3 ms·
For a good introduction to developing an intuition about special relativity via low speed of light, I really recommend George Gamow’s “Mr Tompkins in Wonderland
by gumby 2y ago
For a good introduction to developing an intuition about special relativity via low speed of light, I really recommend George Gamow’s “Mr Tompkins in Wonderland” (or “in paperback”). These short stories explore things like how the world would look if the speed of light were 10 mph.
- asicsarecool 2y agoWow thank you I cant believe I've been ignorant of this my whole life. Thank you so much
- tetris11 2y agohttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr_Tompkins https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr_Tompkins > Four Books in the Series > 1940: Mr Tompkins in Wonderland 1945: Mr Tompkins Explores the Atom 1953: Mr Tompkins Learns the Facts of Life 1967: Mr Tompkins Inside Himself There's a joke there in those last two titles but I'm not going to make it.
- greenbit 2y agoAlso from Gamow, and something that blew my (then) 12 year old mind: 1-2-3-Infinity https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Two_Three..._Infinity https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Two_Three..._Infinity
- tsimionescu 2y agoBut does that make any physical sense? All the other speeds we are familiar with would be proportionally slower, since they are all ultimately determined by fractions of the speed of light, right? For example, if the speed of light were 10mph, the speed of sound would be something like 0.6in/h, days would be much, much longer, chemical reactions would take hours etc. Overall, I don't think it would really make any difference for a human in this world: everything would actually be perfectly identical.
- enkid 2y agoWhy would these dependent on the speed of light?
- tsimionescu 2y agoBecause the basic understanding of physics is that all particles move at constant speed c in spacetime; the proportion of their speed that is happening in the three spatial dimensions is determined by their mass. So, any particle's speed through space is a fraction of the "speed of light" c; the higher its mass, the lower the fraction. The other items I mentioned are then caused by the speed of these particles. The speed of sound in a medium is determined by how fast particles collide into other particles in the medium. The speed of the earth around its axis (the length of a day) is determined by the speed of the particles making it up in the warped spacetime of the earth's gravitational field. The speed of chemical reactions is also limited by how fast atoms and electrons move and can interact with each other.
- zdragnar 2y agoThe length of a day, at least, is unrelated. There was a big splash in the news not long ago because it was determined that the length of Earth's day was changing and we might need to change it by a second. Venus has a much, much slower rotation on its axis, but Mars is almost the same.
- Sharlin 2y agoI doubt it was a big splash of news given that leap seconds have been a fairly routine thing for quite a while. Lately there’s been talk about a possible negative leap second, as Earth’s rotation speed has been increasing for a few years now. Many things can have a measurable on Earth’s rotation, including dynamics of the molten outer core, earthquakes, ocean currents, and melting of polar ice caused by the climate change. Even before we invented precise enough clocks that there was any need for leap seconds, we knew that Earth’s rotation is slowing down due to tidal drag – the moon is literally robbing angular momentum from Earth, and getting farther from Earth in the process. Back in the Cambrian, day length was around 21 hours. Shortly after the formation of the moon, 4.5Ga ago, it would have been only around five hours, assuming the giant impact hypothesis is correct.
- AnimalMuppet 2y agoAlso see Redshift Rendezvous by John E. Stith. It's a novel, not a tutorial, but relativistic effects play a major part at several points.