The principle of Galileo's relativity as the foundation of the theory of relativity of Einstein

The theory of relativity , presented to the court of the scientific community at the beginning of the last century , produced a real sensation. Its author, A. Einstein, defined the main directions of physical research for decades to come. However, do not forget that the German scientist in his works used the numerous achievements of his predecessors, including the famous principle of relativity of Galileo - the famous Italian scientist.

A significant part of his life the Italian scientist devoted to the study of mechanics, becoming one of the founders of such a section of physics as kinematics. Galileo's experiments allowed him to come to the conclusion that there are no fundamental differences in the states of rest and uniform motion - it's all about which point of reference will be adopted. The famous physicist pointed out that the laws of mechanics are valid not for any one chosen coordinate system, but for all systems. This principle went down in history as the principle of Galileo's relativity, and the systems began to be called inertial.

His theoretical calculations the scientist with pleasure confirmed numerous examples from life. Especially popular was the example with the book that is on board the ship: in this case, relative to the ship itself, it is at rest, and relative to the observer on the shore, it moves. The Galilean principle confirms his position that there is no difference between peace and movement.

The Galileo principle of relativity formulated in this way produced a real furore among his contemporaries. The thing is that before the publication of the works of the Italian scientist, everyone was convinced of the truthfulness of the teachings of the ancient Greek scholar Ptolemy, who argued that the Earth is an absolutely immobile body, concerning which the movement of other affairs is taking place. Galileo destroyed this idea, opening new horizons before science.

At the same time, it is impossible to idealize in any way neither the principle of relativity of Galileo, nor the law of inertia. After all, based on this formulation, we can conclude that all these positions are valid for all parameters of speed and distance between bodies, but this is not so. The first step from the teachings of Galileo-Newton to the theory of relativity was the development of Gauss, Gerber and Weber theoretical foundations of the phenomenon, which was called the "delay of potential."

Neither Galileo nor Newton, by virtue of the then existing level of knowledge, could even guess that when the speed of the body approaches the speed of light, the laws of inertia simply cease to function. And, in general, Galileo's principle of relativity is ideal only for those systems that consist of two bodies, that is, the influence of other objects and phenomena on them is so insignificant that they can be neglected. Movement in such a system (an example is the rotation of the Earth around the Sun) was later called absolute, all other movements were called relative.