Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge / 2001 / ib / Paper 4 / 9F (Special Relativity)

The Einstein's principle of relativity says that the laws of physics take the same form in every inertial frame: no inertial frame is physically privileged, and uniform absolute motion cannot be detected by an internal experiment.

Assume $|u|<c$. Direct expansion of the transformed coordinates givesSince $y^{\prime }=y$ and $z^{\prime }=z$, the full Minkowski interval is invariant. Points of the outgoing light shell therefore satisfyAt each fixed $t^{\prime }>0$ this is a sphere of radius $c{t}^{\prime }$. The future branch remains future-directed: for a shell point with $t>0$, $|x|\le ct$ gives $t^{\prime }=\gamma (t-ux/c^2)>0$.

A Lorentz transformation is a linear coordinate transformation preserving the Minkowski metric, equivalently ${\Lambda }^T\eta \Lambda =\eta$. The calculation establishes this property for all events, not only points on the light cone. The displayed map has determinant one and preserves time orientation, so it is the proper orthochronous boost along the $x$ direction.