Matter & Interactions I, Week 3

This week, we encountered what, in my opinion, is the most fundamental aspect of special relativity: the loss of absolute simultaneity. The Michelson-Morley experiment established that light’s speed must be invariant. An immediate consequence of this is that two events that are simultaneous in one inertial frame cannot be simultaneous in any other frame. Last […]

Conceptual Understanding in Introductory Physics VI: Naming Reference Frames

In this post, I present a question from special relativity that addresses how we name reference frames. Students tend to blindly memorize names, terms, labels, and other minutiae that have little or nothing to do with the underlying physics. In one problem, a clock is stated to be in the S frame and has a […]

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