Chambers, Robert (UK) wrote:
This is a common misconception, but it's wrong.
With "classical" special relativity, such as Einstein laid out in his
1905 Electrodynamics paper, one must explicitly add the "clocks
hypothesis", which states that clocks are unaffected by
acceleration.
Once you've done that, however, you can analyze acceleration with no
further problems. (The "clocks hypothesis" has also been
experimentally
verified, by the way.)
To clarify a little (I'm not an expert, I've merely followed Dr Evans' reasoning on
this), his paper states "The rotational motion implies the use of general
relativity...the latter theory [SR] does not deal with the accelerations automatically
introduced by *rotation*" (emphasis mine). So it appears that having a theory which
can adequately cope with *rotational* acceleration (not just linear) is the important
thing.
There's no difference, really; acceleration's acceleration. See
previous email -- either sort of acceleration can be dealt with in SR,
but only by choosing an inertial coordinate system in which to analyze
the behavior of the accelerating object.
And neither sort can be dealt with _completely_ by using SR alone. In
particular, a uniformly rotating disk which is made arbitrarily large
will be found to exceed C at a sufficiently large diameter, and a
uniformly accelerating object which is moving linearly will be found to
have an event horizon somewhere if you extend it far enough "to the
back" (assuming it's accelerating toward the "front"). These are
phenomena which SR doesn't handle at all well.
Dr Evans believes that GR satisfies this condition.
I found this on the clock hypothesis:
http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/Relativity/SR/experiments.html#5.%20Twin%20paradox
Rob
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