36.1 Relativity: What’s It All About?
What do you think of when you hear the phrase “theory of relativity”? Albert Einstein? Black holes? Time travel? Perhaps you’ve heard that the theory of relativity is so complicated and abstract that only a handful of people in the whole world really understand it.
Albert Einstein (1879–1955) was one of the most influential thinkers in history.
There is, without doubt, a certain mystique associated with relativity, an aura of the strange and exotic. The good news is that understanding the ideas of relativity is well within your grasp. Einstein’s special theory of relativity, the portion of relativity we’ll study, is not mathematically difficult at all. The challenge is conceptual because relativity questions deeply held assumptions about the nature of space and time. In fact, that’s what relativity is all about—space and time.