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unusual facts about Relativity



11th dimension

Supergravity, a field theory that combines the principles of supersymmetry and general relativity

Alan Lightman

Problem book in Relativity and Gravitation / Alan P. Lightman, W. H. Press, R. H. Press and S. A. Teulkolsky.

Alternatives to general relativity

Whitrow, G. J. and Morduch, G. E. (1960) General relativity and Lorentz-invariant theories of gravitations, Nature 188, 790-794

C. V. Vishveshwara

Later he developed interest in General Relativity and encouraged by Fuller, transferred to University of Maryland to work with Charles W. Misner.

Carl Laubman

In Germany they visited scientist Albert Einstein, personally delivering a report of observations from the South Australian Government Astronomer concerning the theory of relativity.

David L. Lee

His thesis work was on alternative theories of gravity to Einstein's General Theory of Relativity; he is co-author of the Lightman-Lee and Lee-Lightman-Ni theories of gravity (see Alternatives to General Relativity).

Einstein Papers Project

Includes a previously unpublished manuscript on relativity and electrodynamics, a notebook documenting his preparation for his first joint paper (1913, with Marcel Grossmann), previously unknown calculations with Michele Besso on the motion of the perihelion of Mercury, etc.

Einstein Wrong - The Miracle Year

Started in 2005, the 100th year anniversary of Einstein's Miracle Year (2005), De Hilsters's film follows his mother and family as they journey through the world of scientists who are challenging Einstein's theory of relativity and other mainstream theories.

Faster-than-light

The physicists Günter Nimtz and Alfons Stahlhofen, of the University of Cologne, claim to have violated relativity experimentally by transmitting photons faster than the speed of light.

Geometrodynamics

More properly, some authors use the phrase Einstein's geometrodynamics to denote the initial value formulation of general relativity, introduced by Arnowitt, Deser, and Misner (ADM formalism) around 1960.

Georgia Institute of Technology School of Physics

In terms of pure research, David Finkelstein heads the Quantum Relativity Group, which specializes in fundamental theoretical problems involving the search for simpler, unified models that adequately account for both the "Standard Model" in particle physics and the relativistic nature of space and time.

Gravitational singularity

However, in 1991, physicists Stuart Shapiro and Saul Teukolsky performed computer simulations of a rotating plane of dust that indicated that general relativity might allow for "naked" singularities.

Harald Nordenson

His book, Relativity, Time and Reality, is a controversial critique of Albert Einstein's concepts of time and simultaneity in Special Relativity.

Ignazio Ciufolini

International Occhialini Prize and Medal of the UK Institute of Physics (IOP) and Italian Physical Society (SIF) awarded in London by Jocelyn Bell Burnell, president of IOP, for providing further experimental confirmation of Einstein's theory of General Relativity through the use of laser-ranged satellites to study and measure frame-dragging.

James Higginbotham

"On Words and Thoughts About Oneself." Isidora Stojanovich, François Recanati, and Neftalì Villanueva (eds.), Context-Dependence, Perspective, and Relativity.

Jason Katims

He has also worked on Relativity, which he created and wrote for; Roswell, which he developed, produced and wrote for; Boston Public, which he co-wrote; Pepper Dennis, a short-lived dramedy starring Rebecca Romijn on The WB; the 1996 movie The Pallbearer, starring David Schwimmer and Gwyneth Paltrow.

Joseph Polchinski

In July 2012, Polchinski, together with two of his students — Ahmed Almheiri and James Sully — and fellow string theorist Donald Marolf at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), published a paper whose calculations about black hole radiation seemed to suggest that either Relativity Theory's equivalence principle is wrong, or else a key tenet of quantum mechanics is incorrect.

Leila Steinberg

As a veteran music industry executive she served as a marketer with Atlantic Records, Sony, Def Jam, Tommy Boy, Interscope, and Relativity.

Length contraction

Though in relativity, the higher-than-expected ionization ability can be explained by length contraction of the Coulomb field in frames in which the ionizing particles are moving, which increases their electrical field strength normal to the line of motion.

Lewis Carroll Epstein

Lewis Carroll Epstein is the author of layman's books on physics that use an idiosyncratic mix of cartoons and single-page brain teasers to pull the reader into advanced concepts in classical mechanics, quantum theory, and relativity.

Lisa Cuddy

When Edelstein heard she had to do a strip scene in the episode "House's Head", she called actress Sheila Kelley, wife of Richard Schiff (with whom Edelstein had worked previously on The West Wing and Relativity).

Lisa Edelstein

Bigger roles in TV dramas soon followed, among them the lesbian sister on ABC's Relativity (1996); a high-priced call girl turned Rob Lowe's date on The West Wing (1999); an assigned male at birth (AMAB) transgender woman on Ally McBeal (2000); and Ben Covington's (Scott Speedman) girlfriend on Felicity (2001).

Lorentz invariance in loop quantum gravity

Giovanni Amelino-Camelia then proposed that the mystery of ultra-high-energy cosmic rays might be solved by assuming such violations of the special-relativity dispersion relation for photons.

Mark Piznarski

He has directed episodes from a number of television series, including, amongst others, Veronica Mars, The Lying Game, Gossip Girl, 90210, NYPD Blue, Friday Night Lights, Everwood, My So-Called Life, Relativity and Once and Again.

Married Love

In 1935 a survey of American academics said Married Love was one of the 25 most influential books of the previous 50 years, ahead of Relativity by Albert Einstein, Interpretation of Dreams by Sigmund Freud, Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler and The Economic Consequences of the Peace by John Maynard Keynes.

Mendel Sachs

Yet another phenomenon that Sachs' theory can accommodate that standard cosmology might not is the Huge-LQG large quasar group, since general relativity does not presuppose homogeneity or isotropy, i.e., the cosmological principle.

Michelson-Morley Memorial Fountain

This experiment proved the non-existence of the luminiferous ether and was later cited as circumstantial evidence in support of special relativity as proposed by Albert Einstein in 1905.

Michelson–Gale–Pearson experiment

It's also possible to define rotating frames in special relativity (Born coordinates), yet in those frames the speed of light is not constant in extended areas any more, thus also in this view a positive result must occur.

Pantur Silaban

In 1967, he went to United States to study General Relativity theory at Central Studies of Gravitation at Syracuse University under direction of Peter Bergmann and Joshua N. Goldberg whom were among authoritative experts in general relativity after the inventor, Albert Einstein.

Paul Lorenzen

Lorenzen took an early interpretation of Steven Weinberg (Gravitation and Cosmology, 1972) for his doubts about geometrical elements of general relativity, believing that Maxwell's equations are to be modified by general relativity instate.

Prahalad Chunnilal Vaidya

In 1942, P. C. Vaidya wrote to Professor V. V. Narlikar, father of renowned Indian physicist Jayant Narlikar, expressing his desire to study relativity.

Principle of relativity

The special principle of relativity was first explicitly enunciated by Galileo Galilei in 1632 in his Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, using the metaphor of Galileo's ship.

Problem book

A.P. Lightman, W.H. Press, R.H. Price, and S.A. Teukolsky (1979) Problem Book in Relativity and Gravitation (ISBN 978-0691081625)

Robert S. Shankland

Though Maurice Allais and James DeMeo do not accept Shankland's refutation and hold to the belief that Miller's experiment invalidates the theory of relativity, Einstein's theory is today regarded by most physicists as proven, based largely on the vastly more accurate repetitions of Miller's measurements made using modern optical technology by numerous independent researchers that have shown conclusively that Miller's reported positive signal was spurious.

Sonic black hole

The fact that so many systems mimic gravity is sometimes used as evidence for the theory of emergent gravity, which could help reconcile relativity and quantum mechanics.

Squeeze mapping

Furthermore, Wolfgang Rindler, in his popular textbook on relativity, used the squeeze mapping form of Lorentz transformations in his demonstration of their characteristic property (see equation 29.5 on page 45 of the 1969 edition, or equation 2.17 on page 37 of the 1977 edition, or equation 2.16 on page 52 of the 2001 edition).

Edwin Bidwell Wilson & Gilbert N. Lewis (1912) "The space-time manifold of relativity. The non-Euclidean geometry of mechanics and electromagnetics", Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 48:387–507.

Sticky bead argument

In 1957, at a conference at Chapel Hill, North Carolina, appealing to various mathematical tools developed by John Lighton Synge, A. Z. Petrov and André Lichnerowicz, Pirani explained more clearly than had previously been possible the central role played by the Riemann tensor and in particular the tidal tensor in general relativity.

Tetradic Palatini action

Another important action is the Plebanski action (see the entry on the Barrett-Crane model), and proving that it gives general relativity under certain conditions involves showing it reduces to the Palatini action under these conditions.

The Persistence of Memory

Asked by Ilya Prigogine whether this was in fact the case, Dalí replied that the soft watches were not inspired by the theory of relativity, but by the surrealist perception of a Camembert cheese melting in the sun.

Tsvi Piran

1977-79: Research associate and later Assistant Prof. at the University of Texas at Austing with Bryce DeWitt's group: foundation of Numerical Relativity, jets in AGNs.

United States presidential election in North Dakota, 1996

All major counties in North Dakota turned out for Dole, including the (relativity) highly populated center of Cass County, which contains the city of Fargo.

Vladimir Varićak

In 1910, following a 1909 publication of Sommerfeld, he applied hyperbolic geometry to the special theory of relativity.

Waldyr Alves Rodrigues Jr.

Rodrigues is well known for his diverse research interests such as the applications of Clifford algebras, the study of extraordinary solutions of the relativistic wave equations, and the foundations of quantum mechanics and relativity; he has given several lectures on these subjects at international meetings.

Wormhole

Later, other types of traversable wormholes were discovered as allowable solutions to the equations of general relativity, including a variety analyzed in a 1989 paper by Matt Visser, in which a path through the wormhole can be made where the traversing path does not pass through a region of exotic matter.


see also