Einstein's relativity in metaphor and mathematics by Enders A. Robinson

Apologies for the long hibernation. I was getting a paper ready to submit and pushed just about everything else off to the side. Hopefully, I'll get to write here more frequently as time progresses. Today, if you're looking for a book on special relativity and you'd like to know more about Gudermannians, then Dr. Robinson's book just might be the one for you.

If you're a Landau and Lifshitz fan like me, it will take you awhile to get used to the style of this book. However, once I got my head wrapped around Dr. Robinson's metaphorical style, I really enjoyed his explanations of special relativity. There are no universes cluttered with rigid rods and ideal clocks at every coordinate point! In one chapter the author manages to introduce the hyperbolic nature of space time, Lorentz contraction, and Larmor time dilation all using the metaphor of ants living on a rope hung over a heater with laser holographic communication devices. The example comes off amazingly simply, but still manages to be entertainingly absurd.
The only two downsides are that the book is very, very linear. By the end of the ant chapter the author still hadn't fessed up that the chapter was about anything other than ants. Also, he makes some allusions that are historically inaccurate. In one chapter, Gudermann's space time is referred to. While this makes sense mathematically, and is a cool moniker for the concept, Gudermann died before Minkowski coined the phrase space time.

What about Dr. Robinson himself you ask? He's also a very interesting guy who appears to have made it big in oil exploration!

Comments

The Valentine's Day Magnetic Monopole

There's an assymetry to the form of the two Maxwell's equations shown in picture 1. While the divergence of the electric field is proportional to the electric charge density at a given point, the divergence of the magnetic field is equal to zero. This is typically explained in the following way. While we know that electrons, the fundamental electric charge carriers exist, evidence seems to indicate that magnetic monopoles, the particles that would carry magnetic 'charge', either don't exist, or, the energies required to create them are so high that they are exceedingly rare. That doesn't stop us from looking for them though! Keeping with the theme of Fairbank[1] and his academic progeny over the semester break, today's post is about the discovery of a magnetic monopole candidate event by one of the Fairbank's graduate students, Blas Cabrera[2]. Cabrera was utilizing a loop type of magnetic monopole detector. Its operation is in concept very sim

Cool Math Tricks: Deriving the Divergence, (Del or Nabla) into New (Cylindrical) Coordinate Systems

Now available as a Kindle ebook for 99 cents ! Get a spiffy ebook, and fund more physics The following is a pretty lengthy procedure, but converting the divergence, (nabla, del) operator between coordinate systems comes up pretty often. While there are tables for converting between common coordinate systems , there seem to be fewer explanations of the procedure for deriving the conversion, so here goes! What do we actually want? To convert the Cartesian nabla to the nabla for another coordinate system, say… cylindrical coordinates. What we’ll need: 1. The Cartesian Nabla: 2. A set of equations relating the Cartesian coordinates to cylindrical coordinates: 3. A set of equations relating the Cartesian basis vectors to the basis vectors of the new coordinate system: How to do it: Use the chain rule for differentiation to convert the derivatives with respect to the Cartesian variables to derivatives with respect to the cylindrical variables. The chain

More Cowbell! Record Production using Google Forms and Charts

First, the what : This article shows how to embed a new Google Form into any web page. To demonstrate ths, a chart and form that allow blog readers to control the recording levels of each instrument in Blue Oyster Cult's "(Don't Fear) The Reaper" is used. HTML code from the Google version of the form included on this page is shown and the parts that need to be modified are highlighted. Next, the why : Google recently released an e-mail form feature that allows users of Google Documents to create an e-mail a form that automatically places each user's input into an associated spreadsheet. As it turns out, with a little bit of work, the forms that are created by Google Docs can be embedded into any web page. Now, The Goods: Click on the instrument you want turned up, click the submit button and then refresh the page. Through the magic of Google Forms as soon as you click on submit and refresh this web page, the data chart will update immediately. Turn up the:

Copasetic Flow

Search This Blog