Customer Reviews

Basic Relativity

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Am teaching 8 weeks of Special Relativity out of PART I of this book--for the third time. This book is well-suited for juniors and seniors in Physics. It is a balanced, careful treatment which contains everything I look for in a text on SR: a dollop of 19th century history, gedanken experiments, lorentz algebra, Minkowski diagrams, mechanics, AND electromagnetism (which is hard to find in lower-level treatments.)--all in less than 175 pages!

The math is kept as simple as possible --Euclidean metric--by stratagem of using imaginary 4th- components in 4-vectors. The Lorentz transform reduces to the familiar orthogonal transform.

But teachers, students, and mathematical purists, BEWARE!! The notation, Physics style, can be very casual and often slow or difficult to write or word-process, or even downright misleading. I need to give my students several pages of improved notations so that we can express ourselves and communicate easily. Some things needing help: proper time, 3-vectors,4-vectors, their components, as well as matrices, and their transposes or inverses. But, once this is cleared up, the book is enlightening and worth the effort. An excellent selection of exercises is provided at backs of chapters--do as many as you have time for.

Even an afficionado of the subject will have to sweat some. I very much doubt that a complete novice in relativity should attempt this book.

I have no comments on the PART II of the book, which covers general relativity.

Mould's book is basically half special relativity and half general relativity, with a chapter on differential geometry bridging the gap. The discussion of special relativity gives a good geometrical motivation for this topic. The 44-page chapter on differential geometry is especially good, with the best treatment of covariance and contravariance that I have ever read.

I include the JPEG files for two pages corresponding to section 7.4 (pp.183-184), which includes a diagram (Fig.7.3) for what the author calls "the rectilinear case". In Fig.7.3a we see that contravariant coordinates are measured parallel to the coordinate axes, while in Fig.7.3b covariant coordinates are measured perpendicular to the coordinate axes.