Read the Blitzer Bonus on page 47. The future is now: You have the opportunity to explore the cosmos in a starship traveling near the speed of light. The experience will enable you to understand the mysteries of the universe in deeply personal ways, transporting you to unimagined levels of knowing and being. The downside: You return from your two-year journey to a futuristic world in which friends and loved ones are long gone. Do you explore space or stay here on Earth? What are the reasons for your choice?

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Blitzer Bonus || A Radical Idea: Time Is Relative The Persistence of Memory (1931), Salvador Dali:. © 2011 MOMA/ARS. What does travel in space have to do with radicals? Imagine that in the future we will be able to travel at velocities approaching the speed of light (approximately 186,000 miles per second). According to Einstein's theory of special relativity, time would pass more quickly on Earth than it would in the moving spaceship. The special-relativity equation R₁ - Bin/1-(+)² = gives the aging rate of an astronaut, Ra, relative to the aging rate of a friend, Rf, on Earth. In this formula, v is the astronaut's speed and c is the speed of light. As the astronaut's speed approaches the speed of light, we can substitute c for v.