Do you have a tex program or something? I'm looking for a user friendly stand alone equation writer/scientific writing program. Basically something where I can write documents and that kind of good stuff. If you have info PM me, cause this is a bit off topic.

Hee hee. TeX and user-friendly are not two words I would ever put together. TeX is difficult; writing TeX is a lot like programming. However it is probably the most powerful scientific and mathematical typesetting program. There's nothing it can not do, but you may have to work for it. And as evidenced by JohnOwens's equations, nothing looks as nice.

If you're still interested, you can download TeX at
www.ctan.org.

Look again. Study the page. In Lorentz’s book, t is “time”, and t’ is the variable “local time”. In the equation on the page I posted, t’ is the time dilated time of the Lorentz theory. This book is where Einstein first learned the concept of time dilation. The book was published when Einstein was 16 years old. In a 1907 version of the SR theory, in Vol. 2 of “Collected Papers”, you can read about what Einstein said about why he decided to make use of the Lorentz term in his SR theory.

I don’t have time to photocopy or type up pages of all my books. You can go out an buy the books yourself.

Einstein said in his 1907 paper, “Surprisingly, however, it turned out that a sufficiently sharpened conception of time was all that was needed to overcome the difficulty. One had only to realize that an auxiliary quantity introduced by H.A. Lorentz and named by him ‘local time’ could be defined as ‘time’ in general.”

Lorentz’s “local time”, was introduced in his 1895 book in the form of a slower oscillation rate, and that is where Einstein got the “time dilation” concept, from Lorentz’s 1895 book.

I’ve shown you the page from Lorentz 1895 book where he introduced length contraction and the other page where he introduced time dilation.

You can read about his mass increase theory in the English version of his 1904 paper, and you can read where he says, ”Our assumption amounts to saying that in an electrostatic system E, moving with a velocity v, all electrons are flattened ellipsoids with their smaller axes in the direction of motion.”

That is the length contraction he described in his 1895 book. His idea was that they could not shrink all the way up into “plane figures”, thus “c” was the speed limit for moving masses. That’s why he titled his 1904 paper, “Electromagnetic Phenomena in a System Moving with any Velocity LESS THAN THAT OF LIGHT.”

You can find his relativistic Doppler Effect equations on page 56 of his 1895 book. Lorentz's oscillating "clocks" were atoms.

You have evidently been misled by pop-sci media that claim Einstein invented all of this stuff, whereas in reality, Lorentz invented it.

One more off topic post, since others might be interested. If you want a lovely graphical front end to TeX, try LyX:

http://www.lyx.org/

I've written many papers in it, and it has the best equation editor I've seen outside of Mathematica. And if you like raw TeX/LaTeX, you can also enter it into LyX and have it processed as part of the document. Highly recommended for anyone who wants to produce quality documents with a professional layout.

__________________
"What do you care what other people think?" -- Richard Feynman
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled." -- Feynman, at the conclusion of his Challenger report

Thanks. Unfortunately, it looks like it's only for Unix. I am now a Windoze user. I've been using WinEdt, which is pretty nice and the price is right.

And considering that almost all astronomy and astrophysics journals are published with TeX, I don't think it's off-topic. Okay, maybe off the topic of this thread, but it looks like this thread is devolving into a "SR is wrong" thread. In which case, it deserves to be hijacked.

There are at least two ports to 'doze, both available from the download link at lyx.org. I've never used them though, but you should give it a try!

heh... I've watched this happen several times now. Makes me want go to back and review SR again, but I've lost my book! Recommendations on a good one? And one for GR too, while I'm at it (I swear there was a thread with such things somewhere before)?

__________________
"What do you care what other people think?" -- Richard Feynman
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled." -- Feynman, at the conclusion of his Challenger report

"Spacetime Physics" by Taylor and Wheeler is a good one for SR. I would say GR depends on how you like your textbooks or how much you need to review Differential Geometry. Check the reviews at Amazon.com for Wald's "General Relativity" or do another search there for "MTW's "Gravitation". The reviews should give you an idea for which one is better for you.

__________________
Some try to tell me, thoughts they cannot defend,... - Moody Blues.

Neptune- The original Dark Matter.

The author feels that this technique of deliberately lying will actually make it easier for you to learn the ideas. - Donald Knuth

Hey, thats one I was looking for! Great quote, Sam5/David. In our multi-forum conversation, you have continuously maintained that Einstein was only talking about clock rate effects and not the passage of time itself. That quote states quite explicitly that time dilation is the change in the rate of time itself.

Thanks.

Don't you love it when he does that.

__________________
Some try to tell me, thoughts they cannot defend,... - Moody Blues.

Neptune- The original Dark Matter.

The author feels that this technique of deliberately lying will actually make it easier for you to learn the ideas. - Donald Knuth

Another good one that I've been using is Bernard Schutz A first course in general relativity. It starts off slow, building up the notation and math. Two online site are good as well. Sean Carroll's notes are really good, and if you are only looking for the math stuff then this is another good one. it's basically a free textbook, and well done too!

For SR, I agree with Tensor that "Spacetime Physics" is good.

GR requires a great deal more math, so the answer to your question depends on your background and how badly you want to know GR. I would not recommend MTW or Wald to the beginner. They are the closest thing to a GR canon, but unless you want to be a professional cosmologist, it's overkill. Schutz's "A First Course in General Relativity" is what I used to teach myself. It is quite good, but it is a graduate level text. Taylor and Wheeler's "Exploring Black Holes: Introduction to General Relavtivity" is what I would recommend to start. It's at an undergraduate level but covers everything the amatuer cosmologist needs.

There seems to be a consensus on that one, so I'll give it a look. I honestly can't remember the book we used at Carleton, but it was small, paperback and had a black cover with stars and a x/t and x'/t' plot on the cover. It was also very introductory, but covered all the important parts.

Math doesn't scare me (ok, I still occasionally have nightmares of Galois group diagrams, but that course was special! ). I should probably get a good differential geometry book (I'm pretty sure my girlfriend has one though), since I've never had a course in it. Or do the books listed (I'll dig them up from the UofM library later) include enough diff-geo to get by for a first cut at it? And since one of the things I'm thinking of doing in graduate school (next year) is cosmology, I figure I might as well get a start now. Well, that and the fact that I'm a nerd... ops:

Thanks for all the recommendations everyone! I probably won't have time to look them up for a week or so, but I'll keep ya'll informed as to what I end up with.

__________________
"What do you care what other people think?" -- Richard Feynman
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled." -- Feynman, at the conclusion of his Challenger report

Sounds like a keeper!

No, you’ve got it backwards. I said atomic clock rate changes are clock rate changes of a particular kind of clock. All kinds of clocks change rates for different reasons, because of various laws of physics. Einstein said they were true time changes of what you call “time itself”. But that can’t be true because thermodynamic clocks, electronic clocks, and pendulum clocks can speed up where atomic clocks slow down. That’s why I disagree with his crude point of view about atomic clocks, and especially about his "wristwatch" representing "time itself" in his 1905 paper. I think you are the guy who said that atomic clocks weren’t invented until 1952, but I showed you quotes from Maxwell, Lorentz, Steinmetz, and Einstein, all talking about atomic clocks in the late 19th and earth 20th Centuries. A single atom is a single fundamental “atomic clock”. Its internal oscillation rates can slow down and speed up under different environmental conditions, as predicted by Lorentz in 1895. That is a basic clock rate change, a "clock drift". All clocks experience "clock drift" in different directions and at various rates, but this does not reprsent all of true "time itself" when any kind of clock speeds up or slows down.

Is there any evidence of this? I mean, has this been *observed* in nature, or is this strictly coming from Lorentz here? The problem is time dilation has been observed - pion lifetimes being my favorite example - and it seems to fit both the Lorentz equations and Einstein's explanation thereof perfectly.

As for 'clock drift,' what are these situations you're talking about? Under what conditions have these observations been made? That a pendulum clock and an atomic clock work differently is hardly news *but* that doesn't change the fact that the clocks are designed to measure time. Can you explain how those observations don't just demonstrate the mechanical limitations of the clock being used?

No he didn't, and you have not demonstrated any of the above claims.[/quote]
I’ve shown you the page from Lorentz 1895 book where he introduced length contraction and the other page where he introduced time dilation.

Y[/b]SAM5

Thank you, but I have already read both that essay and a later book that he wrote, almost immediately after Einstein's 1905 paper was published. The book H.A. Lorentz wrote that I will quote is, "The Theory of Electrons," by H.A. Lorentz.


Your Twin Paradox is equally a "contradiction" in either Lorentz's representation, or Einstein's representation, of relativity. In both models. the fellow in the stationary frame and the fellow in the rocket-turnaround frame see the other one with a slowed down clock rate (after correction for the propagation speed of light), and a smaller length. Lorentz gave Einstein credit for coming up with the observation that the idea of a classical elastic ether was of not really consistent with observation.

The Theory of Electrons, by H. A. Lorentz, Copyright 1952 Dover Publications publication of H. A. Lorentz's 1906 lectures
page 229, section 194, beginning of first paragraph.
"It will be clear by what has been said that the [img]impressions received by the two observers A0 and A would be alike in all respect[/img]s. It would be impossible to tell what moves or stands still with respect to the ether, and there would be no reason for preferring the times and lengths measured by one of those determined by the other, nor for saying that either of them is in position of the "true" times and the "true" lengths."

However, H.A.Lorentz gave Einstein credit for developing the theory of relativity.

The Theory of Electrons, by H.A. Lorentz, page 229, section 194, middle of first paragraph.
"This is a point which Einstein has laid particular stress on, in a theory in which he starts from what he calls as a "principle of relativity,", i.e., the principle that the equations by which physical phenomena may be described are not altered in form when we change the axes of coordinates for others having a uniform motion of translation relatively to the original system."

H.A. Lorentz thought the principle of relativity was a fundamental and important contribution.

The Theory of Electrons, page 229, section 194
"I cannot speak here if the many highly interesting applications which Einstein has made of this principle."

However, Lorentz still takes a legitimate credit for helping things along.
The theory of Electrons, page 230, section 194
"His <Einsteins> results concerning electromagnetic and optical phenomena (leading to the same contradiction with Kaufman's results that was pointed out in section 179) agree in the main with those which we have maintained in the preceding pages, the chief difference being that Einstein simply postulates what we have deduced, from the fundamental equations of the electromagnetic field.

And here is where H.A. Lorentz clearly shows his biases.
The Theory of Electrons, page 230, section 194
"By doing so, he may clearly take credit for making us see in the negative result of experiments like those of Michelson, Rayleigh, and Brace, not a fortuitous compensation of opposing effects, but the manifestation of a general and fundamental principle."

Got the difference? Lorentz deduced the time dilation and length contraction from fundamental equations of the electromagnetic field, but his explanation used fortuitous compensation of opposing effects."

On the other hand, Lorentz certainly claimed his share. I fully endorse the following statement.
Theory of Electrons, page 230, section 194,
"Yet, I think something may also be claimed in favour of the form in which I presented the theory."

Please read and understand the form in which Lorentz presented the theory.

[Lorentz]