Description

This text is a considerable amplification and modernization of the authors' earlier Essential Relativity. It brings relativity alive conceptually and emphasizes the foundations and the logical subtleties rather than the mathematics or the detailed experiments. It includes 300 exercises and promotes a visceral understanding and the confidence to tackle any fundamental relativistic problem. Following a critical overview of the whole field, special-relativistic kinematics is presented three dimensionally before the mathematical level gradually rises. Four vectors preceded mechanics, four tensors precede Maxwell theory, and three chapters on cosmology end the text. This book brings the challenge and excitement of modern relativity and cosmology at a rigorous mathematical level within the reach of advanced undergraduates, while containing enough new material to interest lecturers and researchers.

Features

• Completely rewritten and modernized edition of author's earlier Essential Relativity
• Accessible approach with intellectual depth and flavour
• 'Gedankenexperiments': preference of proofs by comprehension over those by calculation
• Deliberate confrontation of subtleties and apparent paradoxes
• Unique collection of 300 exercises

Reviews

"A textbook for graduate or advanced undergraduate physics students who are familiar with calculus up to partial differentiation, ordinary vector, and the binomial theorem. Rindler (physics, U. of Texas-Dallas) has essentially rewritten his earlier Essential Relativity to account for the growing sophistication and inquisitiveness about relativity in mainstream physics. He does not provide a bibliography."--SciTech Book News

Product Details

448 pages; 87 line illus; ISBN13: 978-0-19-850835-9ISBN10: 0-19-850835-2

About the Author(s)