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Re: rapidities, boosts, and the structure of spacetime (was: specialrelativity: accelerated frames)



Hi,
I would like to thank John for his fine
exposition.
Thanks
Roger Haar

*****************************************
"John S. Denker" wrote:

About a year ago there was some discussion of how to
handle accelerated frames using special relativity.

I posed the following puzzle:
Suppose an interstellar spaceship starts from rest, and
accelerates such that the passengers feel one Gee (980 gal)
for one year. How fast are they going at the end of the year?

You can solve this puzzle in less time than it takes to
state it, if you understand a few things about the structure
of spacetime. I wrote up a discussion:
http://www.monmouth.com/~jsd/physics/rapidity.htm

There are some really deep ideas involved, but once you learn to
trust the formalism it is easy to remember and easy to use. I
don't even bother to remember the Lorentz transformation in terms
of square roots or anything like that -- the formulation in terms
of rapidity is incomparably easier to remember.