Please provide a rating, it takes seconds and helps us to keep this resource free for all to use
Welcome to our Physics lesson on The Newtonian System and Speed of Light. The Pseudo-Theory of "Cosmic Ether", this is the fourth lesson of our suite of physics lessons covering the topic of Classical Principle of Relativity, you can find links to the other lessons within this tutorial and access additional physics learning resources below this lesson.
Earlier we saw that Newton's laws have the same form in all inertial systems. As a result, every observer sees the same mechanical phenomena that obey to these laws. The question that naturally arises here is: What happens to electromagnetic phenomena in different inertial systems of reference? In particular, what happens when electric and magnetic field-related processes are observed in two different inertial systems of reference? What happens to the EM waves and the propagation of light as an EM wave? All these questions led to the development of Einstein's Theory of Relativity (both special and general).
In previous Sections (more precisely in Section 11 and 16), we have dealt with two important constants:
Since light is an EM wave, it contains both the electric and magnetic component. Giving that in SI units
and
we can find an equation for the speed of light in terms of the above constants based on the dimensional analysis, which is
The small deflection from the experimental value (299 792 km/s) comes because of the rounding made during the above calculations.
You have reached the end of Physics lesson 18.2.4 The Newtonian System and Speed of Light. The Pseudo-Theory of "Cosmic Ether". There are 5 lessons in this physics tutorial covering Classical Principle of Relativity, you can access all the lessons from this tutorial below.
Enjoy the "The Newtonian System and Speed of Light. The Pseudo-Theory of "Cosmic Ether"" physics lesson? People who liked the "Classical Principle of Relativity lesson found the following resources useful:
Please provide a rating, it takes seconds and helps us to keep this resource free for all to use
We hope you found this Physics lesson "Classical Principle of Relativity" useful. If you did it would be great if you could spare the time to rate this physics lesson (simply click on the number of stars that match your assessment of this physics learning aide) and/or share on social media, this helps us identify popular tutorials and calculators and expand our free learning resources to support our users around the world have free access to expand their knowledge of physics and other disciplines.