Related papers: Paradoxos da Relatividade
This paper has pedagogical motivation. It is not uncommon that students have great difficulty in accepting the new concepts of standard special relativity, since these seem contrary to common sense. Experience shows that geometrical or…
The paradoxes of thermodynamics and statistical physics are unavoidable in the study of physical paradoxes because of their importance at the time they came to be as well as the frequency of their appearance in historical studies of…
A "Two-Spaceship Paradox" in special relativity is resolved and discussed. We demonstrate a nonstandard resolution to the "two-spaceship paradox" by explicit calculation using Generalized Principle of limiting 4-dimensional symmetry…
The principle of invariance of the velocity of light is only valid for the wrong measurements of inertial observers who ignore their own movement and consider themselves at rest. The Langevin (or clock) paradox arises when it is assumed…
The formal structure of the early Einstein's Special Relativity follows the axiomatic deductive method of Euclidean geometry. In this paper we show the deep-rooted relation between Euclidean and space-time geometries that are both linked to…
Thirty original and collected problems, puzzles, and paradoxes in mathematics and physics are explained in this paper, taught by the author to the elementary and high school teachers at the University of New Mexico - Gallup in 1997-8 and…
I give a short non-technical review of the results obtained in recent work on "Doubly Special Relativity", the relativistic theories in which the rotation/boost transformations between inertial observers are characterized by two…
This paper aims to provide teachers with a tool to teach the essential features of special relativity, considering the students' difficulties highlighted by numerous studies. Our proposal presents special relativity as the solution to the…
The theory of relativity, which was proposed in the beginning of the 20th century, applies to particles and frames of reference whose velocity is less than the velocity of light. In this paper we shall show how this theory can be extended…
In the article (Rothleitner and Francis 2011 Metrologia 48 187-195) the correction due to the finite speed of light in absolute gravimeters is analyzed from the viewpoint of special relativity. The relativistic concepts eventually lead to…
Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity was proposed a little over a hundred years back. It remained a bedrock of twentieth century physics right up to Quantum Field Theory. However, the failure over several decades to provide a unified…
The Sorites paradox is the name of a class of paradoxes that arise when vague predicates are considered. Vague predicates lack sharp boundaries in extension and is therefore not clear exactly when such predicates apply. Several approaches…
The distinction between the real positions of moving objects in a single reference frame and the apparent positions of objects at rest in one inertial frame and viewed from another, as predicted by the space-time Lorentz Transformations, is…
The Einstein postulates assert an invariance of the propagation speed of light in vacuum for any observer, and which amounts to a presumed absence of any preferred frame. The postulates appear to be directly linked to relativistic effects…
We discuss how the finiteness and universality of the speed of light arise in the theoretical framework introduced in [1], and derive generalized coordinate transformations, that allow to investigate physical systems in a non-classical…
A new formulation of what may be called the "fundamental theorem of the theory of relativity" is presented and proved in (3+1)-space-time, based on the full classification of special transformations and the corresponding velocity addition…
Relativistic length contraction is revisited and a simple but new thought experiment is proposed in which an apparent asymmetric situation is developed between two different inertial frames regarding detection of light that comes from a…
Students are often mystified by the reasoning that leads from the postulates of special relativity to the requirement of covariance. This is partly due to the lack of transparency resulting from the failure to clearly separate the roles the…
In this paper we treat the so called clock paradox in an analytical way by assuming that a constant and uniform force F of finite magnitude acts continuously on the moving clock along the direction of its motion assumed to be rectilinear.…
Consider the following story: A teacher announces to her students a test for the following week, such that the test will be ``surprising''. The students use this as the basis for a ``logical derivation'' and reach a contradiction, which…