Premium Members Get 10% Off and Earn Rewards Find Out More
Paradoxes in the Theory of Relativity
That Einstein's insight was profound goes without saying. A strildng indication of its depth is the abundance of unexpected riches that others have found in his work - riches reserved for those daring to give serious attention to implications that at first sight seem unphysical. A famous instance is that of the de Broglie waves. If, in ac­ cordance with Fermat's principle, a photon followed the path of least time, de Broglie felt that the photon should have some phys­ ical means of exploring alternative paths to determine which of them would in fact require the least time. For this and other reasons, he assumed that the photon had a nonvanishing rest mass, and, in accordance with Einstein's E = h v, he endowed the photon with a spread-out pulsation of the form A Sin(27TEt/h) in the photon's rest frame. According to the theory of relativity such a pulsation, every­ where simultaneous in a given frame, seemed absurd as a physical entity. Nevertheless de Broglie took it seriously, applied a Lorentz transformation in the orthodox relativistic tradition, and found that the simultaneous pulsation was transformed into a wave whose phase velocity was finite but greater than c while its group velocity was that of the particle. By thus pursuing Einsteinian concepts into thickets that others had not dared to penetrate, de Broglie laid the brilliant foundations of wave mechanics.
1004106832
Paradoxes in the Theory of Relativity
That Einstein's insight was profound goes without saying. A strildng indication of its depth is the abundance of unexpected riches that others have found in his work - riches reserved for those daring to give serious attention to implications that at first sight seem unphysical. A famous instance is that of the de Broglie waves. If, in ac­ cordance with Fermat's principle, a photon followed the path of least time, de Broglie felt that the photon should have some phys­ ical means of exploring alternative paths to determine which of them would in fact require the least time. For this and other reasons, he assumed that the photon had a nonvanishing rest mass, and, in accordance with Einstein's E = h v, he endowed the photon with a spread-out pulsation of the form A Sin(27TEt/h) in the photon's rest frame. According to the theory of relativity such a pulsation, every­ where simultaneous in a given frame, seemed absurd as a physical entity. Nevertheless de Broglie took it seriously, applied a Lorentz transformation in the orthodox relativistic tradition, and found that the simultaneous pulsation was transformed into a wave whose phase velocity was finite but greater than c while its group velocity was that of the particle. By thus pursuing Einsteinian concepts into thickets that others had not dared to penetrate, de Broglie laid the brilliant foundations of wave mechanics.
54.99 In Stock
Paradoxes in the Theory of Relativity

Paradoxes in the Theory of Relativity

by Yakov Terletskii
Paradoxes in the Theory of Relativity

Paradoxes in the Theory of Relativity

by Yakov Terletskii

Overview

That Einstein's insight was profound goes without saying. A strildng indication of its depth is the abundance of unexpected riches that others have found in his work - riches reserved for those daring to give serious attention to implications that at first sight seem unphysical. A famous instance is that of the de Broglie waves. If, in ac­ cordance with Fermat's principle, a photon followed the path of least time, de Broglie felt that the photon should have some phys­ ical means of exploring alternative paths to determine which of them would in fact require the least time. For this and other reasons, he assumed that the photon had a nonvanishing rest mass, and, in accordance with Einstein's E = h v, he endowed the photon with a spread-out pulsation of the form A Sin(27TEt/h) in the photon's rest frame. According to the theory of relativity such a pulsation, every­ where simultaneous in a given frame, seemed absurd as a physical entity. Nevertheless de Broglie took it seriously, applied a Lorentz transformation in the orthodox relativistic tradition, and found that the simultaneous pulsation was transformed into a wave whose phase velocity was finite but greater than c while its group velocity was that of the particle. By thus pursuing Einsteinian concepts into thickets that others had not dared to penetrate, de Broglie laid the brilliant foundations of wave mechanics.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781489926760
Publisher: Springer US
Publication date: 06/09/2013
Edition description: Softcover reprint of the original 1st ed. 1968
Pages: 120
Product dimensions: 6.10(w) x 9.25(h) x 0.01(d)

Table of Contents

I. The Name and Content of the Theory of Relativity.- II. Einstein’s Postulates and the Lorentz Transformations.- III. Paradoxes in Kinematics.- IV. Paradoxes in Relativistic Dynamics.- V. Are Velocities Higher than the Velocity of Light Possible?.- VI. Negative and Imaginary Proper Masses.- Literature Cited.
From the B&N Reads Blog
Page 1 of

Customer Reviews