special relativity

Article

special relativity is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between June 03, 2021 and July 28, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as “Einstein’s annus mirabilis, when he published papers on special relativity”; “This would have been enough for at least special relativity”. It most often appears alongside Einstein, Scott, 1970s World Bank initiatives in Lesotho.

Metadata

  • Category: Concepts
  • Mention count: 2
  • Issue count: 2
  • First seen: June 03, 2021
  • Last seen: July 28, 2022

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

June 03, 2021 · Original source
When a field is established, you can get a lot done by making relatively obvious inferences and running cheap tests. (I’m not sure what share of the patents in the above graph were physics-related but it seems notable that 1905 was Einstein’s annus mirabilis, when he published papers on the photoelectric effect, Brownian motion, and special relativity). After that, you reach the questions you can only resolve by smashing particles into each other in a 10-kilometer long tube, or by buying millions of dollars’ worth of GPUs so you can check how much better neural networks do if you just let them have a billion parameters.
July 28, 2022 · Original source
This would have been enough for at least special relativity but once you get special relativity, general relativity is the logical next step in your investigations. I don't think the "no Mercury anomaly timeline changes by much.