Related papers: Special Relativity: A Centenary Perspective
This paper aims to provide physics teachers with tools to help deepen the understanding of the laws of electromagnetism. The fundamental contributions of our proposal are: a) to use quotes from mythical characters in the history of science…
Various facets of the concept of mass are discussed. The masses of elementary particles and the search for higgs. The masses of hadrons. The pedagogical virus of relativistic mass.
A modern elementary introduction to special relativity for advanced school children or first-year university students, in Russian. I try to demonstrate that relativity does not contradict common sense; on the contrary, it follows from…
This is a review with some comments on the A. Einstein`s 1911 paper, which he published as one of his many attempts of the general theory of relativity. The main point of the idea is to propose a new approach about light and its motion as…
In the last two decades, theories explaining the same experiments as well as special relativity does, were developed by using different synchronization procedures. All of them are ether-like theories. Most authors believe these theories to…
The World Year of Physics 2005 celebrates Einstein 1905. Too much celebration of a single character may be hazardous as an example for the younger generation. With such a motto in mind, I comment on some episodes in Einstein's scientific…
This year marks the 100th anniversary of Einstein's General Theory of Relativity (1915-2015). The first nontrivial solution of the Einstein field equations was derived by Karl Schwarzschild in 1916. This Note will focus mainly on the…
The objective of this second part of the work is to present heuristic derivations of the three classical tests of general relativity. These derivations are based on the Einstein equivalence principle and use Newtonian physics as a…
This is a broad and in places unconventional overview of the strengths and shortcomings of our standard models of fundamental physics and of cosmology. The emphasis is on ideas that have accessible experimental consequences. It becomes…
Many different mathematical languages have been invented to describe the ideas of Einstein's special relativity. One of the most powerful languages is the Minkowski space-time algebra of D. Hestenes. We discuss the ideas of special…
Physics was in crisis at the beginning of the twentieth century because the newborn Maxwell's electromagnetism defied mechanistic preconceptions. Albert Einstein understood that the solution to the crisis required an audacious reworking of…
This Resource Letter provides some guidance on issues that arise in teaching general relativity at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. Particular emphasis is placed on strategies for presenting the mathematical material needed for…
A century ago, Einstein formulated his elegant and elaborate theory of General Relativity, which has so far withstood a multitude of empirical tests with remarkable success. Notwithstanding the triumphs of Einstein's theory, the tenacious…
This is a survey on special metrics. We shall present some results and open questions on special metrics mainly appeared in the last 10 years
The purpose of this paper is to provide an elementary introduction to the qualitative and quantitative results of velocity combination in special relativity, including the Wigner rotation and Thomas precession. We utilize only the most…
A brief outline of the history of the discrepancies within Newtonian mechanics at the end of the nineteenth century is given. The framework of general relativity is described briefly and the famous 'tests' of general relativity are…
2011 marked the hundredth anniversary both of the famous Solvay conferences, and of the Geiger-Marsden experiment that launched the modern understanding of subatomic structure. I was asked to survey the status and prospects of particle…
We review the experimental evidence for Einstein's special and general relativity. A variety of high precision null experiments verify the weak equivalence principle and local Lorentz invariance, while gravitational redshift and other clock…
This article presents a brief review of some historical and philosophical aspects of Einstein's 1917 paper 'Cosmological Considerations in the General Theory of Relativity', a landmark work that denoted the starting point of modern…
This paper develops the approach to special relativity put forward by John S. Bell. The classical dynamics of an electron orbiting a nucleus in uniform motion is solved analytically and compared to numerical simulations for an accelerated…