The Five Most Mind-Blowing Implications of Special Relativity

5. Loss of Absolute Space

In the olden days, before the earth cooled, people tended to believe in absolute space. If you drove for fifty miles, you had driven fifty miles, and that was it. You didn’t have to worry about what you were driving from or to, only that you had traveled a fixed distance. Natural, right?

The problem is, relativity means that everything is relative. You may be driving for 20 miles by your odometer, but the way you know that you’re moving is because you’re passing objects (pedestrians, trees, road-rage-crazed bastards in sports cars). Take away your frame of reference, put your car in deep space away from any gravity wells or other physical objects, and you’ll have no way to tell whether you’re moving*.

It gets better. Let’s say you find another car out in the abyss, and let’s also say it’s moving at 150 mph. To you, the other car is the one that’s moving, and you are stationary. But to the other driver, your car is hurtling along at 150 mph, and their car is floating innocently in space. Who’s right?

 Special relativity says that you’re both equally justified in claiming that the other car is moving, and what’s more, there’s no possible way to tell (without one of you turning on your engine and introducing your own acceleration) who’s right. The question of who’s right has no answer. In other words, you’re not measuring your velocity by some constant of space; you’re measuring it by your reference points, which are entirely relative.

Thanks for the illustration, Cousin Jerry!

4. Time Isn’t Absolute Either

Take the cars that I mentioned before. If you add huge clocks on top of them (I’m shamelessly borrowing from Brian Greene’s The Elegant Universe here, but only because there’s not really another way to illustrate this), both you and the other driver will observe your clock ticking slower than their own. The faster the relative motion between the two observers, the more the clock will appear to slow down. Again, there’s no way of telling which is which (in part because it’s hard to establish that events are taking place simultaneously) because you can both make the same claim to each other, and both be essentially correct.

This same effect happens in a different way, when you’re close to a large body and caught in its gravity well. If your car was orbiting the Earth and the other car was far away from the Earth, your clock would run slower than theirs because of the time-dilating effect of gravity. This time, because you’re introducing the outside force of gravity, it acts as a frame of reference; thus, both of you would agree that your clock is running slower than Driver 2’s.

3. The Faster It’s Going, The Shorter It Gets

I’ll save the buildup for this one and just say: the faster your vehicle is moving, the shorter it will appear to an observer perpendicular to the vehicle’s direction of motion. The vehicle will contract in the direction that it’s moving, in an effect called Lorentz contraction. The driver won’t notice; from her point of view, the vehicle will have the same dimensions it had previously. But to an observer, the vehicle will get marginally shorter as it increases speed.

Now, when I say marginally, I mean incredibly small; until you get up to half the speed of light, the difference is an infinitesimal fraction of an inch. But it occurs with every vehicle that moves at speed, relative to an observer. At 99% of the speed of light (hat tip, Wikipedia), an observer would see the vehicle as having almost no length at all.

2. Space and Time are One

This means, by the way, that the difference between “farther” and “further” is totally irrelevant, since they’re referring to the same thing. You may brandish this information in front of your English professors the next time they correct you. There’s a load of cool shit involving general relativity (which implies that spacetime is curved) and quantum physics, which holds that supposedly smooth spacetime is actually wildly chaotic on insanely tiny scales, but… oh, all right.

In general relativity, gravity is a consequence of spacetime. A massive body will create a sort of dip in spacetime, which means that lighter-mass objects will fall into the “dip” and orbit around the edges. It’s analogous to one of those things they have in airports and museums, where you put the coin in the top and it spirals around to the bottom, except that it takes place in a sphere around the massive body instead of just a funnel. Don’t ask me how to visualize it, I have no idea.

Like this, but we're sinking into the fabric in every direction simultaneously.

1. e = mc^2

Mass and energy are equivalent and can be changed back and forth; mass can become energy and vice versa. That sunlight hitting the ground outside could become a solid block of coal under the right energies, and we (people) could evaporate into electromagnetic radiation under the right energies. If that doesn’t blow your mind, nothing will. And this is a totally proven concept; it is applied every day in nuclear reactors, as mass (in the form of U-235) is changed into energy that powers our cities. I find this absolutely unbelievable.

*Acceleration changes the equation, but in a situation that's not influenced by an outside force, you'll have no way to tell. Also, windowless box: if you're inside of one, you'll have no way to tell whether the acceleration you feel is from your motion or from being near a gravitationally attractive body. Acceleration and gravity feel exactly the same.

Relationships, Time and Space, and Why Firefly Was Unique

Nine years after Firefly went off the air, online groups still maintain petitions for the series to be reinstated. Nathan Fillion even said that, given $300 million from FOX, he would buy the show himself and start producing episodes again. That wouldn't work.

I’d love to see Firefly complete its planned seven-season run as much as anyone else, but if Nathan Fillion bought the franchise tomorrow and was producing episodes by this Friday, what we’d get wouldn’t be the original Firefly. It would be different in a dozen subtle ways. It would not be the same.

A piece of artwork, like Firefly, is a unique snapshot of time and space. We may assume that there was only one chance for us to get Firefly, just as there was only one chance for any piece of literature or culture. Scientific discoveries build on previous discoveries in such a manner as to seem inevitable, but there was nothing predetermined about Shakespeare’s plays. If he hadn’t written them when he did, they would not exist as we know them. They capture a moment in the writer’s life, in his culture, in the lives of the people around him and of a dozen other factors of which we know nothing.

In much the same way, the existence and details of Firefly depended on thousands of different factors. The actors were each at a specific place in their acting careers, and were directed to act in a specific way. The writer was at a point where he wrote the dialogue a specific way. The creation of the show came from an idea that Joss Whedon had, which might not have occurred at any other time. CGI had advanced enough that good-quality images could be produced for the show. The show was influenced by outside factors; for example, FOX reportedly inserted the mysterious “two by two, hands of blue” men into the show to create a conspiratorial vibe. It’s topical and timely; the idea of Westerners and the Chinese going into space together and forming a joint civilization might not have happened fifty years ago. It’s timely in a greater cultural sense; the main characters largely disdain religion, casual sex is acceptable, violence is common and profit is king.

 The point of all this is, without all of these factors working in concert (many of which everyone was unaware of), Firefly would not be the Firefly we know. And if it was produced again today, many of these factors would come into play. The actors are at different places in their careers; they are physically older, they have matured, or they have gone in different directions career-wise. The writers’ style of writing has no doubt evolved. The distinctive look of the show would be difficult to reproduce. It wouldn’t be the same.

Like a piece of artwork, relationships are also unique in time and space. They happen when two (or more) people come together at a specific time in their lives, wanting specific things and being specific people. And while they last, they can be absolutely wonderful. But when they’re over, trying to recapture them can be like trying to travel back in time, trying to recapture old feelings and lost possibilities.

Sometimes, you have to let those feelings go, and trust that maybe one day when the stars cross again, the two of you can make it work again. You (singular) look back on that time for what it was and for what you (plural) had, but you can’t remake Firefly this minute. Perhaps, one day, you can make something new, but for now you have to let it go. There's nothing wrong with looking back fondly, but you shouldn't try to shape the future in the image of the past.