please dont post the link to any website but write it yourself Thanks|||The basic premise is, because the speed of light is fixed, any observation which involves time or movement is dependent on the relative speed between the observer and the object being observed.
The classic example to show this is someone bouncing a tennis ball on a moving train. To someone on the train the ball will appear to move straight up and down. To someone standing beside the track, the ball will move along a curve.|||When you ask people for everything they know about a subject, and to please keep it to 3 or 4 lines, what you're gonna get is people who only know 3 or 4 lines about the subject.
There is no Royal Road to special relativity, and you won't understand it in 3 or 4 lines.
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|||Jan's 1st paragraph is good, but won't lead you to an understanding of SR. The relativity of motion is contained in Newtonian mechanics, and was insightfully described BEFORE Newton, by Galileo in the early 1600's. It was the apparent violation of Galilean relativity that led to the need for SR.
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|||What Jan describes is Galilean relativity. This is a good jumping-off point, and you'll need to understand that, but what needs to be added to that is how the constancy of the speed of light required Galilean relativity to be revised into Einstein's Special Relativity, in which space %26amp; time, ...
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|||...while not interchangeable, are seen as unified, and get mixed in some ways.
OldPilot starts you off in the right direction, and I know he ignored your request for no links, but it will take more than a few words to get a grasp on SR.
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|||We start with the Train and pitcher thought experiment.
You are standing on the ground next to a train track. A train going 100 km/hr is going past. On a flat car is a baseball pitcher that you know can throw 195 km/hr fastballs throwing toward toward you. You have a radar gun so you can measure the speed of the baseballs.
What speed would you measure if the train was coming toward you? (100 + 195 = 295 km/hr )
What speed would you measure if the train was going away from you? (195 - 100 = 95km/hr)
Now we start Special Relativity:
Toward the end of the 1800s scientists measured the speed of light compared with the speed of the earth in orbit. They expected that knowing the speed of the earth going toward the source of light the velocities would add and that when going away from the source of light the velocities would subtract. BUT that is not what happened. It did not matter if they were moving toward the source or away from the source, they got the same value: roughly 3 * 10^8 m/s. VERY STRANGE! They were sure something was wrong. It was not possible, based on their assumption that Time and Space were absolute (unchanging) for that to be true.
Einstein's insight: He thought,"What if the speed of light IS absolute and Time and Space could change to make that true? What does that do to everything else? He worked it out for all the physical quantities. It works! What you get is consistent with what we observe in experiments.
This site will let you play with what happens at near light speed
http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hba…
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