Talk:Galilean transformation

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

i fixed the mispelling ( cooordinate > coordinate)uhuh uhuh... at the last edit.

later mr. uhuh uhuh man

coool

Could somebody please explain briefly what all this means, without having to know any math? Because if it's "common sense", I suppose one could explain it for those of us who failed high school algebra.

See Two New Sciences for Galileo's experiments, where he figured out a quantity that remained unchanged during all the experiments. In this article, that unchanged quantity was the rate of change of velocity u.

[edit] Invariance

I have a serious question. Can anyone work out for me how Maxwell's equations (differential forms, of course) are not Galilean invariant, but are Lorentz invariant? I attempted the problem before but couldn't see anything conclusive in the math. Every book I've run across says "it's easy to show...." ub3rm4th 19:49, 30 Dec 2004 (UTC)

The fact that all electromagnetic waves propagate at the speed of light is enough to show they're not Galilean covariant. As for Lorentz covariance, see Faraday tensor. Phys 17:23, 18 Jan 2005 (UTC)
in the language of differential forms, Maxwell's equations are dF=0 and *d*F=j. The first is invariant under all diffeomorphisms of spacetime. The second is only invariant under transformations which preserve the metric. Lorentz transformations preserve the metric but Galilean transformations do not. Just check what happens to the Hodge star in a Galilean boosted frame. -Lethe | Talk 17:07, Apr 24, 2005 (UTC)
Actually, the latter is invariant under all conformal transformations. Phys 01:08, 13 November 2005 (UTC)
Maybe any transformations which preserve the volume form as well? I forget, but it sounds plausible... -Lethe | Talk 01:21, 13 November 2005 (UTC)