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Space-time: It's all relative

Moving into the past and future has long been a favorite theme of science fiction authors, but the subject of moving in time has also fascinated scientists. For years people thought that time was an absolute: It could not be stretched or condensed. In 1887 two scientists found that the speed of light—how fast light travels in a vacuum—appeared unchanged by the movement of its source or that of the observer. The speed of light is rounded off to 186,000 miles per second (297,600 kilometers per second).

Then in the early 1900s physicist Albert Einstein (1879–1955) changed people's view of time and space. Where something is located is its place in space. Einstein said that time combines with space to form space-time, and that it is not absolute: How fast time moves depends on how fast the person measuring time is moving in space. Einstein's theory showed that time is relative, and so...

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1. Introduction
2. Breaking up time
3. Swing time
4. A mess of times
5. Space-time: It's all relative
6. Atomic time
7. Experiment 1 - Pendulums: How do the length, weight, and swing angle of a pendulum affect its oscillation time?
8. Experiment 2 - Water Clock: Does the amount of water in a water clock affect its accuracy?
9. Design Your Own Experiment