Relativity in Non-Astronomical Terms

Programs for this blog post

High School Abroad in France

Authored By:

Mandy G.

If you’re wondering if watching Interstellar for the fourth time finally inspired me to become an astrophysicist, unfortunately, not even Matthew McConaughey’s quantifiable love can make multi-dimensional physics appealing to a foreign language nerd. As an exchange student, I prefer to think of relativity in the context of travel; far less complex, far more comprehensible to an average human without the genius gene.

If you live in the US, how far is “far.” How long do you need to spend in the car or on a train to feel like you’re truly “traveling”. If you’re from a small-ish town like me, anything within 10 miles is “right around the corner”, while a shopping center 20 miles away is “a bit out of the way.” Something you don’t realize until you’ve spent time in a smaller country like France is that the United States really is enormous. Flying from one end of the country to the other takes six hours, approximately the same amount of time it takes to fly from Boston to Paris.

Where I live in Massachusetts, it takes 6 hours in a car to reach the Canadian border, and God knows how long to get yourself all the way to Mexico. Those two countries are America’s neighbors, yet it still takes quite a bit of work to cross a border. In Northern France, I can hop in the car and buy my groceries in Belgium or take a one-hour car ride, the same amount of time it takes me to drive to and from my rink back home, and wind up in the Chunnel on my way to England. Nevertheless, according to my host Family, Spain is very, very far away; a whopping hour long plane ride! With a flight like that, maybe I could fly a few states down the east coast to North Carolina.

I think that the differences in size of our two countries tend to influence the ways we think about time; and since time is the module through which we organize our lives, it can be interesting to look at the lifestyle differences between us. For example, I have no problem skating at a rink that’s forty-five minutes away from my house because for me, that’s pretty close. In France, a forty-five-minute car ride is practically a road trip. For that reason, all of my host family’s activities are within a 20-kilometer radius of their house, making it easy for my working host parents to pick us up from school, drive up to sports practice, and still come back in time for dinner. In the US, a forty-five-minute car ride my not be far, but it does take quite a hefty chunk of time, meaning that I’m limited as far as the variety of activities I can participate in and the role my parents, aka my chauffeurs, play in my extracurriculars.

Since my mom doesn’t want to drive all the way home then back again to Boxboro, she stays at the rink, watches me skate, and has built a network of friends who are a part of the same community. That community may not exist if not for the inconvenience of distance. Trippy.

Anyway, next time you’re deciding how much time you consider to be reasonable, remember that every country has their scale of measurement and their own theory of relativity.