工科大学物理狭义相对论教学新探

Discussions on the Teaching of Special Relativity in College Physics for Engineering

建设“新工科”背景下对工科专业大学物理教学提出了新的要求,然而工科大学物理课程面临学时紧张的问题。本文指出了现行的狭义相对论教学方案存在的问题,提出了新的教学思路。利用线性代数中正交矩阵的知识引入四维时空的概念以及洛伦兹变换,进而借助正交变换的性质得出光速不变等若干推论,使学生在有限的学时内更好地理解和接受狭义相对论的时空观。

Under the background of building new engineering discipline,new demands have been made for the teaching of college physics course in engineering majors.However,college physics course for engineering majors has the problem of scarce class hours.The shortcomings of current teaching scheme for special relativity are pointed out,and a new teaching thought is presented.The concepts of four dimensional spacetime and Lorentz transformation are introduced by means of the related knowledge of orthogonal matrix in linear algebra,and then several inferences including constant speed of light can be drawn,so as to make the students better understand and accept the space-time notion from special relativity in limited class hours.