Description
Book SynopsisThat Einstein''s insight was profound goes without saying. A strildng indication of its depth is the abundance of unexpected riches that others have found in his work - riches reserved for those daring to give serious attention to implications that at first sight seem unphysical. A famous instance is that of the de Broglie waves. If, in ac cordance with Fermat''s principle, a photon followed the path of least time, de Broglie felt that the photon should have some phys ical means of exploring alternative paths to determine which of them would in fact require the least time. For this and other rea sons, he assumed that the photon had a nonvanishing rest mass, and, in accordance with Einstein''s E = h v, he endowed the photon with a spread-out pulsation of the form A Sin(27TEt/h) in the photon''s rest frame. According to the theory of relativity such a pulsation, every where simulta
Table of ContentsI. The Name and Content of the Theory of Relativity.- II. Einstein’s Postulates and the Lorentz Transformations.- III. Paradoxes in Kinematics.- IV. Paradoxes in Relativistic Dynamics.- V. Are Velocities Higher than the Velocity of Light Possible?.- VI. Negative and Imaginary Proper Masses.- Literature Cited.
