Related papers: On the origin of Special Relativity
During the period identified as the Rebirth of General Relativity, John Wheeler was instrumental in retrieving the physics of gravity that had become hidden behind the mathematical formalism. For Wheeler himself the change in point of view…
This article reviews the biography of the Swiss mathematician Marcel Grossmann (1878-1936) and his contributions to the emergence of the general theory of relativity. The first part is his biography, while the second part reviews his…
Special Relativity is taught to physics sophomores at Johns Hopkins University in a series of eight lectures. Lecture 1 covers the principle of relativity and the derivation of the Lorentz transform. Lecture 2 covers length contraction and…
The special theory of relativity is constructed demanding the retention of the rectilinear form of a trajectory and invariance of the wave equation under linear transformations of space and time coordinates. The usual approach to relativity…
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…
Einstein's contribution to relativity is reviewed. It is pointed out that Weyl gave first unified theory of gravitation and electromagnetism and it was different than the five dimensional theory of Kaluza. Einstein began his work on…
We here deduce Lorentz transformation (LT) as a member of a class of time-dependent coordinate transformations, complementary to those already known as spatial translations and rotations. This exercise validates the principle of physical…
The empirical formula proposed by J. D. Anderson et al. [1] to reproduce the data on the Earth flyby anomalies is derived from special relativity (SR). The transverse Doppler shift together with the addition of velocities account for the…
A new formulation of Special Relativity is described. It is based on Cellular Automata theory and on a new theory of inertia called Quantum Inertia. The universe consists of a huge 3D array of cells given by C(x,y,z), whose numeric states…
Albert Einstein accepted a 'special' visiting professorship at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands in February 1920. Although his appointment should have been a mere formality, it took until October of that year before Einstein…
For the special theory of relativity, the normalization problem is formulated as the question how observers in constant relative motion may reach an agreement on space and time scales. As the normalization problem does not receive a…
A simple re-scaling of velocities calculated from the Paczy{\'n}ski \& Wiita (1980) pseudo-Newtonian potential makes them consistent with special relativity and greatly improves the agreement with the exact relativistic calculations. The…
As shown by the development of Special Relativity the simultaneity concept should be related to that of reference frame. Poincare' proposed to define the simultaneity of two events by means of light signals following what is nowadays known…
Although implicit in the discovery of the Schwarzschild solution 40 years earlier, the issues raised by the theory of what are now known as black holes were so unsettling to physicists of Einstein's generation that the subject remained in a…
The author thinks that the main ideas or Relativity Theory can be explained to children (around the age of 15 or 16) without complicated calculations, by using very simple arguments of affine geometry. The proposed approach is presented as…
Gravity plays an important part in the experiments and discoveries of the modern world. But how was it discovered? Surely Newton and Einstein were not the only people to observe it and account for it. It had been a long path before the full…
Since the mid-1920s, different strands of research used stars as "physics laboratories" for investigating the nature of matter under extreme densities and pressures, impossible to realize on Earth. To trace this process this paper is…
Einstein was in many ways like a detective on a mystery trail, though in his case he was on the trail of nature's mysteries and not some murder mystery! And like all good detectives he had a style. It consisted of taking facts that he knew…
The Heisenberg position-momentum uncertainty principle shares with the equivalence principle the role of main pillar of our current description of nature. However, in its original formulation it is inconsistent with special relativity, and…
We present the special theory of relativity taking the Doppler effect as the starting point, and derive several of its main effects, such as time dilation, length contraction, addition of velocities, and the mass-energy relation, and…