In a bizarre repercussion of Albert Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity, objects traveling close to the speed of light appear flipped over. The Special Theory of Relativity , or special relativity for short, describes what happens to objects traveling at close to the speed of light . Known as the Terrell–Penrose effect, it predicted that objects moving at a high fraction of the speed of light should appear rotated. And, because the cube is moving at nearly the speed of light, that position was very different indeed. Image b) shows image rotation of multiple images of a length-contracted sphere moving at 99.9% of the speed of light.