"Einstein's Pedometer" App Measures How Special Relativity Affects Your Daily Activity

By Rebecca Boyle Posted 04.11.2011 at 1:56 pm 8 Comments

Einstein's Pedometer iTunes App Store

Runners live longer, so they say, and a new iPhone app proves it through the theory of special relativity. Just in time for marathon season!

As your velocity increases, time as you experience it slows down relative to something moving slower than you. A passenger on a spaceship traveling near the speed of light would appear to have aged less than his friends when he returned to Earth, for instance. Similarly, a fast runner appears to gain time compared to a slow runner.

Einstein’s Pedometer brings special relativity to your daily activities, showing how much time you gain by moving. The faster you move, the more nanoseconds you gain relative to your stationary friends.

The iPod app, designed by a Japanese developer, uses the iPhone’s GPS capabilities and Lorentz transformation equations to calculate this. The Lorentz transformation is a set of equations that relate one observer’s space and time coordinates to those of another observer.

Einstein's Pedometer is free on the App Store, available for iPod touch, iPhone and iPad devices.

[Gizmag]

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8 Comments

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-my name here-

04/11/11 at 7:03 pm

i bet it also sucks the life out of your battery...

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Far Out Man

04/11/11 at 8:16 pm

Very corny but someone will buy it! Even if you were the Flash, you wouldn't gain enough time to mention to anyone with a straight face. If you have to run for 100 hours with the objective of gaining a billionth of a second, you should find better use of your time. Luckily there are much better reasons for running! Of course you are gaining nothing really. Time has not changed in your own reference frame.

The idea is particularly foolish because everyone traveling in a vehicle is gaining much more lifetime (in the reference frame of non-moving objects on the Earth). Hopefully the app can be turned off when using other modes of transit as that just makes it worse than useless.

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empjag

04/11/11 at 8:23 pm

I'm sorry, the comic nerd in me has clarify that currently The Flash can run faster than the speed of light.

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empjag

04/11/11 at 8:25 pm

I swear I proof read something a thousand times and still sound like an idiot. *has to clarify*

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drchuck1

04/12/11 at 8:07 am

shite happens

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matsci1

04/12/11 at 9:08 am

The comic book writers seem to have conveniently left out the part where an object also gains mass as it gains velocity. As the Flash approached the speed of light he would become infinitely heavy and thus require infinite energy to further accelerate. That is one of the big sticking points about reaching the speed of light…it would require and infinitely big engine with and infinite energy source.

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Fallacy

04/12/11 at 10:59 am

My inner nerd demands that I point out the works of Douglas Adams, specifically the novel "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy". In the novel, Adams proposes a special energy source, the only energy source in existence which is known to obey it's own special rules, and travel faster than the speed of light: bad news.

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Far Out Man

04/13/11 at 1:08 am

LOL ... good stuff. Sorry, I haven't read The Flash in a long time and I did not know that. Just goes to show how easy it is to pick up hoof in mouth disease. Please replace The Flash with Steve Austin in my earlier comment!