Related papers: Relativity without tears
Despite the success of modern physics in formulating mathematical theories that can predict the outcome of experiments, we have made remarkably little progress towards answering the most fundamental question of: why is there a universe at…
Contrary to our immediate and vivid sensation of past, present, and future as continually shifting non-relational modalities, time remains as tenseless and relational as space in all of the established theories of fundamental physics. Here…
The nature of gravity is fundamental to understand the scaffolding of the Universe and its evolution. Einstein's general theory of relativity has been scrutinized for over ninety five years and shown to describe accurately all phenomena…
General relativity poses serious problems for counterfactual propositions peculiar to it as a physical theory. Because these problems arise solely from the dynamical nature of spacetime geometry, they are shared by all schools of thought on…
We put forward a new view of relativity theory that makes the existence of a flow of time compatible with the four-dimensional block universe. To this end, we apply the creation-discovery view elaborated for quantum mechanics to relativity…
We discuss the cosmological constant problem in the light of dilatation symmetry and its possible anomaly. For dilatation symmetric quantum theories realistic asymptotic cosmology is obtained provided the effective potential has a…
The Principle of Relativity has so far been understood as the {\it covariance} of laws of Physics with respect to a general class of reference frame transformations. That relativity, however, has only been expressed with the help of {\it…
The paper discusses the problem of the Lorentz contraction in accelerated systems, in the context of the special theory of relativity. Equal proper accelerations along different world lines are considered, showing the differences arising…
While purely philosophical in the early times, and still very speculative at the beginning of the twentieth century, Cosmology has gradually entered into the realm of experimental science over the past eighty years. It has raised some…
The cosmological constant problem represents an evident tension between our present description of gravity and particle physics. Many solutions have been proposed, but experimental tests are always difficult or impossible to perform and…
Different aspects of relativity, mainly in a canonical formulation, relevant for the question "Is spacetime nothing more than a mathematical space (which describes the evolution in time of the ordinary three-dimensional world) or is it a…
Along with weaving together observations, experiments, and theoretical constructs into a coherent mesh of understanding of the world around us, physics over its past five centuries has continuously refined the base concepts on which the…
Three of the big puzzles of theoretical physics are the following: (i) There is apparently no time evolution in the dynamics of quantum general relativity, because the allowed quantum states must obey the Hamiltonian constraint. (ii) During…
Thomas S. Kuhn interprets the development of the (natural) sciences as a specific dynamical process. Periods of piecemeal growth of knowledge based on widely accepted paradigms are interrupted by bursts of revolutionary changes which lead…
We provide some guidance and examples to clear up common misconceptions about special relativity. These misconceptions often come from trying to express the truths of special relativity in Newtonian terms rather than in terms more natural…
We present the theory of special relativity here through the lens of differential geometry. In particular, we explicitly avoid any reference to hypotheses of the form "The laws of physics take the same form in all inertial reference frames"…
We present here a spectrum of developments and predictions in gravitation theory in recent years which appear to be amongst some of the most exciting directions. These include the spacetime singularities, gravitational collapse final…
This paper constitutes a background to the paper 'Quantum mechanics as "space-time statistical mechanics"?', arXiv:quant-ph/0501133, presented previously by the author. But it is also a free-standing and self-contained paper. The purpose of…
Bulk peculiar flows are commonplace in the universe, with many surveys reporting their presence on scales spanning between few hundred and several hundred Mpc. However, the sizes and the speeds of some of these bulk flows are well in excess…
The Stringy Uncertainty relations, and corrections thereof, were explicitly derived recently from the New Relativity Principle that treats all dimensions and signatures on the same footing and which is based on the postulate that the Planck…