Postulates of Special Relativity

(Lecture: 15 minutes)

See §2.1 and §2.2 of the text.

Reflections

The key point of this lecture is that, since the speed of light appears explicitly in Maxwell's equations, the only way for those equations to be valid in all “good” reference frames is for the speed of light to be independent of reference frame.

The moving train examples provide memorable insight into how this behavior differs from Newtonian expectations.


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