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Relativistic Romance
A romantic take on relativity of simultaneity by my student in PHYS 101, Einstein’s Century, a modern physics course for non-science majors.
You and I and our perspective frames
are resting relative to one another.
So, how is it that we disagree?
I say, “We fell in love the day we met.”
You say, “It was much later.” But I know
what I observed; the forehead kisses, and
flushed cheeks, all of the more primitive signs,
pointed to us in love at the same time.
Maybe we were never quite in sync.
At times when you appeared to pull away
I, too, was moving, relative to you,
and moving fast. So though we are at rest
today, in our not-quite-so-distant past
simultaneity was an illusion.Celina Reynes, Wellesley College ’16
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Inertial Frames in Black and White
A 1960’s instructional video on inertial frames — a visual gem and an instructional piece of art.
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C. G. Jung on Space and Time
After discussing relativity with Einstein, Carl Jung thought he could explain the results of Joseph Rhine‘s extrasensory perception experiments (EPS) with psychic relativity of space and time:
In my essay ‘On the Nature of the Psyche,’ I considered synchronicity as a psychically conditioned relativity of space and time. Rhine’s experiments show that in relation to the psyche space and time are, so to speak, ‘elastic’ and can apparently be reduced almost to vanishing point, as though they were dependent on psychic conditions and did not exist in themselves but were only ‘postulated’ by the conscious mind.
Jung, Carl G. Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle (from The Collected Works of C. G. Jung, Volume 8, Bollingen Series XX). 1960. Trans. R. F. C. Hull. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010. Print