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[Phys-l] acceleration in spacetime



Hi --

I wrote up some notes on acceleration in spacetime.

Example: Quick question:
If Moe is moving rapidly relative to the lab frame, and is
undergoing a proper acceleration a (as measured in Moe's frame),
what is the 3-acceleration observed in the lab frame?

http://www.av8n.com/physics/spacetime-acceleration.htm

This is new and may need debugging. Suggestions for how to
improve it are always welcome.


It is intriguing and perhaps pedagogically valuable to compare
my calculation with
http://physics.nmt.edu/~raymond/classes/ph13xbook/node59.html
which is AFAICT fundamentally the same calculation ... but it
sure looks different, due to a different representation of the
key quantities.

FWIW I find the sinh/cosh/rapidity representation clearer.
That's how I was taught.

As always, a true master of the subject should be able to see
things either way, using either representation ... but I really
have to struggle to follow the sqrt(1 - v^2/c^2) representation.
It seems to obscure the geometrical significance of the results.