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100 Years of Special Relativity
phrotoma writes "Wikipedia notes in their Selected Anniversaries section that today marks
the 100th anniversary of Albert Eintein's publication of the third of his four Annus Mirabilis Papers entitled On the Electrodynamics of
Moving Bodies; the seminal work that introduced the concepts which would come to be known as Special Relativity. This
event is also being commemorated in a UN endorsed celebration of physics: World Physics
Year 2005 with talks and events at public schools, museums, and universities the world over."
The guiness of Einstein was that he synthesized some more arcane work into some fairly simple equations, continuing to refine what we knew about the universe
But it's already common knowledge that we don't have a GUT yet, and everything we do have seems very complex and overdone, much the same as it was before E=mc2
I can't help but wonder if someone will come along in the next decade or so and synthesize these more complex equations into another step forward for mankind. Who knows? Maybe the answer is something like "42"
Was Worf A Programmer?
And just think -- under today's copyright laws of life+70, these papers would still be under copyright until 2025. Wikipedia is able to publish these today because copyright law was more sane a century ago.
I am sorry, nothing deserves 120 years of copyright protection. I doubt almost anything needs even 28 years. I weep for those who will be looking back 100 years from now.
That was one hell of a year. Any one of those would have established his reputation, but all three, and in the same year!!
> The guiness of Einstein was that he synthesized some more arcane work into some fairly simple equations, continuing to refine what we knew about the universe [...] I can't help but wonder if someone will come along in the next decade or so and synthesize these more complex equations into another step forward for mankind.
I'm sure more guiness will help.
> But it's already common knowledge that we don't have a GUT yet, and everything we do have seems very complex and overdone, much the same as it was before E=mc2
FYI, Einstein didn't make things simpler; he made them more accurate.
If the universe is complex and overdone, we'll just have to live with complex and overdone theories.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
100 years ago Einstein was publishing his theory. Today we're discussing intelligent design and how the dinosaurs attacked Noah's ark. Why do I feel we're going backwards? (low res images because of Slashdotting, I guess... can't find a high res version)
My website
In the simplest possible terms, "frames of reference for which the equations of mechanics hold good" means that both observers can move at different speeds, but that neither one can accelerate or decelerate while the observation is made.
This is important because you can always tell by mechanical means if you are accelerating, but without a point of reference, you are unable to tell if you are moving at constant speed. (Gravity and circular motions are just accelerations)
Perhaps that is why they are hesitant. Brings up bad memories.
What's more worrying is the increasingly extensive politicization of science (yes, it's always been political but it's getting even more so), the concomitant drop in the general education levels and the rise of anti-science as a source of feasible political capital.
The owls are not what they seem
(BTW, nice .sig ;)
Well, we are discussing special (not general) relativity. General is a magnum opus. But we might have a merely semantic disagreement, which does reflect in different standards for "genius". I mean it quite literally, "the origin or source". Special relativity was an evolution of Maxell's fields, and General relativity was an evolution of Special. Even the equivalence of gravity and EM was implications of those progressive developments. Often it is a novel implication that is more valuable, and even a greater insight than some other works of genius (like Bell's telephone, mic'ing a telegraph to a speaker). Einstein's relativity was much more than a refinement of Maxwell's field equations, but not a truly original work. Conversely to your perspective, I don't wave off Maxwell's fields - they were a towering work of genius (unless there's a predecessor I don't know about).
Every great scientist or mathematician I know of stands on the shoulders of giants. I just consider Einstein's Photoelectric Effect to be a leap off those shoulders (as did the Nobel committee), while Relativity was more like tippy-toes.
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make install -not war
Einstein took it further to postulate that laws of physics ARE the same in all reference frames
Nope, that was already postulated by Newton. The laws of Newtonian mechanics are the same in all frames of reference and they are transformed by the Galilei-transformations. I guess this was also the drive for Lorentz to look for transformations which do the same on Maxwell's equations.
What Einstein managed was to bring these two contradictory theories into a consistent one, the Special Relativity.
</nitpick>
:w!q
It happens with all vaguely-science related articles. Most Slashdotters are just kids who've managed to install Linux, they don't know much about science and technology. So when an article like this comes up, they've nothing informed to say. But they treat Slashdot as a chatroom, the social life they don't get in the real world. And they're desperate for attention, so they HAVE to post. Even if they have nothing to say. Especially if they have nothing to say.
So we have kids, desperate to get a +5 funny to validate themselves, on an article they know nothing about. So what do they do? They try posting something 'hilarious', like a play on words of something in the article, or something starting with 'Did anyone else read this as...', or a reference to one of the tired slashdot memes, as if quoting Douglas Adams makes them one of the Slashdot 'in crowd'.
It ruins it for the rest of us, as on any science article, we have to scroll half way down the page to get to the first person who actually says something relevent to the article.