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Relativity is one of the most successful theories that Albert Einstein ever came up with. It shook the world by altering the way that we think of space and time.

One of the effects that come out of the theory of relativity is that different observers, traveling at different speeds, may take completely different measurements of the same event. However, all the measurements are technically correct. It's all relative. For example, a period of time for someone on Earth that lasts for hundreds of years may only be a couple of hours for someone zooming around in a rocket at close to the speed of light. One person may measure a stationary car to be one length, but when that same car starts racing along a track, its length appears shorter to a stationary person. These two effects are known as time dilation and length contraction.

You may be aware of the effects of relativity at insanely fast speeds: near the speed of light. It may surprise you to hear, then, that relativity is something that we experience every day. It's found in the most technical of places, and some places that may never even have occurred to you as being out of the ordinary. Since it's 100 years since Einstein published his paper on general relativity, it seems like the perfect occasion to find out how relativity affects us day-to-day.

 

 

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