JustinS

General Theory of Relativity is the theory that proposes that matter causes space to curve. Essentially the thought that when a large amount of matter is in a particular place, that th area around it becomes 'depressed' and anything of a smaller mass that passes will be drawn towards the larger mass. Suppose you were to take a sheet of latex, and you were to place a ball onto the outstretched sheet, the sheet would sink. This is basically the effect that matter has in space, and smaller masses will sink towards it.

Little Sizzle - Spacetime, as described by Hans von Baeyer, is 'an invisible stream flowing ever onward, bending in response to objects in it s path, carrying everything in the universe along its twists and turns'!

Special theory of Relativity is postulates that Spacetime is in the form of a 4-dimensional continuim, that there are Global Inertial Frames (which are essentially inertial frames of reference throughout all of space for all objects that are not accelerating, or moving at a constant velocity, and moves in a straight line), that the speed of light is constant and the same in any inertial frame, so in essence, the laws of physics are the same in any point of reference(inertial frame) regardless of position or velocityhere.

Bibliographies and Annotations

NCSA. "Genreal Relativity". 2 February, 2009. http://archive.ncsa.uiuc.edu/Cyberia/NumRel/GenRelativity.html This website gives a very good representation of the theory of general relativity and provides sufficient visual aide to accompany the explanitory text.

Hamilton, Andrew. "Special Relativity". 2 February, 2009. http://casa.colorado.edu/~ajsh/sr/sr.shtml And excellent site, giving various visual and verbal explainations on the topic of special relativity and more. May be a tad bit difficult to understand but still a very good resource.