Addition of Velocities Formula
From Biocrawler, the free encyclopedia.
The Addition of Velocities Formula is a consequence of the Lorentz transformations under the special theory of relativity. Due to the time and distance distortions that must be attributed when citing measurements of a frame that is in motion relative to the observer's frame, velocities cannot be added with plain arithmetic, but must employ a more complex formula.
Given two velocities, 
and 
, the summation of these results in:
Where c represents the speed of light.
A feature of the formula is that no summation of velocities ever exceeds c, even if both addends should equal c.
For velocities far less than lightspeed, the formulated summation reduces to regular arithmetic addition because the second term of the denominator becomes negligible.
