“I live 20 miles per hour from the University.” Is that statement confusing?  It should be.  In Episode 20, we take a look at Rates and Functions, and discuss how they have been mistreated for the past century.  More importantly, we’ll take a look at how key concepts and mathematics can get confused if we don’t say the right thing.  For example, would you feel confused if I had began with “I live 20 miles from the University.”?  This Episode is a replay of a presentation that I delivered the Pacific Region AAAS conference at San Francisco State University in August 2009.

This Episode summarizes and synthesizes a lot of the material we’ve looked at over the past 9 videos.  New visitors will find that it serves as a good introduction to the material on the site.

The following specific points are covered in this video:

• A brief history of moving systems equations and SRT


• A look at the mathematical and conceptual mistakes we’re still making today


• Revisiting the improved results to the Michelson-Morley and Ives-Stillwell equations


• Implications on position-based navigation systems

In addition to the video, a PDF version of the presentation is available for download.

Corrections:

• At 15:10 – the arguments to the Tau function invocation in the Key Findings callout should be  (x’,0,0,x’/(c-v)).  This is corrected in the PDF.


• At 16:20 – the callout should say “…Average of the Approaching and Receding Doppler shifts”


• At 16:55 – I should have said “revising Michelson-Morley” instead of saying “revising Ives-Stillwell”

Update: I’ve added the following two links from the NPA Video Conference I delivered in October 2009. One link is for the video and the other is for the slides. I think this video is essentially the “Director’s cut” of the presentation.

Bonus: Download NPA Conference Video in Windows Media Format

Bonus: Download NPA Conference Video in PDF Format

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Download in Windows Media Format

Download in PDF Format