Can you explain in laymans terms the relativity and the special relativity theory?
140231
This has been answered many times. Use the search function to find out more information. \n\nThere are two relativities:\n1. special theory\n2. general theory\n\nThe special theory makes many predictions about things that move very fast:\n\n1. They get shorter, front to back.\n2. They gain mass\n3. Time slows down for them\n\nInformation cannot be transferred at a speed greater than the speed of light. \n\nGeneral relativity describes gravity as a bending of space. So gravity can bend light. And it also predicts something called a black hole, which light cannot escape, and is a place where the equations of physics break down.
118693
There are plenty of good websites that answer this question, for any knowledge level. The concept is complex enough that you won’t get a meaningful answer here.\n\nIn horribly oversimplified terms Relativity simply  states two things. \n\nOne that there is no universal ‘at rest point’, it all depends on how you choose to define it. You sit in a car doing 100mph and I stand beside the road. Normally we assume that you are in motion and I am at rest. Relativity states that we can just as accurately say that you and the car are at rest and I am moving at 100mph. Alternatively, we normally believe that the Earth orbits the sun and the Moon orbits the Earth. Relativity states that it is just as accurate to say that the Earth orbits the moon and the sun orbits the Earth, or we could say that we all orbit some imaginary point in between all three. It is all a matter of choice what we define as being the fixed point.\n\nThe second is that the speed of light is constant regardless of whether you are at rest or moving, and regardless of how fast you move. If you are sitting in a car doing 9/10 of lightspeed and are going past me standing still beside the road and we both look at exactly the same light beam shining down the road we will both see that light beam travelling away from us at exactly the speed of light relative to both of us. You don’t see it slowed down just because you are travelling almost as fast as it is. It will move away form me just as fast as it moves away form you. \n\nThose are the basics, and they aren’t all that hard to understand, even if they don’t seem to make much sense. What Einstein did was sit down and think really hard about the logical consequences of those two points.
385849
i was gonna suggest my physics book. it dedicates one chapter to relativity and Lorentz transformation equations are there.\nIt's University Physics by Young and Freedman.
1042166
Albert Einstein's theory of relativity, or simply relativity, refers specifically to two theories: special relativity and general relativity. As a field of study, relativity also includes metric theories of gravitation in which special relativity applies locally.\nThe term "relativity" was coined by Max Planck in 1908 to emphasize how special relativity (which at that time was the only relativity theory) uses the principle of relativity.\nAlbert Einstein's 1905 paper "On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies" introduced the special theory of relativity. Special relativity considers that observers in inertial reference frames, which are in uniform motion relative to one another, cannot perform any experiment to determine which one of them is "stationary". This is known as the principle of relativity. While this principle was not new to Albert Einstein's work, he found that including electromagnetism in this principle required a new formalism with many surprising consequences. In particular, it required the speed of light in a vacuum to be the same for all these observers, regardless of their motion or the motion of the source of the light.\nOne of the strengths of special relativity is that it can be derived from only two premises:\n·The laws of physics are the same in any inertial frame of reference. This means that the laws of physics observed by a hypothetical observer traveling with a relativistic particle must be the same as those observed by an observer who is stationary in the laboratory. \n·The speed of light in a vacuum is constant (specifically, 299,792,458 meters per second). \nGeneral relativity was developed by Einstein in the years 1911 - 1915. General relativity is a geometrical theory which postulates that the presence of matter "curves" spacetime, and this curvature affects the path of free particles (and even the path of light). It uses the mathematics of differential geometry and tensors in order to describe gravitation without the use of the force of gravity. This theory considers all observers to be equivalent, not only those moving with uniform speed.\nhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_relativity
236771
Try this link - it's Relativity in very short words.\n\nhttp://www.muppetlabs.com/~breadbox/txt/al.html
1008364
You have the old Newtonian physics, which is called classical physics.  It is built on the premise that space and time are absolute fixed entities, and cannot change.  This is the physics that you learn in High School, and is true and works for our everyday life.\n\nHowever, when one begins to approach the speed of light, and apply the classical physics to that situation, we see violations of physical law: such as an object can go faster than the speed of light.  For example, let's say a car is traveling at half the speed of light, and you shoot a bullet that is traveling at .6 times the speed of light (all hypothetical of course).  An observer would see the bullet traveling at 1.1 times the speed of light, which is obtained by adding the speed of the car and the bullet together.  That is the classical method of finding the bullet's speed.\n\nEinstein correctly surmised that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light, or even be seen traveling faster than light, such as our bullet.  Therefore, he considered how classical physics would look if space and time were not fixed entities.  In doing so, he developed a more comprehensive physics, called relativistic physics, which fixes our bullet problem.  \n\nThe cool thing is, the relativistic equations are almost exactly the same as the classical equations, with one exception: the have what I call a relativistic adjustment.\n\nFor example, to find the bullet's speed as seen by an observer, requires the following equation:\n\nV = Vc + Vb\n\nWhich in our problem would be:\n\nV = .5c + .6c = 1.1c\n\nThe relativistic equation is almost the same:\n\nV = (Vc + Vb)/(1+Vc*Vb/c^2)\n\nThe numerator is the same as the classical equation.  The denominator is the relativistic adjustment.  So, the equation becomes with our example:\n\nV = (.5c + .6c)/(1 + .5c*.6c/c^2) = .846c\n\nThe bullet would be seen traveling at almost 85% the speed of light.  \n\nThe cool thing here is that when you use speeds that are very small, like everyday speeds, the relativistic adjustment bascially equals one, so it reduces to the classical equation.
191997
The very best explanation to this is a video I watched in my Philosophy class called "The String Theory" - it is amazing, and makes complete sense. If you looked it up on the internet, it goes into deep detail and is confusing. The video is by Nova (the science channel), and maybe someone else, but it is perfect. Unexplainably mind boggling and amazing.
447950
1.  According to the Special Theory of Relativity you can't travel as fast as the speed of light.\n\n2.  The General Theory of Relativity has to do with gravity, not what happens when you approach the speed of light.\n\n3.  If you could travel at the speed of light, the light from the sun could not catch up with you, no more than a pulse of light can catch up with another pulse of light.  So, you couldn't see the sun again.
240525
What you are missing is about the reference frame.\n\nYou and the other observer are still in a same reference frame, of course a lengthy frame of reference. The relative speed between you and the other is zero.\n\nBoth of you are having instruments to measure the time and distance.\n\nYou will measure the speed of the rod as 1 inch / sec and he will also measure the speed of the rod as 1 inch/ s.\n\nAfter the rod has moved 1 inch (That is at that instant) both want to inform the calculated speed to the other. You have to rely only on some E. M wave (light). You will receive that information after one year from that instant. Similarly the other will also receive the information from you after one year. \n\n The theory of relativity deals with reference frames moving relative to each other.\n The theory of relativity cannot be applied to a single frame of reference.\n\nI will give another example to clear your doubt.\n\nImagine two railway stations 1000 km apart. The engine is at one station followed by no of carriages with the lost one at the other station. If the engine starts moving both station masters will know this information simultaneously.  But to transmit this information they have to rely upon some radiation which is limited by the speed of light. (note the difference between knowing the information and transmitting the information)\n\n Another thing is that theory of relativity has not contradicted cause and effect. Cause comes first and effect comes after,
103856
Newton' and Einstein's on relativity
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Relativityis the only way we currently have of trying to extend our ideas beyind the local to the rest of the universe.\n\nThis is because the intuitive assumptions that we can simply extend our frame of reference here on earth to fill the rest of the universe (like extending the lines on a map off the page into infinity) is simply wrong.\n\nThe fact that the speed of light is the same everywhere in the universe, regardless of how you are moving, means that there is a difference between the reference frames of observers moving relative to one another. You can fill the universe with the reference frame of either observer, but they are different and neither is preferred. This is special relativity.\n\nThe fact that gravity is indistinguishable from acceleration, and that the force of gravity is in opposite directions on either side of the centre of mass of a gravitating mass means that you cannot construct a single reference frame that fills all of the universe in a simple way. This is general relativity.
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Yes the difference between the two are still the speed of light -- it's because at speed of light, or even just factions of the speed of light "normal" Neut on physics stops and only relativity theory explains what happens.  At speed of light time no longer move at the same rate, so the two object will not have same reference in time, and since speed is distance over time, the comparison make little sense to the normal perception of how things work.\n\nAn that ultimately explain why the difference between the two is not 1000 miles per hour.
405952
Ask around if any of your friends have a GPS system.  There is your example of a daily-life example of the theory of relativity.  The Global Positioning System would not be able to give you very accurate locations if it did not take the corrections to time and distance from both special, and general reletivity into account.  I am pretty sure that it is the first piece of public consumer-grade equiptment that relies on our understanding of General Relativity.
838844
I'm not sure what you are refering to. Einstein's special theory of relativity predicts that a "moving" clock actually runs slower. In addition to this, there is another effect which causes us to observe the clock "apparently" running faster or slower depending on the changing distance between the observer and the object...
191791
http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/relativ/tdil.html\nThe equation is true and this first link has his time dilation equation along with some others.\nWe can justify it by experimentation. The following link describes the Ives-Stilwell experiment.  http://www.mpi-hd.mpg.de/ion-storage/Lorentz/relativity.html
981582
Check Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_relativity
179367
the answer to the question deals with einstein's special theory of relativity.  the equations that show the actual relationships are known as the lorentz transformations.  check out the website for a depiction of the lorentz stuff.  wikipedia has a more detailed article on special relativity and the lorentz transformations too.