What Time is it? A clarification on Special Relativity

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Introduction What is time? We may be tempted to assume everyone has a notion of time that is the consistent with one another. A part of that “intuitive” notion of time contains the absoluteness of time – that time ticks at the same rate no matter what and it is independent. Even if an apocalypse were to happen to Earth, time will still flow nonchalantly. Yet, in the early 19th Century, Albert Einstein’s “On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies” or more affectionately known as the Special Relativity paper, confounded our common notions of time, as well as space. The theory could explain many weird phenomena like Stella Abberation , Fizeau’s experiment , Michelson-Morley’s Experiments . It also hypothesized mass-energy (which led to nuclear power plants) and predicted relativity of simultaneity , both of which has been proven at a later time. It has survived the requirements of the scientific method and was on the way to become one of the most famous scientific paper. But the caveat of accepting such a brilliant theory was that our notion of time and space would have to be revised into Minkowski space-time. Space could no longer be talked about as independent of time, nor vice versa. A famous, unintuitive consequence is that time is no longer absolute and independent of space. As the speed of an object gets close to the speed of light, the object would experience a slowdown in time with magnitudes described by the Lorentz transformations. The two revision of the concept of time by Special Relativity (namely the absoluteness and independency of time) are usually seen in the light of greater knowledge about the physical world. Slowing down time and thus, ageing could be the holy grail for the beauty industry, but for an avid physics... ... middle of paper ... ...magnetism and whether the magnet in the first scenario is moving or not depends on which inertial frame of reference one makes his observation . If one sits stationary on top of the coil, one will see the magnet moving and an electric field is induced around him. However, if one were to sit on top of the moving magnet, then to him, the magnet is not moving and the coil is moving towards the magnet. Thus, what one will observe is that the moving coil induces a magnetic field around him. Then, is there a magnetic or electric field between the magnet and coil (refer to figure 1)? Which is the objective truth? In Einstein’s mind, he saw that the existence of electric or magnetic field is relative. Only taken together as electromagnetic fields can they be “ascribed a kind of objective reality” . This, according to Einstein leads to his conviction of the First Postulate.

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