The Twin Thought Experiment in Special Relativity

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In relativity, everyone experiences their own personal time and that personal time will depend on the path they take through space time. Einstein was unimpressed by Minkowski's idea because he didn't think it fit into his theory of gravity. Time-elapsing only becomes noticeable if your velocities are differing from each other at magnitudes close to the speed of light.

My little pandemic-lockdown contribution to the world was a series of videos called The Biggest Ideas in the Universe. The idea was to explain physics in a pedagogical way, concentrating on established ideas rather than speculations, with the twist that I tried to include and explain any equations that seemed useful, even though no prior mathematical knowledge was presumed. I’m in the process of writing a series of three books inspired by those videos, and the first one is coming out now: The Biggest Ideas In The Universe: Space, Time, and Motion. For this solo episode I go through one of the highlights from the book: explaining the mathematical and physical basis of Einstein’s equation of general relativity, relating mass and energy to the curvature of spacetime. Hope it works!

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