Relativity: Ten minutes to Alpha Centauri?

It is almost frightening how well special relativity works, and how internally consistent it is. The simple arguments presented here don’t do full justice to how smoothly the concepts of space and time are intertwined in the theory, and how much sense this link makes on close inspection. We can note, however, that the constancy of the speed of light is well-established experimentally (starting with the aforementioned Michelson-Morley experiment), and in fact time dilation has been confirmed experimentally almost countless times!