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After understanding Newtonian mechanics now it is time to understand where the problem exists. One cannot doubt Sir Issac Newton because we all know him from our childhood his equations of motion are so accurate that one can easily apply them to go to Sun or even any other place in the universe. Einstein himself was a very big fan of Newton. After understanding Galileo's principle of relativity one can check that it is impossible to say which objects are at rest or which are in motion. Everything is relative. The problem comes is with Light. Maxwell showed through his equations which he published in 1873 that light is an electromagnetic wave and its velocity is about 300000km/sec in vacuum. |
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| Special Relativity is because of light |
Now what is so special about light is we don't really understand light too. First of all its speed is something which is very hard to imagine . Can you imagine urself going with the speed of light, if you then one can easily go around the Earth 7 times in one second.
Another interesting thing about nature of light is its speed is irrespective of frame of reference and its going to be the same with respect to everyone. To understand this let's take another example imagine you and your friend are standing 100metres apart both of you have laser and the device to measure the speed of light. Now if you throws the beam of light to your friend who is at rest his device is going to show him that the velocity is 300000km/sec only and it is going to take 0.0000000333seconds to reach your friend but now just tell your friend to move away from your original position and keep moving away from him and now if you throw beam of light towards him according to Galileo, Newton and even according to everyone the speed should decrease because as your friend is moving away from its original position it is going to take more time for light to touch him and velocity should be c-v where c is speed of light and v is friend's moving speed but in reality weird things happen and the device is going to show the speed as just c only. now how this is possible in one sense it breaks our understanding of physics but we have to accept this because this is true. Consider the second situation where your friend is moving towards you now the velocity should increase(c+v) but still it is c only.
And this is where world requires a true genius to solve this problem and this where Albert Einstein come into the picture. now the relativity is becoming special, isn't it?..
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