We visited some friends a couple of nights ago, and - quite bizarrely - the conversation somehow turned to space travel, and that one of our friends couldn’t understand the whole thing about astronauts travelling to mars not ageing as much as the people they left behind.
Don’t ask how we ever get on to these conversations.
Everybody looked to me for an explanation. Apparently I am seen among our circle of friends as not only the font of all knowledge on this kind of thing, but also the one person who could explain nuclear physics to a small child and have them understand it.
I knew it was a mistake. The ensuing scene reminded me of the movie “This is Spinal Tap” - the famous amplifier volume knob scene. I spent a couple of minutes drawing a diagram on paper, and explaining how it was theorised that the speed of light was constant - so it travelled the same speed for everybody, everywhere regardless. I draw a picture of an aeroplane, and wheeled out my famous “lightbulb on a plane” description of the speed of light, and the effect of relativity on it.
After I finished explaining, our friend said “yeah, so the light is going to take longer, and you might look younger if you went really fast for a long time, but you’re still going to drop dead when you would have before, aren’t you”… I stopped explaining at that point.
The argument raged between everybody else trying to form their own theories for the next ten minutes, and slowly - very slowly - everybody explained to themselves exactly what I told them at the start… and realised what I was saying.
“That’s too weird… and we’re obviously not supposed to understand it - we’re not designed to understand it”.
Isn’t it amazing when you see somebody “get” an idea, and then run with it - when they make the leap from a basic building block to a much deeper concept - that the reason we have trouble thinking about relativity and such subjects is because we are not designed to think about them.
Off the back of this, I turned the evening into a topology trick session and made a mobius strip out of paper - and shouted “danaa! a one sided piece of paper!” - to consternation until somebody tried to draw a line around it, and met the start of the line after drawing all the way round… the frown was worth a million words.
I then got them to cut the mobius strip down the middle, which did not of course make two pieces of paper, but one big strip.
Science rules. And any sufficiently advanced science is indistinguishable from magic.