{"id":154688,"date":"2023-01-06T14:23:57","date_gmt":"2023-01-06T20:23:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2023\/01\/how-to-think-about-relativity"},"modified":"2023-01-06T14:23:57","modified_gmt":"2023-01-06T20:23:57","slug":"how-to-think-about-relativity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2023\/01\/how-to-think-about-relativity","title":{"rendered":"How to Think About Relativity"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/how-to-think-about-relativity2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>We\u2019re going to be a little different. Our route into special relativity might be thought of as top-down, taking the idea of a unified space-time seriously from the get-go and seeing what that implies. We\u2019ll have to stretch our brains a bit, but the result will be a much deeper understanding of the relativistic perspective on our universe.<\/p>\n<p>The development of relativity is usually attributed to Albert Einstein, but he provided the capstone for a theoretical edifice that had been under construction since James Clerk Maxwell unified electricity and magnetism into a single theory of electromagnetism in the 1860s. Maxwell\u2019s theory explained what light is \u2014 an oscillating wave in electromagnetic fields \u2014 and seemed to attach a special significance to the speed at which light travels. The idea of a field existing all by itself wasn\u2019t completely intuitive to scientists at the time, and it was natural to wonder what was actually \u201cwaving\u201d in a light wave.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>We\u2019re going to be a little different. Our route into special relativity might be thought of as top-down, taking the idea of a unified space-time seriously from the get-go and seeing what that implies. We\u2019ll have to stretch our brains a bit, but the result will be a much deeper understanding of the relativistic perspective [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":661,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[47],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-154688","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-neuroscience"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/154688","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/661"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=154688"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/154688\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=154688"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=154688"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=154688"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}