RELATIVITY

It’s not difficult, it’s just different, is what you said. Makes it hard to wrap your head around.

And we’d already done the easy stuff, for months it was force equals mass times acceleration, and the average velocity was distance divided by time. We’d studied how all things are attracted by the same inverse square of distance, but gravity relied on the mass of two things while the electromagnetic force depended on their charges. We spent our quality time in the Newtonian universe, held hands with Galilean relativity, slow danced in three-dimensional space and time.

I miss that time (and space), before everything got warped and you introduced new dimensions I couldn’t conceptualize. I understood Galilei and Isaac, they were easy. If you threw an object backwards from a moving vehicle (say, me from your life) at the same speed you were going forward, it would simply stay in one place. Unless you were flying, then it would fall straight to the ground, pulled by gravity until it reached terminal velocity. Or terminal impact.

But then you tried telling me about the dependency of space and time measurements upon accelerated or unaccelerated reference frames. How when I stay in one place and you move on, it looks to each of us as if the other’s clock were moving slower. As though the other weren’t capable of growing up. You said we’re both right, it’s a paradox. What it means, you said, is I can travel into the future by going far away from here, but even if I return I can never really come back.

Einstein understood, and he understood that nothing moves faster than the speed of light. And that, in a vacuum, the speed of light is constant. But I don’t understand. Because the speed of light is also the speed of the entire electromagnetic spectrum and the speed of gravity, which means it should be the speed of all attraction. It’s a paradox, you said, just before the door shut. It depends on your reference frame.

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