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

100 Years

[Inkieminstrel]

100 years according to which observer?

Re:100 Years

[millennial]

Due to special relativity, I accuse you of stealing my joke and posting it before I could.

Re:100 Years

[Black Parrot]

> The first five posts are all riffs on the same theme -- dilation of time. Does that say more about the level of education among Slashdotters, or about our lack of creativity, or both?

Maybe it's just one post arriving via gravitational lensing.

Re:100 Years

[drsquare]

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.

Pffft

[kaellinn18]

I already read about this tomorrow.

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:Depends on How You Look at It

[wass]

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.

First of all you're only referring to special relativity here, which ignores acceleration and gravity. Secondly, there were still some leaps of faith to be made, such as assuming c is constant in all frames of reference, which Lorentz showed non-Newtonian transformations that would allow this for Maxwell's equations. And expanding the new energy definition and concluding the zeroth-order term (mc^2) is the rest energy of mass also took another leap of faith (although that paper wasn't published until a few months after this first relativistic one).

But even so, discovering the connection between relativity and E&M is still amazing, in my opinion. For examle, the permittivity (epsilon_0) and permeability (mu_0) of free space are two constants that can be measured in the laboratory rather easily. Yet Maxwell's equations in vacuum describe waves travelling at speeds 1/sqrt(epsilon_0*mu_0), which is exactly the speed of light in vacuum (although in Gaussian units this connection is far more obvious). It's pretty amazing to think how these are related. But you still need to make some assumptions to get the Lorentz transforms between reference frames.

Additionally, even simple special relativity was extremely controversial, it rejected many assumed notions of space/time. There were also many paradoxes that took awhile to get ironed out. Many scientists didn't believe in relativity until it was shown in experiment. And in fact the theories of relativity were so controversial that the Nobel committee didn't want to award Einstein the prize based on these, so went for the safer 'Photoelectric Effect' instead.

And thirdly, general relativity, although again not included in this 100 year anniversary, is total genius, and it took Einstein 10 years to come up with the theory. So don't wave off relativity as just a 'refinement of Maxwell's field equations' because it really is much more than that.

100 Years of Special Relativity

[Citizen of Earth]

You'd think it wouldn't be considered quite so Special any more.

Remember though. . .

[smooth wombat]

it's only a theory, not a fact. As such I demand that schools teach that it is tiny demons which are causing the effects we are seeing.

My theory is just as credible as yours since it's only a theory and not a fact.

Ok, now that that diatribe is over, what's truly interesting is not that what Einstein proposed 100 years ago is still being studied and restudied, it's that one portion of it was recently confirmed. Frame dragging was only confirmed last year.

Certainly other parts have been verified (relative time for example) but this portion, frame dragging, puts things in a whole new light. We're not just bodies in space. Instead, are bodies are changing the space around us!

But it's ONLY a "theory" ...

[YetAnotherName]

... and being ONLY a "theory," won't be taught in Kansas public schools.

Re:In case of Slashdotting...

[aznrocket]

Good coverage. For those in the Toronto, Ontario, Canada area, there are events being held @ the UofT. http://www.fields.utoronto.ca/programs/scientific/ 04-05/string-theory/strings2005/ for more info =)

Three cheers for the public domain.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

This is just one third of the World Year

[hubie]

The World Year of Physics is celebrating the year that Einstein put out three of his best papers: Special Relativity, brownian motion, and the photoelectric effect. In addition to the importance of relativity, he also confirmed the existence of atoms with the brownian motion paper, and the existence of quantized energy with the photoelectric effect.

That was one hell of a year. Any one of those would have established his reputation, but all three, and in the same year!!

Obligatory Family Guy Quote

[everphilski]

Einstein is working in a patent office
Smith: I'd like to patent this. I call it "Smith's Theory of Relativity"
Einstein browses through Smith's work, nods approvingly and then kills Smith with the overhead window door
-everphilski-

Re:Obvious oversimplification

[A beautiful mind]

Re:Obvious oversimplification (Score:-1, Redundant)
by Moderatbastard (808662) on 2005-06-30 17:49 (#12950737)
About 5 posts saying more or less the same thing within about a 2 minute interval.

Let the 'redundant' modding and subsequent bitching begin.

Well said mate, well said!

See, there you have it!

The two postulates ..

[RedLaggedTeut]

Since it seemed to me 5 minutes ago that people where reluctant to answer to this topic, I went to read the intro of Einsteins paper. I found one line that is memorable and that might help you to answer the quiz-question "What are the two postulates of The theory of special relativity?" The answer is in this quote:

.. the same laws of electrodynamics and optics will be valid for all frames of reference for which the equations of mechanics hold good. We will raise this conjecture (the purport of which will hereafter be called the "Principle of Relativity") to the status of a, postulate, and also introduce another postulate, which is only apparently irreconcilable with the former, namely, that light is always propagated in empty space with a definite velocity c which is independent of the state of motion of the emitting body. These two postulates suffice ..

The thing that needs explaining to me would be "frames of reference". A difference between two frames can be that they are in motion with respect to each other. For example, take a spaceship accelerating to half the speed of light, starting from our resting position. The 2nd postulate explains that the speed of light can be a constant velocity c, both with respect to the frame of the resting observer and the frame(view) of the spaceship. This leads to the question: if you shoot a light ray(velocity c=the speed of light) from the spaceship moving with half= 0.5 c, how come the light ray moves with 1.0 c from the view of both observers, not with 1.5 c from the resting observer?

As Einstein states, he then proceeds to reconcile the two seemingly paradox postulates by formulating laws of electrodynamics that will work.

Moving backwards

[ggambett]

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)

Re:Einstein's centenary - big in the UK

[rumblin'rabbit]

Einstein fled Germany in 1933 when fascism and anti-semitism become intolerable. Indeed, Einstein may have died in a concentration camp had he stayed. Thus Germany's handling of one of the great scientists of all time is not a proud one.

Perhaps that is why they are hesitant. Brings up bad memories.

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.

BBC radio stories to mark the centenary

[Forget4it]

Theories of Relativity
Five specially commissioned short stories to mark the centenary of Einstein's discovery. Listen to them for next few days only here .
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