Brief note before running off to a long meeting…
Can’t work out whether today’s second long class on the structure of Special Relativity was scary or not. Last lecture we did the classic thought (and real) experiments that lead to the deduction of the Lorentz transformations, and the realization that the words “space” and “time” really should be combined into “spacetime”, and that they need to be thinking in those terms. At the end of the lecture and for most of today, I spent a lot of time emphasizing why Special Relativity is really not weird at all, and developed everything from there on as a very simple analogy to rotations in Euclidean space. The only thing that’s different is this minus sign in front of the “t” part, which is either annoying or beautiful. I urged them to pick the latter since without it there’d be just boring Euclidean four-space, with no yesterdays or tomorrows…
Of course, a bit of time must be spent (forgive the unintended pun) developing some Click to continue reading this post
It all goes back to one of my favourite theoretical physicists, Paul Dirac, and you might like how he found it (roughly). He essentially did it by taking the 
Tomorrow afternoon at 4:00pm there’s be an interesting conversation on campus for sure. It’ll be between the science writer and journalist KC Cole and the actor Alan Alda. He’s such an interesting person, and (among other things) currently presents Scientific American Frontiers. 
Being a loyal fan of Scottish single malt whisky, I never thought I’d be blogging about Irish whiskey, but this is why we get out of bed in the morning – we seek the stuff we can’t guess*.
