Question

What would daily life be like if the effects of Special Relativity were evident to regular people？ What would change about our perception of reality if everyday objects were subject to relativistic behavior? I want you to consider and discuss a day in the life of a universe with a slower speed of light. Thanks!

Answer 1

As this brief tour of special relativity has shown, we have to re-think our notions of space and time in Einstein’s world. Moving clocks tick at a slower rate, light speed is the same for all (inertial) observers, and lengths and distances depend on who measures them – unfamiliar territory, if we go by everyday experience. The main reason that we don’t see those relativistic effects every day is because life around us is moving very, very slowly, compared to the speed of light. Even a jet plane flying at full speed reaches a mere fraction of light speed, less than a thousandth of a percent. Compared to light speed, everyday motions are extremely slow, so the relativistic deviations from our classical notions of space and time are correspondingly small.

In our day-to-day lives, we don't have much opportunity to realize just how weird the laws of physics really are. Think about it: there are known scientific phenomena that are so thoroughly alien to our everyday experience that even the most brilliant scientists and thinkers struggle to explain them with any semblance of brevity. An example of such phenomena are those which occur when objects travel at near the speed of light, as prescribed by Einstein's theory of special relativity. Even our eyes will not be able to sense the view instantly. And two events can not be connected spatially even in the regular life.