Shape Dynamics

Barbour's formulation of Mach's principle requires a theory of gravity to implement local relativity of clocks, local relativity of rods and spatial covariance. It turns out that relativity of clocks and rods are mutually exclusive. General Relativity implements local relativity of clocks and spatial covariance, but not local relativity of rods. It is the purpose of this contribution to show how Shape Dynamics, a theory that is locally equivalent to General Relativity, implements local relativity of rods and spatial covariance and how a BRST formulation, which I call Doubly General Relativity, implements all of Barbour's principles.Comment: 8 pages, LaTeX, based on a talk given at Relativity and Gravitation 100 years after Einstein in Prague, June 201

A Glimpse of Special Theory of Relativity

This article provides a brief outline of Special Theory of Relativity. The physics before the relativity, the special relativity in itself, and the consequences of special relativity are discussed here

A logic road from special relativity to general relativity

We present a streamlined axiom system of special relativity in first-order logic. From this axiom system we "derive" an axiom system of general relativity in two natural steps. We will also see how the axioms of special relativity transform into those of general relativity. This way we hope to make general relativity more accessible for the non-specialist

Seeking for the observational manifestation of de Sitter Relativity

The de Sitter invariant special relativity is a natural extension of the usual Einstein special relativity. Within this framework a generalization of special relativity (SR) for the de Sitter space-time introduces a new length scale $R$, serving an origin of geometrical cosmological constant $\Lambda=3/R^2$. De Sitter relativity predicts the departure from the Lorentz invariance due to spacetime curvature, related to the geometrical cosmological constant. In this paper the possible impact of de Sitter special relativity effects on threshold particle processes and equivalence principle violation is considered. The main conclusion is that constraints, coming from cosmological fine structure constant variations render this effects nowadays undetectable. A brief outlook is given thereafter

Relativistic kinematics beyond Special Relativity

In the context of departures from Special Relativity written as a momentum power expansion in the inverse of an ultraviolet energy scale M, we derive the constraints that the relativity principle imposes between coefficients of a deformed composition law, dispersion relation, and transformation laws, at first order in the power expansion. In particular, we find that, at that order, the consistency of a modification of the energy-momentum composition law fixes the modification in the dispersion relation. We therefore obtain the most generic modification of Special Relativity that preserves the relativity principle at leading order in 1/M.Comment: Version with minor corrections, to appear in Phys. Rev.