
115
12
The Theory of Relativity
12.1 INTRODUCTION
You may have already heard some things about relativity. Perhaps you have heard
that it says strange things about time and length, or it does not make sense (i.e., it
does violence to your intuition), or only twelve people in the world understand it. The
rst two statements are true, but the last is certainly not. While some of the ideas
of relativity will indeed initially do violence to your everyday intuition, they also
follow logically. Hopefully by the end of this chapter, you will have a fairly good
understanding of relativity.
Basically it has to do with what two people observe when they are ...