ABSTRACT
During the twentieth century, Einstein’s notion of relativity has become almost common sense, at least part of common high-school education. Even without higher grades in science, most people who did not fully forget their physics training or those who read one of Steve Hawking’s bestsellers have acquired some rudimentary understanding of the notion that time, speed, and location do not exist as absolute properties of the world. Scientific progress in physical disciplines has been crucially dependent on the logical and formal understanding of the underlying relativity. There is nothing like the real point in time that is shared by all vantage points in the universe; not even the location or energetic state of a particle can be determined for sure. Rather, we have to accept the basic relativity of the world. Relative to different vantage points (e.g., different relative speed, or in different gravity environments), the rate with which time goes by differs. It is all a matter of perspective, or relative “behavior” of observers vis-à-vis their environment. Note also that the principle of relativity holds both at the macro level and at the micro level of analysis, that is, for the astronomical study of the universe and its genesis, as well as the nuclear physical study of extremely small particles and short-term states.
