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Lecture 1: General

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FieldValue
SourceFour Lectures on Relativity and Space
Year1923
Section IDfour-lectures-relativity-space-lecture-01
Locationlines 275-735
Statuscandidate
Word Count3959
Equation Candidates In Section0
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LECTURE I GENERAL A. RELATIVITY OF MOTION, LOCATION AND TIME The theory of relativity as developed by Einstein and his collaborators has revohdionized science by sweeping aside many of the limitations which hitherto fettered the human intellect. But, being essentially mathematical, a general conception of it can be given to the non-mathematician only by the use of analogies and illustrations, and this inevitably involves a certain looseness of argumentation. The following pages therefore may serve to give a general idea of the theory of relativity and its consequences, but not to revieiv it critically. The theory of relativity starts from two premises : 1. All phenomena of space, time and motion are relative; that is, there is no absolute motion, etc., but motion, location and time have a meaning only relative to some other location,
... the same, as the same laws of nature apply everywhere. If the laws of nature are the same in the railway train moving at constant speed on straight, level track as they are on the "rigid" platform of the earth or in the empty space among the fixed stars, then the speed of light must also be the same, 186,000 miles per second, and so must be the speed with which the electric current travels in its circuit, which is the speed of light. This is important because all observations depend on it. Any event is either observed by seeing it or recorded by s ...
... nomena of space, time and motion are relative; that is, there is no absolute motion, etc., but motion, location and time have a meaning only relative to some other location, time, etc. 2. The laws of nature are universal ; that is, they apply in the same form everywhere, whether in a speeding railway train on earth or in the empty space between the fixed stars. So far, these two premises appear simple and rather obvious, but startling and revolutionary ideas appear when carrying the reasoning from these premises to their ultimate conclusions, as E ...
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Ether4seeded
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ether4seeded
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