Tag: Special relativity
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Human-powered time travel is real
I have run 1,568,000 metres so far this year, in 556,440 seconds. But thanks to special relativistic time dilation (Lorentz factor is 0.999999999999996) this is, in fact, 556440.000000003926241 seconds of all you non-runners’ time. So, yes, I have travelled 0.000000003926241 seconds into the future.
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A probably entirely naïve question about the principle of relativity
Surely I can quite easily design an experiment that shows the relativity principle is false. If turn around on the spot the principle, as I understand it, asserts that I cannot build an experiment that proves it was me that moved as opposed to everything else that moved while I stayed still. But the rest…
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Lorentz and Einstein
When I was at York University earlier this week I took a break from computer science to remind myself of some of the basics of (special) relativity and was struck, while reading the opening few pages of Rindler’s Essential Relativity: Special, General, and Cosmological (which would appear to be the set text at York), just…
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Seems neutrinos do not arrive before they leave after all
It would appear, reports Science magazine, that neutrinos may not travel faster than light after all – a finding from CERN’s OPERA experiment that would mean, assuming that every other aspect of relativity was not broken, that either neutrinos arrive at a destination before they leave a source or that they cross the universe via…
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If it wasn’t for those pesky neutrinos
Neutrinos have proved to be nothing but trouble for scientists over the years. They could not detect them from the Sun (where they are produced as a by-product of fusion), then they did or did not have mass. Now, it seems, they travel faster than light and are threatening to overturn the apple cart of…
cartesian product ... stuff about computing mostly 