Cue Einstein! |
In 1905, Albert Einstein, one of the most famous physicists of all time, published a paper on what he called the Special Theory of Relativity. This was remarkable, as he was not particularly outstanding at school, and was a lowly clerk in a Swiss patent office at the time! This ground-breaking paper provided an explanation for the problems outlined on the previous two pages, and transformed the way scientists consider space and time. Einstein published a follow-up paper on General Relativity in 1915. (He also won the Nobel Prize in 1921 for some unrelated work on the photoelectric effect.)
Special Relativity |
The whole of Special Relativity is based on the following fundamental ideas :
The laws of physics are the same in all inertial frames.An inertial frame is simply a system that is moving at a constant velocity along a straight line (i.e. with no rotation or acceleration).
In the first example, the tortoise on a skateboard was in one inertial frame, and the sparrow was in another.
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