How to Understand Special Relativity Without Knowing Any Physics

摘要

The Poincare transformation group is derived using only the principles of causality and the constant velocity of light. In this derivation no a priori assumptions are made about the linearity, or even continuity of the transformations. It is also shown that each Poincare transformation is a normalized composition of a one dimensional Lorentz transformation ('boost') and two spatial rotations.