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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."
100 years according to which observer?
I already read about this tomorrow.
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This isn't the sig you're looking for. Move along.
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!
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
... and being ONLY a "theory," won't be taught in Kansas public schools.
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!!
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-
.. 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.
I'm still trying to figure out what people mean by 'social skills' here.
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.
make world, not war
Perhaps that is why they are hesitant. Brings up bad memories.