Boston QuarkNet Fall Meeting (December 12, 2023)

Darien Wood, our Mentor from Northeastern University, brought a new colleague from Northeastern to join ten teachers in person and two teachers on Zoom for our fall meeting. Rick Dower presented a talk titled "Relativity and GPS: How Einstein Helps You Find Your Way Home." Rick reviewed the history of relativity from Galileo to Einstein, discussed efforts to characterize the luminiferous aether, development of the Lorentz transformations, and the importance of the special and general relativistic corrections to the clocks in GPS satellites relative to clocks on Earth that allows accurate position finding with GPS receivers in smart phones.Embedded in the talk were the classic video of the muon time dilation experiment with measurements on Mt. Washington in New Hampshire, and at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and a short video on the history of the GPS satellite system. Rick also gave out the teachers' version of the Lorentz Transformation worksheet  that he sent to the Boston QuarkNet participants.