How to prove Einstein’s relativity for less than $100
With off-the-shelf materials and a little dry ice, you can discover particles that wouldn’t exist unless relativity were real.
“The experiments that we will do with the LHC [Large Hadron Collider] have been done billions of times by cosmic rays hitting the earth. … They’re being done continuously by cosmic rays hitting our astronomical bodies, like the moon, the sun, like Jupiter and so on and so forth. And the earth’s still here, the sun’s still here, the moon’s still here.” -John Ellis
The idea of special relativity is still one of the most difficult for people to wrap their heads around. We’re so used to thinking of space and time as fixed, unchanging entities — you can take a map and a clock anywhere, after all — that it’s hard to imagine that they do change dependent on how you move. Yet it’s incontrovertibly true: if you travel close to the speed of light, distances contract in your direction of motion, while time will dilate more and more the faster you move. It’s such an outlandish idea that today, more than a century later, many still don’t accept it. Yet it’s not only true, but you can prove it to yourself for under $100 and with less than a day’s worth of labor.
