At any rate, (pun intended) one of the babies stays on Earth and the other baby is jettisoned into space on a rocket that travels at an extremely high velocity, like close to the speed of light, even.
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| The "Twin Paradox" | ||||||||||||||||||||
| A classic example that all physics teachers use is something called the "Twin Paradox." Essentially, the situation goes like this: | ||||||||||||||||||||
| Suppose you have a set of twin babies. These aren't cute babies or anything. In fact, they're babies that were made only for this experiment. (Don't feel sad for the babies, this is only a hypothetical situation.) At any rate, (pun intended) one of the babies stays on Earth and the other baby is jettisoned into space on a rocket that travels at an extremely high velocity, like close to the speed of light, even. |
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| Experiment twins pictured above | ||||||||||||||||||||
| Here's where the weird stuff starts happening. Trust me, it's even weirder that shooting a baby off into space. The baby travelling at the speed of light will age at a slower rate than the baby that stays on Earth! Even though they are twins, they will look of a completely different age when the space baby returns. | ||||||||||||||||||||
| Confused? Click here to go to a really great website dedicated to providing all of the different explanations of the "Twin Paradox." | ||||||||||||||||||||
| This site goes even one step further and has a video demonstration. (see "Time Dilation") Those of you who get your kicks off this sort of thing might want to explore the website even further! Supposedly you can "learn the finer points of relativity in less time than it takes to eat a sandwich." | ||||||||||||||||||||
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