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Oct 30, 2002 Einstein said: "The only constant in life is the speed of light." Hmm,.. so? Few people understood and even at present day, still few people understand. Mostly because it doesn’t effect our daily lives. Imagine that the speed of light would be a lot lower. Let’s say 1000 miles per hour in stead of 186.000 miles per second. Then our daily lives would be effected immensely. You wake up, get ready to go to work, and at 8 am you step in the car to go to work. It takes you just 5 minutes in your car to get there. When you arrive your watch shows 8:05 am. The clock in the office however, shows it is 9 am. Hmm, what happened with the other 55 minutes? Well, since you were driving, your speed was closer to the speed of light, compared to your house and the office. This means time is going slower in the car then it is going in still- standing buildings. Since the speed of light is only 1000 miles per hour, the effect is very noticeable. But what to do when there is a traffic-jam? Well, that is easy. You still leave at 8 am and you will arrive at 9 am at work. Another effect of traveling closer to the speed of light is that distances get shorter. Everything shrinks in the direction that you are going. So when you end up in a traffic-jam, you are going slower and the distance to the office gets longer. But your watch is going faster now. You don’t notice that, but somebody looking at your watch from the side walk would notice this. So after the traffic-jam which makes the time that you spend in your car longer, you still arrive in an office with a clock that shows that it is 9 am. So it would actually be nice if the speed of light would be slower? Well, that depends on your job. If you are a taxi-driver your days will be short, and you won’t make much money. Every time you bring a customer from point a to point b, the day progresses faster than your time in your car. So 10 minutes in your car driving and the day has progressed 2 hours. You can bring just a few customers around in one day. But imagine how old you can get like that. You will live a lot longer than people that work at the office. Your wife on the other hand won’t be so pretty after a few of your years. Your kids probably die before you do, unless they become taxi drivers too of course. Well, I hope I could simplify the laws of relativity a bit. I am sure that I made some mistakes in this little fictional story, but the idea of it, I hope, I could show. It is very interesting material, I think. Steven Hawkins wrote a very nice book about these and other laws of nature in his "The Universe in a Nutshell". He knows how to explain a lot better than I will ever be able to do. Let us just be very happy that the speed of light is so enormously high. ------------ Peter Faber is Dutch and has recently moved to Brazil. Visit Peter's website. Email Peter: getting_there@uol.com.br Comment on this column in the forum. ------------ |
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