[MUSIC PLAYING]

ETHAN ADDICOTT: So I’ve done Taylor approximations for sine of x and e

to the x but how can we use Taylor approximations to understand
the mass-energy
equation?
MBOYO ESOLE: So in order to find a Taylor approximation we need to
decide what is the small parameter that we will use for our expansion,
and it happens that the speed of light, as we said before, is really,
really big, so if you compare an object moving at the usual speed that
we see everyday to the speed of light, that number [v squared over c squared]
will be an extremely small number.
And so basically the Taylor approximation
will be done with respect to this number.
So let’s try to see see how — what we can approximate this function.
So, first of all, it helps to actually introduce a new parameter,
so I’m going to call x “v over c” so the expansion that we wanted to do for v
over c we can now express it as an expansion for x.
So let’s rewrite the equation E equals mc squared [over the square root of]
one minus x squared where we recall that x was v over c.
So now the point of this is to try to expand
the denominator one over square root of one minus x squared with respect to x
with center x equals zero.
ETHAN ADDICOTT: And why do we want to do that?
MBOYO ESOLE: Because we will have the leading term and the
highest term will be less relevant because they will be higher powers of
this expression [v over c] which is supposed to be a very small number.

ETHAN ADDICOTT: Okay.