Low-speed expansion
We can rewrite the expression for the energy as a Taylor series In mathematics, the Taylor series is a representation of a function as an infinite sum of terms calculated from the values of its derivatives at a single point. It may be regarded as the limit of the Taylor polynomials. Taylor series are named after the English mathematician Brook Taylor. If the series is centered at zero, the series is also:
For speeds much smaller than the speed of light, higher-order terms in this expression get smaller and smaller because v / c is small. For low speeds we can ignore all but the first two terms:
The total energy is a sum of the rest energy and the Newtonian In the fields of physics, classical mechanics is one of the two major sub-fields of study in the science of mechanics, which is concerned with the set of physical laws governing and mathematically describing the motions of bodies and aggregates of bodies geometrically distributed within a certain boundary under the action of a system of forces kinetic energy The kinetic energy of an object is the extra energy which it possesses due to its motion. It is defined as the work needed to accelerate a body of a given mass from rest to its current velocity. Having gained this energy during its acceleration, the body maintains this kinetic energy unless its speed changes. Negative work of the same magnitude.
The classical energy equation ignores both the m0c2 part, and the high-speed corrections. This is appropriate, because all the high-order corrections are small. Since only changes in energy affect the behavior of objects, whether we include the m0c2 part makes no difference, since it is constant. For the same reason, it is possible to subtract the rest energy from the total energy in relativity. By considering the emission of energy in different frames, Einstein could show that the rest energy has a real physical meaning.
The higher-order terms are extra correction to Newtonian mechanics which become important at higher speeds. The Newtonian equation is only a low-speed approximation, but an extraordinarily good one. All of the calculations used in putting astronauts on the moon, for example, could have been done using Newton's equations without any of the higher-order corrections.
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