Related papers: Relativity in Introductory Physics
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…
Spacetime curvature plays the primary role in general relativity but Einstein later considered a theory where torsion was the central quantity. Just as the Einstein-Hilbert action in the Ricci curvature scalar R can be generalized to f(R)…
The Special Theory of Relativity, introduced by Albert Einstein in the early 20th century, marked a radical shift in our understanding of space and time. Nevertheless, the theory's non-intuitive implications continue to pose conceptual…
We submit the viewpoint that, perhaps, some of the controversies in gravitation occurred during this century are not due to insufficiencies of Einstein's field equations, but rather to insufficiencies in the mathematics used for their…
The four dimensional spacetime continuum, as first conceived by Minkowski, has become the dominant framework within which to describe physical laws. In this paper, we show how this four-dimensional structure is a natural property of…
After a historical discussion of Einstein's 1907 principle of equivalence, a homogeneous gravitational field in Minkowski spacetime is constructed. It is pointed out that the reference frames in gravitational theory can be understood as…
This paper shows one way to construct phase spaces in special relativity by expanding Minkowski Space. These spaces appear to indicate that we can dispense with gravitational singularities. The key mathematical ideas in the present approach…
We present a comprehensive introduction to spacetime algebra that emphasizes its practicality and power as a tool for the study of electromagnetism. We carefully develop this natural (Clifford) algebra of the Minkowski spacetime geometry,…
The book presents ideas by H. Poincare and H. Minkowski according to those the essence and the main content of the relativity theory are the following: the space and time form a unique four-dimensional continuum supplied by the…
Einstein's theory of relativity is largely thought of as one of the most important discoveries of the 20$^{th}$ century and continues to pass observational tests over 100 years later. Yet, it is Newtonian gravity, a 350 year old formalism…
In 1908, Minkowski put forward the idea that invariance under what we call today the Lorentz group, $GL(1,3, {\bf R})$, would be more meaningful in a four-dimensional space-time continuum. This suggestion implies that space and time are…
This paper presents a brief but comprehensive introduction to certain mathematical techniques in General Relativity. Familiar mathematical procedures are investigated taking into account the complications of introducing a non trivial…
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…
Many professional physicists do not fully understand the implications of the Einstein equivalence principle of general relativity. Consequently, many are unaware of the fact that special relativity is fully capable of handling accelerated…
The Euclidean interpretation of special relativity which has been suggested by the author is a formulation of special relativity in ordinary 4D Euclidean space-time geometry. The natural and geometrically intuitive generalization of this…
Since the main open problem of contemporary physics is to find a unified description of the four interactions, we present a possible scenario which, till now only at the classical level, is able to englobe experiments ranging from…
A thought experiment first proposed by Sartori is analysed using the parallel velocity addition formula of special relativity. The distances and proper-time intervals between some similarly defined spatial coincidence events are found to be…
We present a matrix formalism, inspired by the Minkowski four-vectors of special relativity, useful to solve classical physics problems related to both mechanics and thermodynamics. The formalism turns out to be convenient to deal with…
In the standard cosmological theory one uses the Einstein concepts of space and time as were originally introduced for the special theory of relativity and the general relativity theory. According to this approach all physical quantities…
A common approach to metric-affine, local Poincar\'e, special-relativistic and Galilei spacetime geometry is developed. Starting from an affine composite bundle, we introduce local reference frames and their evolution along worldlines and…