Let's learn something new

[Tale]

I agree. Personally, I'm wanting to draw some diagram, so if you could hook up some touchscreen functionality that I can use with my DS when I get home that'd be terrific.

[taks]

I guess the big-ticket achievement of Special Relativity is the codification of the speed of light as a finite, knowable and predictably static value irrelative to any other factor (okay, the medium through which light travels does affect its velocity, but generally people talk about the speed through a vacuum).

what's interesting is that even if it turned out that c was not constant, it is now by definition. a meter is defined as the distance light travels, in a vacuum, in 1 second. it has become circular.

 

taks

[Gfted1]

a meter is defined as the distance light travels, in a vacuum, in 1 second.

 

 

Youre off by a little bit.

 

In metric units, the speed of light is exactly 299,792,458 metres per second.

[Guard Dog]

Frequency=3.0x10^8/Wavelength. I use that almost every day for channel planning.

[Pidesco]

All you said was accurate, if, ultimately, superficial.

 

Special relativity is fairly simple and straightforward, by the way. It's not by chance that it is included in some secondary school curricula.

 

General relativity, on the other hand, is hell to grasp, conceptually and to handle, mathematically. Which, of course is why it's so awesome.

[Tale]

Well, it can't be too complicated if I was able to have an even superficial grasp of it when I was in middle school back when I first read about it. However, some aspects of it when explored as thought experiments are immensely counterintuitive. Further, the implications it has for order of events and how faster than light communication can ultimately result in breaks in causality (as some people have supposedly put forth) are what are most interesting and most complicated to grasp. And that's what I plan on going over next assuming my fickle nature does not take hold of me tomorrow.

 

I'm trying to put it in words that are relatively easy to follow, as well, as the intention is to teach for those who may not have any particular education in even so much as physics. Or at least as simply as I reasonbly can without doing any serious planning. But, my ADHD makes my train of thought drift, so I'm probably getting off track.

 

If anyone wants to add something, feel more than free to jump right in. Add, clarify, discuss, elaborate, take over, whatevah!

Edited October 19, 2007 by Tale

[Guard Dog]

Actually Tale, if you are really interested in this subject there is a book I highly reccomend: Six Easy Pieces and Six Not So Easy Pieces by Richard Feynman.

 

OK, I'll be honest, I never finished it. I really only read the parts about Gauss's law and Kirchhoff. But what I did read was pretty interesting. It is not a text book, and it will not make you a physics expert but it does a pretty good job breaking down the concepts to the essentials

[taks]

In metric units, the speed of light is exactly 299,792,458 metres per second.

oh, yeah, sorry... i meant to say that a meter is defined by the speed of light, not "in 1 second"

 

taks