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Lecture

Causality and Inertial Universes

In course

MATH-115(b): Advanced linear algebra II

L'objectif du cours est d'introduire les notions de base de l'algèbre linéaire et de démontrer rigoureusement les résultats principaux du sujet. ...

Description

This lecture covers the concept of causal relations and inertial universes, exploring the inequalities of the inverted triangle and the notion of proper time. The instructor discusses the isotropic nature of time and the properties of inertial lines in spacetime.

Instructor

Marc Troyanov

Doctorat en mathématiques à l'Université de Genève (1987) - Postdoc à Paris et Salt-Lake City, puis professeur assistant à l'UQAM (Montréal). Venu en 1993 à l'EPFL comme professeur assistant, nommé MER en 1999 puis professeur titulaire en 2005. Domaine de recherche : géométrie différentielle, analyse sur les variétés et sur les espaces métriques.

Official source

Ontological neighbourhood

Physics

Relativity: Special relativity

Related concepts (32)

Causal inference

Causal inference is the process of determining the independent, actual effect of a particular phenomenon that is a component of a larger system. The main difference between causal inference and inference of association is that causal inference analyzes the response of an effect variable when a cause of the effect variable is changed. The science of why things occur is called etiology, and can be described using the language of scientific causal notation. Causal inference is said to provide the evidence of causality theorized by causal reasoning.

Causality

Causality (also called causation, or cause and effect) is influence by which one event, process, state, or object (a cause) contributes to the production of another event, process, state, or object (an effect) where the cause is partly responsible for the effect, and the effect is partly dependent on the cause. In general, a process has many causes, which are also said to be causal factors for it, and all lie in its past. An effect can in turn be a cause of, or causal factor for, many other effects, which all lie in its future.

Proper time

In relativity, proper time (from Latin, meaning own time) along a timelike world line is defined as the time as measured by a clock following that line. The proper time interval between two events on a world line is the change in proper time, which is independent of coordinates, and is a Lorentz scalar. The interval is the quantity of interest, since proper time itself is fixed only up to an arbitrary additive constant, namely the setting of the clock at some event along the world line.

Comoving and proper distances

In standard cosmology, comoving distance and proper distance (or physical distance) are two closely related distance measures used by cosmologists to define distances between objects. Comoving distance factors out the expansion of the universe, giving a distance that does not change in time due to the expansion of space (though this may change due to other, local factors, such as the motion of a galaxy within a cluster).

Proper length

Proper length or rest length is the length of an object in the object's rest frame. The measurement of lengths is more complicated in the theory of relativity than in classical mechanics. In classical mechanics, lengths are measured based on the assumption that the locations of all points involved are measured simultaneously. But in the theory of relativity, the notion of simultaneity is dependent on the observer. A different term, proper distance, provides an invariant measure whose value is the same for all observers.

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