Albert Einstein - Essence of His Theory of Special Relativity

According to the reasoning of relativity, time slows down for the observer as he speeds up because everything is physically compressed more and more as the observer moves faster and faster. It is as if space and everything in it is elastic ( the same concept is working behind the formation of black holes when there is an ultra high concentration of mass ).  The essence of Einstein's discovery is that the relation between time-space is tied by the constant speed of light. Brian Greene summarizes this point in the most elegant way in his book " The Fabric of the Cosmos ( on page 49 - Penguin Books ) in the following manner :- " Special relativity declares a similar law for all motion : the combined speed of any object's motion through space and its motion through time is always precisely equal to the speed of light ....The key fact, Einstein discovered, is that these two kinds of motion are always complementary. When the parked car you were looking at speeds away, what really happens is that some of its light-speed motion is diverted from motion through time into motion through space, keeping their combined total unchanged. Such diversion unassailably means that the car's motion through time slows down. " 

( my personal notes : - when the car is parked it experiences all its motion through the time dimension. Light is peculiar in that it is massless and lives " its life " in the fast lane - it always travels at the fastest possible speed. From this fact, Einstein also concluded that mass is equivalent to energy - E=MC2 - because it will take an infinite amount of energy to accelerate anything with the slightest mass to the speed of light which is massless. Please note that the constant speed of light again ties the relation between E and M in nuclear reactions in the above most famous of all equations. Another profound conclusion from the above facts is that light ( or the quantum of light - the photon ) is timeless in the sense that for the photon time stands still. This can be seen in the modern version on the Double Slit experiment pioneered by Thomas Young in the 1800s. )

I may as well set out my other views on the concept of space-time. Light is the single most important entity in the universe as far as human beings are concerned. Without light no signals can be communicated and nothing can happen. Our feeling of time is based on events which are only made possible with the help of light. The light signals we receive must interact with our photo sensitive cells in our eyes to transmit signals to our brain that interprets these signals to make sense of the situation we are in. Our consciousness as expressed through our physiological systems then make events happen. Therefore, I totally agree with Sir Roger Penrose that we will not be able to completely understand all the basic concepts such as time-space until we understand more about our own consciousness. 

NOTE : For interested readers please read Chapter ( iv ) of my e-book on the detailed explanation of both Special and General Relativity from pages 73 to 84 at this link :-https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&pid=sites&srcid=ZGVmYXVsdGRvbWFpbnxqa2hjbGlmZXN0eWxlfGd4OjM5NmM2NTViMjAzY2M5MTk

( The above account is my elaboration of Albert Einstein's Theory of Special Relativity on the official forum of the world's largest online scientific research project - Galaxy Zoo ( now part of the voluntary online research project - Zooniverse ) with over 1,000,000 members worldwide. I was lucky enough to have been the No.1 most prolific researcher in Galaxy Zoo 1 when it started on July 11, 2007. I had personally analysed and classified over 1.2 million galaxies images from the database of SDSS Sloan Digital Sky Survey camera sited at Apache Point in New Mexico, USA. This automated survey camera with an 8 feet diameter lens has taken over 80 million images and mapped over half of the visible universe. Please follow this link if you are interested to take part as a volunteer researcher : -https://sites.google.com/site/jkhclifestyle/Home/milky-way-over-hawaii/my-galaxy-zoo-images   )