CHAT: More relativity

> Date:         Tue, 12 Nov 2002 06:38:50 -0000
> From: Lars Henrik Mathiesen <thorinn@...>
>
> (And to be even more modern, your E is the Minkowski norm of the
> energy-momentum four-vector, and in the particle view the energy
> component is again m c^2).
Sorry, I got that turned around. The 'relativistic energy' E is the
timewise component of the energy-momentum four-vector, whose invariant
norm is E_0 = m_0 c^2 --- and in the modern view it is only the latter
quantity that is physically interesting, the former is nothing but an
artifact of your coordinate system.

If this is linguistically relevant, it's only to show how specialist
sublanguages can change faster than the traces they leave in the
general language; something that is still a well-known thruth in the
popular view may have become false, or at least technically incorrect,
to the specialist.

Lars Mathiesen (U of Copenhagen CS Dep) <thorinn@...> (Humour NOT marked)