Getting the Lorentz transformations without requiring an invariant speed

by Stefano Piacentini (Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare)

Thursday 13 Apr 2023, 16:00 → 17:30 Europe/Rome

Aula Touschek (Marconi building, second floor)

We will have our usual Pheno Journal Club on April 13th at 4.00pm in Aula Touschek (second floor of Marconi building at Sapienza: map). In the first part we will discuss interesting papers that recently appeared in the arXiv, while in the second one Stefano Piacentini will tell us everything about ‘Getting the Lorentz transformations without requiring an invariant speed’ (arxiv:1504.02423), find the abstract below for more details.

Abstract: In their paper in 2015, prof. A. Pelissetto and M. Testa showed that it is possible to get the structure of the Lorentz transformations just by requiring the absence of a privileged reference frame and the group structure of the transformations. This result, already derived by Von Ignatowsky in 1911, demonstrates that the existence of an invariant speed is a consequence of the principle of relativity and not a necessary assumption. We will go through this derivation, and, in the last part of the presentation, I will also mention the deductive derivation of Lorentz invariance from Galilei invariance in Newtonian mechanics by prof. A. Nicolis.

Aula Touschek is booked from 12pm until the end of the day for participants coming from Tor Vergata, Roma 3 and LNF.

A google doc with a tentative list of the next speakers and all the relevant information is available at this link:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1G_jGdYRIyPoG46AA3Yt8mk32aBIeLYYDKIEs2OFnOos/edit

Please remind to the interested people to register to this mailing list:
https://lists2.roma1.infn.it/mailman/listinfo/pheno-jc