Introduction Let’s begin with a simple fact: time passes faster in the mountains than it does at sea level! The difference is small, but it has been measured and it can be measured with precision timepieces that can be bought today. With practice, anyone can witness the slowing down of time. With the timepieces of specialized laboratories, this slowing down of time can be detected […]
ADVANCED RELATIVITY – II
In my previous article, we saw how light travels at a 450 angle and any particle with mass will always have at a velocity less than the speed of light. Therefore the events for an ordinary matter with real mass will occur within the region as shown in fig. 1 and there we have our light-cone. One thing to note is that the cone is […]
ADVANCED RELATIVITY – I
To understand relativity you just need an understanding of basic algebra. However, things become truly nasty when we start thinking about the events in different frames of reference. One of the best solutions to visualize the transformation between the reference frames between any observers is Minkowski’s spacetime diagram. I hope you have read my last post, ‘Relativity for beginners‘ and are ready to go to […]
SPECIAL RELATIVITY FOR BEGINNERS
Albert Einstein, in his 1905 paper (On the electrodynamics of moving bodies) formulated a physical theory that described the relationship between space and time. This theory which was built on the earlier work of Hendrik Lorentz is the special theory of relativity. The incompatibility of Newtonian mechanics with Maxwell equations of electromagnetism and Michelson-Morley experiment which demonstrated the non-existence of aether led Einstein to develop […]
ABSTRACT NATURE OF TIME
Time has been a long run debating topic for many people in the scientific community. The notion of time has changed over the centuries in the field of physics. At around the Newtonian period, time was considered to be flowing at a constant rate and everything in the universe was considered to experience the same time. But during the phase of the early twentieth century, […]
UNDERSTANDING THE FOURTH DIMENSION
Hey friends! I assure you that this post would be one of the amazing posts by me. It was very fun to review my old notes and to go through some recent developments on this topic and I assure you to answer all your queries through this post. Before initiating the topic, I would request you to throw away all the methodologies and mindsets for […]
GRAVITATIONAL LENSING
WHAT IS GRAVITATIONAL LENSING? A gravitational lens is a distribution of matter (such as a cluster of galaxies) between a distant light source and an observer, which is capable of bending the light from the source as the light travels towards the observer. Gravitational lensing is one of the experimental evidence that objects having mass bends the spacetime. Einstein predicted that if his general theory of relativity […]