Special Relativity
Ask just about anyone to name a scientific equation, and they'll likely come up with this one: E equals m c squared. It tells us that mass and energy are equivalent - an idea that helped astronomers explain how the stars shine. And it tells us that there's a universal constant - the speed of light - the letter c.
This equation was first expressed - in a slightly different form - in a paper written a century ago by Albert Einstein.
The patent clerk published five papers in 1905, including one for which he would win a Nobel Prize. His ideas transformed physics, and made Einstein a household name.
His most famous ideas form the theories of relativity, which were described in two of his 1905 papers, and another a decade later. The first arrived at a German physics journal 100 years ago today.
Special Relativity introduced the idea that time and space are relative depending on the motion of the observer. For someone in a spaceship traveling at near the speed of light, for example, the outside universe would appear to speed up. Yet for someone outside the ship, everything else outside would still be occurring at its usual rate, and it would look like the person on the ship had slowed down.
E=mc2 provided equally profound insights. It helped astronomers realize that stars shine through nuclear fusion - a process in which a tiny bit of matter is converted into a whole lot of energy.
More about relativity tomorrow.
Script by Damond Benningfield, Copyright 2005
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