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100 Years of Special Relativity

Posted by Zonk on from the much-better-than-the-regular-kind dept.

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."

2 of 299 comments (clear)

  1. Depends on How You Look at It by Doc+Ruby · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

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  2. Gravity Probe B by mknewman · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.