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Space and time are not what they seem. Their true nature only becomes clear as particles reach the speeds close to the speed of light where some of the common sense ideas start to break down. Indeed, one of major themes of twentieth century physics is that common sense is not a good guide when we look closely at the universe. In this chapter, we start to understand the true nature of space and time, as encapsulated in Einsteins theory of special relativity. We will see many wonderful things, from time slowing down to the lengths shrinking. There will be stories of twins and trains and elementary particles failing to die.
Introducing the Minkowski diagram and Minkowski space; how do we represent motion? And how can we represent the phenomena of length contraction and time dilation graphically?
Chapter 1 contains the problem statements of the 150 problems in special relativity theory. The chapter is divided into nine sections with problems organized by different topics defined by the keywords in the section headings.
Given a centrally symmetric convex body $B$ in ${{\mathbb{E}}^{d}}$, we denote by ${{\mathcal{M}}^{d}}\left( B \right)$ the Minkowski space (i.e., finite dimensional Banach space) with unit ball $B$. Let $K$ be an arbitrary convex body in ${{\mathcal{M}}^{d}}\left( B \right)$. The relationship between volume $V\left( K \right)$ and the Minkowskian thickness (= minimal width) ${{\Delta }_{B}}\left( K \right)$ of $K$ can naturally be given by the sharp geometric inequality $V\left( K \right)\ge \alpha \left( B \right)\cdot {{\Delta }_{B}}{{\left( K \right)}^{d}}$, where $\alpha \left( B \right)>0$. As a simple corollary of the Rogers-Shephard inequality we obtain that ${{\left( _{d}^{2d} \right)}^{-1}}\le \alpha \left( B \right)/V\left( B \right)\le {{2}^{-d}}$ with equality on the left attained if and only if $B$ is the difference body of a simplex and on the right if $B$ is a cross-polytope. The main result of this paper is that for $d=2$ the equality on the right implies that $B$ is a parallelogram. The obtained results yield the sharp upper bound for the modified Banach–Mazur distance to the regular hexagon.
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