Tag Archives: Special Relativity
A crushed flower.
This post has nothing to do with Amy Winehouse, sadly on the list of great talents who, poorly served by those in their lives, lost their way and died tragically and long before their time. (It’s bad enough when the ravages of life — disease and accident — steal away those with gifts. Losing people to human foibles is a more painful loss.)
The topic here is the Block Universe Hypothesis, which I’m revisiting, so the title kinda grabbed me (and I am a Winehouse fan). I’ve written about the BUH before, but a second debate with the same opponent turned up a few points worth exploring.
So it’s back to basic block (everyone looks good in block?)…
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31 Comments | tags: block universe, simultaneity, Special Relativity | posted in Physics
With COVID-19 putting a damper on social activity, “the gang” doesn’t get together very often, but we still gather occasionally (and carefully). One of the times recently I got into how, even though we’re all sitting essentially motionless in a living room, we’re moving through time at the speed of light. I explained why that was, and they found it pretty cool.
Then I ran into someone online who just couldn’t wrap his head around it — just couldn’t accept it (despite explaining in detail and even providing links to some videos). Physics is sometimes challenging to our daily perceptions of reality!
In this case, though, it’s just a matter of some rather simple geometry.
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17 Comments | tags: frame of reference, light speed, Lorentz equation, spacetime, Special Relativity, velocity | posted in Physics
Remember when “going viral” didn’t mean hospitalization and possible death? (Obviously if we go back even further to the original meaning, it did.) I had an old post go briefly and mildly viral last week. Big traffic spike with a very rapid tail-off. Most bemusing.
I’ll tell you about that, and about a spike on another post, this one weirdly seasonal — huge spike ever September for three years now. I have no idea what’s going on there. Most puzzling.
There is also a book about the friendship and conflict between Albert Einstein and Erwin Schrödinger that I thoroughly enjoyed despite it not being my typical sort of reading (I’ve never gone in much for either history or biography).
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3 Comments | tags: Albert Einstein, blog, blogging, Einstein's Dice, Erwin Schrödinger, General Relativity, Leon Wieseltier, Paul Halpern, Schrödinger Equation, Schrödinger's Cat, Special Relativity | posted in Books
Back in 2015, to celebrate Albert Einstein’s birthday, I wrote a month-long series of posts about Special Relativity. I still regard it as one of my better efforts here. The series oriented on explaining to novices why faster-than-light travel (FTL) is not possible (short answer: it breaks reality).
So no warp drive. No wormholes or ansibles, either, because any FTL communication opens a path to the past. When I wrote the series, I speculated an ansible might work within an inertial frame. A smarter person set me straight; nope, it breaks reality. (See: Sorry, No FTL Radio)
Then Dr Sabine Hossenfelder seemed to suggest it was possible.
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12 Comments | tags: Albert Einstein, ansible, causality, causality violation, Einstein, faster than light, frame of reference, FTL, FTL radio, light, light speed, light year, Sabine Hossenfelder, simultaneity, spacetime, Special Relativity, speed of light | posted in Physics
Recently I had a debate with someone who was downright evangelical about the Block Universe (BU) being, absolutely, positively, the way things are. Because Special Relativity. In particular because of what SR says about simultaneity between inertial frames.
Up to that point I’d never given the BU a great deal of thought other than to file it under «Probably Not the Case» (for reasons I’ll get to). But during my morning walks I’ve turned it over in my mind, and after due consideration,… I still think it’s probably not the case.
I get why people feel SR seems to imply a BU, but I don’t see the necessity of that implication. In fact, it almost seems contrary to a basic tenant of SR, that “now” is strictly a local concept.
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14 Comments | tags: block universe, line of simultaneity, plane of simultaneity, simultaneity, simultaneous events, spacetime, Special Relativity, surface of simultaneity, time-space diagram | posted in Physics
I was gonna give us all the day off today, honestly, I was! My Minnesota Twins start their second game in about an hour, and I really planned to just kick back, watch the game, have a couple of beers, and enjoy the day. And since tomorrow’s March wrap-up post is done and queued, more of the same tomorrow.
But this is too relevant to the posts just posted, and it’s about Special Relativity, which is a March thing to me (because Einstein), so it kinda has to go here. Now or never, so to speak. And it’ll be brief, I think. Just one more reason I’m so taken with matrix math recently; it’s providing all kinds of answers for me.
Last night I realized how to use matrix transforms on spacetime diagrams!
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Leave a comment | tags: Albert Einstein, Einstein, faster than light, frame of reference, light, light speed, light year, matrix math, matrix transform, simultaneity, spacetime, Special Relativity, speed of light | posted in Math, Physics
In the March Mathness post I mentioned that one reason I love March is that it contains the Vernal Equinox, the official astronomical start of Spring. More importantly to me, it means six months of more daylight than darkness, and as much as I’m a night person, I prefer long, sunny days.
Well, today is the day! The equinox happened at 21:58 UTC (two minutes before 5:00 PM locally). What’s better is that, after all the miserable bitter cold and all that snow in February and into March, the weather is indeed finally turning. Deeply embedded in our mythologies is the idea of spring rebirth; New Year’s parties aside, this, today, is the true new year.
And the forecast is for muon showers!
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17 Comments | tags: Albert Einstein, equinox, muon, Special Relativity, spring, spring equinox, tau, vernal equinox | posted in Physics
Speaking of Special Relativity, back when I wrote the SR series, one topic I left along the wayside was the concept of the spacetime interval. It wasn’t necessary for the goals of the series, and there’s only so much one can fit in. (And back then, the diagrams I wanted to make would have been a challenge with the tool I was using.)
But now that we’re basking in the warm, friendly glow of March Mathness and reflecting on Special Relativity anyway, it seems like a good time to loop back and catch up on the spacetime interval, because it’s an important concept in SR.
It concerns what is invariant to all observers when both time and space measurements depend on relative motion.
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1 Comment | tags: Albert Einstein, Einstein, faster than light, frame of reference, light, light speed, light year, simultaneity, spacetime, Special Relativity, speed of light | posted in Physics
Earlier, in the March Mathness post, I mentioned Albert Einstein was born on March 14th. That’s also Pi Day, which deserved its own pi post (about pizza pi), so old Al had to wait for me to address a topic I’ve needed to address for several months.
To wit: Some guy was wrong on the internet.
That guy was me.
Back in 2015 (also celebrating Einstein’s birthday), I wrote a series of posts exploring Special Relativity. Near the end of the series, writing about FTL radio, I said (assuming an “ansible” existed) I wasn’t convinced it violated causality if the frames of reference were matched.
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10 Comments | tags: Albert Einstein, ansible, causality, causality violation, Einstein, Emmy Noether, faster than light, frame of reference, FTL, FTL radio, light, light speed, light year, simultaneity, spacetime, Special Relativity, speed of light | posted in Physics
It took almost exactly 100 years. In 1905, über-geek hero Albert Einstein presented four papers of major significance to the world. One of those was about Special Relativity. It took Einstein ten more years to figure out the General theory of Relativity. He presented that work in November of 1915.
One of the predictions of General Relativity is that gravity warps space, creating gravity waves (which move at the speed of light). And while many other predictions of GR have been tested and confirmed (to very high precision), we’ve never quite managed to detect gravity waves.
Until September 14th of 2015!
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10 Comments | tags: Albert Einstein, black hole, General Relativity, gravity, gravity wave, LIGO, Special Relativity, Theory of Relativity | posted in Physics
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