Einstein and The Special Theory of Relativity
How Einstein (& others) discovered Special Relativity. Pi day (3.14) is Albert Einstein's Birthday! To celebrate, we'll explain 4 of his most groundbreaking papers from 1905, when he was...
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Around nineteen-hundred, all of physics, and particularly Einstein, was in trouble: theycouldn't figure out how anything could move… Now before you complain that I'm exaggerating,check out this cat! You can clearly see that the cat is moving away from Einstein at aconstant velocity… but do a little sliding switcheroo, and suddenly it looks like Einstein'sthe one moving. This is the "old-fashioned principle of relativity," so of course it'sthe one we teach in schools… but the point is that the switcheroo changes relative things,like position and velocity, and not absolute ones, like the separation of Einstein fromhis cat.Now for the problem: before Einstein was even born, physicists showed that the speed oflight was on...
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Around nineteen-hundred, all of physics, and particularly Einstein, was in trouble: theycouldn't figure out how anything could move… Now before you complain that I'm exaggerating,check out this cat! You can clearly see that the cat is moving away from Einstein at aconstant velocity… but do a little sliding switcheroo, and suddenly it looks like Einstein'sthe one moving. This is the "old-fashioned principle of relativity," so of course it'sthe one we teach in schools… but the point is that the switcheroo changes relative things,like position and velocity, and not absolute ones, like the separation of Einstein fromhis cat.Now for the problem: before Einstein was even born, physicists showed that the speed oflight was on...
