World Lines As A Tool To Describe Events
A one-dimensional line or curve can be represented by the coordinates as a function of one parameter. Each value of the parameter corresponds to a point in spacetime and varying the parameter traces out a line. So in mathematical terms a curve is defined by four coordinate functions (where usually denotes the time coordinate) depending on one parameter . A coordinate grid in spacetime is the set of curves one obtains if three out of four coordinate functions are set to a constant.
Sometimes, the term world line is loosely used for any curve in spacetime. This terminology causes confusions. More properly, a world line is a curve in spacetime which traces out the (time) history of a particle, observer or small object. One usually takes the proper time of an object or an observer as the curve parameter along the world line.
Read more about this topic: World Line
Famous quotes containing the words world, lines, tool, describe and/or events:
“National literature does not mean much these days; now is the age of world literature, and every one must contribute to hasten the arrival of that age.”
—Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe (1749–1832)
“We stand in the tumult of a festival.
What festival? This loud, disordered mooch?
These hospitaliers? These brute-like guests?
These musicians dubbing at a tragedy,
A-dub, a-dub, which is made up of this:
That there are no lines to speak? There is no play.”
—Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)
“And if thou wilt make me an altar of stone, thou shalt not build it of hewn stone: for if thou lift up thy tool upon it, thou hast polluted it.”
—Bible: Hebrew Exodus 20:25.
“all the categories which we employ to describe conscious mental acts, such as ideas, purposes, resolutions, and so on, can be applied to ... these latent states.”
—Sigmund Freud (1856–1939)
“The geometry of landscape and situation seems to create its own systems of time, the sense of a dynamic element which is cinematising the events of the canvas, translating a posture or ceremony into dynamic terms. The greatest movie of the 20th century is the Mona Lisa, just as the greatest novel is Gray’s Anatomy.”
—J.G. (James Graham)