Spatial geometry of the rotating disk and its non-rotating counterpart
Popular Physics
2015-05-30 v2 General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology
Physics Education
Abstract
A general relativistic description of a disk rotating at constant angular velocity is given. It is argued that conceptually this direct approach poses fewer problems than the special relativistic one. For observers on the disk, the geometry of their proper space is hyperbolic. This has interesting consequences concerning their interpretation of the geometry of a non-rotating disk having the same radius. The influence of clock synchronization on spatial measurements is discussed.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1109.2488,
title = {Spatial geometry of the rotating disk and its non-rotating counterpart},
author = {Klaus Kassner},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1109.2488},
year = {2015}
}
Comments
10 pages, 3 figures, this is the version accepted by American Journal of Physics; I had to remove the special relativity part, which one of the referees did not like; it is still available in v1