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."

Comments

Depends on How You Look at It

[Doc Ruby]

Although he's a hero of mine, I've found only Einstein's "photoelectric effect" insights to be a work of genius - a "quantum leap", if you will (or even if you won't, how will I know? It's all the same to me...) Relativity is brilliant, and changed science and culture forever. But it's really an ingenious refinement of Maxwell's field equations, even more than extra precision added to Newton's formulas.

Re:100 Years

[RWerp]

Each object in the Universe has its own coordinate system (a thing equivalent to an observer), in which it is always at rest. To put it shortly, it's observing itself. The time measured in this coordinate system is called a proper time. I guess we can say that it's been ca 100 years of proper time of the manuscript of Einstein's article...

audio captures of lectures on special relativity

[_peter]

I guess today is the day to finally listen to these...

http://www.teach12.com/ttc/EinsteinLectures.asp?ai =18990

Re:100 Years

[AKAImBatman]

Arguably, space-time warping can be accounted for in a calendar as long as some sort of reference point is given. For example, if I left on a rocket ship at .95C, bound for Alpha-Centauri and returned 10 years later (Earth time), I could still say that ten years have passed on the Sol calendar based on the current positions of the bodies inside the solar system. The fact that the movement of those bodies occurred inside a period of only 8 years my time is irrelevant. 10 years has still passed according to the Sol calendar.

Timekeeping is fun. Especially if you're a computer programmer. ;-)

Gravity Probe B

[mknewman]

It's worthy of note that one of the more obscure aspects of Einstein's theorum of Relativity is Frame Dragging, which predicts that time and space will be dragged around a spinning object's mass. This is being tested to an extremely high level of accuracy by the 4 most perfect spheres ever created in the Gravity Probe B (http://www.gravityprobeb.com/ experiment going on currently. The project is a 1 year flight with NASA and Stanford as the sponsors, and they are keeping mum as to interim results of the test. Supposedly the results will be announced in the near future after the 1 year test period is complete.

Sci-fi fans would do well to consider this...

[Chowser]

If only the fans of sci-fi would learn about special relativity, they would quickly learn that their dreams of intergalactic travel would quickly shrivel up. Consider the so-called "twin paradox" that would have a space traveler age quite differently than the people left behind. Here is a link http://theory.uwinnipeg.ca/mod_tech/node141.html with a brief explanation. Better ones can probably be found.

Re:I Wonder What The Next Relativity Theory Will B

[ZombieWomble]

In a way, he did make things simpler too - most of the transformations arising from SR had already beeen derived elsewhere (e.g. when trying to explain the Michleson-Mosley experiment), but Einstein produced a simple rule (i.e. that physical constants are invariant) which led directly to those results - and several other interesting ones, too

Re:Why we all thought of Time dilation immediately

[Foobar of Borg]

Anyway, it's been nearly 150 years since Darwin proposed his theories - still the debate continues. At least in physics there seems to be less religion messing up with it.

Well, this is because the fundamentalist wackos don't understand it at all. They don't understand evolution either, but they at least have a BS version of it to bash. Although, I have seen a few fundies mention that the theory of relativity is "only a theory" whereas the laws of thermodynamics are "laws" and thus somehow help their arguments. Basically, it is another "argument by semantics".

Crazy, crazy people...

Re:Why we all thought of Time dilation immediately

[brainstyle]

Anyway, it's been nearly 150 years since Darwin proposed his theories - still the debate continues. At least in physics there seems to be less religion messing up with it.

Alas, that isn't the case.

Re:This is just one third of the World Year

[hubie]

There were philosophical differences as well as a head-to-head clash between Newtonian dymanics (little balls bouncing around not caring about which way time was going) and kinetic theory (entropy, the 2nd law, "time's arrow"). You had reductionists and their counterparts. There was a lot of good work on the atomic theory that led to great advances in chemistry and thermodynamics, but remember that no one had ever seen an atom. I think it is a lot like how some people are wary of quarks because though they make a lot of sense in the standard model, they cannot exist by themselves, which leads to a philosophical distinction (are they real if you can't isolate them?).

A nice writeup is here.

galileo first stated relativity

[peter303]

"Any two observers moving at constant speed and direction with respect to one another will obtain the same results for all mechanical experiments."

Galileo was trying to explain why its difficult to tell the earth is moving: when everything moves in unison its like relatively no motion at all. Thats why we dont have thousand mile winds at the equation, the soup doesnt pool to the east in its bowl, etc. The other image Galileo used was things and activities inside a moving ship.

Einstein amplified this to objects moving rapidly to one another with the assumption there is a maximum constant velocity.