Einstein special relativity

None of Einstein s first four papers published between 1901 and 1904 foreshadowed his explosive creativity of 1905, his annus mirabilis, in which he produced in March, his proposal of the existence of light quanta and the photoelectric effect, work for which in 1922 he received the Nobel Prize in April, a paper on the determination of molecular dimensions, which earned him his Ph.D. m Zurich m May, his theory of special relativity in September, a sequel to the preceding paper containing the relation E = mc. Any one of these papers would have made him greatly renowned their totality made him immortal. 

In 1939 Einstein wrote to Roosevelt to draw his attention to possible military use of atomic energy. His influence on these later developments was marginal, however. In 1943 he became consultant to the U.S. Navy Bureau of Ordnance but was never involved in atomic bomb work. In 1944 a copy of his 1905 paper on special relativity, handwritten by him for this purpose, was auctioned for six million dollars as a contribution to the war effort. (It is now in the Library of Congress.)... 

The twentieth century brought a fmidaniental extension of the first law, with Albert Einstein s follow-up of his famous special-relativity paper pub-... 

Relativity Einstein s theory invoking a constant speed of light, which divides into special relativity and general relativity, the latter describing gravity. 

This formula defines the Einstein addition law for parallel velocities. It shows that, no matter how closely P and (3 approach unity f3" can never exceed unity. In this sense c can be considered to be the ultimate speed allowed by special relativity. 

The next step forward has yet to be taken The clash between relativity and quantum mechanics - the choice between causality and unitarity - awaits resolution. However, on a less grand scale, the tension between fundamentally different points of view is already apparent in the discord between quantum and classical mechanics. Unlike special relativity, where v/c —> 0 smoothly transitions between Einstein and... 

A. Einstein Theory of special relativity in Selected Papers, edited by I.E. Tamm... 

The early years of the twentieth century saw giant advances in man s understanding of nature which must be mentioned in any synopsis of the scientific history of this era. Thus, in 1901, M. Planck (NLP 1918 ) published his first paper on the black-body radiation law which ushered in the era of quantum mechanics. In 1905, A. Einstein (NLP 1918 ) published his Anna Mirabilis Papers on the photo effect, on Brownian motion, and on the theory of special relativity and the equivalence of matter and energy. 

The power of the operational approach became strikingly evident in Einstein s theory of special relativity, with its analysis of the meaning of presumably absolute, intuitive concepts such as time or space. Newton defined absolute time as... 

According to many scholars I consulted, there will never be another individual on par with Einstein. Thomas Levenson, author Einstein in Berlin, suggests, It seems unlikely that [science] will produce another Einstein in the sense of a broadly recognized emblem of genius. The sheer complexity of models being explored [today] confines almost all practitioners to parts of the problem. Unlike today s researchers, Einstein required little or no collaboration. Einstein s paper on special relativity contained no references to others or to prior work. 

To this list can now be added the advantages of 0(3) over U(l) electrodynamics, advantages that are described in the review by Evans in Part 2 of this three-volume set and by Evans, Jeffers, and Vigier in Part 3. In summary, by interlocking the Sachs and 0(3) theories, it becomes apparent that the advantages of 0(3) over U(l) are symptomatic of the fact that the electromagnetic field vanishes in flat spacetime (special relativity), if the irreducible representations of the Einstein group are used. 

According to Einstein s theory of special relativity, at 60 percent the speed of light, gold s innermost electrons experience only 52 seconds for each i of our minutes. A diamond may be forever, but the innermost electrons of gold are 8 seconds per minute slow ... 

In this work, Einstein s theory of special relativity (SRT) is fully accepted, with the supposition that it is valid in the region of the spacetime where v < c is possible only. There are many experimental proofs that support the concepts of SRT, which justify the main postulate c = constant. However, none of the experimental proofs for the validity of the special relativity concepts have led to the fundamental postulate c = constant being accepted as a physical law. It still remains a postulate, that is, an assumption. It is a justified assumption for the theory of special relativity, but still an assumption only [1-3]. 

In 1916, Einstein published his work The fundamentals of general relativity [10], 11 years after he published his theory of special relativity [1,2]. Later, in 1954, he published a work to explain the differences and connections between special and general relativity [15]. In this work he gives the exact formulation of general relativity, with the following two postulates ... 

As already discussed at the end of Section 2.2.3, we derived a universal superposition principle from a complex symmetric ansatz arriving at a Klein-Gordon-like equation relevant for the theory of special relativity. This approach, which posits a secular-like operator equation in terms of energy and momenta, was adjoined with a conjugate formal operator representation in terms of time and position. As it will be seen, this provides a viable extension to the general theory [7, 82]. We will hence recover Einstein s laws of relativity as construed from the overall global superposition, demonstrating in addition the independent choice of a classical and/or a quantum representation. In this way, decoherence to classical reality seems always possible provided that appropriate operator realizations are made. 

The possibility of non-local interaction within quantum systems, so vividly illustrated here for a holistic electron, was first recognized by Einstein and others [46]. To avoid conflict with the theory of special relativity the effect was interpreted to mean that quantum theory was incomplete. More recently... 

Misuse alert One hears some folks with superficial minds say Einstein showed that everything is relative. In fact, special relativity shows that only certain measurable things are relative, but in a precisely and mathematically specific way, and other things are, not relative, for all observers agree on them. 

The argument so far is premised on the assumption that there is no interaction possible between the correlated atoms at the time that the measurement is done. However, should there be an undisclosed interaction between the two particles, disturbance of A, caused by the measurement could communicate itself to B, causing a simultaneous disturbance at that position as well. This interaction may result in orientation of the spin at B in a direction opposite to that of A. Not surprisingly Einstein, the father of special relativity, did not even consider such a possibility since it requires instantaneous non-local interaction. 

Now Tm going to tell you about a strange concept that s necessary for understanding radioactivity and other nuclear reactions. That concept is the equivalence of mass and energy. Mass can transform into energy, and vice versa. This is part of Einstein s theory of special relativity and is the source of that famous equation E = m. Let s apply the theory to the activities you did in the previous section. When the two magnets are apart, we say that they have potential energy due to... 

At about the same time that Einstein was performing his analysis of the photoelectric effect, he was also constructing the theory of special relativity. In connection with this work Einstein derived the famous equation... 

Recall that Einstein postulated in his theory of special relativity in 1905 that the mass (m) of a moving object increases with its velocity (v) ... 

In 1887 two American scientists, physicist Albert Michelson and physical chemist Edward Morley, performed an experiment that was designed to detect the motion of Earth through a hypothetical medium known as the luminiferous ether, which was thought to be present throughout space. They made their measurements with a very sensitive optical instrument now called a Michelson interferometer. Their observations showed no indication of movement through the predicted ether. This outcome was unexpected and has become one of the fundamental experimental results in support of the theory of special relativity, developed by Albert Einstein in 1905. 

The Michelson-Morley experiment is a perfect example of a null experiment, one in which something that was expected to happen is not observed. The consequences of their observations for the development of physics were profound. Having proven that there could be no stationary ether, physicists tried to advance new theories that would save the ether concept. Michelson himself suggested that the ether might move, at least near the Earth. Others studied the possibility that rigid objects might actually contract as they traveled. But it was Einstein s theory of special relativity that finally explained their results. 

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