Recent content by rupcha

I was recently very surprised when I had a looked up relativistic kinetic energy. All sources gave the kinetic energy as the difference between total energy and rest energy, in some or other variant of the formula ##E_k=(\gamma−1)mc^2##. I didn't really understand at first. It seemed overly...

Thanks a lot for all the answers - and sorry for the parts which were off-topic here. While all kinds of new questions are popping into my head about variations of the topic (like rockets going back and forth and circular paths), I need to do more mulling over before I'll be able to even ask...

Recently, I spent some time trying to get an intuitive understanding of special relativity. (I am not a physicist, only took a few physics lectures in the mid-90s) It all went well until I tried to imagine accelerating objects with non-zero length. Specifically, I tried to imagine what a...