit
Posted by Ethan on April 26, 2013 
“All our sweetest hours fly the fastest.” -Virgil If you’ve been around the block once or twice, you know that the speed of light in a vacuum — 299,792,458 meters-per-second — is the absolute maximum speed that any form of energy in the Universe can travel at. In shorthand, this speed is known as c to…
Black Holes Won’t Incinerate You, After All
Posted by Ethan on March 8, 2013 
“You wait for a gem in an endless sea of blah.” -Lawrence Grossman On the one hand, we have General Relativity, our theory of space, time, and gravity. It describes the Universe on both large and small scales perfectly, from the hot Big Bang to our cold accelerating expansion, from vast superclusters of galaxies down…
How Big is Our Observable Universe?
Posted by Ethan on March 1, 2013 
“The mind, once expanded to the dimensions of larger ideas, never returns to its original size.” -Oliver Wendell Holmes When General Relativity supplanted Newton’s work as our theory of how gravity works in the Universe, it didn’t just change how we view how masses attract, it gave us a new understanding of what the questions where…
A thought experiment for the relativity skeptics
Posted by Ethan on January 9, 2013 
“Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds.” -Albert Einstein It may be hard to believe, seeing as how it’s been our leading theory of gravity for nearly a century now, but Einstein’s General Relativity is possibly the most frequently challenged scientific idea of all-time. Of course, it’s emerged victorious from each and…
Weekend Diversion: Science Book Reviews for the Holidays
Posted by Ethan on December 2, 2012 
“A truly good book teaches me better than to read it. I must soon lay it down, and commence living on its hint. What I began by reading, I must finish by acting.” -Henry David Thoreau Every day that we have free or leisure time, there’s this great conflict as to how we spend it:…
Weekend Diversion: The First Relativistic Video Game!
Posted by Ethan on November 11, 2012 
“There is no such thing as magic, supernatural, miracle; only something that’s still beyond logic of the observer.” -Toba Beta It might be hard to believe, but science tells us truths about the Universe that we might never have intuited or philosophized about if the Universe itself didn’t reveal them to us through investigation. Bap Kennedy…
Say Something Smart
Posted by Ethan on August 27, 2012 
“You must learn to talk clearly. The jargon of scientific terminology which rolls off your tongues is mental garbage.” -Martin H. Fischer I’ve always thought that the Universe is absolutely amazing; that everything from the tiniest indivisible particles all the way up to the largest structures and superstructures making up the Universe has an amazing…
