Surely these people shouldn't be staking their lives on the GPS system.
It's one of our most reliable machines (the most reliable I know of), but even still, it could go down some time.
What happened to being able to read a chart, keeping a sextant on-board, triangulating your position with a compass, and all the other skills people used to be taught?
Also can someone explain why phones need GPS for their operation. Do 3g/4g services require the phone's location to more precision than the tower can provide? Is there no fallback to some lower bandwidth mode?
Relspace is unfortunately commercial. It seems to be more intent on showing you what space looks like than educating on the concepts of SR, so accelerations are limited to extremely huge rather than insanely huge:
I have this theory that noone sane can even begin to comprehend modern physics, that's why they give undergrad physics students a heavy course load -- in hopes that they'll have a nervous breakdown and thus be ready for the next step.
Not to blow my own trumpet, but I've been working on something with the goal of providing an understanding of Special Rel incl limited stuff about accelerating frames that you usually only see in intro GR texts. From there the concepts of GR are not too bad, it's just getting any mathematical results that's v/ difficult.
The end goal is an interactive textbook, so far it's just (somewhat buggy) simulations.
You're a month or so early for it to be useful (bugs galore, limited browser compatability (chrome and ff>4) and it's my first piece of programming over 50 lines or so), but feel free to keep an eye on it. Here's the preview:
If anyone else feels like popping in and taking a look/helping out you're most welcome. Even a critique/pointing out of mistakes at this stage is most appreciated.
On the subject of GR:
You'll need a heavy helping of calculus, including vector calculus. Decent linear algebra. Geometry and some understanding of tensors. There are a lot of books around that start from about that level.
Also there's some stanford lectures on youtube that may be useful:
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Sure, they should learn that, too. At least enough so they aren't likely to die if their sextant breaks while the GPS is down.
Surely these people shouldn't be staking their lives on the GPS system. It's one of our most reliable machines (the most reliable I know of), but even still, it could go down some time. What happened to being able to read a chart, keeping a sextant on-board, triangulating your position with a compass, and all the other skills people used to be taught? Also can someone explain why phones need GPS for their operation. Do 3g/4g services require the phone's location to more precision than the tower can provide? Is there no fallback to some lower bandwidth mode?
Well that's easy. Just use a more reactive sacrificial cathode. I recommend Caesium, things will work out just fine.
I was gunna be a hipster. But it was too mainstream.
Yore very helpful to post this. Thank ewe.
Real time relativity is fairly complete and free, but limited to a moving observer in a static world
http://realtimerelativity.org/
Relspace is unfortunately commercial. It seems to be more intent on showing you what space looks like than educating on the concepts of SR, so accelerations are limited to extremely huge rather than insanely huge:
http://www.relspace.astahost.com/
My own (incomplete and probably still slightly incorrect) offering, based on html 5
http://schroedingers-hat.github.com/jsphys/jsphys.html
If you would be interested in collaborating on something that shows some general relativistic effects at some point in the future, I'm all ears.
I have this theory that noone sane can even begin to comprehend modern physics, that's why they give undergrad physics students a heavy course load -- in hopes that they'll have a nervous breakdown and thus be ready for the next step.
The end goal is an interactive textbook, so far it's just (somewhat buggy) simulations.
You're a month or so early for it to be useful (bugs galore, limited browser compatability (chrome and ff>4) and it's my first piece of programming over 50 lines or so), but feel free to keep an eye on it. Here's the preview:
http://schroedingers-hat.github.com/jsphys/jsphys.html
If anyone else feels like popping in and taking a look/helping out you're most welcome. Even a critique/pointing out of mistakes at this stage is most appreciated.
On the subject of GR:
You'll need a heavy helping of calculus, including vector calculus. Decent linear algebra. Geometry and some understanding of tensors. There are a lot of books around that start from about that level.
Also there's some stanford lectures on youtube that may be useful:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hbmf0bB38h0