My Task was to \"Write.a.short.science.fiction.story.which.involves.three.concep

Question

My Task was to "Write.a.short.science.fiction.story.which.involves.three.concepts.relating.to.Einstein’s.Theory.of.Relativity.
The.physics.concepts.used.must.be.an.essential.part.of.the.story.and.must.be.clearly.explained".

Some of the concepts that I thought I would include are:

Time dilation
Wormholes
Time travel
Grandfather paradox (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xp3Xpi4F-zI&feature=related)

Could you please help me plot a story (a good one) that uses three concepts of Einstein's theory of relativity. (could be the ones I listed or things that you thought about). Please explain the concepts to me on a side note if possible. I don't want you to write the whole story. Just give me the plot (but I need it detailed as I would need to write a story that is 600 to 1000 words in length) and I will write the story. Thanks a lot.

Explanation / Answer

Two twin brothers, Astro and Clay, bid a tearful farewell as Astro journeys into space. Astro is gone for twenty earth years, but because he is moving so incredibly fast, his clock is running very slowly and only a year passes in his own frame. When he returns, Clay is gray-haired and wrinkly, while Astro is still young and healthy. Based on Relativity, it makes perfect sense to say that less time passed for Astro because his clock was running slow. But then you can ask, what happened from Astro's perspective? He wasn't moving, and Earth was; so Clay's clock was moving slowly; so shouldn't Clay be the young one? CONTRADICTION. Think about that for a while. Does Einstein have a way to wriggle out of this one? As before, yes, he does; and yes, it's sneaky and weird. Astro doesn't have an inertial reference frame. You can't look at things from his perspective, because he turned around in mid-flight. I mentioned earlier that an "inertial reference frame" means one which keeps on travelling at a constant speed. When Astro turned around; when he lost his stomach because the rocket was suddenly stopping and starting up again in the other direction; he should have realized that he was now in a different reference frame from the one he started in. So all bets are off, as far as Special Relativity is concerned. Clay's perspective tells the true story, and for Astro to calculate his brother's age, he has to take his reference-frame-change into account in his calculations. When he does, he will get the same result Clay got: young Astro, old Clay. The rest of relativity is a lot like those last two thought experiments, usually done with enough math to rigorously prove the results that I "hand-waved" my way through. You can come up with—and explain—more and more time-dilation paradoxes. Some of your explanations lead to other bizarre relatavistic phenomena. You can show that length is different in different reference frames, destroying the classical concept of space; that mass is different in different reference frames, destroying the classical concept of matter; and that mass and energy are the same thing, destroying the classical concept of a winnable war. And Einstein did all of this, in the first decade of this century. His theory explained what happens when things go astonishingly fast, just as Quantum Mechanics was explaining what happens when things get amazingly small. (And Einstein went on to form the General Theory of Relativity, which explains what happens when things get incredibly big.) All of this is the wonder of modern Physics, the lure that drew me and so many others into the field: concepts which are as far out as any of science fiction or fantasy, are real, and can be analyzed and discussed intelligently rather than kind of mumbled about. And now that you have made it all the way through this paper, you can talk more intelligently about them than most. And maybe—hopefully—you're starting to wonder what else you can say about them.

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