Relative Space and Time

Abstract

Sometimes one can hear the phrase “everything is relative”, in order to describe the theory of relativity by Albert Einstein. This is, of course wrong: If everything was relative, then there’d be nothing anything could be relative to. Rather, the Theory of Relativity claims that some things we believed to be absolute, are in fact relative – like space, and even more importantly time. On the other hand, it also requires that some things we had thought were relative, are in fact absolute – such as the speed of light.