Yesterday I received an email with a very interesting question about Einstein’s lightclock. Why do we assume that light in a moving lightclock travels a longer distance than in a clock that stands still? If we throw a ball into the air in a moving train, it falls down vertically, right? Why is that different for a clock? This is a great question! It helps us realise what it actually means to say that things happen in absolute space (as Newton believed).
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Euclid’s parallel Postulate
Non-Euclidean Geometry
Today I started a lecture series about Einstein’s relativity theories. I started explaining things about basic geometry, so we talked about the postulate of the parallels first described by Euclid of Alexandria: if you draw a straight line on a piece of paper (l in the image on the right) and a point (p in the image) next to it, then there can be only one straight line through this point which does not intersect the line we started with (the dashed line) – there is only one parallel.
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Is information physical?
Recently I visited a conference at the university of Delft dedicated to quantum technology and philosophy. Among physicists working with quantum information, it has become more and more fashionable in the past few decades to say that information is physical. Is that a sensible claim?
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Hoe de Riemann tensor gekromde ruimte beschrijft
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Reader bij cursus Theorieën van Alles
Van het oude Griekenland tot de Zwitserse deeltjesversneller CERN – al millennia probeert de mensheid een theorie te bedenken die het hele universum beschrijft.
In deze cursus van de Vrije Universiteit te Amsterdam neem ik u mee op een wervelende reis langs de kopstukken en sleutelmomenten die deze zoektocht hebben vormgegeven, die ver voor de moderne wetenschap begint.
We zullen zien dat we de paradoxen van Zeno kunnen beschouwen als voorloper van de relativiteit van Galileo en zelfs Einstein, terwijl discussies tussen Plato en Aristoteles relevant zijn voor bewijs voor de snaartheorie, één van de meest kansrijke kandidaten voor de Theorie van Alles.
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Logica & Wiskunde
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