Related papers: Students' difficulties in understanding the basic …
University students taking introductory physics are generally successful executing mathematical procedures in context, but often struggle with the use of mathematical concepts for sense making. Physics instructors note that their students…
The idea of gravity as an "emergent" phenomenon has gained popularity in recent years. I discuss some of the obstacles that any such model must overcome in order to agree with the observational underpinnings of general relativity.
Simple physical models of a measuring rod and of a clock are used to demonstrate the contraction of objects and clock retardation in special relativity. It is argued that the models could help in promoting student understanding of special…
Teleparallel gravity has significantly increased in popularity in recent decades, bringing attention to Einstein's other theory of gravity. In this Review, we relate this form of geometry to the broader metric-affine approach to forming…
Galilean Relativity and Einstein's Special and General Relativity showed that the Laws of Physics go deeper than their representations in any given reference frame. Thus covariance, or independence of Laws of Physics with respect to changes…
Although general relativity is a predictively successful theory, it treats matter as classical rather than as quantum. For this reason, it will have to be replaced by a more fundamental quantum theory of gravity. Attempts to formulate a…
The problem of time in quantum gravity occurs because `time' is taken to have a different meaning in each of general relativity and ordinary quantum theory. This incompatibility creates serious problems with trying to replace these two…
Observed physical phenomena can be described well by quantum mechanics or general relativity. People may try to find an unified fundamental theory which mainly aims to merge gravity with quantum theory. However, difficulty in merging those…
We introduce in the framework of the linear approximation of General relativity a natural distinction between General gauge transformations generated by any vector field and those Special ones for which this vector field is a gradient. This…
General Theory of Relativity and Quantum theory gives two different description of the same mother nature in the big and small scale respectively. Mathematical languages of these two theories are entirely different, one is geometric while…
The Standard Model of particle physics and the theory of General Relativity (GR) currently provide a good description of almost all phenomena of particle physics and gravitation that have received controlled experimental tests. However, the…
General relativity describes the gravitational field geometrically and in a self-interacting way because it couples to all forms of energy, including its own. Both features make finding a quantum theory difficult, yet it is important in the…
A deformation of special relativistic kinematics (possible signal of a theory of quantum gravity at low energies) leads to a modification of the notion of spacetime. At the classical level, this modification is required when one considers a…
It was generally believed that, in general relativity, the fundamental laws of nature should be invariant or covariant under a general coordinate transformation. In general relativity, the equivalence principle tells us the existence of a…
This contribution shows that the main topics of Relativity can be discussed at an elementary level and in a considerable extent - including the formal results of "Time Dilation" and "Lorentz Contraction" - by a minor modification of the…
It is sometimes claimed that the twin "paradox" requires general relativity for a resolution. This paper presents a simple, exact resolution using only special relativity and the equivalence principle. Two earlier approximate solutions are…
The established way of looking at special relativity is based on Einstein postulates: the principle of relativity and the constancy of the velocity of light. In the most general geometric approach to the theory of special relativity, the…
Introductory undergraduate courses in classical physics stress a perspective that can be characterized as realist; from this perspective, all physical properties of a classical system can be simultaneously specified and thus determined at…
This is the first in a series of papers that analyze college student beliefs in realms where common astronomy misconceptions are prevalent. Data was collected through administration of an inventory distributed at the end of an introductory…
Teleparallel gravity shares many qualitative features with general relativity, but differs from it in the following way: whereas in general relativity, gravitation is a manifestation of space-time curvature, in teleparallel gravity,…