The foray into target practice showed that the shooter's forward motion

along the intended path didn't alter light's forward speed.

This is one example of the impact of Einstein's first assumption on the
constancy of the speed of light.
And it's not the only such example.
Consider sideways motion.
You're in a rainstorm with an umbrella.
Typically, the droplets fall with terminal velocity of 10 to 30 meters a
second on account of air resistance.
This is the reason you test Galileo's prediction about the free-fall of a
feather on the moon.
So standing still under an umbrella, you see the rain fall
directly from overhead.
On the left panel, you see an umbrella, the horizontal black line,
and the rain falling vertically.
Sprinting to get indoors as quickly as possible gives us the
picture on the right.
The rain now appears to come from a position in front of you, assuming you
run forward.
In your new frame, the raindrops' motion includes the original vertical
component plus an extra horizontal contribution from your running.
In fact, probably without giving it much thought, you tilt the umbrella to
maximize the protection of your face.
It will now point in the direction of the falling rain.
How does the sideways motion of an observer change the motion of light?
For an astronomer, the raindrops are photons from a distant star.
The umbrella is the telescope.
And the adjustment you make to keep the umbrella pointed in the direction
of the falling rain is the change in the star's position on the sky.
The position on the sky is the angle of the star.
Motion-induced change in that position is called aberration.
What about the astronomical analog of standing still and then running?
Is there one?
Actually, there are many.
The most noticeable one is just the Earth's annual orbital
motion about the sun.
There are a whole host of other motions, the spin of the Earth, the
motion of the sun through the galaxy, the motion of the
galaxy through the universe.
They're all similar qualitatively, though not quantitatively.

he scene above shows the edge-on solar system. This is the frame of the Sun, the Sun is at rest. A
very distant star happens to lie in the direction perpendicular to the orbital plane of the Earth. This
is a special choice Ive made to illustrate the idea most clearly. Photons, the wavy lines, arrive from
the star; its so distant that the direction is the same as viewed from anywhere in the Suns frame
(there is no parallax). Gravitys effect on the photon is ignored.
In the picture, the Earth is moving in its orbit. It is running through a photon rain storm. Now, what
does this picture look like in the Earth frame? From what direction does the photon arrive at an
Earth-bound telescope at, say, the North pole? Below are two interpretations of how the photon
moves, Galileo on the left and Einstein on the right. They are NOT the same.

The horizontal arrow that appears in the two pictures shows the effect of the Earths motion (equal
to the Suns motion in the Earth frame). Now, according to Galileo, the total photon velocity is a
vector with two perpendicular components, one is the vertical velocity, labeled c; thats the same
vertical velocity the photon had in the Suns frame. The other is the horizontal component, labeled
v. Galileo knows the two legs of the left triangle. The magnitude of the velocity in the Earth frame
is the length of the hypotenuse of the triangle calculated according to Pythagoras theorem [Math
Processing Error]. The line is dotted because Galileo infers the speed of the photon in the Earth
frame by vector addition.

According to Einstein the speed of the photon is ALWAYS c, so the hypotenuse must be c. He
agrees with Galileo on the horizontal velocity. Comparing the two pictures, Einstein labels a leg and
the hypotenuse and infers the other leg. The aberration is the green angle. The two triangles are
different, so the angle (brown vs green) will also be different. The differences are quite tiny,
however, because they involve the ratio of the Earths velocity to the speed of light.
The linked video silently reviews the relationship between legs and hypothenuse for skinny
triangles. It applies the results to find the small angle of aberration for the photon in the picture.
That angle is as small as the width of fishing line at 10 meters. It reviews the relationship
between radians, degrees, arcminutes and arcseconds. It shows that the typical aberration is about
20 arcsec for the Earth's motion about the Sun.
Understanding aberration was one of the important stimuli for Einsteins development of Special
Relativity. His assumption that the speed of light was constant for all observers automatically made
his theory consistent with the experiments. Is Einsteins aberration ever so much different than
Galileos that its observable in astronomy? Yes. Whenever, sources or observers move at relativistic
velocities with respect to each other the difference becomes large and Einsteins version must be
used. Its also called the headlight or beaming effect, which we'll explore further in later
subsections.

Lorentz contraction
Now lets explore another seemingly magical phenomenon the Lorentz contraction. To do this we
will examine how viewers in two different frames measure the length of a moving object. One way
to measure length is to compare the two ends of a ruler to the two ends of an object AT THE SAME
TIME.
When simultaneity fails, distance measurements are compromised.
Say a train rider (he) decides to measure the length of a train carriage under the watchful eyes of a
ground observer (she). He sets up a flashbulb exactly in the middle of the car. He and his assistant
on the train will measure the ends of a tape measure at the same time. In his lab AT THE SAME
TIME will be based on the arrival of the light pulse from the flashbulb. The bulb goes off, the
readings are taken at both ends and he and his assistant calculate the length.
What does this look like to the observer on the GROUND? How would this observer critique the
attempt? In her frame she sees photons emitted from the center of the car; since the train moves
forward while the photon is in motion, she sees the photon moving towards the rear strike first; later
the second photon strikes the front. She might remark, The rulers ends are not being used AT THE
SAME TIME. The ruler moved forward during the measurement. I dont trust your result!
Previous
Next

Exploring the law of velocity addition: Pitching practice for

Einstein and Galileo
When working with normal, everyday velocities (those much slower than the speed of light), the
velocities of moving objects in different reference frames add. For example, if we look at Galileo
shooting a gun from a moving train, the velocity ( ) of the bullet that we observe standing on the
ground is the sum of the velocity of the bullet (
relative to the gun) plus the velocity of the train
( ) with respect to the ground. This is expressed mathematically as:

Recall that velocities are calculated as change in distance

divided by change in time
. Now
lets explore what happens to
when the velocities
and approach the speed of light.

Pillars of the cosmology:

Universe is expanding (Hubble law).
Thermal radiation fills the Universe (Cosmic Microwave Background).
Night sky is dark (Olber's paradox).
The pillars are distinct observations that have guided the development of Big Bang cosmology. In
addition, there are some general synthetic results, accumulated with much work, that underlie most
modern investigations:
The Universe is homogeneous and isotropic on large scales.
The Universe is filled with a variety of different material components and these are
connected to its dynamics.
Some of the components we know well: nuclei that make up ordinary matter (baryonic matter),
charged particles (electrons), weakly interacting stuff (neutrinos) and photons. Other components
are more mysterious. Some stuff behaves like normal matter by exerting gravitational forces and
clustering but is invisible (dark matter). Other stuff is very unlike normal matter, is repulsive and is
invisible (dark energy).

A neW PILLAR??
News flash from the frontier: March 17, 2014
The BICEP2 team has announced the detection of primordial gravitational waves from an
experiment looking at the polarization of the cosmic microwave background radiation. There are
many implications but, in the context of inflation, the generation of detectable gravitational waves
implies that the energy scale of inflation is only about two orders of magnitude less than the Planck
scale. This one observation probes physics at energy scales at least a dozen orders of magnitude
higher than the most powerful accelerator to date. It provides support for efforts to unify gravity and
quantum mechanics and identifies a characteristic energy scale for the unification.

Liam McAllister discusses the significance of the discovery in the blog Reference Frame.
Lets consider the following experiment: force free, indestructible particles are monitored at a
variety of times. Assume the comoving position is constant for each particle. For example, the
comoving coordinate interval between two radially separated particles is
. The physical
distance between the two points is
. We are interested in how the number density of
particles varies as the universe expands or contracts. Add a box of fixed physical size and count the
number of particles per physical volume to track the number density.