Related papers: Modernizing Newton, to work at any speed
This essay considers a simple model of observers that are influenced by the world around them. Consistent quantification of information about such influences results in a great deal of familiar physics. The end result is a new perspective…
Are we smarter now than Socrates was in his time? Society as a whole certainly enjoys a higher degree of education, but humans as a species probably don't get intrinsically smarter with time. Our knowledge base, however, continues to grow…
A challenge in teaching about special relativity is that a number of the theory's effects are at odds with the intuition of classical physics, as well as student's everyday experience. The relativity of simultaneity, time dilation and…
The job of a physicist is to describe Nature. General features, hypotheses and theories help to describe physics phenomena at a more abstract, fundamental level, and are sometimes tacitly assigned some sort of real existence; doing so…
In this essay, I wish to share a novel perspective based on the principle of universalization in arriving at the relativistic and quantum world from the classical world. I also delve on some insightful discussion on going ``beyond''.
This article is an attempt for a new vision of the basics of Physics, and of Relativity, in particular. A new generalized principle of inertia is proposed, as an universal principle, based on universality of the conservation laws, not…
It is becoming common to hear teaching advice about spending more time on the "physics of the problem" so that students will get more physical insight and develop a stronger intuition that can be very helpful when thinking about physics…
This is a short note to announce the availability of some movies that may be useful in classroom discussions on the photographic appearance of objects moving at relativistic speeds. The images are based on special relativity with no account…
In physics, there is the prevailing intuition that we are part of a unique external world, and that the goal of physics is to understand and describe this world. This assumption of the fundamentality of objective reality is often seen as a…
The classical gravitational two-body problem is generalized in order to be applicable also to weak gravitational fields. The equation of motion holds both for terrestrial and large cosmic scales, the Newtonian gravitational law represents a…
We describe in detail an advanced project devised for outstanding High School (or undergraduate) students with appropriate abilities in physical reasoning (rather than with a good standard preparation), centered around the well-known…
It is a quite common view among people, that are not aware of the developments in modern physics, that it is part of human nature to substitute religious faith in places where there is no knowledge. Therefore, an increase in knowledge would…
Planck's formula and General Relativity indicate that potential energy influences spacetime. Using Einstein's Equivalence Principle and an extension of his Chock Hypothesis, an explicit description of this influence is derived. We present a…
Statements about relativistic effects are often subtle. In this essay we will demonstrate that the three classical tests of general relativity, namely perihelion precession, deflection of light and gravitational redshift, are passed…
Application of Newton's ideas from "Principia" gives many new results in mechanics. Here we explore the question ``What form of extra force will maintain the magnitude of a vector constant of the motion while changing its direction?''
A new class of modified gravity theories, made possible by subtle features of the canonical formulation of general covariance, naturally allows MOND-like behavior (MOdified Newtonian Dynamics) in effective space-time solutions without…
The reality of neutrino oscillations has not really sunk in yet. The phenomenon presents us with purely quantum mechanical effects over macroscopic time and distance scales (milliseconds and 1000s of km). In order to help with the…
Quantum technology has the potential to revolutionize how we acquire and process experimental data to learn about the physical world. An experimental setup that transduces data from a physical system to a stable quantum memory, and…
The work done by Isaac Newton more than three hundred years ago, continues being a path to increase our knowledge of Nature. To better understand all the ideas behind it, one of the finest ways is to generalize them to wider situations. In…
A modified version of relational quantum mechanics is developed based on the three following ideas. An observer can develop an internally consistent description of the universe but it will, of necessity, differ in particulars from the…