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Four-force
About: Four-force is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 3459 publications have been published within this topic receiving 87308 citations.
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TL;DR: In this paper, the relative simultaneity relation in the context of Minkowski spacetime has been discussed, as well as the possibility of recovering the global geometric structure of spacetime from its causal structure.
Abstract: This survey paper is divided into two parts. In the first (section 2), I give a brief account of the structure of classical relativity theory. In the second (section 3), I discuss three special topics: (i) the status of the relative simultaneity relation in the context of Minkowski spacetime; (ii) the "geometrized" version of Newtonian gravitation theory (also known as Newton-Cartan theory); and (iii) the possibility of recovering the global geometric structure of spacetime from its "causal structure".
45 citations
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TL;DR: In a comparison of the principles of special relativity and quantum mechanics, the former theory is marked by its relative economy and apparent explanatory simplicity as discussed by the authors, and a number of theorists have been led to search for a small number of postulates that would play the role in quantum mechanics that the relativity principle and the light postulate jointly play in Einstein's 1905 special relativity theory.
Abstract: In a comparison of the principles of special relativity and of quantum mechanics, the former theory is marked by its relative economy and apparent explanatory simplicity. A number of theorists have thus been led to search for a small number of postulates—essentially information theoretic in nature—that would play the role in quantum mechanics that the relativity principle and the light postulate jointly play in Einstein’s 1905 special relativity theory. The purpose of the present paper is to resist this idea, at least in so far as it is supposed to reveal the fundamental form of the theory. It is argued that the methodology of Einstein’s 1905 theory represents a victory of pragmatism over explanatory depth; and that its adoption only made sense in the context of the chaotic state state of physics at the start of the 20th century—as Einstein well knew.
45 citations
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02 Oct 2011
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors present the special theory of relativity from a mathematical point of view, and discuss the kinematics of Special Relativity in terms of Lorentz transformations.
Abstract: Based on a course taught at Simon Fraser University, this book presents the special theory of relativity from a mathematical point of view. It begins with the axioms for Minkowski space-time, and discusses the kinematics of Special Relativity in terms of Lorentz transformations. Extending the discussion to spinors, the author shows how a unimodular mapping of the spinor space can induce a proper Lorentz mapping on the Minkowski space. Relativistic mechanics is discussed from a Lagrangian point of view, and the book concludes with a development of relativistic (classical) field theory, including a proof of Noether's theorem and discussions of the Klein-Gordon, electromagnetic, and Dirac fields. The final chapter describes recent work on classical fields in an eight-dimensional covariant phase space.
45 citations
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TL;DR: In this paper, a screening mechanism for conformal vector-tensor modifications of general relativity is proposed, where the conformal factor depends on the norm of the vector field and makes the field to vanish in high dense regions, whereas drives it to a non-null value in low density environments.
44 citations