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SPECIAL THEORY OF RELATIVITY

for Dr. N. Pathmanathan SPH4U1

by Sidra Kausar

ONTARIO INTERNATIONAL INSTITUTE JULY 30, 2012

1 Contents
Abstract ......................................................................................................................................................... 1 Introduction ................................................................................................................................................... 1 Special Theory of Relativity ......................................................................................................................... 1 Einsteins New Concept of Relativity ....................................................................................................... 1

Unifying space and time .................................................................................................. 5 Unifying mass and energy ............................................................................................... 7
Relativity of Time, Length, and Momentum ................................................................................................ 7 Energy and Mass ........................................................................................................................................... 7 Conclusion .................................................................................................................................................... 7 Work Cited .................................................................................................................................................... 7

Abstract Introduction Special Theory of Relativity

The concept of relativity is not as revolutionary as commonly accepted by many. Spatial relativity is a part of the everyday experience. Spatial, or Galilean relativity1, is often confused with Einsteins theories. Galileo describes that an observer in motion has a different perception on the relative comparatively to a stationary observer. This is due to the fact that the two observers have different special coordinate systems, or reference framesi. Einsteins New Concept of Relativity Albert Einsteins notion of relativity had been a construct that differed from the previous classical relativity due to the way he reviewed the concept of time. Previously, individuals had thought time was absolute, or that one large clock measured time for the entire universe. Accordingly, on hour on Earth would be equivalent to an hour on Mars, or one hour in another galaxy. However, this concept had been faulty. In an absolute time frame, the speed of light then cannot be constant.
Einstein's new concept of relativity. However, there was a problem with this concept. In an absolute time frame the speed of light cannot be constant. Roemer found that the speed of light is finite and has a certain, quantifiable
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In honour of Galileo, the first to formulate the concept of relative motion.

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velocity (usually abbreviated with "c"), which at first implies Galilean relativity. This would mean that while the Earth rotates at a velocity of v, light emitted in the direction of the Earth rotation must be c + v, while light emitted in the opposite direction would travel at c - v, relative to an outside observer. In 1881, A. Michelson conducted an experiment which proved that this is not the case. With the help of an apparatus that allowed measuring minute differences in the speed of light by changes in the resulting interference patterns, Michelson observed that the speed of light is always the same. No changes whatsoever. The experiment has been repeated later with greater precision by Michelson and E.W. Morley. Special Relativity published in 1905. Numerous attempts were made at reconciling these discrepancies, yet they were all unsuccessful, until Einstein solved the dilemma with his famous paper On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies in 1905, in which he developed his Special Relativity Theory. Special Relativity is an extremely elegant construct that deals with things moving near or at the speed of light. Surprisingly, the new concept of space and time that arises from Relativity is based only on two simple postulates: 1. The laws of physics are the same in all inertial (=non-accelerating) reference frames, and 2. The speed of light in free space is constant. It is a matter of common experience that one can describe the position of a point in space by three numbers, or coordinates. For the purpose of explaining the relativistic model, Einstein added time as a fourth component to the coordinate system, and the resulting construct is called spacetime. Just as there is an infinite number of 3-D reference frames in Galilean relativity, there is an infinite number of 4-D spacetime reference frames in Einstein's theory. This is to say that Einstein put an end to absolute time. The revolutionary insight lies in the conclusion that the flow of time in the universe does indeed differ depending on one's reference frame.

Albert Einstein (1879-1955)

German physicist Albert Einstein published his papers on Relativity Theory between 1905 and 1916. He became internationally noted after 1919 and was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1921. Einstein emigrated to the USA when Hitler came to power in Germany. Einstein: "Relativity teaches us the connection between the different descriptions of one and the same reality."

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In his usual humble way, Einstein explained how he reinvented physics: "I sometimes ask myself how it came about that I was the one to develop the theory of Relativity. The reason, I think, is that a normal adult stops to think about problems of space and time. These are things which he has thought about as a child. But my intellectual development was retarded, as a result of which I began to wonder about space and time only when I had already grown up." On Relativity, he said: "Relativity teaches us the connection between the different descriptions of one and the same reality." This view of Relativity, that there are different realities, has been picked up unanimously by the public, and hence, has taken on a far greater meaning than that of the original scientific theory, the focus of which was -strictly speaking- on mechanics and electrodynamics. This astonishing success was at least in part due to Einstein's personality. He understood himself as a philosopher as much as a scientist, and he was ready to discuss philosophical issues at any time, particularly matters involving Relativity. The philosophical aspect of Relativity forced people to think differently about the universe. Suddenly, the cosmos was not a God-created clockwork anymore, but a totality of disparate realities with the same basic natural laws. E=mc - Energy equals mass times the speed of light squared. An outstanding feature of Special Relativity is its mass-energy relation, which is expressed in the well-known formula: E=mc. Click on this button to hear Einstein explaining his famous formula E=mc (.au, 426 kb) Einstein derived this relation in an attempt to reconcile Maxwell's electromagnetic theory with the conservation of energy and momentum. Maxwell said that light carries a momentum, which is to say that a wave carries an amount of energy. Due to the principle of conservation of momentum, if a body emits energy in the form of radiation, the body loses an equivalent amount of mass that is given by E/c. This describes the relation between energy and mass. According to the conservation principle, in a closed system the sum of mass and its energy equivalent is always the same. The mass-energy relation tells us that any change in the energy level of an object necessarily involves a change in the object's mass and vice-versa. The most dramatic consequences of this law are observed in nature, for example in nuclear fission and fusion processes, in which stars like the Sun emit energy and lose mass. The same law also applies to the forces set free in the detonation of an atomic bomb. Was Einstein involved in the development of the atomic bomb? Einstein was not directly involved in the creation of the atomic bomb, as some people assume. His credits are rather being the one who provided the theoretical framework. In 1939, Einstein and several other physicists wrote a letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, pointing out the possibility of making an atomic bomb and the peril that the German government was embarking on such a course. The letter, signed only by Einstein, helped lending urgency to efforts in the creation of the atomic bomb, but Einstein himself played no role in the work and knew nothing about it at the time. General Relativity published in 1916.

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Eleven years after On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies, Einstein published his second groundbreaking work on General Relativity, which continues and expands the original theory. A preeminent feature of General Relativity is its view of gravitation. Einstein held that the forces of acceleration and gravity are equivalent. Again, the single premise that General Relativity is based on is surprisingly simple. It states that all physical laws can be formulated so as to be valid for any observer, regardless of the observer's motion. Consequently, due to the equivalence of acceleration and gravitation, in an accelerated reference frame, observations are equivalent to those in a uniform gravitational field. This led Einstein to redefine the concept of space itself. In contrast to the Euclidean space in which Newtons laws apply, he proposed that space itself might be curved. The curvature of space, or better spacetime, is due to massive objects in it, such as the sun, which warp space around their gravitational centre. In such a space, the motion of objects can be described in terms of geometry rather than in terms of external forces. For example, a planet orbiting the Sun can be thought of as moving along a "straight" trajectory in a curved space that is bent around the Sun. On the following pages we will examine spacetime and other fascinating aspects of Relativity in some detail and see how Relativity leads us to new insights about the structure and the creation of the universe.

In this document we discuss Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity. The treatment is nonmathematical, except for a brief use of Pythagoras' theorem about right triangles. We concentrate on the implications of the theory. The document is based on a discussion of the the theory for an upper-year liberal arts course in Physics without mathematics; in the context of that course the material here takes about 4 or 5 one-hour classes. Einstein published this theory in 1905. The word special here means that we restrict ourselves to observers in uniform relative motion. This is as opposed the his General Theory of Relativity of 1916; this theory considers observers in any state of uniform motion including relative acceleration. It turns out that the general theory is also a theory of gravitation. Sometimes one hears that the Special Theory of Relativity says that all motion is relative. This is not quite true. Galileo and Newton had a similar conception. Crucial to Newton's thinking is that there is an absolute space, independent of the things in that space: "Absolute space, in its own nature, without relation to anything external, remains always similar and immovable. Relative space is some movable dimension or measure of the absolute spaces; which our senses determine by its position to bodies .. because the parts of space cannot be seen, or distinguished from one another by our senses, there in their stead we use sensible [i.e. perceptible by the sense] measures of them ... but in philosophical disquisitions, we ought to abstract from our senses, and consider things themselves, distinct from what are only sensible measures of them." -- Principia I, Motte trans. For Newton, the laws of physics, such as the principle of inertia, are true in any frame of reference either at rest relative to absolute space or in uniform motion in a straight line relative to

5 absolute space. Such reference frames are called inertial. Notice there is a bit of a circular argument here: the laws of physics are true in inertial frames, and inertial frames are ones in which the laws of physics are true. In any case, from the standpoint of any such inertial frame of reference all motion can be described as being relative. If you are standing by the highway watching a bus go by you at 100 km/hr, then relative to somebody on the bus you are travelling in the opposite direction at 100 km/hr. This principle, called Galilean relativity, is kept in Einstein's Theory of Relativity. Many of the consequences of the Special Theory of Relativity are counter-intuitive and violate common sense. Einstein correctly defined common sense as those prejudices that we acquire at an early age.
In 1905, Albert Einstein published the theory of special relativity, which explains how to interpret motion between different inertial frames of reference that is, places that are moving at constant speeds relative to each other. Einstein explained that when two objects are moving at a constant speed as the relative motion between the two objects, instead of appealing to the ether as an absolute frame of reference that defined what was going on. If you and some astronaut, Amber, are moving in different spaceships and want to compare your observations, all that matters is how fast you and Amber are moving with respect to each other. Special relativity includes only the special case (hence the name) where the motion is uniform. The motion it explains is only if youre traveling in a straight line at a constant speed. As soon as you accelerate or curve or do anything that changes the nature of the motion in any way special relativity ceases to apply. Thats where Einsteins general theory of relativity comes in, because it can explain the general case of any sort of motion. Einsteins theory was based on two key principles:

The principle of relativity: The laws of physics dont change, even for objects moving in inertial (constant speed) frames of reference. The principle of the speed of light: The speed of light is the same for all observers, regardless of their motion relative to the light source. (Physicists write this speed using the symbol c.)

The genius of Einsteins discoveries is that he looked at the experiments and assumed the findings were true. This was the exact opposite of what other physicists seemed to be doing. Instead of assuming the theory was correct and that the experiments failed, he assumed that the experiments were correct and the theory had failed. In the latter part of the 19th century, physicists were searching for the mysterious thing called ether the medium they believed existed for light waves to wave through. The belief in ether had caused a mess of things, in Einsteins view, by introducing a medium that caused certain laws of physics to work differently depending on how the observer moved relative to the ether. Einstein just removed the ether entirely and assumed that the laws of physics, including the speed of light, worked the same regardless of how you were moving exactly as experiments and mathematics showed them to be!

Unifying space and time

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Einsteins theory of special relativity created a fundamental link between space and time. The universe can be viewed as having three space dimensions up/down, left/right, forward/backward and one time dimension. This 4dimensional space is referred to as the space-time continuum. If you move fast enough through space, the observations that you make about space and time differ somewhat from the observations of other people, who are moving at different speeds. You can picture this for yourself by understanding the thought experiment depicted in this figure. Imagine that youre on a spaceship and holding a laser so it shoots a beam of light directly up, striking a mirror youve placed on the ceiling. The light beam then comes back down and strikes a detector.

(Top) You see a beam of light go up, bounce off the mirror, and come straight down. (Bottom) Amber sees the beam travel along a diagonal path. However, the spaceship is traveling at a constant speed of half the speed of light (0.5c, as physicists would write it). According to Einstein, this makes no difference to you you cant even tell that youre moving. However, if astronaut Amber were spying on you, as in the bottom of the figure, it would be a different story. Amber would see your beam of light travel upward along a diagonal path, strike the mirror, and then travel downward along a diagonal path before striking the detector. In other words, you and Amber would see different paths for the light and, more importantly, those paths arent even the same length. This means that the time the beam takes to go from the laser to the mirror to the detector must also be different for you and Amber so that you both agree on the speed of light. This phenomenon is known as time dilation, where the time on a ship moving very quickly appears to pass slower than on Earth. As strange as it seems, this example (and many others) demonstrates that in Einsteins theory of relativity, space and time are intimately linked together. If you apply Lorentz transformation equations, they work out so that the speed of light is perfectly consistent for both observers.

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This strange behavior of space and time is only evident when youre traveling close to the speed of light, so no one had ever observed it before. Experiments carried out since Einsteins discovery have confirmed that its true time and space are perceived differently, in precisely the way Einstein described, for objects moving near the speed of light.

Unifying mass and energy

The most famous work of Einsteins life also dates from 1905 (a busy year for him), when he applied the ideas of his relativity paper to come up with the equation E=mc2 that represents the relationship between mass (m) and energy (E). In a nutshell, Einstein found that as an object approached the speed of light, c, the mass of the object increased. The object goes faster, but it also gets heavier. If it were actually able to move at c, the objects mass and energy would both be infinite. A heavier object is harder to speed up, so its impossible to ever actually get the particle up to a speed of c. Until Einstein, the concepts of mass and energy were viewed as completely separate. He proved that the principles of conservation of mass and conservation of energy are part of the same larger, unified principle, conservation of mass-energy. Matter can be turned into energy and energy can be turned into matter because a fundamental connection exists between the two types of substance.

Relativity of Time, Length, and Momentum Energy and Mass Conclusion Work Cited http://www.dummies.com/how-to/content/einsteins-special-relativity.html http://science.howstuffworks.com/science-vs-myth/everyday-myths/relativity.htm http://www.upscale.utoronto.ca/GeneralInterest/Harrison/SpecRel/SpecRel.html http://www.thebigview.com/spacetime/relativity.html
References
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Two individuals are riding a train to travel from New York City to San Francisco, playing a game of ping-pong in the sports compartment of the train.
Two people riding on a train from New York to San Francisco play a game of ping-pong in the sport compartment of the train. Lets say, the train moves at 100 km per hour (= 27.8 m/s) and the two players hit the ball at a speed of two meters per second. In the reference frame of the players, the ball moves back and forth at this particular speed. For a stationary observer standing beside the railroad, however, things look quite different. In his reference frame the ball moves at 29.8 m/s when it is played forward in the direction where the train is heading, while it moves at 25.8 m/s in the same direction when it is played backwards. Thus he doesn't see the ball moving backward at all, but always moving towards San Francisco. For an observer in outer

space, things look again totally different because of the Earth's rotation, which is opposite to the train's movement; therefore the outer space observer always sees the ball moving East.