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Basic Doubts About Light


Guest nakayama

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Constant c falls out of Maxwell's equations. Special relativity follows from constant c. Do the math. There is no ether. Yes, it's strange. Get over it already.

 

Maxwell discovered that his equations describe electric and magnetic fields as propagating at the speed of light, from which he guessed that these fields are light. In fact, maxwell's equations are relativistic to begin with, i.e. lorentz-invariant. Special relativity extends the physical requirement of lorentz-invariance to mechanical systems. To do so however required more than just the postulate that light travels at the same speed at all times in all inertial frames. It required that we postulate that physics be the same in all inertial frames, and it is in fact the combination of these two postulates that sometimes makes special relativity seem a bit odd to people when they first encounter it.

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