“I live 20 miles per hour from the University.” Is that statement confusing? It should be. In Episode 20, we take a look at Rates and Functions, and discuss how they have been mistreated for the past century. More importantly, we’ll take a look at how key concepts and mathematics can get confused if we don’t say the right thing. For example, would you feel confused if I had began with “I live 20 miles from the University.”? This Episode is a replay of a presentation that I delivered the Pacific Region AAAS conference at San Francisco State University in August 2009.
This Episode summarizes and synthesizes a lot of the material we’ve looked at over the past 9 videos. New visitors will find that it serves as a good introduction to the material on the site.
The following specific points are covered in this video:
- A brief history of moving systems equations and SRT
- A look at the mathematical and conceptual mistakes we’re still making today
- Revisiting the improved results to the Michelson-Morley and Ives-Stillwell equations
- Implications on position-based navigation systems
In addition to the video, a PDF version of the presentation is available for download.
Corrections:
- At 15:10 – the arguments to the Tau function invocation in the Key Findings callout should be (x’,0,0,x’/(c-v)). This is corrected in the PDF.
- At 16:20 – the callout should say “…Average of the Approaching and Receding Doppler shifts”
- At 16:55 – I should have said “revising Michelson-Morley” instead of saying “revising Ives-Stillwell”
Update: I’ve added the following two links from the NPA Video Conference I delivered in October 2009. One link is for the video and the other is for the slides. I think this video is essentially the “Director’s cut” of the presentation.
Bonus: Download NPA Conference Video in Windows Media Format
Bonus: Download NPA Conference Video in PDF Format
[podcast format=”video”]http://www.relativitychallenge.com/media/RelativityChallenge.com-Episode20_iPod.m4v[/podcast]
Download in Windows Media Format
Download in PDF Format
