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Received — 31 May 2026 Physics Forums Insights

Relativator (Circular Slide-Rule) – Simulated with Desmos

By: robphy
2 September 2025 at 13:55
The Relativator (revisited) This is an update of my 2006 post (reconstructed in 2014) Relativator: The circular slide-rule for physicists. This is a circular slide-rule for doing relativistic calculations for elementary particle physics that I learned about from – an article by Elizabeth Wade ( “Artifact: Relativator”, Symmetry (FNAL/SLAC), 01/01/06, https://www.symmetrymagazine.org/article/december-2005january-2006/artifact-relativator  https://www.symmetrymagazine.org/sites/default/files/legacy/pdfs/200512/artifact_relativator.pdf ), which is...

Addition of Velocities (Velocity Composition) in Special Relativity

By: robphy
20 May 2024 at 12:37
The “Addition of Velocities” formula (more correctly, the “Composition of Velocities” formula) in Special Relativity [tex]\frac{v_{AC}}{c}=\frac{ \frac{v_{AB}}{c}+\frac{v_{BC}}{c} }{1 + \frac{v_{AB}}{c} \frac{v_{BC}}{c}}[/tex] is a non-intuitive result that arises from a “hyperbolic-tangent of a sum”-identity in Minkowski spacetime geometry, with its use of hyperbolic trigonometry. However, I claim it is difficult to obtain this by looking at...
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