Science Forums 2

[UncleAl]

This is a simple thing. You are competent or you are incompetent. Either you understand the math or you do not. It s not a subject properly explored by prose in English class. There is a huge accumulation of mathematically precise interpretations of

Annalen der Physik 4 XVII 891-921 (1905)
http://www.fourmilab.ch/etexts/einstein/specrel/www/

and its one contained error

http://fourmilab.to/etexts/einstein/specrel/specrel.pdf
http://www.geocities.com/physics_wor...1905_error.htm
http://www.physics.gatech.edu/people...relativity.pdf
Longitudinal and transverse mass

http://arXiv.org/abs/gr-qc/0407022
Geometric basis of inertial frames

Special Relativity is physics on a topologically trivial Lorentzian manifold with a metric whose curvature tensor is zero. This is a perfectly diffeomorphism-invariant condition and does not require any particular coordinate choice. It is invariant under the full group of diffeomorphisms. The Poincare group is the group of *isometries* of the metric in special relativity.

The Special Relativity metric is non-dynamical (unlike GR). It defines the coupling constants of your theory. If you change the metric in any nontrivial way you are changing your theory. An operation can only be called a symmetry of a special-relativistic (non-gravitational) theory if it preserves the metric, and therefore the symmetry of special-relativistic theories is the Poincare group only. General Relativity (gravitation) has a dynamic metric.

Stuff like that. Galileo and Newton were wrong. "Common sense" is meaningless as a basis for theory.