The Twin Paradox

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Minkowski says you can redrive all of the results of special relativity by generalizing that formula, distance squared equals x squared plus y squared plus z squared to spacetime. But there's a clever little switch that comes in there, and I will tell you what that switch is. So think about the twin paradox because it's not a paradox. It's a thought experiment, the twin thought experiment.

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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