Quotes About Relativity

We have a saying that a snake is never as long as the stick to which we liken its length.

Because it's all relative. You're pinned down in some filthy hellhole of a paddy, getting your ass delivered to kingdom come, but then for a few seconds everything goes quiet and you look up and see the sun and a few puffy white clouds, and the immense serenity flashes against your eyeballs - the whole world gets rearranged - and even though you're pinned down by a war you've never felt more at peace.

If time and space were in fact entwined along the loop of relativity, how then could anyone ever reach a point of no return? Were not all such points contrivance? Therefore meaningless? So, again, what was the point? Not to return.

If you could buckle your Bugs Bunny wristwatch to a ray of light, your watch would continue ticking but the hands wouldn't move. That's because at the speed of light there is no time. Time is relative to velocity. At high speeds, time is literally stretched. Since light is the ultimate in velocity, at light-speed time is stretched to its absolute and becomes static. Albert Einstein figured that one out.

They say that February is the shortest month, but you know they could be wrong.

The highest virtue here may be least in another world.

Will once said each galaxy has about a hundred billion stars. He said that ninety-eight percent of what exists around us we can't even see. Sometimes I let go and float out there, staring back at earth. I lose track of time. Will told me to forget time, that it was relative. He said light was the thing. At the speed of light, time stands still. It's the wild card. It makes things happen. (The Speed of Light)

No matter how hard we may try, we can only travel forward. The relativistic laws guarantee it.

singularities, he asserted, "are a place in which the fiery marriage of Einstein's relativistic laws with the quantum laws is consummated.

If I ask whether two events—one on Earth and the other on Proxima b—are happening "at the same moment," the correct answer would be: "It's a question that doesn't make sense, because there is no such thing as 'the same moment' definable in the universe." The "present of the universe" is meaningless.

Quantum mechanics extends this relativity in a radical way: all variable aspects of an object exist only in relation to other objects. It is only in interactions that nature draws the world.

If things fall, it is due to this slowing down of time. Where time passes uniformly, in interplanetary space, things do not fall. They float, without falling. Here on the surface of our planet, on the other hand, the movement of things inclines naturally toward where time passes more slowly, as when we run down the beach into the sea and the resistance of the water on our legs makes us fall headfirst into the waves. Things fall downward because, down there, time is slowed by the Earth.

Things change only in relation to one another. At a fundamental level, there is no time.

For everything that moves, time passes more slowly.

A university student attending lectures on general relativity i the morning and others on quantum mechanics in the afternoon might be forgiven for thinking that his professors are fools, or have neglected to communicate with each other for at least a century.

The world is like a collection of interrelated points of view.

A moving object therefore experiences a shorter duration than a stationary one: a watch marks fewer seconds, a plant grows more slowly, a young man dreams less. For a moving object, time contracts.

The notion of "the present" refers to things that are close to us, not to anything that is far away. Our "present" does not extend throughout the universe. It is like a bubble around us.

And it is at this point that an extraordinary idea occurred to him, a stroke of pure genius: the gravitational field is not diffused through space; the gravitational field is that space itself. This is the idea of the general theory of relativity. Newton's "space," through which things move, and the "gravitational field" are one and the same thing.

All of this, I believe, indicates that in order to grasp the basic grammar of the world, we need to merge three basic ingredients, not just two: not just general relativity and quantum mechanics, but also the theory of heat, that is, statistical mechanics and thermodynamics, which we can also describe as "information theory.

quantum mechanics cannot deal with the curvature of spacetime, and general relativity cannot account for quanta. This is the problem of quantum gravity.

This means we can say that on Mars there are events that in this precise moment have already happened, events that are yet to happen, but also a quarter-of-an-hour of events during which things occur that are neither in our past nor in our future.

In technical terms, we say that Einstein has understood that "absolute simultaneity" does not exist: there is no collection of events in the universe that exist "now.

Let's begin with a simple fact: time passes faster in the mountains than it does at sea level.