17. Lesson 17:
Special Relativity, 3#
Bringing Electricity and Magnetism together with something different from Newton!
What’s Coming:
Now that we’ve appreciated that space and time have very different jobs in Relativity, we need to think about what that means for our old friend, speed. After all, it’s space divided by time. That, and a re-examination of electromagnetism were advanced by Hendrik Lorentz, a friend of Einstein’s and the guy who nearly got there first. Looking at speed through Relativity glasses will lead to a realization: we’re trapped at sub-light-travel. Despite Star Trek.
Special Relativity uses a model for space and time that preceeded Einstein. Our previous friend, Hendrik Antoon Lorentz - the grandfatherly looking gentleman from the Netherlands - was the world’s expert on Maxwell’s theory in the late 1800s and tried (repeatedly) to figure out how to solve some of the conundrums that the Maxwell model seemed to suggest. In the process he came up with equations that transform space and time between frames of reference that we call the Lorentz Transformations.
Einstein derived them separately and with an entirely different interpretation which is why even though Lorentz was first, Einstein got it right.
In this chapter you’ll not actually use the transformations, but with graphs and simple ideas we can see their import.
Goals of this lesson:
Understanding, Appreciation, and Familiarity
I’d like you to Understand:
What the Lorentz Transformations mean
How they become the Galilean Transformations when the speed of an adjacent reference frame is very small.
How to do calculations using the transformation for speeds.
I’d like you to Appreciate:
Where the notion that nothing can go faster than the speed of light originates and falls out of Einstein’s Postulates
How intergalactic space travel will be a disturbing thing for humankind to grapple with.
I’d like you to become Familiar With:
The oddities that are inherent in Special Relativity
What the “twin paradox” actually implies