The Impact of Special Relativity on Theoretical Physics
DOI: 10.1063/1.881108
As one of my colleagues put it, “Asking about the impact of special relativity on theoretical physics is like asking about the impact of Shakespeare on the English language.” An impossibly large, even senseless, task. Special relativity is a fact of life, part and parcel of the way nature is. If its impact on everyday life is slight, its impact on physicists’ thinking is profound. Space and universal, inexorable time were rudely united into space‐time by Albert Einstein’s discovery of special relativity. Explorations of the properties of space‐time, of the covariance of physical laws, and of the physical invariants of nature, together with quantum mechanics, led to the formulation of relativistic quantum field theories. The external symmetries of space‐time were augmented by abstract spaces for internal symmetries corresponding to invariant (conserved) quantities such as isospin, strangeness and charm. The whole worldview of modern theoretical physics can be traced back to the fundamental postulate or idea that physical phenomena do not change just because you happen to be moving by, instead of standing still, when observing them. Rotations and other transformations in internal spaces have replaced “moving by,” but the idea is the same.
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More about the Authors
J. David Jackson. University of California, Berkeley.
