How soap operas can help us understand special relativity

I AM not sure I am supposed to confess to this in public, but I am an avid watcher of the British soap opera Emmerdale. It is available to me in the US via a streaming service, and I look forward to watching each day’s episode, especially on Thursdays when we get a longer one. The writers are so good at keeping the drama high, and no one actually gets hurt, unlike on reality TV.

Part of how they achieve this high drama is by using timescales that make …