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Is the world we live to complex to comprehend? Or are we simply short on a few facts?

Albert Einstein, the world-renowned physicist, put forth his theories of Relativity in the early 1900's. A half century later, scientists were still devising experiments to corroborate his theories. That is, what Einstein understood with intuition, the average scientist needed high-tech experiments to confirm. Today, Einstein's perception of the universe stands as a pillar of some of the most fundamental aspects of physics.

It is with little wonder that the word "Einstein" has become synonymous with genius. Here was a man who envisioned revolutionary ideas which other scientists (forget about average people - other scientists) could not conceive of. In a sense, Einstein was more than just a genius. We're used to referring to as a genius someone who comes up with revolutionary ways of dealing with tangible ideas - a method of prefabricating houses, a lotion that cleans any stain off any material, a plane that can take off as a helicopter or as a plane, etc. But coming up with ideas which take others years to grasp and ultimately turn out to be the foundation of a branch of science, is beyond our simple understanding of genius. Out of lack of an adequate term, I would simply call it beyond-human genius.

Although it is generally known that Einstein is responsible for the formula E=mc2 and that he is the father of the Atom Bomb, the average person knows very little about what his theories say. Probably because if scientists have had a hard time understanding his theories, the average person has surely found them incomprehensible. And rightly so. Some of Einstein's theories seem to defy common sense and logic.

But there are ways of getting a "glimpse" of something that may otherwise be incomprehensible when done in "small, limited doses." It is in this vein that I'd like to touch on some of the "hair-raising" ideas presented by Einstein.

First I should note that the "Theory of Relativity" actually consists of two theories: Special Relativity, dealing with high-speed motion, and General Relativity, dealing with gravity. The technical differences between the two theories, however, are beyond the scope of and irrelevant to this article. I therefore simply refer to them as "The Theory of Relativity."

One of the great puzzles confronting Einstein and his contemporaries was the consistency of the speed of light. Experiments showed that light, which travels at 186,000 miles per second, maintained

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