Over a course of three weeks the Special Relativity class dove into what Einstein's theory of special relativity is and its implications for technology, cosmology, and modern physics while also reading Andy Weir's book, Project Hail Mary, and getting a crash-course introduction to programing and designing Arduino boards. We began by learning about the Michelson–Morley experiment and Einstein's light clock where we learned that light will always go the speed of light which means that time and length dilation must occur to account for different velocity reference frames. Shortly after we worked together to derive the Lorentz factor from the Michelson-Morley experiment so we could mathematically represent our observations about time and length dilation at relativistic speeds. Later on in the class we were given the option to attend two different lectures on two derivations of the famous equation e=mc^2 so we could further understand where the equation came from, how it related to the math we had already done, and why it was so important to the topic of Special Relativity. Even later on in the class we spent a day going down the rabbit whole of General Relativity, which was very interesting to learn the broad strokes of, but the math involved (tensor calculus) was much to difficult for high school level comprehension. In that time we discussed the importance of science fiction writing and why it is so interesting to look forward in time at the possible technology humans could one day have. We chose the book Project Hail Mary for this as it was chalk full of well researched scientific application moments as well as speculative science that drew us, as the readers, in to a fantastical story. We also spent a couple of days learning the basics of coding Arduino boards, which we would use to create our final projects for the course.
E=MC^2 Project
During the second week of this course, the class took a trip to two museums in Albuquerque: The National Museum of Nuclear Science & History and The New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science. During these exertions we looked at professional examples of educational science exhibits as we would soon be making our own science exhibit based on special relativity. The exhibit that my group worked on was a show of lights that moved in a circle. There was a button that sped up the lights slightly every time it was pressed. However, at a certain point the light would begin to move at "relativistic speeds" and so it would take more and more energy to accelerate the light more until the light wouldn't speed up any more. This demonstration represented the equation e=mc^2 and why nothing with mass could possibly go the speed of light by the rules of relativistic physics.