WEBVTT
Kind: captions
Language: en

1
00:00:02.060 --> 00:00:07.600
I'm in an airplane bathroom aboard a 777 somewhere over the mid-Atlantic.

2
00:00:07.670 --> 00:00:11.220
It's a long flight and this is a strange
place to film a video, but

3
00:00:11.220 --> 00:00:14.730
it is the perfect place to tell you about relativity.

4
00:00:14.730 --> 00:00:20.000
Specifically, that Einstein was not the first person to have ideas about relativity.

5
00:00:20.000 --> 00:00:25.900
Centuries earlier, Galileo came up with the concept of what now is called "Galilean relativity,"

6
00:00:25.900 --> 00:00:30.200
which is the more basic idea that if you're in – well, he would have been thinking about something like

7
00:00:30.200 --> 00:00:35.500
the hold of a sailing ship – but if you're in an airplane bathroom, there is no physics experiment

8
00:00:35.500 --> 00:00:38.870
you can do that will tell you how fast you are going.

9
00:00:38.870 --> 00:00:42.000
You could be going 500 mph, as we are,

10
00:00:42.000 --> 00:00:46.500
you could be going at 9/10 the speed of light, magically, given you'd actually burn up to a cinder,

11
00:00:46.500 --> 00:00:52.850
you could be stopped, just hovering in some kind of simulator at this altitude, and

12
00:00:52.850 --> 00:00:57.500
there is no way you could tell, because, well, you can't see what you're going relative to.

13
00:00:57.500 --> 00:01:02.500
And that idea, that there is no privileged frame of reference, was built upon by Einstein,

14
00:01:02.500 --> 00:01:07.000
who realized that if you are in an airplane bathroom going at 9/10 the speed of light

15
00:01:07.070 --> 00:01:10.600
and you turn the headlights of the plane on, well,

16
00:01:10.620 --> 00:01:14.610
the pilot of the plane would see the light go at the speed of light and an observer would

17
00:01:14.610 --> 00:01:17.650
also see it going at the speed of light, that crucial idea

18
00:01:17.650 --> 00:01:22.800
is where all of relativity comes from, the idea that there is no privileged frame of reference.

19
00:01:22.800 --> 00:01:26.210
But that was Galileo's idea centuries earlier.

20
00:01:26.210 --> 00:01:28.600
And that is something you might not have known.

21
00:01:28.600 --> 00:01:33.800
And here's another thing. If I was clever, if I was really clever, then what I would do

22
00:01:33.800 --> 00:01:38.800
is film this in a completely fake airplane bathroom and now, to prove my point,

23
00:01:38.800 --> 00:01:42.000
I would have the walls fall away...

24
00:01:45.200 --> 00:01:49.200
I've got about 5 hours left in this flight.

25
00:01:50.460 --> 00:01:52.460
[Translating these subtitles? Add your name here!]