- #1
JustinLevy
- 895
- 1
Do you think you could give me some helpful insight to a follow up question from the discussion of defining inertial frames:
I'm still having trouble figuring out a good way of incorporating parity violation into my intuition. If it wasn't for experiment showing otherwise, I probably would have lumped this symmetry in as a requirement from relativity. Throwing away a whole subclass of frames (right vs left handed coordinate systems) that could equally have been chosen as "inertial frames" is bothering me. We're forced to throw out one or the other, but the fact that we could choose, and even choose arbitrarily, whether we keep right or left handed coordinate systems bothers me.
Is there some way of looking at this that would be more insightful and not seem so adhoc?
I'm clearly still missing something, for this seems to destroy part of the beauty of SR.
I'm still having trouble figuring out a good way of incorporating parity violation into my intuition. If it wasn't for experiment showing otherwise, I probably would have lumped this symmetry in as a requirement from relativity. Throwing away a whole subclass of frames (right vs left handed coordinate systems) that could equally have been chosen as "inertial frames" is bothering me. We're forced to throw out one or the other, but the fact that we could choose, and even choose arbitrarily, whether we keep right or left handed coordinate systems bothers me.
Is there some way of looking at this that would be more insightful and not seem so adhoc?
I'm clearly still missing something, for this seems to destroy part of the beauty of SR.