Einstein's Relativity according to Magritte
and Dali
At the speed of light, length shrinks to zero while mass and time approach infinity

         
The House of Glass by R.Magritte           The Listening Room by R.Magritte


The Persistence of Memory by S.Dali

      In Einstein's universe, the only absolute quantity is the speed of light. His theories yielded some seemingly bizarre conclusions. For example, a traveler at the speed of light would become totally flattened, so that his face could be seen in the rear of his skull, like the figure in Magrittes's playful painting The House of Glass. On the other hand, in The Listening Room, the size of the apple in relation to the room creates a sensation that at the speed of light the mass of the apple approaches infinity, as predicted by the theory. Finally, in The Persistence of Memory, time seems as if it stopped; in other words, a time interval of, say, one second, will extend to infinity if an identical watch would be traveling at the speed of light. Thus, we see how art serves to illustrate scientific ideas which are frequently beyond human conception.


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