Wednesday, July 5, 2017

spacetime - What is an event in Special Relativity?


Lorentz transformations help us transform coordinates of one frame to that of another.


For example, let the coordinates of an event in an inertial frame $S$ be $(x, t)$, then the coordinates in frame $S'$ is got as $(x', t')$ using Lorentz transformations.


This means that there is some kind of equivalence between $(x, t)$ and $(x', t')$. But what kind of equivalence is it?


What I am trying to ask is What does it mean to say coordinates of the same event? What is an event?


Edit: I am probably wrong about this, but anyways: I think all the current answers are circular. I am asking about events so as to understand what spacetime means. But, all the answers involve spacetime in one way or the other. You can't just say an event is a location and a time because that is what I am trying to understand. Without absolute space and absolute time, what does that mean?




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