Why special relativity for teenagers?

Creative mathematics as a passion starts in ambitious youth at seventeen, blossoms into a profession in adult life and ripens into contemplation in the seventies. Special Relativity is an excellent starting point for it is deep and profound in concept yet elegant and simple in structure involving only elementary algebra and geometry, an interpretation of Space and Time fascinating to minds young and old, the novice and the learned.

There is a double reason why the `New Rod Approach to Special Relativity' is the best way to introduce young aspirants to research careers. It is a graphical approach involving only one dimensional motion of `Rods' of different `lengths' and velocities moving with respect to one another.

The second reason is that the laboratory for performing a Michelson-Morley experiment without any expense is just the freeway in the United States! Two cars moving with the same velocity with a constant distance between them called `length' constitute a `Rod'. If observed from the car it is `stationary' with the freeway moving with the opposite velocity! The freeway itself is an infinite rod which can be divided into segments of different `lengths'. A moving car crosses these stationary rods or equivalently the moving rods cross the `stationary' car. The crossing of a car by another with a different velocity is an `event' and two events are separated by `time' and `distance'.

Cars moving with the same velocity though separated in distance observe the same phenomena, that is, they measure the same `distance' and `time' between two `events'.

The fundamental axiom of Special Relativity is that the length of a rod is different when observed by cars with different velocities.

It was Fitzgeralds' intuitive genius to postulate that this changes by a factor

K=C1-v2/c2

This leads directly to the Lorentz Transformation which relates the spatial and time differences between `events' as we shift from one car to a car with different velocity.

Einstein interpreted the Lorentz Transformation effectively and his transcendent genius led him to the correspondence between space and time on the one hand and momentum and energy on the other. This resulted in his famous equation.

E=mc2

Which has directed the course of human civilisation!

The constancy of the velocity of light which was the incentive for the the creation of the `Theory of Special Relativity' is a direct consequence of Lorentz Transformation.

The `Rod' approach restores the primary role of Fitzgerald contraction which was ignored due to the needless introduction of the non-existent medium called `ether'.

Simplicity is the result of long evolution. Intuition and genius advance knowledge by leaps and bounds and it is only years later that interconnections and nuances come to light in a logical sequence.

It makes us believe in the aphoristic statement `God said let there be light all else is the motion of matter through Space and Time' as demonstrated by Fitzgerald, Lorentz and Einstein.

Einstein's Space-Time continuum is a mathematical bundle of a continuous infinity of infinite rods moving with respect to one another with all possible velocities less than an upper limit. These rods are contracted with respect to one another by Fitzgerald factor, generating `events' separated by `distance' and `time' obeying the Lorentz Transformation.

All this due to the Act of God who set the upper limit to velocities the velocity of Light.

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