Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #862020 in Books
• Published on: 1989-07-01
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 128 pages

Customer Reviews

Difficult to follow. Not insightful.
Quick Review

This first-look-at-relativity book relies heavily on diagrams to make its points, but I had a very difficult time following the textual explanations of some of these diagrams. By the end of the book, I had learned nothing new about relativity, and very little new about space-time diagrams. I think your time is better spent elsewhere.



Longer Review

A quick search on Amazon reveals that hundreds of books claim to be clear, accessible explanations of relativity. Finding the one best suited to your needs is difficult, but I chose "Relativity Illustrated" from the library shelf because I was looking for a book that would do an especially good job demonstrating the use of space-time diagrams in special relativity. (Space-time diagrams, or Minkowski diagrams (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minkowski_diagram), are useful tools which show the relationship between "events" - the core of special relativity.)



"Relativity Illustrated" teaches special relativity using almost exclusively space-time diagrams (as opposed to algebra and thought experiments, the methods most books use). Having already taken a course in relativity, I was able to see where the book was going before it got there. Schwartz works up to special relativity by deducing, step by step, what the correct form of a Minkowski diagram should must look like. He starts by explaining that we're making graphs of one-dimensional space versus time, then introduces the problem relativity tries to solve: what would the world look like if, instead of seeing it the way I do, I saw it through the eyes of a friend who was zooming past me at very high speed?



The answer is that things would look quite different - things that I think happen at the same time happen at different times according to my friend. Distances look shorter to him, and time runs slower. Schwartz introduces all these ideas and shows them to be true through his use of diagrams, but while the effects are demonstrated to be true, they aren't made believable. One problem is that his writing is not very clear. Following the explanation of the addition of velocities formula on page 97 is a nightmare. A few very long paragraphs of text describe in detail a long list of comparisons and geometrical results on a graph (black and white) with eight lines and 26 labels. That example is too long to cite, but here is another, from the section on page 107 where Schwartz find the algebraic expression for the dilation factor gamma:

"The amount of time which Mr. A considers to have elapsed between the instant he passes Mr. B. and the instant when he reaches that point in his path which, according to Mr. B's notion of time, he reaches after x seconds bears the same proportion to x as x does to one, that is, x times x, or x^2 seconds."

Because of these convoluted, poorly-organized sentences, I needed to read many passages three times before I got the point. A further confounding difficulty was that the entire book is one long piece - not broken into chapters or even clear break points.



Another reason I think the book fails is that it fails to impress the reader's gut. A clever enough reader will follow through all the geometrical arguments and be unable to refute the results. But when the result is something like time dilation, where it's claimed that a moving clock runs slowly, a list of individual steps carried out on a diagram and eventually leading to a mathematical result is not convincing. On the other hand, the "light clock" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_clock#Simple_inference_of_time_dilation) thought experiment is far more immediate and convincing.



The book also failed to cover the bases of a standard introduction to relativity. Never once did it mention the invariant interval - an extremely important result which instigated Minkowski's interest in special relativity to begin with. Another egregious omission is a full statement of the Lorentz transformations (we never leave one dimension). The light cone was described, but the key aspect of the light cone is that it doesn't change when moving from observer to observer, and this was not in the book. There are many other interesting topics which the book rightly describes as being beyond its scope, but these few basic results should have been in there.



I don't think the book is useless. Its idea - to show all of relativity through the use of Minkowski diagrams, is a good one, but the execution was poor, and the complete lack of problems or exercises will only make it harder for the reader to learn.

If you want an introductory text on special relativity, my advice is to choose Spacetime Physics by Taylor and Wheeler. This book's style is slightly annoying, but its exercises are brilliant, it has a lot of great supplementary material, and the presentation is both accurate and clear.

Another good choice would be to work your way though the introductory relativity course on MIT OpenCourseWare (http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Physics/8-20January--IAP--2005/CourseHome/index.htm) which requires Introduction to Special Relativity by Resnick and Special Relativity by French and Relativity: The Special and General Theory (Illustrated Edition) from Einstein himself.

I haven't read Resnick, but French is a fine book with more explanation of the experimental and historical context than other books, and Einstein's book is challenging for a beginner but also rewarding in its deeply physical understanding, and includes a bit about General Relativity as well.



If you're not interested in going through all the math of it, try the Wikipedia article (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Introduction_to_special_relativity) or the popular book by Einstein and Infeld, Evolution of Physics

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Jacob T. Schwartz is a hottie and this book is exactly what it claims to be!