On this day in 1905 Albert Einstein published his paper introducing special relativity in a German physics journal. Entitled ...

The part that makes special relativity so "special" is because these laws apply to everyone, everywhere at every time, including deep inside gravitational fields of all magnitudes.

In the late 19th century, classical physics seemed complete. Scientists believed they had uncovered all the laws governing ...

Discover how Einstein’s theory of special relativity reshaped physics by linking space, time, mass, and energy in a universe governed by the speed of light.

Einstein put forth special relativity, which explains motion at near-light speeds. Although there are many consequences of Special Relativity, this complex theory consists of only two postulates ...

This fact is vitally important, and leads to our great thought experiment which shows that special relativity cannot be the full story.

Special relativity is beyond weird. Among its many statements are that moving clocks run slow and that moving rulers shrink. But how are we supposed to make sense of this?

Now, special relativity is built around two main assumptions, or postulates. The first says that the laws of physics are the same in all inertial reference frames.

The Terrell-Penrose effect, predicted in 1959, suggests that objects moving at speeds close to that of light appear rotated. This optical illusion results from the combination of relativistic ...

Special relativity is also based on a second assumption that gives the speed of light — 186,000 miles per second (300 million meters per second) — in a vacuum a special status.

Tests of special and general relativity Over the last century, many experiments have confirmed the validity of both special and general relativity.