Abstract
The theory of relativity, due primarily to H. A. Lorentz in the 1890s and Albert Einstein in the early 1900s, revolutionized scientific thinking. This chapter gives a brief introduction to the ideas of “special relativity”—the subject of a 1905 paper by Einstein. The special theory of relativity considers the viewpoints of different observers moving with constant velocities, as in the previous chapter. But the key postulate and the conclusions will now be quite different and, for most people, surprising.
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© 1984 Springer Science+Business Media New York
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Driver, R.D. (1984). Special Relativity. In: Why Math?. Undergraduate Texts in Mathematics. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4612-1108-2_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4612-1108-2_9
Publisher Name: Springer, New York, NY
Print ISBN: 978-0-387-94427-2
Online ISBN: 978-1-4612-1108-2
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