Its all relative...

I have many interests in my head. As you know they mainly centre around science/technology.

Physics in particular holds a special interest for me as i feel that we have the best possible chance of understanding as much as we can if we study physics.

A a professional engineer i have to be able to explain complex systems, find solutions to complex problems and sometimes explain my ideas to people at varying levels. Admittedly i do get carried away with myself sometimes and start spouting lots of analogies to explain my ideas.

It occurred to me the other day that most non engineering people and probably most people in the world to be fair would have probably heard of Albert Einstein at some point through school or their life somewhere, but it also occurred to me as i drifted off into another analogy whilst talking to a colleague at work that although most people could probably tell you what Albert Einstein was in terms of him being a physicist, but probably couldn't really tell you much more than that.

Maybe a few could pick out the famous equivalence of mass and energy equation(E=mc^2), but i wonder how many of that smaller group could tell you about any of the other extremely profound work he did?

One such area of work was called 'Special relativity'.

I remember the day well that i first came across special relativity(special because it omits the force of gravity as an influence). I read it, then read it again, then read it again and thought what??

This can't be right......

But of course it was, i wasn't questioning the great man's work, who am i to do that. What i was doing was struggling to understand the awesome impact on the world around me as i knew it.

Time as i knew it and as we all know it was not constant...........

For the physics bods out there, this of course is nothing that you already do not know. However the main purpose of this blog is to interface engineers, scientists and others that are interested but do not work or study these things together to explore their own understanding.

So back to the time thing.....

As an engineer i quickly got my head around the applications of this profound insight, but can you imagine what most people must think.

If you asked most people on the street what is the time they will tell you, but if you said did you know that time is not the same for everything? i.e. there is no universal time.......what would they say back?

An interesting experiment that could be.

In a nutshell the faster you travel relative to something else travelling slower the the slower time ticks past. This is a real phenomenon that happens to us all everyday, its just that it is so small with the normal velocities that we are dealing with that we do not notice it.

However, we can still use a real everyday example.
You and your friend set your super accurate watches together so that they are synchronised to a few millionths of a second.
You fly on an aeroplane from the UK to the US then fly back again afterwards, whilst your friend stays in the UK.

Even at a average speed of about 600mph you are travelling fast enough to make a discernible difference, on your return you check the watches still agree........

They do not!!

They may only differ by fractions of a second but its there in front of you for all to see, your watch is slow compared to your friends watch and therefore ticked slower than your friends watch.

In technical terms it is called time dilation, in theory if you could travel at the speed of light which is 299,792,458 m/s (in a vacuum) then time would according to SR stand still!!!

OMG.....That's crazy right?

For me SR has got to be one of the most interesting 'classical' theories of physics even though it is over 100 years old it still never ceases to amaze me.