Tag Archives: Einstein

blog 2: Gravity over time

Posted on February 1, 2024 by matthewastro

Isaac Newton originally conceptualized gravity as a mutually attractive force between all objects with mass. Those who came before him, such as Galileo, had performed experiments and attempted to establish increasingly robust understandings of this force, but none quite unified the idea like Newton. The story goes that Newton saw an apple fall from a […] Continue reading →

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Time Dilation and the Theory of Relativity

Posted on March 7, 2023 by Europa

With our totally unrestricted guidelines on Blog 4, I would like to make a bit of a deviation from the content of our course and discuss time dilation and the theory of relativity! When I first learned about time dilation, which refers to the difference in elapsed time as measured by different clocks due to […] Continue reading →

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Gravitational Waves

Posted on March 17, 2020 by phildowd

Gravitational waves are a fascinating concept. The thought starts from the idea that gravity moves at the speed of light. Now, at the start this sounds like a silly idea. Doesn’t the force of gravity always act on people? Yet take this example. Say the sun were to simply disappear. Not explode or change, butContinue reading “Gravitational Waves” Continue reading →

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Breaking “c” and the Warping of Space-time

Posted on March 14, 2020 by Phillip Yoon

The speed of light, often denoted by the constant “c,” is faster than anything that we know. Although there have been attempts to get certain particles to travel faster than the speed of light, like when scientists at the CERN laboratory in Switzerland tried to get a hold of neutrinos, no one has successfully brokenContinue reading “Breaking “c” and the Warping of Space-time” Continue reading →

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Gravity Waves

Posted on February 10, 2020 by khalilgreene

Gravity waves have been speculated to exist ever since Einstein set a speed limit to the universe, the speed of light. When Newton came up with the gravitational force equation, it only considered mass and distance when calculating the force. It did not take into account that if one mass disappeared, then that information ofContinue reading “Gravity Waves” Continue reading →

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Ultraviolet Catastrophe

Posted on February 9, 2020 by remieri

While we discussed in class the importance of blackbody spectra continuous spectra, there is an important historical footnote in understanding where the famous blackbody curve arises from. Physics in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s predicted the wavelength-intensity relationship to be I α 1/λ^4, using a derivation based on classical statistical mechanics. This relationship closelyContinue reading “Ultraviolet Catastrophe” Continue reading →

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How a Solar Eclipse Revolutionized Our Understanding of the Universe

Posted on January 19, 2020 by Dan Pitagora

Up until the early 20th century, the laws that our universe abided by were best described by Isaac Newton in his Philosophiae naturalis principia mathematica. Newton’s principles still hold true for the most part, as they are the basis of many introductory classical mechanics classes today. Despite being able to model the laws of ourContinue reading “How a Solar Eclipse Revolutionized Our Understanding of the Universe” Continue reading →

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Blog #2: Special Relativity

Posted on February 10, 2019 by Katie

Albert Einstein was one of the most influential thinkers regarding the fabric of the universe. Einstein’s major contribution to modern physics was his theory of relativity. The first part of this revolutionary idea was his special theory of relativity. Published in 1905, it established two major points: the laws of physics are the same in … Continue reading Blog #2: Special Relativity → Continue reading →

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Time Travel

Posted on February 12, 2018 by Caroline Henning

Anything that has mass can bend the “four dimensional fabric” of space-time. This bending in space, known as gravity, causes objects to move in a non-linear fashion through space. According to Einstein’s theory of general relativity, gravity can bend time. By this theory, time moves faster or slower depending on your speed relative to something else–if … Continue reading Time Travel → Continue reading →

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Is the speed of light constant or actually variable?

Posted on February 13, 2017 by astromalhotra

Throughout studies into interactions of various celestial bodies, one constant in putting into scope the mind-bogglingly vast distances has been the speed of light, via the distance unit of a light-year. The concept of the speed of light was first fully suggested when Einstein hypothesized that the speed of light plays the role of infinite speed […] Continue reading →

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