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Special relativity
- Special relativity posits that the speed of light is always the same, irrespective of the motion of the person who measures it. Special relativity also implies that space and time are intertwined to a degree never previously imagined.
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- Space and Time
- GPS
- Mercury's Orbit
- Gravitational Lensing
- The Big Bang Theory
- Black Holes
- Dark Matter
- So That's Sorted Then... Well Not Quite
In November 1915, Einstein described gravity with the 10 heavy-handed field equations of general relativity, but what those equations basically say is — gravity is what you get whenever spacetime is warped, bent or stretched. Spacetime isn't something we normally talk about, because we think of space (up-down, left-right, forwards-backwards) as sep...
GPS relies on satellites orbiting high above us, where Earth's gravity is weaker (because spacetime is less warped by Earth's mass the further away you go). So the ultra-precise atomic clocks in the satellites run 45 millionths of a second faster per day than clocks here on the ground, deep in Earth's gravitational well. It's not that the clocks on...
Mercury's orbit has always been a little strange — it's got this weird little kink that none of the other planets have. The only way 19th century mathematicians could account for the kink was if Mercury was being pulled on by something else — like the gravity from another nearby planet, somewhere between Mercury and the Sun. But the proposed planet...
Warped space doesn't just affect matter and time — it bends light around massive objects too. The warped space acts like a lens, making things like distant stars and galaxies visible around closer massive objects that should be blocking them from view. This gravitational lensing was predicted by general relativity — and observations of the lensing ...
General relativity says that when spacetime stretches around a massive object, the light travelling through that spacetime stretches too. So light that starts out one colour ends up a slightly different (longer wavelength) colour after travelling through stretched spacetime. This colour shift is called cosmological redshift (red is the colour with ...
One of the earliest solutions to Einstein's general relativity equations was calculated by German physicist Karl Schwarzchild in 1916, when the theory was still hot off the press This result gave us one of nature's (and Hollywood's) great blockbusters — black holes. These infinitely dense remnants of massive dead stars are so tiny, and their gravit...
Dark matter remains one of the big mysteries of the universe. In fact, the only thing we know about it is that it has mass. And we only know that because the gravity resulting from its mass distorts the light coming from galaxies behind it. General relativity tells us how gravitational lensing should affect this light, and physicists can work backw...
With general relativity, Einstein gave physicists the maths that let them make predictions about the universe based on how gravity affected spacetime. It turned their ideas about the cosmos into science. It has passed every test that has been proposed, but there is a problem with the theory. It can never work with quantum theory, which is extremely...
- Universal Speed Limit. Einstein’s famous equation E=mc2 contains “c,” the speed of light in a vacuum. Although light comes in many flavors – from the rainbow of colors humans can see to the radio waves that transmit spacecraft data – Einstein said all light must obey the speed limit of 186,000 miles (300,000 kilometers) per second.
- Strong Lensing. Just like the Sun bends the light from distant stars that pass close to it, a massive object like a galaxy distorts the light from another object that is much farther away.
- Weak Lensing. When a massive object acts as a lens for a farther object, but the objects are not specially aligned with respect to our view, only one image of the distant object is projected.
- Microlensing. So far, we’ve been talking about giant objects acting like magnifying lenses for other giant objects. But stars can also “lens” other stars, including stars that have planets around them.
The theory of relativity usually encompasses two interrelated physics theories by Albert Einstein: special relativity and general relativity, proposed and published in 1905 and 1915, respectively. Special relativity applies to all physical phenomena in the absence of gravity .
Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity is a theory developed by Einstein in order to describe gravity in a way that is consistent with Special Relativity and the propagation of light. Einstein was famous for his “thought experiments,” which allow us to think about some of the implications of a theory, even if the experiments would be ...
In 1907, two years after the publication of his theory of special relativity, Albert Einstein came to a key realization: special relativity could not be applied to gravity or to an object undergoing acceleration. Imagine someone inside a closed room sitting on Earth.
General relativity, also known as the general theory of relativity and Einstein's theory of gravity, is the geometric theory of gravitation published by Albert Einstein in 1915 and is the current description of gravitation in modern physics.
Nov 24, 2015 · Science. How Einstein’s theory of relativity changed the world. Originally published November 24, 2015 at 6:52 pm. The general theory of relativity transformed our understanding of space...
