Talk:Postulates of special relativity

message: It seems that  may be the person known on UseNet newsgroups by such handles as Androcles and Hexenmeister (google on this handles with group:sci.physics.relativity).  The first edits of this new WP user unfortunately violated a number of policies; I just noted some of the violations on his user talk page.  Please help us monitor to make sure he follows our behavioral rules in future.---CH 04:12, 15 June 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: [[User:Der alte Hexenmeister]]

message: News flash: Most textbooks are wrong, says unsourced Wikipedia article. Please save this kind of opinion for your blogs. Tim Shuba 15:28, 9 October 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Unencyclopedic paragraph removed 

message: After reviewing the rest of this article, I see that the whole thing is pretty bad. It seems to be just someone's (unfortunately misguided) summary of special relativity. When you get into the "mathematical defintion of the postulates" section, it just goes completely off the rails, making all kinds of statements that are unsourced (and, incidentally, wrong). Now, we could go through and correct everything, but isn't this already covered in one or more of the numerous other articles on special relativity? Shouldn't the "postulates of special relativity" just be part of the article on "special relativity"?
I see that this article was nominated for deletion about 8 months ago, and the decision was "keep". I wonder if that decision should be re-considered. Maybe I should go read the discussion related to that decision... but I fear the discussion was likely dominated by whoever concocted this misguided article in the first place.
In any case, I definitely think the article must either be deleted or else drastically re-written to eliminate all the mis-statements. Lumpy27 (talk) 05:21, 9 January 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: Yes, perhaps you could go read the discussion. It wasn't much of a discussion to begin with, but you can always propose to delete the article again, or make it better. Cheers, DVdm (talk) 09:07, 9 January 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: The article suffers from severe issues; sources are only primary (there should be no problem in finding secondary sources for such a topic!); it is frequently unclear what is derived from what. The paragraph talking about pseudo-Riemannian manifolds is confusing rather than clarifying. I am not a physics myself, and it would take a very long time for me to improve the article, but everyone having a bit of familiarity with special relativity can understand that the article is unclear, incomplete, and partly incorrect. (of course, it should be rewritten, not deleted!)78.15.179.105 (talk) 21:13, 29 July 2015 (UTC)
thread_title: Another Proposal to Delete this Article?

message: Some discussion of the conventional two-postulate narrative, with sources provided (mostly Einstein). The usual two postulates (plus some reasonable unspoken assumptions, such as classical continuity and wave-compatibility) are not enough to uniquely specify the SR equations: Einstein's derivation also assumes that the relativistic lightbeam geometry derived specifically for empty space (i.e. Minkowski spacetime) still applies when space is not empty. The 1905 paper fails to "flag up" this third (quite important) dependency.
If the presence and relative motion of matter affects the propagation of light in any way, we get a divergence of equations: SR as a "null theory" that only holds for truly empty space, and some other set of different equations that describe signals sent between real lumps of geometry-complicating moving matter. In that scenario, SR is valid geometry but not correct inertial physics.
A historical counter-example to Einstein's derivation would seem to be something like Hertz' earlier (1890) theory of the electrodynamics of moving bodies, which supports both relativity and local c-constancy (for physical observers). Einstein commented that the Hertz theory was logically valid, so he seems to have been aware that his two-postulate narrative was not "airtight", and that at least one other system was available.    
With just the two standard postulates, SR risks being a theory of observation that only holds in the absence of physical observers: Some references to this possibility (mainly Wheeler and Einstein) are given. ErkDemon (talk) 23:56, 27 February 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  The two standard postulates are insufficient ... revision, with deeper background and refs 

message: I suggest merging Postulates of special relativity with Alternative formulations of special relativity. The 2-postulate formulation is just one of several. We don't know two articles to say that. Roger (talk) 23:50, 7 July 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  Merge