Über die spezielle und die allgemeine Relativitätstheorie (Gemeinverständlich)
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Einstein’s own account of relativity, written in 1916 for readers without higher mathematics: what space, time and motion mean once the speed of light is the same for everyone.
This is a sample: 4 of 29 sections. · Made in 170 min
Consider how geometry is put together. It starts from a few basic ideas, such as point, straight line and plane, which we picture more or less clearly, and from a few simple statements about them, the axioms, which we accept because the pictures make them feel obvious.
Why, then, do we feel so sure that the theorems are true? Because the ideas of geometry grew out of objects in nature, which correspond to them more or less exactly.
Now comes the decisive step, and it is a single added sentence. To Euclid's theorems we add the statement that two points of a practically rigid body always correspond to the same segment, the same distance, however we move the body about.
Measuring physics does so with the Cartesian coordinate system, named after Descartes. Picture three rigid flat walls, each at right angles to the other two and joined into one rigid body, like two walls and the floor meeting in the corner of a room.
A path with its reference body named is still not a complete description of motion. We must also say how the body changes its place with time: for every point of the path, at what time the body is there.
The visible fixed stars are bodies to which the law of inertia should apply with great accuracy, since nothing is farther from everything else. Take a coordinate system rigidly attached to the Earth, the three walls fixed to the ground.
Examples for: a curious adult with school physics; add one modern instance per idea, such as GPS satellite clocks
The lectures retell the German text of Project Gutenberg #77850, the 1917 Vieweg edition. The author died in 1955; the work is in the public domain. The retelling, the drawings and the voice are made by AI and checked against the book by a second model; nothing was edited by hand. How AI is used.
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