#general-relativity

Frame-dragging may explain an odd pattern seen in the brightest supernovae.

Magnetars drag spacetime to power superluminous supernovae

Hop in with me, a time machine we ride, Intent on chasing space-time concepts wild, To fathom Einstein’s insights into Reality, In his Special and General Relativity.

Like Wordsworth, a lonely cloud wandering,[2] Through space and time we will be winging, Not to appreciate the “daffodils” of Nature; But to understand Nature’s Architecture.

We start with Special Relativity; We’ll meet the strangest thing in memory; It is the constancy of the speed of light; Scientists puzzled with all their might.

The fact is contrary to our expectations; Scientists tried all sorts of explanations; For such a strange behaviour, Unsatisfactory were all conjectures.

The constancy of the speed of light, Is not an ordinary fact, in hindsight; Indeed, it is an intrinsic, primary behaviour; Unexplainable by other features of Nature.

Common sense, which includes us all, Treats this fact of light to be as usual; Instead, with “uncommon” sense, Einstein saw The constancy of the speed of light is Nature’s Law.

From this, Einstein deduced strange consequences; On elements, like time and space, in our experiences: The key components in the design of the Cosmos, The topics in Book I, in detail we will discuss.

We cannot get over this feeling strange; In mind, we yield; yet our intuition, unmoved, remains; A dog can never comprehend Quantum Mechanics;[3] It’s hard: our intuitive understanding has its limits.

We then move on to General Relativity; Einstein’s theory on the phenomenon of gravity; For ten years after Special Relativity, he struggled; Between confidence and misgivings, he wobbled.

A key idea inspired his imagination: letting go in gravity; One banishes gravity, by yielding to it completely! Einstein says, it is his life’s happiest thought; The field equation was the culmination of his effort.

Say, we jump out a window; we are “weightless”; However, Tidal Gravity remains; as we will see, this is What Einstein eventually realized: the Spacetime Curvature; on this, in Book II, we will spend our time.

We’ll be discussing implications and impacts too: such as, What do the two theories, reveal about the Cosmos? Facts of Nature and theories: what is their connection? What do the theories imply, on the mind-Nature relation?

With the map of what’s ahead laid out, A ready mind and a heart so stout, And each a seat in the time machine, It is time for our journey to begin…

About the author

Feliciano Bantilan lives in Hyderabad, India with his career-busy wife, home-bound due to Parkinson's; free from the usual distractions, his mind turns time into writings in poetry and prose. So far, he has published three books. 

He earned his PhD in Physics from Duke University, USA in 1983.

Authors: Fabrizio Canfora, Francisco Correa, Alex Giacomini, Julio Oliva

Authors: Liu Zhao, Wei Xu, Pengfei Yu

Authors: Biju Patla

An approximate analytical formula for the capacitance of a non-parallel plate capacitor with small values of inclination angles and distance separations of the plates is presented. Most applications involving position sensing that are employed in precision experiments and micromechanical devices often use a parallel plate approximation for modeling the capacitance. The analytical approximation presented here is based on the more general, but hard to implement formalism for small angles, and that may be used directly to compute the forces acting on the proof masses by taking the derivative of the capacitance.

Authors: Saskia Grunau, Valeria Kagramanova, Jutta Kunz, Claus Lämmerzahl