ABSTRACT
The special theory of relativity, pioneered by Hendrik Lorentz and Henri Poincare and brought to full bloom by Albert Einstein and Hermann Minkowski, threw common sense out of the window. Said Einstein, ‘Common sense is that layer of prejudice laid down in the mind before the age of 18.’ Einstein based this ‘outrageous’ theory on two postulates: one seemingly innocuous and the other much more bizarre. The inoffensive postulate merely reflects the experience of anyone who has flown in a large modern jetliner. In the theory of relativity, the experience is generalized into Einstein’s first postulate to say that no experiment of any kind, whatever its degree of sophistication, carried out inside a non-accelerating compartment can tell him whether that compartment is moving. The second postulate is much more odd and was bound to cause something in our common sense to recoil.
