Would LessWrong readers be interested in an intuitive explanation of special relativity?
Of course any scifi fan knows about Mazer Rackham's very own "There and Back Again." Why does that work? Special relativity!, I hear you say. But what does that actually mean? It probably makes you feel all science-like to say that out loud, but maybe you want a belief more substantial than a password. I did.
Relativity also has philosophical consequences. Metaphysics totally relies on concepts of space and time, yet philosophers don't learn relativity. One of my favorite quotes...
"... in the whole history of science there is no greater example of irony than when Einstein said he did not know what absolute time was, a thing which everyone knew." - J. L. Synge.
If I were to teach relativity to a group of people who were less interested in passing the physics GRE and more interested in actually understanding space and time, I would do things a lot differently from how I learned them. I'd focus on visualizing rather than calculating the Lorenz transforms. I'd focus on the spacetime interval, Minkowski spacetime, and the easy conversion factor between space and time (it's called c).
I love to teach and write and doodle but I'm not sure whether LessWrong is an appropriate forum for this topic. I don't want to dance in an empty or hostile theater dontchaknow.
I think intuitive explanations of physics are awesome. Though, there already seem to be several pretty great ones on the internet for special relativity. For example, see here, here, and here.
Are you aware of these other explanations? What would you do differently/better than them? Maybe there's another topic not as well covered, and you could fill that gap? (These are just rhetorical questions to spark your thinking; no need to actually answer me.)
If you do pursue this project, then do let us know. Best of luck!
(Disclaimer: I'm not a physicist. My univ...
If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post, even in Discussion, it goes here.