Special relativity (alternative formulations)

About: Special relativity (alternative formulations) is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 3102 publications have been published within this topic receiving 55015 citations.

Einstein, General Relativity, and the German Press, 1919-1920

Abstract: Recent articles have used the pages of the Times (London) and the New York Times in the period 1919-1920 to document the British and American public reaction to Einstein's General Theory of Relativity.' Both newspapers couched their reports in terms of a fight-in Britain between Newton and Einstein, in America between the common folk and the scientists-and both indicated that the theory was incomprehensible. They thus helped to create two persistent myths. The present article uses contemporary sources-the leading newspapers (particularly the Vossische Zeitung) and Einstein's correspondence and documents-to give an account of German public reaction at the time. We shall see that the German reaction-both for better and for worse-differed significantly from the Anglo-American one.

Causal Paradoxes in Special Relativity

Abstract: It has been argued that the existence of faster than light particles in the context of special relativity would imply the possibility to influence the past, and that this would lead to paradox. In this paper I argue that such conclusions cannot safely be drawn without consideration of the equations of motion of such particles. I show that such equations must be non-local, that they can be deterministic, and that they can avoid the suggested paradoxes. I also discuss conservation of energymomentum, and how instantaneous action at a distance can avoid similar paradoxes.