Is there an easily visible consequence of special relativity that you can see without specialized equipment?
A working GPS receiver.
In general, things like a smartphone “verify” a great deal of modern science.
Just direct observation, by the way, gives you little. Yes, you can observe discontinuous spectra of fluorescent lights. So what? This does not prove quantum mechanics in any way, this is merely consistent with quantum mechanics, just as it is consistent with a large variety of other explanations.
How much can you directly demonstrate in biology or the social sciences?
In biology, it really depends on what do you want demonstrate. For some things a frog and a scalpel will be sufficient :-/ Or maybe just a scalpel X-D
Is there an easily visible consequence of special relativity that you can see without specialized equipment?
A working GPS receiver.
I only believe that depends on special relativity because I was told so; if I’m so skeptical I suspect that scientist lied to me about special relativity, then I should be equally suspectful of engineers telling me GPSes have to take special relativity into account to work right.
If you are at all mathematical, you can verify that relativity affects GPS signals by calculating what difference both special relativity (satellite clock moving faster than clock on Earth, hence slower) and general relativity (satellite clock higher up the gravitational field than clock on Earth) would make to timekeeping and hence accuracy of location. The effects work against each other, but one is larger than the other.
You can verify accuracy of location of a GPS yourself. IME this is almost always considerably less accurate than published estimates by the device manufacturer, but still impressive. However, you need to be careful—most smartphones use multiple technologies to determine their location, not just GPS, so will be more accurate than the GPS signal can possibly be.
But 1) even if I measure a GPS’s accuracy, I can’t distinguish errors caused by relativity from other instrument errors, and 2) GPS devices and satellites already try to correct for relativity, so the error I’ll be observing is the error in correction.
Is there an easily visible consequence of special relativity that you can see without specialized equipment?
A working GPS receiver.
In general, things like a smartphone “verify” a great deal of modern science.
Yah. Though the immediacy of the verification will vary. When I use my cell phone, I really feel it that information is being carried by radio waves that don’t penetrate metal. But I never found the GPS example quite compelling; people assure me “oh yes we needed relativity to get it to work right” and of course I believe them, but I’ve never seen the details presented and so this doesn’t impress me at an emotional level.
I don’t know how much my feelings here are idiosyncratic; how similar are different people in what sorts of observations make a big impression on them?
Just direct observation, by the way, gives you little. Yes, you can observe discontinuous spectra of fluorescent lights. So what? This does not prove quantum mechanics in any way, this is merely consistent with quantum mechanics, just as it is consistent with a large variety of other explanations.
I’m not so sure about “consistent with a large variety of other explanations”—my impression is that nobody was able to come up with a believable theory of spectroscopy before Bohr. Can you point to a non-quantum explanation that ever seemed plausible? Furthermore once you say “okay, spectral lines are due to electron energy-level transitions”, you wind up intellectually committed to a whole lot of other things, notably the Pauli exclusion rule.
A working GPS receiver.
In general, things like a smartphone “verify” a great deal of modern science.
Just direct observation, by the way, gives you little. Yes, you can observe discontinuous spectra of fluorescent lights. So what? This does not prove quantum mechanics in any way, this is merely consistent with quantum mechanics, just as it is consistent with a large variety of other explanations.
In biology, it really depends on what do you want demonstrate. For some things a frog and a scalpel will be sufficient :-/ Or maybe just a scalpel X-D
I only believe that depends on special relativity because I was told so; if I’m so skeptical I suspect that scientist lied to me about special relativity, then I should be equally suspectful of engineers telling me GPSes have to take special relativity into account to work right.
If you are at all mathematical, you can verify that relativity affects GPS signals by calculating what difference both special relativity (satellite clock moving faster than clock on Earth, hence slower) and general relativity (satellite clock higher up the gravitational field than clock on Earth) would make to timekeeping and hence accuracy of location. The effects work against each other, but one is larger than the other.
You can verify accuracy of location of a GPS yourself. IME this is almost always considerably less accurate than published estimates by the device manufacturer, but still impressive. However, you need to be careful—most smartphones use multiple technologies to determine their location, not just GPS, so will be more accurate than the GPS signal can possibly be.
But 1) even if I measure a GPS’s accuracy, I can’t distinguish errors caused by relativity from other instrument errors, and 2) GPS devices and satellites already try to correct for relativity, so the error I’ll be observing is the error in correction.
Yah. Though the immediacy of the verification will vary. When I use my cell phone, I really feel it that information is being carried by radio waves that don’t penetrate metal. But I never found the GPS example quite compelling; people assure me “oh yes we needed relativity to get it to work right” and of course I believe them, but I’ve never seen the details presented and so this doesn’t impress me at an emotional level.
I don’t know how much my feelings here are idiosyncratic; how similar are different people in what sorts of observations make a big impression on them?
I’m not so sure about “consistent with a large variety of other explanations”—my impression is that nobody was able to come up with a believable theory of spectroscopy before Bohr. Can you point to a non-quantum explanation that ever seemed plausible? Furthermore once you say “okay, spectral lines are due to electron energy-level transitions”, you wind up intellectually committed to a whole lot of other things, notably the Pauli exclusion rule.