Eighteen-year-old Ryan Chester won $400,000 for explaining Albert Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity and its bizarre property of time dilation in a way that 10-year-olds can understand. He won a total of $400,000—$250,000 as a scholarship, $50,000 to his teacher, and $100,000 to his school to fund a science lab.In the video above, he uses his parent's house and a couple of other neat little graphical stunts to explain the theory's two main postulates:
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1. The laws of physics are the same in all inertial frames of reference.2. The speed of light in a vacuum has the same value c in all inertial frames of reference.The first one's easy: the postulate states that objects moving at similar constant speeds, or "inertial frames of reference," follow the same laws of physics. To illustrate this, he sits with a bowl of popcorn in two different places: at rest and in a car going at a steady speed. These are his two frames of reference. But when the car screeches to a halt (no longer keeping the objects in a state of inertia), the laws of physics are different. The popcorn falls off, Chester flies off his seat.The second postulate, which involves the speed of light and time dilation, is a little harder to pull off, but Chester settled for a nice and concise whiteboard explanation along with some rough CGI spaceships to explain why faster-moving objects seem to age slower from a slower observer's point-of-view:A nifty home experiment to explain a tangled theory. Just nifty enough to win Chester $400,000 and make him stand out from 2,000 applicants and 15 finalists.