The equation that allows us to calculate stuff in special relativity!

Take two observers with identical rules and stopwatch, and aligned axes, but one is on a car moving at towards the $+x$ direction at speed $v$.

TODO image.

When both observe an event, if we denote:It is of course arbitrary who is standing and who is moving, we will just use the term "standing" for the one without primes.

Then the coordinates of the event observed by the observer on the car are:where:

Note that if $\frac{v}{c}$ tends towards zero, then this reduces to the usual Galilean transformations which our intuition expects:

This explains why we don't observe special relativity in our daily lives: macroscopic objects move too slowly compared to light, and $\frac{v}{c}$ is almost zero.

Same motivation as Galilean invariance, but relativistic version of that: we want the laws of physics to have the same form on all inertial frames, so we really want to write them in a way that is Lorentz covariant.

This is just the relativistic version of that which takes the Lorentz transformation into account instead of just the old Galilean transformation.

Basically a synonym of Lorentz covariance?

OK, so let's verify the main desired consequence of the Lorentz transformation: that everyone observes the same speed of light.

Observers will measure the speed of light by calculating how long it takes the light going towards $+x$ cross a rod of length $L=x_2-x_1$ laid in the x axis at position $X1$.

TODO image.

Each observer will observe two events:

Supposing that the standing observer measures the speed of light as $c$ and that light hits the left side of the rod at time $T1$, then he observes the coordinates:

Now, if we transform for the moving observer:and so the moving observer measures the speed of light as:

Suppose that a rod has is length $L$ measured on a rest frame $S$ (or maybe even better: two identical rulers were manufactured, and one is taken on a spaceship, a bit like the twin paradox).

Question: what is the length $L^{\prime }$ than an observer in frame $S^{\prime }$ moving relative to $S$ as speed $v$ observe the rod to be?

The key idea is that there are two events to consider in each frame, which we call 1 and 2:Note that what you visually observe on a photograph is a different measurement to the more precise/easy to calculate two event measurement. On a photograph, it seems you might not even see the contraction in some cases as mentioned at en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrell_rotation

Measuring a length means to measure the $x_2-x_1$ difference for a single point in time in your frame ($t2=t1$).

So what we want to obtain is $x_2^{\prime }-x_1^{\prime }$ for any given time $t^{\prime }2=t^{\prime }1$.

In summary, we have:

By plugging those values into the Lorentz transformation, we can eliminate $t_{2}and{t}_1$, and conclude that for any $t_2^{\prime }=t_1^{\prime }$, the length contraction relation holds:

The key question that needs intuitive clarification then is: but how can this be symmetric? How can both observers see each other's rulers shrink?

And the key answer is: because to the second observer, the measurements made by the first observer are not simultaneous. Notably, the two measurement events are obviously spacelike-separated events by looking at the light cone, and therefore can be measured even in different orders by different observers.

What you would see the moving rod look like on a photo of a length contraction experiment, as opposed as using two locally measured separate spacetime events to measure its length.

One of the best ways to think about it is the transversal time dilation thought experiment.

Light watch transverse to direction of motion. This case is interesting because it separates length contraction from time dilation completely.

Of course, as usual in special relativity, calling something "time dilation" leads us to mind boggling ideas of "symmetry breaking": if both frames have a light watch, how can both possibly observe the other to be time dilated?

And the answer to this, is the usual: in special relativity time and space are interwoven in a fucked up way, everything is just a spacetime event.

In this case, there are three spacetime events of interest: both clocks start at same position, your beam hits up at x=0, moving frame hits up at x>0.

Those two mentioned events are spacelike-separated events, and therefore even though they seem simultaneous to you, they are not going to be simultaneous to the moving observer!

If little clock one meter away from you tells you that at the time of some event (your light beam hit up) the moving light watch was only 50% up, this is just a number given by your one meter away watch!

It appears that Maxwell's equations can be derived directly from Coulomb's law + special relativity:This idea is suggested by the charged particle moving at the same speed of electrons thought experiment, which indicates that magnetism is just a consenquence of special relativity.

This is a well known though experiment, which Richard Feynman used to emphasize

In the above experiment:

The solution to this problem is length contraction: the positive charges are length contracted and the moving electrons aren't, and therefore they are denser and therefore there is an effective charge from that frame.

This is also mentioned at David Tong www.damtp.cam.ac.uk/user/tong/em/el4.pdf (archive) "David Tong: Lectures on Electromagnetism - 5. Electromagnetism and Relativity" "5.2.1 Magnetism and Relativity".

See also: covariance.

Subtle is the Lord by Abraham Pais (1982) chapter III "Relativity, the special theory" mentions that this fact and its importance (we want the laws of physics to look the same on all inertial frames, AKA Lorentz covariance) was first fully relized by poincaré in 1905.

And at that same time poincaré also immediately started to think about the other fundamental force then known: gravity, and off the bat realized that gravitational waves must exist. general relativities is probably just "the simplest way to make gravity Lorentz covariant".

Bibliography:

A 4D gradient with some small special relativity specifics added in (the light of speed and sign change for the time).

${\mathbb{R}}^4$ with a weird dot product-like operation called the Minkowski inner product.

Because the Minkowski inner product product is not positive definite, the norm induced by an inner product is a norm, and the space is not a metric space strictly speaking.

The name given to this type of space is a pseudometric space.

This form is not really an inner product in the common modern definition, because it is not positive definite, only a symmetric bilinear form.

The matrix representation of the symmetric bilinear form that is the Minkowski inner product.

Since that is a symmetric bilinear form, the associated matrix is a symmetric matrix.

By default, we will use the time negative representation unless stated otherwise:but another equivalent one is to use a time positive representation:The matrix is typically denoted by the Greek letter eta.