Physics 30 - Dec 8

Today we talked about the twin paradox which is another neat ramification of time dilation.  Then we started to look at length contraction, another consequence behind special relativity and the constancy of the speed of light.  This means that for objects approaching light speeds, lengths of those objects actually decreases in the direction of motion as observed in another frame of reference.  We then looked at a couple of examples on how to calculate the length contraction.  This was all covered on slides 50-56 in the Unit 4 Notes.  Students were assigned Part 2 of Assignment 4.3.  We will go over this tomorrow.