Quotes About Relativity

There is a famous joke, attributed to Einstein: "When a man sits with a pretty girl for an hour, it seems like a minute. But let him sit on a hot stove for a minute and it's longer than any hour. That's relativity." I don't know whether Einstein actually ever said those words. But I do know that's not relativity.

Space itself is not fundamental; it's just a useful way of talking from certain points of view.

My grandfather gave me a watch. It doesn't have any hands or numbers. He says it's very accurate. I asked him what time it was. You can guess what he told me.

Relativity theory forced the abandonment, in principle, of absolute space and absolute time.

I merely wish to point out that some of the major break-throughs in the history of science represent such dramatic tours de force, that 'ripeness' seems a very lame explanation, and 'chance' no explanation at all. Einstein discovered the principle of relativity 'unaided by any observation that had not been available for at least fifty years before'; the plum was overripe, yet for half a century nobody came to pluck it.

The concept of unity, in which positive and negative are attributes of the same force, in which good and evil are relative, ever-changing, and always joined to the same phenomenon—such a concept is still reserved to the physical sciences and to the few who have grasped the history of ideas.

felicidad perfecta es inalcanzable, podamos llegar a esa felicidad relativa que consiste en la ausencia del dolor.

There was a young lady of Wight Who travelled much faster than light. She departed one day, In a relative way, And arrived on the previous night. The point is that the theory of relativity says that there is no unique measure of time that all observers will agree on.

It appeared that each observer must have his own measure of time, as recorded by a clock carried with him, and that identical clocks carried by different observers would not necessarily agree.

general theory of relativity and quantum mechanics. They are the great intellectual achievements of the first half of this century.

Another prediction of general relativity is that time should appear to run slower near a massive body like the earth.

As an object approaches the speed of light, its mass rises ever more quickly, so it takes more and more energy to speed it up further. It can in fact never reach the speed of light, because by then its mass would have become infinite, and by the equivalence of mass and energy, it would have taken an infinite amount of energy to get it there. For this reason, any normal object is forever confined by relativity to move at speeds slower than the speed of light.

one of the twins went for a long trip in a spaceship at nearly the speed of light. When he returned, he would be much younger than the one who stayed on earth. This is known as the twins paradox, but it is a paradox only if one has the idea of absolute time at the back of one's mind. In the theory of relativity there is no unique absolute time, but instead each individual has his own personal measure of time that depends on where he is and how he is moving.

famous equation, E = mc2. So, if there's

According to some accounts, a journalist told Eddington in the early 1920s that he had heard there were only three people in the world who understood general relativity. Eddington paused, then replied, "I am trying to think who the third person is.")

Roger Penrose and I showed that Einstein's general theory of relativity implied that the universe must have a beginning and, possibly, an end.

Only light, or other waves that have no intrinsic mass, can move at the speed of light.

The nonexistence of absolute rest therefore meant that one could not give an event an absolute position in space, as Aristotle had believed. The positions of events and the distances between them would be different for a person on the train and one on the track, and there would be no reason to prefer one person's position to the other's.

to some accounts, a journalist told Eddington in the early 1920s that he had heard there were only three people in the world who understood general relativity. Eddington paused, then replied, "I am trying to think who the third person is.")

The mass of the sun curves space-time in such a way that although the earth follows a straight path in four-dimensional space-time, it appears to us to move along a circular orbit in three-dimensional space.

In other words, the theory of relativity put an end to the idea of absolute time!

We must accept that time is not completely separate from and independent of space, but is combined with it to form an object called space-time.

What most of these authors don't seem to have realized is that if you can travel faster than light, the theory of relativity implies you can also travel back in time, as the following limerick says: There was a young lady of Wight Who travelled much faster than light. She departed one day, In a relative way, And arrived on the previous night.

The fundamental postulate of the theory of relativity, as it was called, was that the laws of science should be the same for all freely moving observers, no matter what their speed.