Bed Simulation

My goodness, I’d done it! My magnum opus in the field of engineering was finally complete. I had created a bed that simulated the effects of near light speed travel. People could now experience time dilation while in bed, and get more hours of sleep as a result. My celebration was cut short when my father woke me up for school. It turned out that my singular achievement had merely been part of a dream, a dream which my unconcious created from my fascination with the special relativity unit in the physics class I took at Pomona College.
Perhaps the strongest lure of special relativity is its way of contradicting the most fundamental scientific observations. Concepts I always assumed to be true were proven wrong by Albert Einstein nearly a hundred years ago. Is Newtonian momentum conserved in every inertial reference frame? Nope. Is time absolute? Absolutely not! Hearing my professor (who looked a bit like Einstein himself) relate such groundbreaking information sparked my curiosity to further …show more content…
My idea is actually quite simple. If I could somehow modify a bed to turn it into an isolated environment that would experience time dilation, then I could create a way for people to have more hours of sleep during any given session. “Time dilation” may sound like a made-up phrase some self-righteous kid at a Harvard bar would say to sound smart; however, I promise it is a real concept. Time dilation refers to the phenomenon in which a reference frame moving close to the speed of light will experience time at a slower rate than one moving at a normal speed. Basically, if I had a twin brother who was put on a spacecraft with near-light speed capabilities while I remained on Earth, he would age more slowly and, upon return to earth, would be younger than me. While on board the spacecraft, he could theoretically spend three hours sleeping (measured in normal Earth time), yet experience nine hours of sleep in his own