Tag
#relativity
5 articles
The Doppler Effect
Motion crowds the waves in front of a source and stretches the ones behind. That single geometric fact explains sirens, sonic booms, weather radar, and the expanding universe.
Maxwell's Equations and the Nature of Light
Maxwell combined everything known about electricity and magnetism, found a self-sustaining wave hiding in the algebra, and computed its speed from two bench-top constants. The answer was the speed of light.
Black Holes
How escape velocity reaching the speed of light defines an event horizon, why the Sun would be 3 km across, and what a black hole would — and would not — do to Earth.
Gravitational Waves
How accelerating masses shake spacetime, why the resulting strain is only ~10⁻²¹, and how LIGO's laser interferometers detect a ripple that stretches a 4 km arm by less than a thousandth of a proton's width.
Time Dilation
How Einstein's special relativity predicts that time passes differently for observers in relative motion.