Teen wins prize for relativity video

USA Today reports:

Meet Ryan Chester, 18, whose quirky video explaining Albert Einstein’s mind-bending Special Theory of Relativity won the inaugural Breakthrough Junior Challenge Sunday. The prize nets the North Royalton (Ohio) High School senior $250,000 toward college; $50,000 for Rick Nestoff, the physics teacher that inspired him; and $100,000 for a new school science lab.

Parents, take note: That's not too shabby a haul in exchange for a zippy 7-minute clip.

It is a slick video, and it follows closely a common textbook explanation in terms of Einstein's postulates (ie, Poincare's relativity principle and Lorentz's constancy of the speed of light), the Michelson-Morley experiment, and spacetime without an aether.