IFLScience: Still baffled by Einstein’s theory of relativity, or even the parts in the movie Interstellar when everyone experiences time differently? Well, this teenager’s explanation of special relativity even gives Carl Sagan a run for his money.
Ryan Chester, from North Royalton in Ohio, submitted his video for the Breakthrough Junior Challenge, which invites students aged 13-18 to share their passion for math and science with the world. The competition received over 2,000 applications from 86 countries. After being narrowed down to 15 finalists, Ryan managed to wrangle the prize and glory. Ryan wrote the script, filmed, edited, and created all the visual effects and motion graphics for this video.
Overall, he won $400,000 – $250,000 of which will go towards a scholarship, $50,000 to his teacher Richard Nestoff and $100,000 for his school to fund a science lab. Not bad!
YT: 110 years ago Albert Einstein published a theory that revolutionized the way we think about the universe. In this video I'll show you how to prove its two postulates using easy-to-understand real-world experiments, and how even the simplest understanding of quantum mechanics can be used to wrap your mind around why time must slow down the faster an object moves.
I wrote, filmed, edited, and created the visual effects and motion graphics for this video.
4 Comments
KrazyKat42says...I still don't buy it.
The Earth is flat.
It's turtles all the way down.
dannym3141This is an excellent explanation for someone of his age and his skill with video editing obviously helps a lot. It held my interest, the world needs more entertaining and educating videos like these.
My only criticism - and some youtubers have already pointed this out - is that the explanation of time dilation "..the same bodily change that happens on earth takes much longer to occur when you are moving so fast.." is wrong.
Signals sent within the body can be analogous to a clock - any fixed duration measured between two ~lightspeed reference frames will be different, including seconds measured by an atomic clock - but time dilation specifically has nothing to do with the mechanics behind how you measure the time or the time it takes a signal to travel. It's a property of the nature of spacetime. Time itself actually slows down. There's no 'trick' to understanding how or why, it's just a property that it has. We can forgive him because he'd already demonstrated that physics is the same in any inertial reference frame and there is no "preferential" reference frame; therefore the motion of the reference frame can't be responsible for the observed difference, so he obviously already really knew all this.
There's no shame in getting that wrong, because he'll be taught more and better about it as he progresses through school. Generally the arbitrary subjects are the hardest to live with because you just have to accept them as they are rather than 'understand'. Quantum mechanics is the same - you just have to accept the rules and apply the maths. Everyone struggles with it, even Feynman said "If you think you understand quantum mechanics, you don't understand quantum mechanics."
spawnflaggerI liked the video too, but when he got to this part of the explanation, I wondered why I never heard it before.
Also remember that Einstein came up with special theory of relativity without the advent of quantum mechanics (btw, he didn't like Q.M. and couldn't believe that "God rolls the dice", and was later proven wrong (decades after he died though)).
My only criticism - and some youtubers have already pointed this out - is that the explanation of time dilation "..the same bodily change that happens on earth takes much longer to occur when you are moving so fast.." is wrong.
AziraphaleI've seen a video from sixty symbols with a similar explanation (kind of). Does this have any relevance?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cxqjyl74iu4
This is an excellent explanation for someone of his age and his skill with video editing obviously helps a lot. It held my interest, the world needs more entertaining and educating videos like these.
My only criticism - and some youtubers have already pointed this out - is that the explanation of time dilation "..the same bodily change that happens on earth takes much longer to occur when you are moving so fast.." is wrong.
Signals sent within the body can be analogous to a clock - any fixed duration measured between two ~lightspeed reference frames will be different, including seconds measured by an atomic clock - but time dilation specifically has nothing to do with the mechanics behind how you measure the time or the time it takes a signal to travel. It's a property of the nature of spacetime. Time itself actually slows down. There's no 'trick' to understanding how or why, it's just a property that it has. We can forgive him because he'd already demonstrated that physics is the same in any inertial reference frame and there is no "preferential" reference frame; therefore the motion of the reference frame can't be responsible for the observed difference, so he obviously already really knew all this.
There's no shame in getting that wrong, because he'll be taught more and better about it as he progresses through school. Generally the arbitrary subjects are the hardest to live with because you just have to accept them as they are rather than 'understand'. Quantum mechanics is the same - you just have to accept the rules and apply the maths. Everyone struggles with it, even Feynman said "If you think you understand quantum mechanics, you don't understand quantum mechanics."
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