Special Relativity and Quantum Mechanics: Physics Central
Special Relativity and Quantum Mechanics: Physics Central
Special Relativity and Quantum Mechanics: Physics Central
GPS satellites are above Earth and experience weaker gravity. So even
though the GPS satellites are moving and experience a seven-microsecond
slowing every day because of their movement, the result of the weaker gravity
causes the clocks to tick about 45 microseconds faster than a ground-based
clock. Adding the two together results in the GPS satellite clock ticking faster
than a ground-based clock, by about 38 microseconds daily.
As our knowledge of physics has advanced, scientists have run into more
counterintuitive situations. One is trying to reconcile general relativity — which
describes well what's going on with large objects — with quantum mechanics,
which is best used for very small things (such as uranium atom decay). The
two fields, which excellently describe their individual fields, are incompatible
with one another — which frustrated Einstein and generations of scientists
after him.
There are several ideas to overcome this (which are beyond the scope of this
article), but one approach is to imagine a quantum theory of gravity that would
have a massless particle (called the graviton) to generate the force. But as
physicist Dave Goldberg pointed out in io9 in 2013, there are problems with
that. At the smallest scales, gravitons would have infinite energy density,
creating an unimaginably powerful gravity field. More study will be required to
see if this is possible.
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(2) Force is equal to the change in momentum per change of time. For a
constant mass, force equals mass times acceleration.
Twenty years later, an unexpected result threw this into question. Physicist
A.A. Michelson and chemist Edward Morley (both Americans at the time)
calculated how Earth's motion through this "ether" affected how the speed of
light is measured, and found that the speed of light is the same no matter
what Earth's motion is. This led to further musings on light's behavior — and
its incongruence with classical mechanics — by Austrian physicist Ernst Mach
and French mathematician Henri Poincare.
Einstein began thinking of light's behavior when he was just 16 years old, in
1895. He did a thought experiment, the encyclopedia said, where he rode on
one light wave and looked at another light wave moving parallel to him.
Classical physics should say that the light wave Einstein was looking at would
have a relative speed of zero, but this contradicted Maxwell's equations that
showed light always has the same speed: 186,000 miles a second. Another
problem with relative speeds is they would show that the laws
of electromagnetism change depending on your vantage point, which
contradicted classical physics as well (which said the laws of physics were the
same for everyone.)
Famous equation
Einstein's work led to some startling results, which today still seem
counterintuitive at first glance even though his physics is usually introduced at
the high school level.
2015 marks 100 years since the publication of Albert Einstein's General Theory of
Relativity. Learn the basics of Einstein's theory of relativity in our infographic
here. (Image credit: By Karl Tate, Infographics Artist)
One of the most famous equations in mathematics comes from special
relativity. The equation — E = mc2 — means "energy equals mass times the
speed of light squared." It shows that energy (E) and mass (m) are
interchangeable; they are different forms of the same thing. If mass is
somehow totally converted into energy, it also shows how much energy would
reside inside that mass: quite a lot. (This equation is one of the
demonstrations for why an atomic bomb is so powerful, once its mass is
converted to an explosion.)
This equation also shows that mass increases with speed, which effectively
puts a speed limit on how fast things can move in the universe. Simply put,
the speed of light (c) is the fastest velocity at which an object can travel in a
vacuum. As an object moves, its mass also increases. Near the speed of light,
the mass is so high that it reaches infinity, and would require infinite energy to
move it, thus capping how fast an object can move. The only reason light
moves at the speed it does is because photons, the quantum particles that
make up light, have a mass of zero.
Another strange conclusion of Einstein's work comes from the realization that
time moves relative to the observer. An object in motion experiences time
dilation, meaning that time moves more slowly when one is moving, than
when one is standing still. Therefore, a person moving ages more slowly than
a person at rest. So yes, when astronaut Scott Kelly spent nearly a year
aboard the International Space Station in 2015-16, his twin astronaut
brother Mark Kelly aged a little faster than Scott.
While this time dilation sounds very theoretical, it does have practical
applications as well. If you have a Global Positioning Satellite (GPS) receiver
in your car, the receiver attempts to find signals from at least three satellites to
coordinate your position. The GPS satellites send out timed radio signals that
the receiver listens to, triangulating (or more properly speaking, trilaterating)
its position based on the travel time of the signals. The challenge is, the
atomic clocks on the GPS are moving and would therefore run faster than
atomic clocks on Earth, creating timing issues. So, engineers need to make
the clocks on a GPS tick slower, according to Richard Pogge, an astronomer
at Ohio State University.
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1. Equilibrium of Structures
Loading on Structures
Conditions of Equilibrium
Transmissibility of Force
Principle of superposition
Exercise 1
Internal Forces