A Relatively Painless Guide to Special Relativity
-
- CHF 22.00
-
- CHF 22.00
Beschreibung des Verlags
Serious and accessible—finally the special relativity course book that both physics majors and lifelong learners deserve.
Special relativity challenges one’s physical intuition of space, time, matter, and energy in a way that few other topics in physics do. Yet the subject is often treated as an extra in undergraduate courses—something to be picked up in a few random lectures and presented as a combination of geometric and logical puzzles (seemingly with the premise of getting the novice student to concede that Einstein was a genius and that the universe is weird). But special relativity is absolutely fundamental to modern physics. It is the canvas on which electromagnetism, particle physics, field theory, and ultimately general relativity are based. For physics students, developing a relativistic intuition isn’t just a luxury: it’s a requirement.
Physicist and popular author Dave Goldberg provides a rigorous but conversational introduction to fill this void in spacetime education. Employing the standard calculus a sophomore or junior university student in science, engineering, or computer science will have encountered, Goldberg connects relativity to a student’s work ahead, acquainting them with topics like tensors, the development of new physical theories, and how relativity directly relates to other disciplines. But more than this, Goldberg welcomes lifelong learners who may have encountered special relativity in popular accounts, but are seeking a mathematical challenge to understand an elegant physical theory.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This impenetrable primer by Drexel University physics professor Goldberg (The Universe in the Rearview Mirror) explores "how space and time work." He explains that relativity is about "how we measure the distance between two points... in space and time" and delves into how it affects the physics of light, momentum, and electromagnetism. The explanations are highly technical, as when he walks through the complex mathematical notation for expressing a particle's position in spacetime and the matrix devised by German mathematician Hermann Minkowski to account for time in equations. Brief moments of accessibility are peppered throughout—such as the overview of how scientists have attempted to calculate the speed of light since Galileo, whose unsuccessful experiment from the early 1600s involved flashing a lamp from the top of a hill at an observer a mile away—but they're overwhelmed by jargon-filled examinations of Lorentz transformations (converting between one frame of reference and another) and doppler shifts (the phenomenon in which the frequency of waves depends on what direction the emitter is moving in). Though Goldberg aspires to write for undergraduate physics students and readers who "have read qualitative or popular science versions of relativity and wanted to delve deeper," this is likely too complicated for the latter group. It's "painless" in name only.
