Related papers: Looking beyond special relativity
The renaissance of General Relativity witnessed considerable progress regarding both understanding and justifying Einstein's equations. Both general relativists and historians of the subject tend to share a view, General Relativity…
Double Special Relativity theories are the relativistic theories in which the transformations between inertial observers are characterized by two observer-independent scales of the light speed and the Planck length. We study two main…
We review the status of "Einstein-Aether theory", a generally covariant theory of gravity coupled to a dynamical, unit timelike vector field that breaks local Lorentz symmetry. Aspects of waves, stars, black holes, and cosmology are…
Henri Poincare's work on mathematical features of the Lorentz transformations was an important precursor to the development of special relativity. In this paper I compare the approaches taken by Poincare and Einstein, aiming to come to an…
In this pedagogical article, we explore a powerful language for describing the notion of spacetime and particle dynamics intrinsic to a given fundamental physical theory, focusing on special relativity and its Newtonian limit. The starting…
This article is a partly pedagogical, partly historical and partly technical review of special relativity and its experimental foundations, in honor of the centenary of Einstein's annus mirabilis.
Special relativity is no longer a new revolutionary theory but a firmly established cornerstone of modern physics. The teaching of special relativity, however, still follows its presentation as it unfolded historically, trying to convince…
Simply by assuming the first postulate of Special Relativity and by exploring Gedankenexperiments with electromagnetic forces, we suggest that there is a speed limit in the universe, which can be determined as a relation between vacuum…
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…
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…
In 1935 Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen (EPR) pointed out that Quantum Mechanics apparently implied some mysterious, instantaneous action at a distance. This paradox is supposed to be related to the probabilistic nature of the theory, but…
Einstein's celebrated theory of gravitation can be presented in three forms: general relativity, teleparallel gravity, and the rarely considered before symmetric teleparallel gravity. Extending the latter, we introduce a new class of…
General relativity and quantum mechanics are perhaps the two most successful theories of the XXth century. Despite their impressive accurate predictions, they are both valid at their own scales and do not seem to be expressible using the…
Owing to the existence of an invariant length at the Planck scale, Einstein special relativity breaks down at that scale. A possible solution to this problem is arguably to replace the Poincar\'e invariant Einstein special relativity by a…
Entangled Relativity is a novel theory of relativity that offers a more economical approach than General Relativity. It successfully recovers both General Relativity and standard quantum field theory within a specific (yet generic) limit.…
The unification of electricity and magnetism achieved by special relativity has remained for decades a model of unification in theoretical physics. We discuss the relationship between electric and magnetic fields from a classical point of…
Scalar fields have had a long and controversial life in gravity theories, having progressed through many deaths and resurrections. The first scientific gravity theory, Newton's, was that of a scalar potential field, so it was natural for…
Recent criticism of higher-dimensional extensions of Einstein's theory is considered. This may have some justification as regards string theory, but is misguided as applied to five-dimensional theories with a large extra dimension. Such…
Einstein regarded as one of the triumphs of his 1915 theory of gravity --- the general theory of relativity --- that it vindicated the action--reaction principle, while Newtonian mechanics as well as his 1905 special theory of relativity…
The ordinary quantum theory points out that general relativity is negligible for spatial distances up to the Planck scale. Consistency in the foundations of the quantum theory requires a``soft'' spacetime structure of the general relativity…