Module 3: Special and General Relativity
12 videos • 1,728 views • by Jason Kendall Join this channel to get access to perks: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCdnM... This is part of Module 3 of 14 which details an entire online introductory college course. This video series was used at William Paterson University and CUNY Hunter in online classes as well as to supplement course material. In this lecture series, we start with Michael Faraday and James Clerk Maxwell finalizing and culminating the wave theory of light. Faraday gives us our best picture of how light "looks" and Maxwell gives us the four equations that unify electricity, magnetism, and light. Also, we check in on Hershel's discovery of infrared, and other wavelengths of light. Next, we ask what is the speed of light? What do the waves of light travel in? What do we know about how light gets here from there? The answers are even more puzzling. In this one, we learn that the waves of light can still be waves, even if they don't actually "wave" anything. Nature starts to show us just how strange she is. Third, we check in on an oddity. Once upon a time, there was classical physics. It had Galilean Relativity, Newtonian Mechanics, and Maxwell's Laws of Electromagnetism. But, these three things, while wildly successful, did not fit together at all. Let's see why. Next, we chat about the postulates of Special Relativity, and three of its main implications: desynchronization of clocks, time dilation, and length contraction. Then we detail the effects of time dilation, length contraction, and clock desynchronization. We also chat about muon decay which demonstrates this effect. In the next lecture, General Relativity arises out of our need to reconcile the issues of Newtonian Gravity. It has some problems that only rethinking Gravity can solve. After this, we start to see why General Relativity is one of the most successful theories of Physics. It helps us give a mechanism to gravity and allows for testable predictions. We'll chat about the Correspondence Principle, The Equivalence Principle, inertial versus gravitational mass, and the nature of spacetime curvature and how it's measured. We'll chat about various tests of general relativity, and how they showed that it's the best explanation so far for the nature of space, time, and gravity. For the next lecture, we see General Relativity’s many interesting results. In this first of two, I try to show how we can more intuitively understand what the curvature of spacetime means. In this one, we look at the Equivalence Principle and show how it requires that light's path is bent according to a distant observer, but if you're falling along with the light, the path looks straight to you. Next, we chat about how light is redshifted as it rises out of a gravity well, and how time runs slower in a gravity well compared to clocks far away. We also dare to ask "into where does space curve.” As a coda to this series, we discuss the nature of the tides and what causes them. We directly counter an extremely stupid ex-television host: the tides do come in, and they do go out, and yes, we can explain them. Finally, we play around by asking what happens when you go faster than light? Can you go faster than light? (well, no, but let's chat anyway). And how do we know that we can't go faster than light? Why does going faster than light mean traveling into the past? Supplement the videos with "OpenStax Astronomy", 24: Black Holes and Curved Spacetime: https://openstax.org/books/astronomy/...