special relativity

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From: Paul Doherty (pauld@exploratorium.edu)
Date: Tue May 03 2005 - 21:31:54 PDT 

Message-Id: <713D2F1F-BC55-11D9-BDED-000A95B38012@exploratorium.edu>
From: Paul Doherty <pauld@exploratorium.edu>
Subject: special relativity
Date: Tue, 3 May 2005 21:31:54 -0700

Hi Pinholers

Tom Humphrey and I will be doing an Exploratorium web page on Special
relativity.

What topics would you and your students like us to explore on the web
page, we can do animations, we can explore real data.

Did you know that experimenters measured the speed of light emitted by
pions that were traveling at 0.99975 c and found that the speed of
light in the forward and backward directions was c!

That in 1971 an atomic clock was flown around the earth twice once to
the east and then to the west and confirmed the predictions of time
dilation due to speed of the plane and gravitational time dilation due
to general relativity. It flew coach class on a commercial 707
airliner.

That GPS locations on the earth would drift off by 1.5 miles per day
due to time dilation due to the speed of the moving atomic clocks in
the GPS satellites orbiting the earth (There is an even larger term due
to general relativity the two terms together would produce a 7 mile
error or 35,000 nanosecond error every day.

We can use your questions to help us build a great site.

Paul D

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