Related papers: Proposal of an experimental strategy to introduce …
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 development of both special and general relativity is accomplished in a series of 6 papers using a simple approach. The purpose is to explain the how and why of relativity to a broad public, and to be useful for students of physics by…
This paper presents some ideas which might assist teachers incorporating special relativity into an introductory physics curriculum. One can define the proper-time/velocity pair, as well as the coordinate-time/velocity pair, of a traveler…
We outline here the design, execution, and educational outcomes of an intervention inspired by Einstein's elevator thought experiment, intended to introduce secondary school students to the principle of equivalence, which is at the basis of…
A century after its formulation by Einstein, it is time to incorporate special relativity early in the physics curriculum. The approach advocated here employs a simple algebraic extension of vector formalism that generates Minkowski…
The principles of the special theory of relativity are extremely simple. A knowledge of the Pythagorean theorem and an ability to perform the simplest algebraic operations are sufficient to be conversant with the kinematics of the special…
The objective is a foundation of physics from the operationalization of its basic observables. We begin with classical and relativistic kinematics. Seizing on a programmatic proposal by Heinrich Hertz we arrive via quantification of…
Introducing Modern Physics represents an increasingly urgent need, towards which physics education concentrates many efforts. In order to contribute to this attempt, at the Department of Mathematics and Physics of Roma Tre University in…
These lectures notes contain an introduction to General Relativity. They are addressed to a general mathematical audience with no specific background in physics. The goal is to motivate and explain Einstein's theory of gravity and discuss…
Whoever has to learn or to teach thermodynamics is confronted with conceptual difficulties which are specific to this field of physics ([1],[2]). It seems that they can be eliminated by inserting relativity in the thermodynamic theory. The…
In this paper, it is shown why Lorentz Transformation implies the general case where observed events are not necessarily in the inertia frame of any observer but assumes a special scenario when determining the length contraction and time…
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…
The Einstein-First project aims to change the paradigm of school science teaching through the introduction of modern Einsteinian concepts of space and time, gravity and quanta at an early age. These concepts are rarely taught to school…
Einstein's general relativity is increasingly important in contemporary physics on the frontiers of both the very largest distance scales (astrophysics and cosmology) and the very smallest(elementary particle physics). This paper makes the…
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…
The possibility of a modification of special relativity with an invariant energy scale playing the role of a minimum energy is explored. Consistency with the equivalence of different inertial frames is obtained by an appropriate choice of a…
The goal of this lecture is to introduce the student to the theory of Special Relativity. Not to overload the content with mathematics, the author will stick to the simplest cases; in particular only reference frames using Cartesian…
Preliminary results on a canonical formulation of general relativity based on an analogy with the string model of elementary particles are presented. Rather than the metric components, the basic fields of the formalism are taken to be the…
This is a report of a course on modern physics designed and taught to undergraduate science and engineering students in the Spring of 2013. The course, meant for freshmen, attempts to integrate statistical mechanics into non-classical…
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…