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69

The Foucault pendulum is a great experiment which does demonstrate that the Earth is rotating, but it was only introduced in 1851. The Earth had been known to rotate for several centuries before that, probably stimulated by Copernicus and Galileo pushing the heliocentric model of the solar system during the 16th century. A couple of decades before Faucalt's ...

61

This is a very good question. Einstein himself, in a 1907 review (available in translation as Am. J. Phys. 45, 512 (1977), e.g. here), and Planck, one year later, assumed the first and second law of thermodynamics to be covariant, and derived from that the following transformation rule for the temperature: $$T' = T/\gamma, \quad \gamma = \sqrt{1/(1-v^2/c^2)}... 54 Foucault pendulum. I don't know how the ancients did it, but it is surely pure classical mechanics. The animation describes the motion of a Foucault Pendulum at a latitude of 30°N. 54 Due to momentum being conserved, when you accelerate yourself forwards relative to the plane, the tangential force you're applying to the floor will accelerate the rest of the plane backwards. Since the plane has a lot more mass than you, its velocity will not change by very much. Thus, an inertial observer who was initially at rest with respect to the ... 53 Key point in your quote is: "from protons reference frame". In the reference frame, travelling at a relativistic speed, length contraction is experienced. All the lengths in the direction of travel of the particle are contracted by Lorentz factor:$$ l'=\frac{l}{\gamma} \gamma = \frac{1}{\sqrt{1- \frac{v^2}{c^2}}}$$So  \gamma = \frac{1}{\sqrt{1-(0.... 50 Imagine two donut-shaped spaceships meeting in deep space. Further, suppose that when a passenger in ship A looks out the window, they see ship B rotating clockwise. That means that when a passenger in B looks out the window, they see ship A rotating clockwise as well (hold up your two hands and try it!). From pure kinematics, we can't say "ship A is ... 44 It's not a mechanism so much as a misconception of the nature of space (and its relationship to time): at low velocities, everything looks linear and Euclidean so we assume it is, but in reality it is not (as can be determined by appropriate experiments). It's kind of like asking by what mechanism you can reach something to your west by traveling east: if ... 36 Kinetic energy is not invariant under Galilean transformations. To see this consider the following: In the rest frame of the plane you apply a force F of 100N for one second to accelerate yourself to 1 m/s. During this time you move a distance d of 0.5m so the work done is:$$ W = Fd = 100 \times 0.5 = 50\,\text{J} $$This of course is equal to your ... 33 The centre of mass of the binary system cannot move because there are no external forces acting. The line joining the two stars must always pass through the centre of mass, because by definition the centre of mass lies on the line between the two stars. That means the two stars must orbit with the same period. If their periods weren't the same they could ... 32 No. Relative to Earth your bus will have (almost) zero length, so moving from back to the front of the bus will contribute nothing to your speed relative to Earth. 30 Velocity is relative. There is no special reference frame that would be "at rest". But acceleration is not and was never claimed to be. Reference frames in free fall are special and reference frames that are accelerating relative to the ones in free fall contain inertial forces (circular motion involves acceleration towards the centre; the corresponding ... 28 What keeps a bicycle up is a variety of things, but it all comes down to the front wheel, which can move left/right. The bike is always out of balance, and if it starts to fall to the left you unconsciously turn to the left, which moves the point of support (the wheel on the surface) to the left, which arrests the fall and may start the bike falling to the ... 27 Yes, kinetic energy is a relative quantity. As you might guess, this means that when you're using energy conservation, you have to stay within a single frame of reference; all that energy conservation tells you is that the amount of energy as measured in any one frame stays the same over time. You can't meaningfully compare the amount of energy measured in ... 24 yes, you may describe the motion from any reference frame, including the geocentric one, assuming that you add the appropriate "fictitious" forces (centrifugal, Coriolis, and so on). But the special property of the reference frame associated with the Sun - more precisely, with the barycenter (center of mass) of the Solar System, which is just a solar radius ... 24 Imagine a slightly different scenario: two pilots, Alice, and Bob, are in their spaceships. They move towards a tunnel of length L at a velocity v, and remain a distance l' apart. Alice is closest to the tunnel and thus enters first, approaching a wall at the end of the length of the tunnel. Just as Bob enters he decelerates, coming quickly to a halt ... 23 There was no problem with electromagnetism. The problem was that Maxwell's equations are invariant under Lorentz transformations but are not invariant under Galileo transformations whereas the equations of classical mechanics can be easily made invariant under Galileo transformations. The question was: how to reconcile both in a universe in which Maxwell's ... 20 Mach's principle has influenced Einstein but the final formulation of general relativity as of 1916 clearly invalidates Mach's conjecture. According to Mach's principle, motion - including accelerating and rotating one - may only be defined relatively to other objects. That would imply that there can't exist any gravitational waves. However, general ... 19 In physics, it is often implicitly assumed that the Lagrangian L=L(q^i,v^i,t) depends smoothly on the (generalized) positions q^i, velocities v^i, and time t, i.e. that the Lagrangian L is a differentiable function. Let us now assume that the Lagrangian is of the form$$L~=~\ell(v^2),\qquad\qquad v~:=~|\vec{v}|,\qquad\qquad(1) where $\ell$ is a ...

19

By the principle of relativity, you will not fall over – assuming that you know how to use the bike and you won't be deliberately "confused". The principle says that the laws of physics have the same form in all inertial frames that are moving by a constant velocity relatively to each other. The reference frame associated with the moving sidewalk is as good ...

18

This is indeed a Big Question; you have essentially stumbled into Mach's principle. For an even more bewildering version: suppose that in that bit of intergalactic space, you have two spherical objects, which are rotating relative to each other about their separation axis, with the distant stars stationary with respect to object 1. Our current ...

17

I think the Foucault pendulum is the best answer, but for the sake of variety I'll add another very interesting one: the equatorial bulge affecting the figure of the Earth. This is the "pancaking" of the planet due to its rotation. You can measure the geometry of the Earth without leaving its surface, and find that it is bulging in accord with your ...

17

This is the fundamental postulate of special relativity: Light (in vacuum) moves at the same speed no matter what you measure it relative to. Pretty much everything in SR is just a mater of figuring out the deductive consequences of this basic fact. It is an experimental fact that it is so, and it was so even before Einstein -- in particular, light had ...

16

Newton's second law says $F = ma$. Now if we put $F = 0$ we get $a = 0$ which is Newton's first law. So why do we need Newton's first law? I don't think this is obvious from Newton's statement of the Second Law. In his Principia Mathematica, Newton says that a force causes an acceleration. Without the first law, this doesn't necessarily imply that zero ...

16

While we may not be able to define a universal rest frame (Galilean invariance), we can still tell when frames are non-inertial. A spinning frame of reference is non-inertial, and thus there are non-inertial forces that arise, which we have ascribed to being "fictitious," which means that they are not fundamental, but rather a poor choice of reference. If we ...

14

Anything related to the Coriolis effect (some pretty pictures can be found in the link), i.e. even cannons will be (not precisely, rather seem) deflected because of the earth's rotation.

14

An indirect indication that the Earth rotates is the fact that the rotation varies over time. First of all, the orientation of the Earth's axis changes: long-term effects like precession and slow variations in the axial tilt, as well as small short-term variations like nutation. Precession was already known in the Ancient world (Hipparchus, Ptolemy,...) and ...

14

One thing to note is observing something's temperature and thermodynamic notions of temperature aren't exactly the same thing. This is in line with @Mattia 's answer. If a star is receding form you then it will appear cooler because its radiation has been red-shifted. Does this mean that there can be a net flow of heat from us to the star (provided it's ...

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