On Mon, Jul 6, 2020 at 2:36 AM Alan Grayson <[email protected]> wrote:
*> For laws of physics to exist, they must be independent of coordinate > system.* That statement *IS* the Equivalence Principle, it's just using different language, and Einstein passionately thought it was true, but there were some instances where it didn't seem to be. For example, if there was no limit on how fast you could move and the speed of causality was infinite then you could move at the speed of light alongside a light beam and if you looked at the light beam you would see that it consisted of a unmoving standing wave of electric and magnetic fields; but that's *NOT* what Maxwell's equations says it should ever look like. So Maxwell's equation, a very important law of physics, would NOT be independent of the coordinate system. Einstein was just about the only one who was bothered by this and so he worked on the problem and in 1905 he found the solution, at least for Maxwell's equations, he found a way to make them true regardless of the coordinate system. But doing the same thing for gravity was far far more difficult, he concentrated on the problem for 10 years after that so hard he got sick, lost 60 pounds and nearly died, but eventually he found a tensor to describe how objects move through space-time and a tensor to describe how mass curved space-time. And so with those tensors gravity became independent of the coordinate system too *> I don't see what the EP has to do with this, * I do. John K Clark -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/CAJPayv2g_HMK-mJJSP88JKq8D8ZGeRU7mDet_aKto_YMvyue4w%40mail.gmail.com.
