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Albert Einstein’s introduction of special relativity at the dawn of the 20th century left physicists with any number of peculiar new puzzles to work through. One of the most famous is the thought experiment that came to be known as the ‘twin paradox’, which considers how twins would age in relation to one another if one were to journey light years into space and back while the other remained on Earth. Using the twin paradox as a launch pad, this animation from TED-Ed takes viewers on a journey into the knotty world of time dilation. In particular, the short details why it would be a mistake to view the spaceship and Earth as two equally stationary objects, which would have caused each twin to have, paradoxically, aged faster from the perspective of the other once they were reunited.
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Ecology and environmental sciences
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Film and visual culture
Our world has very different contours when a millimetre is blown up to a full screen
8 minutes
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Astronomy
The remarkable innovations inspired by our need to know the night sky
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Knowledge
Why it takes more than a lifetime to truly understand a single meadow
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Physics
Groundbreaking visualisations show how the world of the nucleus gives rise to our own
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Earth science and climate
There’s a ‘climate bomb’ ticking beneath the Arctic ice. How can we prepare?
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Physics
To change the way you see the Moon, view it from the Sun’s perspective
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Ecology and environmental sciences
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Space exploration
The rarely told story of the fruit flies, primates and canines that preceded us in space
12 minutes