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This is the second book in the Everyone’s
Guide Series devoted to Einstein’s Theory of Special Relativity.
Readers will benefit from a prior reading of Special Relativity 1: Light, Time, &
What’s Relative.
Relativity and Quantum
Mechanics are the
two major pillars of 20th century physics, which together
revolutionized our understanding of nature, utterly dismantling
Newtonian physics that had been the gold standard of science for over
200 years, and introducing radically new concepts that defy human
intuition. These theories may represent the greatest upheaval in the
history of science. Both Relativity and Quantum Mechanics were launched
over 100 years ago, yet we are still digesting their broad and stunning
implications. Both theories have been exhaustively tested and confirmed
to extraordinary precision. As bizarre as they may seem at first, there
is no denying that they describe our world as it really is.
n this
book, we will discuss: spacetime,
Einstein’s unification of space and time; the Lorentz Contraction and
Transform; relativistic mass and Einstein’s most famous equation E=mc2;
light cones past and future; causality and simultaneity; and the impact
of Relativity on space travel. Also included are helpful math tricks
that simplify problem solving.
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Spacetime
can be thought
of being like salami. In
our inertial frame, the upper
half of the image, each thin slice perpendicular to the long axis is a
slice of constant time. We observe every event on each slice occurring
at the same time — to us every event on a slice occurs simultaneously.
We observe time progressing as we move from slice to slice toward the
right. The two dots in the image appear to us to occur at different
times.
But the
situation changes
in moving frames. As shown in the lower half of the image, the slices
of constant time for moving observers seem askew to us. In the moving
frame, the two dots occur at the same time, and events that we consider
simultaneous occur at different times.
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See all the books
in the
Everyone's Guide
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