From Newton to Einstein: the birth of Special Relativity

Abstract

Physics was in crisis at the beginning of the twentieth century because the newborn Maxwell's electromagnetism defied mechanistic preconceptions. Albert Einstein understood that the solution to the crisis required an audacious reworking of the concepts of space and time. Special Relativity deeply modified our way of regarding space and time, in order to harmonize electromagnetism with the principle of relativity. As a consequence, lengths and elapsed times were stripped of the invariant character that classical Physics conferred them; in their place, the speed of light acquired that privileged status. Such revolutionary change forced Einstein to reformulate Newtonian mechanics, a step that led him to discover the mass-energy equivalence.