Chapter 36: Q. 4 (page 1059)
A baseball pitcher can throw a ball with a speed of . He is in the back of a pickup truck that is driving away from you. He throws the ball in your direction, and it floats toward you at a lazy . What is the speed of the truck?
The speed of the truck is
Over 30 million students worldwide already upgrade their learning with Vaia!
All the tools & learning materials you need for study success - in one app.
Get started for free
At what speed, as a fraction of c, is a particle’s total energy twice its rest energy?
The sun radiates energy at the rate . The source of this energy is fusion, a nuclear reaction in which mass is transformed into energy. The mass of the sun is .
a. How much mass does the sun lose each year?
b. What percent is this of the sun’s total mass?
c. Fusion takes place in the core of a star, where the temperature and pressure are highest. A star like the sun can sustain fusion until it has transformed about of its total mass into energy, then fusion ceases and the star slowly dies. Estimate the sun’s lifetime, giving your answer in billions of years.
The diameter of the solar system is 10 light hours. A spaceship crosses the solar system in 15 hours, as measured on earth. How long, in hours, does the passage take according to passengers on the spaceship?
The diameter of the solar system is light hours. A spaceship crosses the solar system in hours, as measured on earth. How long, in hours, does the passage take according to passengers on the spaceship?
This chapter has assumed that lengths perpendicular to the direction of motion are not affected by the motion. That is, motion in the -direction does not cause length contraction along the or axes. To find out if this is really true, consider two spray-paint nozzles attached to rods perpendicular to the axis. It has been confirmed that, when both rods are at rest, both nozzles are exactly 1 m above the base of the rod. One rod is placed in the reference frame with its base on the axis; the other is placed in the reference frame with its base on the axis. The rods then swoop past each other and, as FIGURE P36.60 shows, each paints a stripe across the other rod.
We will use proof by contradiction. Assume that objects perpendicular to the motion are contracted. An experimenter in frame finds that the nozzle, as it goes past, is less than above the axis. The principle of relativity says that an experiment carried out in two different inertial reference frames will have the same outcome in both.
a. Pursue this line of reasoning and show that you end up with a logical contradiction, two mutually incompatible situations.
b. What can you conclude from this contradiction?
What do you think about this solution?
We value your feedback to improve our textbook solutions.
