Timeline for Speed of light as a universal speed limit
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
8 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| May 29, 2014 at 16:18 | comment | added | bright magus | That's exactly how it always was - from the time of Einstein. Nothing changed. You draw these cones (artificial things for illustration purposes only) based on how light travels. It all follows from the assumption that light travels at $c$ in all frames. | |
| May 29, 2014 at 16:15 | comment | added | doetoe | Not by light, by the speed of light (which is the speed of many other things too). It could be called the speed of a massless particle, the Lorentz-invariant speed, the speed of gravity, etc. | |
| May 29, 2014 at 16:11 | comment | added | bright magus | "The postulate on the invariance of the speed of light...". This is exactly what you call "a special role played a priori" by light. | |
| May 29, 2014 at 15:39 | comment | added | doetoe | The postulate on the invariance of the speed of light implies that under an admissible change of coordinates the light cone is preserved. From this it follows (a theorem by E.C. Zeeman) that admissible changes of coordinates are essentially just Lorentz transformations. Transformations that leave any other speed constant would preserve a different cone in 4-space, and the conclusions on time dilation, Lorentz contraction, causal order etc. hold in a world where the laws of physics don't change under these transformations, with the speed of light replaced by that other speed. | |
| May 29, 2014 at 10:18 | comment | added | bright magus | And how did you arrive at this conclusion? | |
| May 29, 2014 at 10:10 | comment | added | doetoe | Thanks bright magus, but I have to disagree with you. Relativity is a theory of space and time in which light does not a priori play a special role (although historically it did indeed). | |
| May 29, 2014 at 9:42 | history | edited | bright magus | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
added 71 characters in body
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| May 29, 2014 at 9:33 | history | answered | bright magus | CC BY-SA 3.0 |