Albert Einstein - On The Theory Of Relativity

VIP免费

2024-12-24 0 0 14.97KB 2 页 5.9玖币

侵权投诉

A Universal Download Edition

WWW.UDownloadBooks.Com 1

On the Theory of Relativity

Albert Einstein

King's College, London, 1921

IT is a particular pleasure to me to have the privilege of speaking in the capital of the country

from which the most important fundamental notions of theoretical physics have issued. I am

thinking of the theory of mass motion and gravitation which Newton gave us and the concept of

the electromagnetic field, by means of which Faraday and Maxwell put physics on a new basis.

The theory of relativity may indeed be said to have put a sort of finishing touch to the mighty

intellectual edifice of Maxwell and Lorentz, inasmuch as it seeks to extend field physics to all

phenomena, gravitation induded.

Turning to the theory of relativity itself, I am anxious to draw attention to the fact that this theory

is not speculative in origin; it owes its invention entirely to the desire to make physical theory fit

observed fact as well as possible. We have here no revolutionary act but the natural continuation

of a line that can be traced through centuries. The abandonment of certain notions connected

with space, time, and motion hitherto treated as fundamentals must not be regarded as arbitrary,

but only as conditioned by observed facts.

The law of the constant velocity of light in empty space, which has been confirmed by the

development of electro-dynamics and optics, and the equal legitimacy of all inertial systems

(special principle of relativity), which was proved in a particulariy incisive manner by

Michelson's famous experiment, between them made it necessary, to begin with, that the concept

of time should be made relative, each inertial system being given its own special time. As this

notion was developed, it became clear that the connection between immediate experience on one

side and coordinates and time on the other had hitherto not been thought out with sufficient

precision. It is in general one of the essential features of the theory of relativity that it is at pains

to work out the relations between general concepts and empirical facts more precisely. The

fundamental principle here is that the justification for a physical concept lies exclusively in its

clear and unambiguous relation to facts that can be experienced. According to the special theory

of relativity, spatial coordinates and time still have an absolute character in so far as they are

directly measurable by stationary clocks and bodies. But they are relative in so far as they

depend on the state of motion of the selected inertial system. According to the special theory of

relativity the four-dimensional continuum formed by the union of space and time (Minkowski)

retains the absolute character which, according to the earlier theory, belonged to both space and

time separately. The influence of motion (relative to the coordinate system) on the form of

bodies and on the motion of clocks, also the equivalence of energy and inert mass, follow from

the interpretation of coordinates and time as products of measurement.

文档加载中……请稍候！
如果长时间未打开，您也可以点击刷新试试。

下载文档到电脑，查找使用更方便

5.9 玖币 0人已下载

立即下载 VIP免费下载

摘要：

AUniversalDownloadEditionWWW.UDownloadBooks.Com1OntheTheoryofRelativityAlbertEinsteinKing'sCollege,London,1921ITisaparticularpleasuretometohavetheprivilegeofspeakinginthecapitalofthecountryfromwhichthemostimportantfundamentalnotionsoftheoreticalphysicshaveissued.Iamthinkingofthetheoryofmassmotionand...

展开>> 收起<<

Albert Einstein - On The Theory Of Relativity.pdf

共2页,预览1页

还剩页未读，继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

Albert Einstein - On The Theory Of Relativity

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: