Relativistic Rotation in the Large Radius, Small Angular Velocity Limit
Relativistic rotation is considered in the limit of angular velocity approaching zero and radial distance approaching infinity, such that centrifugal acceleration is immeasurably small while tangent velocity remains close to the speed of light. For this case, the predictions of the traditional approach to relativistic rotation using local co-moving Lorentz frames are compared and contrasted with those of the differential geometry based non-time-orthogonal analysis approach. Different predictions by the two approaches imply that only the non-time-orthogonal approach is valid.
The Evolution of Physics:
THE interpretation of science to the lay reader—and we may quite candidly admit that ‘lay reader’ must be interpreted as including practically all men of science who do not happen to be professionally interested in the particular branch of science under consideration—is a task both important and difficult. Of books which might be described as being suitable for some “ Wonders of the Universe ” series there is an excellent supply, and very good some of them are. The universe is a wonderful place, and to explore it under the guidance of a distinguished cicerone is both pleasant and profitable. Too often, however, one lays the book down with an uneasy feeling that something is missing. It reads like a detective story from which all the middle pages are missing. The first chapter, with its neatly arranged pile of corpses, is there, and the last page or so in which the name of the villain is disclosed ; but the account of the search, and in particular, that thrilling chapter, near the end, where the 'little grey cells' come iftto play, is wanting, and the real interest of the book has vanished with it. While it is, no doubt, edifying to learn that a lump of matter is nothing but a whirl of flying electric charges, what the reader would like to know, and what it is important that he should know, is how, and by what stages, the physicist arrives at this astounding conclusion. If, as Prof. Einstein and his co-author claim, “Physics is a creation of the human mind, with freely invented ideas and concepts ”, it is this intellectual content which gives to physics one of its chief claims to cultural significance, and provides for the thoughtful non-technical reader his main source of interest in it. It is with this aspect of the subject that the authors are concerned in this very distinguished book.The Evolution of Physics: the Growth of Ideas from the Early Concepts to Relativity and Quanta. By Albert Einstein and Leopold Infeld. (Cambridge Library of Modern Science.) Pp. x+319+3 plates. (Cambridge: At the University Press, 1938.) 8s. 6d. net.
Hulse and Taylor Win Nobel Prize for Discovering Binary Pulsar
In the summer of 1974, University of Massachusetts radioastronomer Joseph Taylor and his graduate student Russell Hulse discovered the first binary pulsar. This month in Stockholm, Hulse and Taylor are being honored with the 1993 Nobel Prize in Physics “for [this] discovery of a new type of pulsar, a discovery that has opened up new possibilities for the study of gravitation.” The importance of this new star for the investigation of gravity in the relativistic regime was clear almost from the start.