Discovering Lorentz transformation with Albert Einstein

This is a story about Lorentz transformation and its geometry from the perspective of Albert Einstein and Hermann Minkowski, with insights from Leonard Susskind and Brian Greene. In this video, I shall prove to you with simple arguments, the form of the Lorentz transformation, which one can derives just by assuming that the speed of light is the same across all inertial frames of reference. In the second half of this video, we elucidate on a geometrical approach to the understanding of Minkowski spacetime. As we shall see, Lorentz transformation can be mapped onto hyperbolic geometry, allowing for very intuitive picture of spacetime transformation, which can be particularly useful in understanding of well-known phenomena in special relativity such as time dilation and length contraction. Let’s begin.

[@NEWDAWNrealizingself]

THANKS ! ELEGANTLY EXPLAINED WHAT THE 4- DIMENSIONAL SPACE - TIME IS !

[@paulclayton9893]

This is an appealing and concise introduction to the subject of relativity. Can I just point to a missing minus sign in the Euclidean rotation matrix at 34:20 ?

[@VortekStarling]

You can't work out time dilation as simply as the common illustrations of the Einstein moving light clock thought experiment would suggest. For a light clock traveling at 0.866 light speed for instance, which has a Lorentz factor of 2, you can't just draw a 1 meter high light clock (if we say for simplicity that light travels 1 meter per second) and a horizontal line 0.866 meters long and join the top of the light clock to the end of the horizontal line and say that's how far light really traveled, because that line would be 1.322 meters long. It would take 1.322 seconds for light to travel that diagonal length but the Lorentz factor for 0.866 c is 2, not 1.322., so that diagonal line gave us nothing related to the Lorentz factor for that velocity. You can't get 2 from 1.322 because 2 divided by 1.322 is 1.51, which is a number unrelated to anything. Even if you say "Einstein made the light clock tick when the light goes both ways, not just one way", it wouldn't fix things, because 2 x 1.322 is 2.644, which is still not 2. I think he made the clock a 2 way instead of a 1 way just to muddy the waters a little more, to make his error less immediately obvious. I made the clock have a 1 way ticking cycle to keep everything clear and simple. For the diagonal line to be the real distance light would travel at Lorentz factor 2, it would need to be 2 meters long. To get that length for the diagonal light path, the distance traveled by the light clock along the horizontal path has to be 1.732 meters, not 0.866 meters. In other words, you would need to already know the Lorentz factor, and multiply the 0.866 by it, in order to correctly draw the diagram, because you would need to know that you have to let the light clock travel 1.732 meters, instead of 0.866, in order for the hypotenuse of the right triangle, the perceived diagonal light path, to be 2 meters long . How would you know what to multiply the 0.866 meters by to get the distance for the base of the triangle if you don't already know the Lorentz factor for the velocity of 0.866 c is 2? To be generous, we could conclude that Einstein simply made a mistake, but to not be generous we could conclude that he was being purposely deceptive and hoped nobody would ever notice. Neither of those two possibilities look good for Einstein. So what happens when Einstein said a certain thought experiment was the basis for his time dilation theory and then we check it and find that it doesn't even come close to working, what would that mean?

[@joe_ninety_one5076]

You don't need to separately add the constancy, or absolutely nature, of the speed of light. As described, given that Maxwell's equations contain the speed of light as a fixed constant the concept that the laws of physics are the same is enough and that was Einstein's genius.

[@skakofilsanonims4434]

All the people who love science and has a degree know that Mileva Maric did the work for Einstein with the Lorentz transformation.

[@juergenlidl6765]

No, his dog did most of the hard tasks

[@skakofilsanonims4434]

@@juergenlidl6765 no, your mother did.

[@bernardofitzpatrick5403]

Brings to mind Rosalind Franklin and the whole discovery of the structure of DNA, story. She surely deserved a large % of the credit , for her input from her X-ray crystallography work. Only now, years later, is her contribution somewhat recognised. Crick and Watson took all the credit!

[@CliffSedge-nu5fv]

Al was too busy being a pimp and a playa.

[@willemesterhuyse2547]

Timestep 2:28: I saw the same picture but with the magnetic field at a maximum when the electric field is zero. I can see that as such the fields support each other, but you can't see this with that picture where bot fields are zero at the same time.

[@Bjowolf2]

The Lorentz factors actually look like projections ( cosines) back and forth, if you interpret them geometrically, so maybe there is something deeper going on here? - so that it's not the length of the moving object that contracts along the direction of motion with velocity v relative to the observer, but rather the "presence" of the object that shrinks, i.e. its projection onto the "length" dimension of the observer, if we think of it as a complex number / "vector" that rotates more and more away from this "length" axis ( but still has the same length in its own "length" dimension, so to speak ), the more v approaches c. Is there any deeper explanation as to why c is the same in all reference frames? Where does this very strange "demand" come from? And do we actually know that c has always had the same value over long cosmological time spans? It wouldn't be totally unreasonable, if it somehow depended on how much space had expanded at a given time.

[@jnhrtmn]

Postulates are declarations, not observations. Given that velocity is INFINITELY relative, Relativity says that every time you change your velocity in any direction, EVERY photon of light coming at you in the ENTIRE Universe is INSTANTLY adjusted to YOUR new velocity creating a new perspective of the Universe FOR YOU. I don't care if the math works, because this is too goofy. You can't show me dimensions 1 or 2, and time is in your brain doing the math, so dimensions start out fake -adjusting that to create your theory is right out. Velocity does nothing in physics until it changes, so I don't think nature even realizes velocity. Velocity addition experiments with actual speed addition should be redone. The only one I have says, they calibrated the detector with an electron beam, and the electrons were assumed to not be faster than light. Then, if they were psycho and needed to prove Relativity, this has the entire world of science fooled. The muon atmosphere thing is a test, not a proof. We need more proofs. All Gamma-ray Bursts arrive here in order of wavelength, and they can't come out and say that. It is an "afterglow" theory, where they had to invent a way that radio gets here last, but that's the very value of radio in astronomy that radio skips debris to beat visible light --not in these bursts. There is no way Relativity would be here if this were known in 1900.

[@CliffSedge-nu5fv]

No. That is not correct.

[@keithmcgarrigle8921]

If speed of a visable laser light is 90 degrees to me what is the speed of light would I see? Then if the laser beam is rotated by 45 degees has my time line changed even though the earth has rotated?

[@CliffSedge-nu5fv]

I love pausing to inspect the mathematics when the robot voice tells me to.

[@monkerud2108]

In a certain sense, saying the speed of light is the same for everyone in all directions, is a bit like saying maxwells equation feels yellow, it has no physical significance as all, the statement that the one way speed cannot be measured given a certain way the equations of motion transform captures all the physics independently of talking about a one way speed at all.

[@williamwalker39]

The speed of light is not a constant as once thought, and this has now been proved by Electrodynamic theory and by Experiments done by many independent researchers. The results clearly show that light propagates instantaneously when it is created by a source, and reduces to approximately the speed of light in the farfield, about one wavelength from the source, and never becomes equal to exactly c. This corresponds the phase speed, group speed, and information speed. Any theory assuming the speed of light is a constant, such as Special Relativity and General Relativity are wrong, and it has implications to Quantum theories as well. So this fact about the speed of light affects all of Modern Physics. Often it is stated that Relativity has been verified by so many experiments, how can it be wrong. Well no experiment can prove a theory, and can only provide evidence that a theory is correct. But one experiment can absolutely disprove a theory, and the new speed of light experiments proving the speed of light is not a constant is such a proof. So what does it mean? Well a derivation of Relativity using instantaneous nearfield light yields Galilean Relativity. This can easily seen by inserting c=infinity into the Lorentz Transform, yielding the GalileanTransform, where time is the same in all inertial frames. So a moving object observed with instantaneous nearfield light will yield no Relativistic effects, whereas by changing the frequency of the light such that farfield light is used will observe Relativistic effects. But since time and space are real and independent of the frequency of light used to measure its effects, then one must conclude the effects of Relativity are just an optical illusion. Since General Relativity is based on Special Relativity, then it has the same problem. A better theory of Gravity is Gravitoelectromagnetism which assumes gravity can be mathematically described by 4 Maxwell equations, similar to to those of electromagnetic theory. It is well known that General Relativity reduces to Gravitoelectromagnetism for weak fields, which is all that we observe. Using this theory, analysis of an oscillating mass yields a wave equation set equal to a source term. Analysis of this equation shows that the phase speed, group speed, and information speed are instantaneous in the nearfield and reduce to the speed of light in the farfield. This theory then accounts for all the observed gravitational effects including instantaneous nearfield and the speed of light farfield. The main difference is that this theory is a field theory, and not a geometrical theory like General Relativity. Because it is a field theory, Gravity can be then be quantized as the Graviton. Lastly it should be mentioned that this research shows that the Pilot Wave interpretation of Quantum Mechanics can no longer be criticized for requiring instantaneous interaction of the pilot wave, thereby violating Relativity. It should also be noted that nearfield electromagnetic fields can be explained by quantum mechanics using the Pilot Wave interpretation of quantum mechanics and the Heisenberg uncertainty principle (HUP), where Δx and Δp are interpreted as averages, and not the uncertainty in the values as in other interpretations of quantum mechanics. So in HUP: Δx Δp = h, where Δp=mΔv, and m is an effective mass due to momentum, thus HUP becomes: Δx Δv = h/m. In the nearfield where the field is created, Δx=0, therefore Δv=infinity. In the farfield, HUP: Δx Δp = h, where p = h/λ. HUP then becomes: Δx h/λ = h, or Δx=λ. Also in the farfield HUP becomes: λmΔv=h, thus Δv=h/(mλ). Since p=h/λ, then Δv=p/m. Also since p=mc, then Δv=c. So in summary, in the nearfield Δv=infinity, and in the farfield Δv=c, where Δv is the average velocity of the photon according to Pilot Wave theory. Consequently the Pilot wave interpretation should become the preferred interpretation of Quantum Mechanics. It should also be noted that this argument can be applied to all fields, including the graviton. Hence all fields should exhibit instantaneous nearfield and speed c farfield behavior, and this can explain the non-local effects observed in quantum entangled particles. *KZbin presentation of above arguments: kzbin.info/www/bejne/qZazlX1tq7iErLM *More extensive paper for the above arguments: William D. Walker and Dag Stranneby, A New Interpretation of Relativity, 2023: vixra.org/abs/2309.0145 *Electromagnetic pulse experiment paper: www.techrxiv.org/doi/full/10.36227/techrxiv.170862178.82175798/v1 Dr. William Walker - PhD in physics from ETH Zurich, 1997

[@physicsVischi]

There is a type of Space-Time diagram in which the scale for both systems is the same. They are called "Loedel Palumbo Diagrams" and with them any analysis of special relativity is significantly simpler. They were developed in the mid-20th century by the Uruguayan physicist Enrique Loedel Palumbo from the simple, but brilliant idea, of considering in a diagram of Minkowski not one, but two "mobile" systems with the same speed, but in opposite directions and then remove the "fixed" system from the middle and... voila! you have two systems with the same scale! .The relative speed between these two systems is now given by the sine of the angle between the axes, not by the tangetic and trigonometry is that of all life. It is a shame that they are not very widespread.The deduction is very simple and can be found in the following link kzbin.info/www/bejne/pWXOfJh9bbWsr68

[@monkerud2108]

Not to fault the creator of the video, but most professionals dont even know about this fact. They know its not possible to measure a one way speed, but few really comprehend that the principle that the speed of light is the same for all observers in all directions is just the consequence of a spesific coordinate choice, while the physics which is coordinate independent doesnt care whether that is true at all.

[@Stellar-Forge]

The AI grammar and cadence is not good.

[@qualquan]

requires matrix math

[@monkerud2108]

Einstein got that wrong conceptually, his math is correct, but it just doesnt tell you that the one way speed is determined by the theory, other than in the sense of words stapled onto representations that are isomorphic to representations where the one way speed varies, but all the same physical behaviour occiurs with no alterations.

[@monkerud2108]

No, its wrong, the constancy of the speed of light is meaningless physically in a single direction, so no you can habe special relativity in amy old basis you want with exactly the same causal picture.

[@TunLeng-i1z]

❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤very very happy good ❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤