Einstein's postulates

As Einstein's postulates two crucial assumptions are called, which Albert Einstein in 1905 in his work of moving the Electrodynamics of body met to on this special theory of relativity to justify.

• The first postulate is the principle of relativity and says that physical laws are invariant to the change of the inertial system, that is, that they are the same in all inertial systems. For this reason, in principle, no absolute movement can be determined, so that all movements must be viewed as relative.
• The second principle is the constancy of the speed of light . It says that in all inertial systems the vacuum speed of light is the same.

These postulates form an axiomatic basis for the special theory of relativity and led to the fact that essential principles of classical physics such as the Galilean transformation had to be expanded and the concept of simultaneity had to be redefined .

literature

• Wolfgang Nolting: Basic course Theoretical Physics 4: Special Theory of Relativity, Thermodynamics . Springer, 2009, ISBN 978-3-642-01603-5 ( limited preview in Google book search).