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Routledge eBooks

The Special Theory of Relativity

David Böhm

Published Sep 2, 2003• 158 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Based on his famous final year undergraduate lectures on theoretical physics at Birkbeck College, Bohm presents the theory of relativity as a unified whole, making clear the reasons which led to its adoption and explaining its basic meaning. With clarity and grace, he also reveals the limited truth of some of the "common sense" assumptions which make it difficult for us to appreciate its full implications.With a new foreword by Basil Hiley, a close colleague of David Bohm's, The Special Theory of Relativity is an indispensable addition to the work of one of greatest physicists and thinkers of the twentieth century.

DOI
10.4324/9780203203866

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Based on his famous final year undergraduate lectures on theoretical physics at Birkbeck College, Bohm presents the theory of relativity as a unified whole, making clear the reasons which led to its adoption and explaining its basic meaning. With clarity and grace, he also reveals the limited truth of some of the "common sense" assumptions which make it difficult for us to appreciate its full implications.With a new foreword by Basil Hiley, a close colleague of David Bohm's, The Special Theory of Relativity is an indispensable addition to the work of one of greatest physicists and thinkers of the twentieth century.
Albert Einstein and relativity If I were to ask a number of people in the street what they think was the most important new theory in physics in the twentieth century, and who has been the greatest physicist, I am fairly sure that – of those able to express an opinion at all – a substantial majority would say that relativity has been the greatest theory, and Einstein the greatest physicist. Indeed Albert Einstein has probably achieved the remarkable feat of not just becoming the best-known practitioner of any branch of science among the general public, but retaining that position for 85 years, 50 of those years since his death in 1955. It was in 1905, when he was 26, that Einstein astonished the scientific community by producing four pieces of work of the very highest quality. These included his first paper on relativity, in which he introduced what is now called the special theory of relativity (a term I shall explain in Chapter 3). The three other papers will be referred to in due course. What was astonishing was not just the quality of the work, but that the author was not an academic of note, or even of promise, but was working as a patent inspector after rather a mediocre student career. (A recent pleasantly written biography of Einstein is that of Abraham Pais [1], himself a well-known physicist; Pais gives references to many other accounts of Einstein's life. Another, more recent, biography is that by Fölsing [2].
There are few scientists of the twentieth century whose life's work has created more excitement and controversy than that of physicist David Bohm (1917-1992). For the first time in a single volume, The Essential David Bohm offers a comprehensive overview of Bohm's original works from a non-technical perspective. Including three chapters of previously unpublished material, and a forward by the Dalai Lama, each reading has been selected to highlight some aspect of the implicate order process, and to provide an introduction to one of the most provocative thinkers of our time.
Written for advanced undergraduates, physicists, and historians and philosophers of physics, this book tells the story of the development of our understanding of quantum phenomena through the extraordinary years of the first three decades of the twentieth century. Rather than following the standard axiomatic approach, this book adopts a historical perspective, explaining clearly and authoritatively how pioneers such as Heisenberg, Schrodinger, Pauli and Dirac developed the fundamentals of quantum mechanics and merged them into a coherent theory, and why the mathematical infrastructure of quantum mechanics has to be as complex as it is. The author creates a compelling narrative, providing a remarkable example of how physics and mathematics work in practice. The book encourages an enhanced appreciation of the interaction between mathematics, theory and experiment, helping the reader gain a deeper understanding of the development and content of quantum mechanics than any other text at this level.
David Bohm is one of the foremost scientific thinkers of today and one of the most distinguished scientists of his generation. His challenge to the conventional understanding of quantum theory has led scientists to reexamine what it is they are going and his ideas have been an inspiration across a wide range of disciplines. Quantum Implications is a collection of original contributions by many of the world' s leading scholars and is dedicated to David Bohm, his work and the issues raised by his ideas. The contributors range across physics, philosophy, biology, art, psychology, and include some of the most distinguished scientists of the day. There is an excellent introduction by the editors, putting Bohm's work in context and setting right some of the misconceptions that have persisted about the work of David Bohm
In the beginning of the twentieth century, there occurred a surge in both the experimental data acquired and the theories proposed to explain the sometimes “unexpected” data. With the formulation of the Special Theory of Relativity by Albert Einstein in 1905, the “quantum hypothesis” by Planck in 1900, and the development of quantum theory in the 1920s and 1930s, modern physics was created. This veritable explosion of data and theory led to an entirely new and different perception of the laws of nature and the way physical systems behave.