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Full-Text Articles in Physics
Background, 2, David Peak
Background, 2, David Peak
Background
Ordinary, everyday, Galilean/Newtonian relativity
An “event” is something that happens at a point in space, at an instant in time. In physics, relativity means the rules by which two observers can compare and make sense of measurements each makes of the positions and times of the same events. In physics, an observer is not a person or an individual measuring device. Such isolated “detectors” are plagued by experimental issues of parallax, delay times, and so forth. For our purposes, an observer will always mean an infinite collection of rigidly attached, perfect sensors and microprocessors whose internal clocks are perfectly synchronized. …
History Graph, David Peak
Late History Graph, David Peak
Background, 1, David Peak
Background, 1, David Peak
Background
This course deals with the structure of matter at its extreme length scales: cosmological on the large end (on the order of 1026 m), sub-nuclear on the small (less than 10-19 m). It also deals with the now firmly established realization that the organization of matter on these two phenomenally different scales is actually intimately connected. This course is about science in its most alive and vibrant state: what we think we know about the big and small of the universe changes virtually daily. Satellite observatories and ground-based particle accelerators make what was formerly “common knowledge” obsolete at a rapid …