Quite surprisingly, you just need ordinary algebra, no calculus, no tensors to scare the hell out of you.
Enjoy.
http://soi.blogspot.ca/2013/06/einstein ... ation.html (http://soi.blogspot.ca/2013/06/einsteins-derivation-of-famous-equation.html)
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Quote from: "Solitary"8-) I'm in awe of your abstract thinking. =D>
The credit goes to Einstein. Remarkably he derived his equation without any math wizardry. When I first learned it was through tensors calculus, now called differential geometry. And the derivation was much shorter, but that's only because we had spent three to four weeks developping the math formalism. Einstein did it with simple math but with a lot of physical insight.
QuoteWhy did you leave, if you visit? Bill
Let bygones be bygones.
The Rick Copeland thought Einstein started coming up with it in his youth when he was wondering what a beam of light would look like if he ran at the speed of light-- or something along those lines...
Yes, he did dream a lot in his teens -- no school, on his own all day, everyday. But he did not formalize his idea until after graduation. Because he had spent some much unstructured time, he couldn't attend any classes during his years at the university. He would ask his friends what was covered on a typical day, then go and study on his own. As a result, when he graduated, no teachers would give references, so he was shut out from academia. But he got a job as a patent officer for the Swiss government. That's where he developped all his ideas, including time dilation, length contraction, and E = mc[sup:1usns1av]2[/sup:1usns1av]. And the rest is history.
Quote from: "josephpalazzo"But he got a job as a patent officer for the Swiss government.
Slight correction - clerk at the patent office.
Nit-pick•ist
I thought I should bump this thread up. Some people in this forum have weird ideas about Special Relativity. The surprising derivation of E=mc[sup:7jpuxz9e]2[/sup:7jpuxz9e] is that Einstein looked at a decaying particle from two different observers: one at rest, the other moving with velocity V. By calculating the total energy and then the kinetic energy from these two inertial frames, he concluded the only the way this could make sense is that some of the mass of the decaying particle had to be converted to energy according to E=mc[sup:7jpuxz9e]2[/sup:7jpuxz9e].
EDIT: note that if one wants to understand certain concepts in physics, it is by going through the derivations of these from basic principles. People who don't have the mathematical background to deal with these concepts can only have a superficial understanding.
http://soi.blogspot.ca/2013/06/einstein ... ation.html (http://soi.blogspot.ca/2013/06/einsteins-derivation-of-famous-equation.html)
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