Drawing the Line Between Kinematics and Dynamics
| Abstract | I defend the widely held view challenged by Harvey Brown in his recent book that special relativity is preferable to those parts of Lorentz’s electron theory it replaced because various phenomena that special relativity reveals to be of purely kinematical origin were given a dynamical explanation in Lorentz’s theory. The phenomena most commonly discussed in this context in the philosophical literature are length contraction and time dilation. I consider three other such phenomena that played a role in the early reception of special relativity in the physics community: the Fresnel drag effect in the Fizeau experiment, the velocity dependence of electron mass in the -ray deflection.. | |||||||||
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Similar books and articlesAmit Hagar (2008). Length Matters: The Einstein–Swann Correspondence and the Constructive Approach to the Special Theory of Relativity. Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics 39 (3):532-556.
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Harvey R. Brown & Oliver Pooley (2001). The Origins of the Spacetime Metric: Bell's Lorentzian Pedagogy and its Significance in General Relativity. In Craig Callender & Nick Huggett (eds.), Physics Meets Philosophy at the Plank Scale. Cambridge University Press.
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