Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Background: what you need to know before you start
- 1 Gravity on Earth:
- 2 And then came Newton
- 3 Satellites
- 4 The Solar System
- 5 Tides and tidal forces
- 6 Interplanetary travel
- 7 Atmospheres
- 8 Gravity in the Sun
- 9 Reaching for the stars
- 10 The colors of stars
- 11 Stars at work
- 12 Birth to death
- 13 Binary stars
- 14 Galaxies
- 15 Physics at speed
- 16 Relating to Einstein
- 17 Spacetime geometry
- 18 Einstein's gravity
- 19 Einstein's recipe
- 20 Neutron stars
- 21 Black holes
- 22 Gravitational waves
- 23 Gravitational lenses
- 24 Cosmology
- 25 The Big Bang
- 26 Einstein's Universe
- 27 Ask the Universe
- Appendix: values of useful constants
- Glossary
- Index
16 - Relating to Einstein
Logic and experiment in relativity
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Background: what you need to know before you start
- 1 Gravity on Earth:
- 2 And then came Newton
- 3 Satellites
- 4 The Solar System
- 5 Tides and tidal forces
- 6 Interplanetary travel
- 7 Atmospheres
- 8 Gravity in the Sun
- 9 Reaching for the stars
- 10 The colors of stars
- 11 Stars at work
- 12 Birth to death
- 13 Binary stars
- 14 Galaxies
- 15 Physics at speed
- 16 Relating to Einstein
- 17 Spacetime geometry
- 18 Einstein's gravity
- 19 Einstein's recipe
- 20 Neutron stars
- 21 Black holes
- 22 Gravitational waves
- 23 Gravitational lenses
- 24 Cosmology
- 25 The Big Bang
- 26 Einstein's Universe
- 27 Ask the Universe
- Appendix: values of useful constants
- Glossary
- Index
Summary
Our introduction to special relativity in the last chapter covered the basics, but it may have raised more questions for you than it answered. Before reading the chapter, you may have been very happy with the simple idea that everyone would agree on the length of a car, or the time it takes for the hands on a clock to go around once. If so, you have now learned to question these assumptions, that Nature does not really behave like that. If you want to fit these ideas together into a more logical framework, and if you want to learn something about why scientists are so sure that Nature really follows the principles of special relativity, then this chapter is for you. Read on.
In this chapter: we examine the foundations of special relativity in detail, deriving all the unusual effects from the fundamental postulates, examining the experimental evidence in favor of each one, and showing that the theory is self-consistent even if at first sight it seems not to be.
▷ The image under the text on this page illustrates length contraction. The top figure is after Leonardo da Vinci's famous drawing. The bottom figure has the dimensions that an experimenter would measure if the experimenter were flying across the original drawing at a speed of 0.9c.
In the previous chapter I listed some important effects of special relativity and gave a brief description of each, such as time dilation and the equivalence of mass and energy.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Gravity from the Ground UpAn Introductory Guide to Gravity and General Relativity, pp. 195 - 210Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2003