AST201H1 Lecture Notes - Lecture 3: Special Relativity, Length Contraction

• School: UTSG
• Department: Astronomy & Astrophysics
• Course: AST201H1
• Professor: Bryan Gaensler

Document Summary

If someone is moving relaive to you, their clock will appear to run slower ime dilaion. Observers in moion relaive to one another also disagree about lengths and distances length contracion. Someone moving relaive to you will measure your length to be shorter than it is. Zoomer travels to a star far away at 60% the speed of light then comes home. Upon reuniing, one must be older as this is clearly paradoxical. Special relaivity only afects our frame of reference: if we change our frame of reference, things get a bit more confusing. Assume zoomer"s star is 3 light years away (1 light year = 9. 5 trillion km don"t need to memorize) With this assumpion, clocks move 80%, so just ater a bit of ime, both of their clocks would have diferent imes, but their clocks would go more and more out of sync.