YOU NEED:
A Christmas Bauble taken from your Christmas tree (avoid the expensive looking glass ones that might break easily), and a friend or relative.
METHOD:
This experiment involves you running past your friend, or relative, while you simultaneously throw the bauble in the air and catch it again. Get your friend, or relative, to stand at a vantage point while you perform the experiment. Now run past them and throw the ball in the air. Try to throw it in such a way that it will appear to go almost vertically up and down above you as you run. You’ll find you will do this naturally anyway. Ask your friend/relative what trajectory they thought the ball took.
RESULT:
Your friend/ relative should tell you the ball travelled in an arc – but you saw the ball go vertically up and down, so what’s going on? Can you both be right? Well yes you can; Einstein, in his theory of relativity, said everybody’s perspective is as valid as anyone else’s and can be related to each other. To show this we need one equation:
Speed = Distance / Time
Now, if we think back to our experiment, the thing that will have stayed constant is the speed at which the ball was thrown. For you, the ball went straight up and down, but for your friend/relative it travelled a much greater distance in an arc. Therefore if the speed stayed the same and the distance shrunk, so must the time.
So by moving you made time slow down. You have, in fact, done a form of ‘time travelling’.
Time has only slowed down, for you, by a tiny tiny amount, but if you could run really fast, close to the speed of light, then time would almost stand still. So what does this all mean for Santa? Santa’s sled is packing 12RP’s (Reindeer power) which is enough to make the sled go so fast that he could in fact slow down time enough to get round the whole world in just 24 hours. And you didn’t believe in Santa…
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