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Re: Symmetry in Lorentz transformation equations



At 10:09 PM 9/3/99 +0500, DEVARAKONDA VENKATA NARAYANA SARMA wrote:
I think that Lorentz transformation is not valid for accelerated frames.

The situation is not nearly as bad as that seems to suggest.

It is easy to deal with accelerated reference frames, using the following
trick. At each instant, choose an *instantaneously comoving*
freely-falling reference frame. Do the physics in that frame, and then
move on.

This concept is part and parcel of the notion of rapidity, which provoked
this thread. Consider a spaceship undergoing a constant acceleration: its
rapidity grows linearly with time. This is deeply analogous to a
merry-go-round undergoing steady rotation; it's angle grows linearly with
time.

Since presence of mass is equivalent to accelerated frame,

Huh? I wouldn't have said that. At any given point, an accelerated frame
is equivalent to a gravitational field -- not to a mass _per se_.