Special Relativity – Why is Addition of Velocities Under Lorentz Transformation Associative and Commutative for Same Direction Boosts?

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I'm working with Lorentz transformations, and one of the problems I encountered needed a derivation of the velocity of a particle $u$ in a stationary reference frame S, in the variables $u'$, which is the velocity measured of the particle of an observer moving with another reference frame S', that's moving with a velocity $v$ to the right.

Either way, the problem is one dimensional with respect to spatial dimensions, meaning, we're only dealing with $x$-coordinates.

I managed to find it to be $$u = \frac{u' + v}{1 + \frac{u' v}{c^2}}.$$ Then I encounted a question where I needed to argue why velocity addition under the Lorentz transformation is commutative, and associative, in the case when we have a boost in only one direction. I did some research and found out that this isn't always the case for when we have boosts in multiple directions (since a boost can be described my a matrix, two boosts after one another (that're not in the same direction) is a product of two matricies, for which the order matters).

How can one intuitively explain why it's associative and commutative under my given conditions?

Best Answer

For parallel boosts we can treat space as $1$-dimensional, so Lorentz boosts are in $2$ dimensions. They are hyperbolic rotation matrices, of the form $$\left(\begin{array}{rl} \cosh w & \sinh w\\ \sinh w & \cosh w \end{array}\right),$$which multiply viz.$$\left(\begin{array}{rl} \cosh w_{1} & \sinh w_{1}\\ \sinh w_{1} & \cosh w_{1} \end{array}\right)\left(\begin{array}{rl} \cosh w_{2} & \sinh w_{2}\\ \sinh w_{2} & \cosh w_{2} \end{array}\right)=\left(\begin{array}{rl} \cosh\left(w_{1}+w_{2}\right) & \sinh\left(w_{1}+w_{2}\right)\\ \sinh\left(w_{1}+w_{2}\right) & \cosh\left(w_{1}+w_{2}\right) \end{array}\right).$$As @Qmechanic's second point notes, you're just adding $w$s.

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