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Showing posts with the label Rindler

Gravitomagnetism: Updates on Bahnson, Thomas Townsend Brown, and Bryce DeWitt

 I'm getting some bandwidth to put more work into my book about Boleslaw Gladych and his connections to the gravity (and antigravity) research communities that included characters like Agnew Hunter Bahnson Jr. during the 1950s.  I found an article [pdf], (pamphlet? it's 42 pages), that sheds more light on the woork DeWitt did with superconductors and gravitomagnetic fields in the '60s. Take a look at page 34 where DeWitt comments on his work to try to verify Bahnson's fringe pet project: Thomas Townsend Brown's gravitators. There you'll find a reference to DeWitt looking into superconductor theory .  I also found a nice little JSTOR blog post on the whole Babson and Bahnson Gravity Days era. I haven't seen anything new in it yet, but I aslo haven't taken the time to focus on it. Speaking of DeWitt, this history of the UNC Field Institute is interesting in that it mentions DeWitt's work related to 'large spaceships'.  One final note, Wolfgan...

Cosmology from Newtonian Mechanics and Teaching Special Relativity in the First Week of Freshman Physics

The first page of an arXiv[3] article I came across this morning has a very nice explanation of what a Newton-Hooke spacetime is.  As it turns out you can model expanding and contracting cosmological theories using Newtonian mechanics without going all the way to general relativity.  This was most recently demonstrated by Elisha Huggins in Physics Teacher[1], but seems to have been around for quite a long time.  I've found it as far back as the '60s in Wolfgang Rindler's excellent book "Essential Relativity"[2].  Finally, there's what looks like a pretty excellent video of Huggins in a colloquium where he advocates teaching special relativity as well as Fourier analysis and quantum mechanics in the first course of freshman physics very early on[4]. *References* 1.  http://scitation.aip.org/content/aapt/journal/tpt/51/6/10.1119/1.4818374 2.  http://books.google.com/books?id=0J_dwCmQThgC&lpg=PP1&dq=essential%20relativity%20rindler&pg=PP1#v=on...