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Special Relativity
Special Relativity
Galilean Relativity again
At this point in the course, we finally enter the twentieth century—Albert
Einstein wrote his first paper on relativity in 1905. To put his work in
cont...
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The Speed of Light
The Speed of Light
Early Ideas about Light Propagation
As we shall soon see, attempts to measure the speed of light played an
important part in the development of the theory of special relativity, an...
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Relativistic Mass Increase
As we discussed in the last lecture, even before
Newton formulated his
laws, Descartes, with a little help from Huygens, had discovered a deep
dynamical truth: in any collision, or in fact in any int...
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Galileo's Acceleration Experiment
Summarizing Aristotle’s View
Aristotle held that there are two kinds of motion for inanimate matter,
natural and unnatural. Unnatural (or “violent”) motion is when
something is being pushed, and in th...
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Green's Functions
A
→ have plane wave solutions in empty space. But we need a full solution, including
regions with nonzero charge and current densities.
The basic strategy is to Fourier transform with respect to
ti...
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Ionosphere
Discovery of the Ionosphere: Plasma Reflection of Radio Waves
The first attempts at communication using radio waves were
carried out in the late 1890’s by Gulielmo
Marconi, mostly in England. In 19...